Beastly Modernisms

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 BEASTLY MODERNISMS

The Figure of the Animal in Modernist

Literature and Culture

Edited by Saskia McCracken and

Alex Goody

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 Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in
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© editorial matter and organisation Saskia McCracken and

Alex Goody 2023
© the chapters their several authors 2023
Cover image: Franz Marc, Fate of the Animals, 1913 oil on canvas,
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 CONTENTS

List of Figures vii

Acknowledgementsix

Introduction: Beastly Modernisms 1

Saskia McCracken and Alex Goody

Part I: Companion Species

1. Metamodernist Beasts, or Flush’s Future: Ceridwen Dovey’s Only the
Animals and Sigrid Nunez’s Mitz: The Marmoset of Bloomsbury23
Derek Ryan
2. Can Flush Count?: Virginia Woolf, Animality and Numbers  38
Jane Goldman
3. Canine Companions, Race and Affective Anthropomorphism in
Florence Ayscough’s The Autobiography of a Chinese Dog (1926)
and Mary Gaunt’s A Broken Journey (1919) 56
Juanjuan Wu

Part II: Beastly Traces

4. Making an Impression Deeply: Authorising Animals in D. H. Lawrence 75
Carrie Rohman
5. Following the Beast Familiar: Djuna Barnes’s Family Dramas 91
Peter Adkins

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 contents

6. The Taxidermic Imaginary in Modernist Literature 107

Paul Fagan

Part III: Animal, Nation, Empire

7. Species Cleansing: The Rhetoric of Rat Control in the People’s
Republic of Poland 1945–1956 125
Gabriela Jarzębowska
8. The Barking Dog and Crying Bird in Partition Stories: Beastly
Modernism and the Subaltern Animism of Manto, Rakesh and Anand  143
Beerendra Pandey
9. Resistant Reindeers: Human–Animal Relations and Cultural
Self-Appropriation in Sámi Art and Literature 159
Katharina Alsen

Part IV: Intersections, Encounters

10. Animal–Human Entanglements in the Canadian Wild Animal Stories
of Charles G. D. Roberts 181
Lauren Cullen
11. Encountering Female Human Animal Becomings in Leonora
Carrington’s Surrealist Hybrid Tales 198
Karen Eckersley
12. Modern Intersections: Reading Anita Scott Coleman’s Animals 215
Elizabeth Curry

Part V: Extinction, War, Proliferation

13. 1940s Avian Noir231
Laura Blomvall
14. Unhoming the Pigeon: Ahmed Ali’s Twilight in Delhi248
Caroline Hovanec
15. The Modernist Jellyfish 263
Rachel Murray

Afterword: The Animal in the Mirror  279

Kari Weil

Notes on Contributors 292

Index297

vi

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 FIGURES

7.1 Anon. Map. Courtesy of the Polish National Archive, Szczecin. 131
7.2 Bogdan Nowakowski. Rozwój. 1925. Courtesy of the Poster
Museum, Wilanow. Public domain.  132
7.3 Anon. Szczury tępi Delicia. Undated [c.1940s]. Courtesy of the
Polona Archive, Narodowa Library. Public domain. Available at:
<https://polona.pl/search/?query=delicia&filters=public:1>
(last accessed 7 July 2022).  133
7.4 Włodzimierz Zakrzewski. Demokracja Buduje. 1945. Courtesy
of the Poster Museum, Wilanow.  135
9.1 Britta Marakatt-Labba. Historjá (History) (Detail). 2003–7.
Embroidery, print, applications and wool on linen. 39 cm × 23.5 m.
Oslo: KORO Public Art Norway. © Britta Marakatt-Labba /
BONO, Oslo 2022. Photo: Cathrine Wang.  160
9.2 Britta Marakatt-Labba. Historjá. (Overview at UiT The Arctic
University of Norway, Tromsø). 2003–7. © Britta Marakatt-Labba /
BONO, Oslo 2022. Photo: Larissa Acharya.  161
9.3 Johan Turi. Reindeer Corral in Autumn. 1910. Ink drawing.
Illustration from Muittalus samid birra (An Account of the Sámi).  167
9.4 John Savio. Mann med reinokse (Almei hergin / Man with Bull
Reindeer). Between 1925 and 1938. Hand-coloured woodcut
on paper. 26.5 cm × 22.5 cm. Oslo: National Museum of Art,
Architecture and Design.  169

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 figures

9.5 John Savio. Pulkkjøring (Hærgevuodje or Heargevuoddji / Sleighride).

Undated. Woodcut on paper. 25.2 cm × 19.5 cm. Kirkenes:
The Savio Museum.  170
9.6 John Savio. Alene (Okto / Alone). Between 1928 and 1934.
Woodcut on paper. 28 cm × 32.5 cm. Oslo: National Museum
of Art, Architecture and Design.  171
9.7 John Savio. Gutter med lasso (Gánddat suohpaniin /
Boys with Lasso). Between 1928 and 1938. Woodcut on
paper. 20.5 × 29 cm. Oslo: National Museum of Art,
Architecture and Design.  174

viii

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 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

First of all, we would like to thank the contributors to this volume for all their
hard work, patience, research and excellent chapters. Thank you also to Jackie
Jones, Susannah Butler and the team at Edinburgh University Press for the care
with which they brought this volume to publication. We would like to thank
Peter Adkins, Caitlin Stobie and Maria Sledmere, who helped co-organise the
2019 Beastly Modernisms conference at the University of Glasgow, as well as
those who made the conference possible, including the university, volunteers
and all the participants for sharing their research and inspiring us to put this
volume together. Many of those participants have work included in the follow-
ing pages. We would also like to thank Peter Adkins for his phrasing for the
conference call for papers which shaped our editors’ Introduction.
We would like to thank the Polish National Archive, Szczecin; the Poster
Museum, Wilanow; the Polona Archive, Narodowa Library; KORO Public Art
Norway; the National Musuem of Art, Oslo; and the Franz Marc estate for
granting us to reproduce images from their archives.
Alex would also like to thank her colleagues Andrea Macrae and Antonia
Mackay for their unstinting support and friendship and all the Willoughby-
Goodys – Matthew, Jasmine, Imogen, Maverick and Indy – for their encour-
agement, love and care.
Saskia would also like to thank Jane Goldman and Nigel Leask for their
supervisory support, which made this project possible. And Greg, as ever, for
everything.

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 INTRODUCTION:
‘BEASTLY MODERNISMS’

Saskia McCracken and Alex Goody

I still do not think La Somnambule the perfect title – Night Beast

would be better except for that debased meaning now put on that nice
word beast.
– Djuna Barnes to Emily Holmes Coleman

Nonhuman animals, both written and pictorial, form one of the many beastly
connections between two singular modernists, Djuna Barnes and James Joyce.
Joyce had moved to Paris from Zürich in July 1920, and in early 1922 Barnes
was also visiting Paris, continuing her career as a journalist and working on
the collection that would be published as A Book the following year. As a
Greenwich Village expatriate, Barnes had a network of connections in Paris,
and her first-hand knowledge of Ulysses (1922) and the recent Little Review
obscenity trial gave her an entry to conversations with Joyce: she collated her
early encounters with him into a piece entitled ‘A Portrait of a Man Who Is,
At Present, One of the More Significant Figures in Literature’ and published in
Vanity Fair in April 1922. Recalling their first meeting ‘Sitting in the café of the
Deux Magots, that faces the little church of St. Germain des Prés’, Barnes’s gaze
alights on Joyce’s waistcoat:

the most delightful waistcoat it has ever been my happiness to see. Purple
with alternate doe and dog heads. The does, tiny scarlet tongues hanging
out over blond lower lips, downed in a light wool, and the dogs no more

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 saskia mccracken and alex goody

ferocious or on the scent than any good animal who adheres to his master
through the seven cycles of change. (Barnes 1922: 65)

This hunting waistcoat was a family heirloom – originally belonging to his

great-grandfather, James Joyce – and, in ‘The Dead’, Joyce attires Gabriel in
a version of it, ‘a waistcoat of purple tabinet, with little foxes’ heads upon
it, lined with brown satin and having round mulberry buttons’ (Joyce 1993:
347). Joyce inherited the waistcoat from his father and wore it for special occa-
sions (Jackson and Costello 1998: 17); it was presented to the James Joyce
Museum at Sandycove by Samuel Beckett in the 1960s (Nicholson 2001: 295).
The waistcoat is not the only nonhuman animal figure that mediates their
exchanges in Barnes’s article: ‘We have talked of death, of rats, of horses, the
sea; languages, climates and offerings,’ Barnes relates (Barnes 1922: 65), sug-
gesting something again of their shared interest in the lives and affects of the
more-than-human world.
It is the detail of Joyce’s waistcoat, on first meeting him, that generates
delight and happiness for Barnes. The garment is thus in contrast to the ‘sad-
ness’ and ‘weariness’ that her article otherwise attributes to Joyce. It is as if
the animal abundance of the antique embroidered waistcoat agglomerates and
externalises the inhuman and nonhuman energies that come to resonate with
both Barnes’s and Joyce’s modernism and their conversations of ‘death, of rats,
of horses, the sea [. . .] climates and offerings’ (Barnes 1922: 65). And Barnes
sees, in the proliferating doe and dog heads of Joyce’s purple waistcoat, not the
carnage of blood sports but a suggestion of companion species relations, an
adherence between or assemblage of ‘master’ and ‘good animal’ that extends
in time through the ‘seven cycles of change’. With this phrase Barnes alludes,
not to Shakespeare’s Seven Ages, but to Rudolf Steiner’s Anthroposophy and
his theory of human development; references to Theosophy, from which Steiner
broke in 1912, run through Ulysses and Joyce owned a copy of Steiner’s 1910
Blut ist ein ganz besonderer Saft (Morrison 2009: 512). In Steiner’s anthropo-
sophical ideas of evolution and of human nature, human life is connected to the
life force of plants (the life or etheric body) and nonhuman animals (the astral
body), a notable challenge to the absolute division between human and nonhu-
man that underpins the hierarchical binaries of humanism.
When Barnes resolves to identify ‘what seemed to be the most character-
istic pose of James Joyce’, animal affinities surface again: ‘the head; turned
farther away than disgust and not so far as death, for the turn of displeasure
is not so complete, yet the only thing at all like it, is the look in the throat of
a stricken animal’ (Barnes 1922: 65). In this complex figuration Joyce turns
away from the human world, afflicted by and distanced from it, caught in the
impossible gazing at, and gaze of, an alterity that is itself unutterable (‘the look
in the throat’). For Bonnie Kime Scott this is ‘an extraordinary metaphor that

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 introduction

imagines the mental attitude and represents the physical attribute of a hunted
animal’, serving to ‘bring the complex artist in to the realm of the natural
world, and primal desperation’ (Scott 1991: 157). It opens the way for Scott
to foreground ‘Joyce and Barnes[’s] shared [. . .] interest in the interface of
human and animal’ (158) and to explore how, through motifs of childbirth, the
bovine, rape and hunting in their texts, they ‘deal in the dark, primitive, sexual,
bestial, under-texts of life and its continuation’ (172). But Joyce is ‘stricken’
with a more than a primal desperation and mental orientation towards the
natural world in Barnes’s metaphor; his turning is not a recoiling from the
human, but a turning in, an orbiting towards the void, ‘the central emptiness,
the hiatus that – within man – separates man and animal’ (Agamben 2004: 92).
This is the ‘intimate cesura’ that the philosopher Giorgio Agamben uncovers in
the functioning of the ‘anthropological machine’ ‘at work in our culture’ (37).
In categorising and placing human and nonhuman animals along vectors of
inclusion and exclusion, the anthropological machine functions in a perpetual
process of differentiation, essaying to establish the human by bracketing off
human and nonhuman life within and outside man. What results is not ‘the
human’ itself but a ‘zone of indifference’ at the core (37), an ontological hiatus
that is ‘perfectly empty’ (38). To ‘render inoperative’ (33) this ceaseless process,
to turn off the anthropological machine we could, Agamben proposes, ‘risk
ourselves in this emptiness, the suspension of the suspension’ (92). Joyce takes
this risk, as does Barnes, and, as the contributions to this volume illustrate, so
do many other modernists.

Beastly Modernisms?
If modernism heralded a moment of socio-political, cultural and aesthetic trans-
formation, it also instigated a refashioning of how we think about, encounter and
live with animals. Recognising this correspondence raises crucial questions about
human–nonhuman animal coexistence at the foundation of modernity. Beasts
abound in modernism. Virginia Woolf’s spaniel, Zora Neale Hurston’s dog and
mule, Langston Hughes and Leonora Carrington’s cats, D. H. Lawrence’s snake,
Samuel Beckett’s lobster and Mulk Raj Anand’s cows all present prominent
examples of animals and animality at the forefront of modernist innovation.
At stake in such beastly figurations are not just matters of species relations but
matters of the nonhuman animal in excess of capture by culture, language and
representation. The attendant questions of human animality, nonhuman agency
and the limits of humanism also open on to broader ideas of social relations,
culture, race, sex, gender, empire, capitalism and religion, and motivate this
volume of essays on Beastly Modernisms. We begin here with Barnes and Joyce,
not because they are key to unlocking the figure of the animal in modernism, but
because they help to illustrate the trajectories and affects of the new articulations
of animal studies and modernist studies.

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Explorations of the nonhuman, more-than-human and human–animal in

Joyce have become central concerns in contemporary work on this canoni-
cal modernist figure, generating innovative readings of Ulysses and bringing a
new attention to Finnegan’s Wake (1939).1 Whilst Joyce studies may have been
enlivened by such animal encounters, refurbishing claims for Joyce’s centrality
to modernist studies, Barnes’s ‘improper modernism’, resting in the canoni-
cal margins for much of the last four decades, has come to figure significantly
in the animal turn of modernist studies. Following her earlier exploration of
the bovine/childbirth in Barnes and Joyce, Scott devotes considerable space to
Barnes’s ‘blurring of the distinctions’ ‘between the bestial and the human’ in the
second volume of Refiguring Modernism (Scott 1995: 73). Successive scholars
have turned to the animal in Barnes’s work, and she occupies a significant place
in Carrie Rohman’s Stalking the Subject (2009). Nightwood’s (1936) ‘beast
turning human’ emerges as one focal motif for much work in modernist animal
studies and, as Peter Adkins’s contribution to this volume illustrates, new work
on Barnes is moving the focus beyond Nightwood to examine the animal traces
in her drama and short stories.
While Barnes appears in our list of contents, we have not given space to
work on Joyce and the nonhuman animal in the contents of this volume; if there
is a touchstone for the book it is Virginia Woolf, not Joyce. Woolf studies has
also been enlivened by the animal and nonhuman turn in modernist scholar-
ship (see Adkins 2022b, Alt 2010, Goldman 2016, Hovanec 2018, McCracken
2012, Ryan 2013, Scott 2012). But the recurrence of Woolf in the pages that
follow is not an attempt to enshrine her, in Joyce’s stead, as the exemplar of this
new field; instead, it illustrates something that Kari Weil points out in Thinking
Animals (2012) about the coincidence of feminism and animal studies. Thus,
though it may be ‘easier for many to contemplate animals as significant others
than women’, ‘[m]uch like the “women” in women’s studies, the “animal” in
animal studies must be placed under erasure’ (Weil 2012: 24, 23). Moreover
Woolf, as a queer, pacifist, woman modernist, signals how the recent animal
turn in the humanities necessitates both new ways of thinking about the beasts
that we find in modernist culture, and a final dethroning of the mankind of
modernism. Animal studies indeed arrives at a point at which modernist studies
is already in the process of redefining what modernism means.
Turning to modernism’s animals and building on the foundational work on
animals and modernism by Carrie Rohman, Margot Norris, Kari Weil, Derek
Ryan and others, as this volume does, promises fresh ways of understanding its
multispecies foundations. Signalling how modernist studies might intervene in
contemporary debates around nonhuman animal life, this volume and its field
also indicate the need to resist the centrifugal force of canonical modernism –
how many more new readings of Ulysses do we need? That the animal turn is a
particular opportunity to read modernism differently means not just decolonising

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 introduction

modernism, turning to women modernists, reading queer modernists, including

inter-, adjacent or late modernists, but also, as we have essayed with this volume,
providing a welcome to different geographies and ontologies, to defiantly non-
canonical texts, writers and forms. The beastly or brutish has powerful racial
valencies and animalising rhetoric is often deployed, in modernist primitivism
and elsewhere, for the purposes of racialising and depersonalising. Mel Y. Chen
highlights how the ‘figurative substitution of a human with an animal figure
often accomplishes [. . .] and constitutes a displacement to lower levels of the
animacy hierarchy’, producing an ‘objectification’ that is ‘above and beyond the
possibility of dehumanization’ (Chen 2012: 44, 45); our beastly modernisms are
intended to confront the dynamics of this rhetoric and the racial hierarchies that
it enshrines.
Beastly Modernisms focuses on the ‘beastly’ understood as the nonhuman
other of modernity; the contiguous animality of contemporary human exis-
tence; the persistence of more-than-human life; the unknowable animal that is
apprehended within the experiments of modernism. Our deployment of the term
‘beastly’ is strategic, and we offer it as a speculative frame for encountering the
nonhuman knowledges and animal proximities that manifest in modernist lit-
erature and culture. Terminology is crucial in the field this volume contributes
to – thus, although the contributors here do employ the terminology that prevails
in the particular animal studies theoretical frameworks they utilise, this volume
as a whole adheres to a language that is respectful of our relation to animals
of other species, and fully acknowledges the role that linguistic designation has
in the appropriations and violences enacted on nonhuman life. The term ‘crea-
tural’ does significant work in recent animal studies, emphasising as it does the
continuities of animal and human embodiment; as David Herman explains, the
‘slight semantic shift from creaturely to creatural’ indicates ‘the status of being a
creature, subject to the requirements of the surrounding environment, the vicis-
situdes of time, and the vulnerabilities of the body’ (Herman 2016: 3). Donna
Haraway’s preference for the term ‘critters’ also points to the importance of the
words and signs we use in our critical work on human–animal relations: ‘the
taint of “creatures” and “creation” does not stick to “critters”’, she writes; ‘if
you see such a semiotic barnacle, scrape it off [. . .] “critters” refers promis-
cuously to microbes, plants, animals, humans and nonhumans, and sometimes
even to machines’ (Haraway 2016: 169, n1). Beastly is our idiom, however, our
own way of coming to terms with those figures, those ‘material-semiotic knots’
(Haraway 2007: 4) that modernists generated in attempts to apprehend the
nonhuman animal world. In the Oxford English Dictionary ‘beastly’, as an
adjective, is defined as describing that which resembles a beast (irrational, brut-
ish, inhuman) or that which is ‘Unfit for human use or enjoyment; abominable;
disgusting, or offensive, especially from dirtiness’. As an adverb its meaning is
‘In a beastly manner, like a beast’, and ‘as an adjunct to an adjective: Brutishly,

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 saskia mccracken and alex goody

brutally, abominably, offensively (in society slang, often merely = Exceedingly)’.

It is this slippage – from the brutish, animal and inhuman, offensive, abominable,
to slang for ‘exceedingly’ – that we deploy in theorising the ‘beastly’ knowledges
that emerge from the modernist appropriations and disavowals of, and coinci-
dences with, the nonhuman animal. The animal, as we consider it here, is a living
map of modernist taxonomic excess; the intemperate, superfluous and overdeter-
mined, the trace that slips between aesthetic and ontological closure, the supple-
ment that exposes the incompleteness of the project of modernism.
Beastly also shares an etymological root with bestiary (from bestiarium voca-
blum), the term for a book of real and imagined animals that had its roots in
Near Eastern cultures. Medieval bestiaries, drawing on the Latin translation
of the Physiologus, Pliny the Elder’s Historia naturalisai and Isidore of Seville’s
Etymologiae, offer a sequential arrangement of images and texts that derive
allegorical interpretation and symbolic relationships from the attributes of non-
human animals. The anthropomorphic moral and spiritual guidance of the besti-
ary was always set against gorgeous, fantastical illustrations, and the aesthetics
of the bestiary animals escaped from the covers of these manuscripts to populate
tapestries, metalwork and stained glass. Bestiaries, though comprised of specific
correlations of creature–attribute–moral, never contained a set number or order
of entries and this heterogeneity, alongside the affects of the animal illuminations
and the secular textual enjoyment the works provided, suggests something of the
miscellaneous pleasures of the bestiary and its animal figures.
The influence of medieval bestiaries can be seen in the marginal animal
illustrations of Djuna Barnes’s Ladies Almanack (1928) and the posthumously
published Creatures in an Alphabet (1982), while Guillaume Apollinaire, Pablo
Neruda and Jorge Luis Borges all produced modernist versions of the bestiary.
Borges’s bestiary is one of ‘Imaginary Beings’ and it offers, against any claims
to the bestiary as moral taxonomy or source of natural historical knowledge,
what Melanie Nicholson describes as ‘a glimpse into the human imagination
as it confronts the unknown or imperfectly known’ (2020: 138). Elsewhere
Borges points out that ‘there is no classification of the universe that is not
arbitrary and conjectural’ straight after enumerating an alternate animal tax-
onomy, that of the fantastical Chinese encyclopaedia Celestial Emporium of
Benevolent Knowledge, where ‘animals are divided into (a) belonging to the
Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g)
stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumer-
able, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) others, (m) having just
broken a flower vase, (n) those that resemble flies from a long way off’ (Borges
1993: 231). Michel Foucault responds to this taxonomic animal ‘fable’ in his
Preface to The Order of Things (1966), with a ‘laugh that shattered’ a ludic
recognition of the impossibility of our own systems of thought ‘with which we
are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things’. For Foucault,

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 introduction

such recognition ‘threaten[s] with collapse our age-old distinction between the
Same and the Other’ (Foucault 1994: xv).
The beastly modernisms explored in this volume do not function within the
allegorical tradition of the bestiary, but they do share in the heterogenous ener-
gies and delights of their more-than-human figures, and they turn our atten-
tion, as scholars and readers, to the wild profusions and manifold liveliness
that cannot be trapped with the anthropocentric logic of Same and Other. In
their 2019 An Eclectic Bestiary, Birgitte Spengler and Babette Tischleder sug-
gest that the bestiary convention can be differently implemented, to ‘redirect
the attention of our readers to the diverse forms and rich more-than-human
“cultures” of our multispecies world’ (2019: 12). Tischleder thus suggests that
the bestiary can ‘invite thinking through and with plants and animals’, and
provides a ‘means for imagining historical power relations and cultural hier-
archies, as well as offering occasion to assess the role and place of humanity
as species among species’ (16). Antoinette Burton and Renisa Mawani also
identify the disruptive potential of the bestiary, functioning as an ‘unruly tax-
onomy’ in their Animalia: An Anti-Imperial Bestiary for Our Times (2020:
13). Exposing the operations and limits of the biopolitical power of Empire,
the ‘bestiary form [. . .] offers a provocation to new ways of seeing and writing
about empire and its biocultural creatures’ (6). Our beastly modernisms offer
different modes of thinking through the multispecies relations of modernism
and its hierarchies of power, and of disclosing the brutish beauty of modern-
ism’s encounters with its own wildness.

Modernist Animals in History and Theory

Modernism’s interest in the figure of the nonhuman animal speaks to the
immense changes in animal life in the early twentieth century, a period when
the reverberations of Darwinian theory were being felt in the new life sci-
ences, as well as in emergent social theories that employed discourses of spe-
cies, and when developing technologies, media and markets radically altered
everyday human–nonhuman animal relations. It was also a period in which
newly formed animal rights groups – such as the Royal Society for the Protec-
tion of Animals (RSPCA, established in 1824) and the Royal Society for the
Protection of Birds (RSPB, established as the SPB in 1889) in the UK – were
pushing for animal welfare legislation and drawing public attention to ques-
tions around human responsibilities towards animals. These contexts raised
questions about how we think about and represent the (sometimes human)
animal. Modernist artists and writers, along with these welfare groups, knew
from Darwinism that humans descended from animals, ‘that animals have
some phenomenological experience’ and that humans had caused numerous
species extinctions (Hovanec 2018: 27). Questions of human animality, animal
sentience and animal welfare intersected, furthermore, with the discourse on

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 saskia mccracken and alex goody

British imperial identity. As Burton and Mawani explain, ‘The British empire
was entangled in animal life at every possible scale’ and animals were used
‘as imaginative resources, military vehicles, settler foodstuffs, status emblems,
contested signs, or motors of capital’ (2020: 1). Thousands of exotic birds were
tortured and killed for the global feather fashion trade. When India legislated
against exporting such plumage in 1902, and other countries such as Australia,
Egypt and New Guinea followed suit, Britain rushed to catch up (Haynes 1983:
28). Maneesha Deckha observes that ‘imperialism and the need to maintain a
“civilized” identity vis-à-vis colonized peoples’ led to the criminalisation of
some forms of animal cruelty, which reinforced civilisational hierarchies and
British claims ‘to a more civilized and progressive “home” culture and nation’
(2013: 521). Actual nonhuman animals, then, were central to the British colo-
nial project and imperial discourse.
At the same time the ‘cultivation of ideas of race, culture, gender, and species’
under colonialism were ‘interactive and mutually constitutive’ (Deckha 2008:
252). The figure of the animal became a synonym for colonised, racialised,
gendered humans. At the turn of the century, modernist writers and artists, not
least those in colonised countries, were paying attention to, and subverting,
these beastly tropes in the context of increased calls for independence from
colonial rule. Between 1900 and 1945, for example, several countries gained
this independence: Australia (1901), Afghanistan (1919), Egypt (1922), New
Zealand (1931), Iraq (1932) and South Africa (1934), with Partition – and
the associated deaths and displacements of millions – following in 1947. By
1950, Jordan (1946), India and Pakistan (1947), Israel, Myanmar and Sri
Lanka (1948) were also independent. The figure of the anticolonial animal is
under-discussed in modernist animal studies, and is the focus of chapters in
this volume on Indian and Pakistani writing: Beerendra Pandey’s work on dogs
and birds in Saadat Hasan Manto’s, Mohan Rakesh’s and Mulk Raj Anand’s
partition stories, and Caroline Hovanec’s ‘Unhoming the Pigeon: Ahmed Ali’s
Twilight in Delhi’. Meanwhile, questions of race, nation and belonging are
explored through animal figures in Gabriela Jarzębowska’s work on (human
and nonhuman) pests in Polish Stalinist propaganda, Katharina Alsen’s explo-
ration of reindeers in Sámi art and Elizabeth Curry’s writing on animality, race
and gender in the writing of African American Mexican modernist Anita Scott
Coleman. Perhaps the most popular approach to the animal as a figure for
the other is feminist animal studies, as we have observed above. This volume
considers beastly women in the works of Virginia Woolf (in chapters by Jane
Goldman and Kari Weil), Djuna Barnes (Peter Adkins), Leonora Carrington
(Karen Eckersley) and more. The figure of the nonhuman animal often gestures
towards the other more broadly (including the working classes and disabled
people) but addressing the racialised colonial context in which modernists
figured animals is central to our approach in this volume.

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 introduction

It is not surprising, given the above contexts, that, as Derek Ryan puts it,
‘there is something specific to early twentieth-century modernity’ that ‘finds
writers probing the boundaries between humans and other species’ (2019: 321).
Modernists not only recognised ‘the proximity of human and non-human life’
and analysed the ‘discursive prejudices behind representations of these lives’, but
they also ‘model[led] new agencies that reimagine the ontological and ethical
relations between human and non-human’ (Ryan 2019: 322). Many modernists
were also part of a wider milieu concerned with animals and animality. Virginia
Woolf, for example, knew biologist Julian Huxley, evolutionary scientist J. B.
S. Haldane and philosopher Bertrand Russell, who were ‘deeply invested in the
question of how to represent animal subjectivity, and whose forays into animal
worlds shaped their understanding of science and literature’ (Hovanec 2018:
162, 3). Such modernist networks ‘can be understood as responding to the same
two questions – How should we understand animal life after Darwin? And how
can we capture animals in words that are true to life?’– whilst recognising that
any possible answers are ‘speculative, provisional’ (Hovanec 2018: 4–5, 3). The
challenge, which Darwinism made possible, both to ‘understand animals as
subjects’ and to know that ‘one cannot know animals’ subjective experience,
drove many modernists to the very limits of literary scientific representation’
(Hovanec 2018: 3) and animal figuration.
Animal studies scholarship on modernism is rich and recent, beginning in
earnest with Carrie Rohman’s Stalking the Subject: Modernism and the Animal
(2009) and Kari Weil’s Thinking Animals (2012). Rohman, discussing how
Darwin’s ‘discourse of species’ (13) destabilises notions of human subjectiv-
ity, observes that British modernist literature ‘is marked by a certain crisis in
the human vis-à-vis the animal’ (21). Weil, drawing on the works of Woolf,
Kafka and Thomas Mann, considers the personal, ethical and political implica-
tions of the boundaries which have so often been drawn between the human
and the animal. Since these foundational works, modernist animal studies has
developed substantially, and in the last few years Caroline Hovanec’s Animal
Subjects: Literature, Zoology, and British Modernism (2018) has considered
animal subjectivity in British literary modernism; Cathryn Setz’s Primordial
Modernism: Animals, Ideas, Transition 1927–1938 (2020) has explored pri-
mordial critters in the works of writers including James Joyce and Gottfried
Benn; Cary Wolfe has offered a posthumanist theory of ecopoetics and used
Wallace Steven’s poetry as an illustration of meaning-making beyond the
human in Ecological Poetics, or Wallace Stevens’s Birds (2020); and Rachel
Murray’s The Modernist Exoskeleton: Insects, War, Literary Form (2020) has
examined modernist insect imagery and literary form in the works of Wyndham
Lewis, D. H. Lawrence, H.D. and Samuel Beckett. More recently, Peter
Adkins’s The Modernist Anthropocene: Nonhuman Life and Planetary Change
in James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Djuna Barnes (2022) frames modernist

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 saskia mccracken and alex goody

literary works in the context of climate change and extinction, while Hovanec
and Murray’s collection, Modernism/modernity Print Plus cluster Reading
Modernism in the Sixth Extinction (2022), and Alberto Godioli’s and Carmen
van den Berg’s Crossing Borders: Transnational Modernism Beyond the
Human (forthcoming) share these international and environmental concerns.
In 2019, Saskia McCracken, Peter Adkins, Caitlin Stobie and Maria Sledmere
organised an international Beastly Modernisms conference at the University of
Glasgow, bringing together established and emerging scholars, artists and poets
from across Europe, Asia and North America to share new modernist animal
studies work. The success of that conference inspired us to create this vol-
ume, to recreate the sense of a beastly modernist scholarly community begun in
Glasgow and to share the fascinating research that arose during and following
that event. Our volume builds on, and includes, the valuable work of many
of the scholars listed above, and those at the conference, celebrating different
animal studies approaches to a range of modernist literary and artistic works.
In Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of the Species, and Posthu-
manist Theory (2003) Cary Wolfe examines the ‘cross-articulation of speciesism
and heteronormative gender’ (141) in the work of the canonical, masculinist
modernist Ernest Hemingway. For Wolfe, it is possible to read at once ‘the trans-
gressive possibilities of gender performativity’ in Hemingway’s texts (122) and
the ‘desperate humanism’ that seeks to heal the ‘internal rift’ of the Enlighten-
ment subject through violence and domination (141). Wolfe’s concern in this
reading of Hemingway, and across his volume, is to engage concurrently the
‘unexamined framework of speciesism’ (1) and the ‘constitutive disavowals and
self-constructing narratives enacted by that fantasy figure called “the human”’
(6). Wolfe’s work exemplifies how the interdisciplinary field of animal stud-
ies engages in a concerted interrogation of the species discourse of humanism
informed by poststructuralist and, more recently, posthumanist and new mate-
rialist theoretical frames. So Donna Haraway’s ‘natureculture’ (2003), Karen
Barad’s intra-action (2007) and Stacy Alaimo’s ‘transcorporeality’ (2010) can be
seen as contrasting conceptions of the inextricable entanglements and ontological
intimacies between bodies and environments. In Jane Bennett’s vital materiality
affect extends far beyond the human, and thus ‘organic and inorganic bodies,
natural and cultural objects [. . .] all are affective’ (xii); Bennett illustrates our
enmeshment in the material world and surmises ‘an ontological field without
any unequivocal demarcations between human, animal, vegetable, or mineral’
and where ‘all forces and flows (materialities) are or can become lively, affective,
and signalling’ (2010: 117). Of importance also, in thinking through the desig-
nation, regulation and control of liveliness, are Michel Foucault’s biopower and
biopolitics – that is, the governance of biological life (1994; 2003) – and Giorgio
Agamben’s theorisation of ‘bare life’ and zoē – the biological life that is excluded
from the polis and from individuation (Agamben 1998).

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 introduction

Acknowledging the irreducible alterity and plurality of nonhuman life and

the systems of thought that have sought to categorise and control it, contem-
porary animal theory seeks to decentre the human, develop a rigorous riposte
to anthropocentrism and explore the ways that human and nonhuman life are
entangled. But as our discussion in this Introduction and the contributions to
this volume illustrate, modernist writers and artists were already querying the
figure of the animal as antithesis or even straightforward counterpart to the
human. It might be possible to locate, in Jakob von Uexküll’s concept of animal
Umwelten or ‘environment-worlds’ (first posited in Umwelt und Innenwelt der
Tiere [The Environment and Inner World of Animals] in 1909), for example,
an early twentieth-century understanding of the alterity of the phenomenologi-
cal experiences of animals, and in the vitalist philosophy of Henri Bergson the
roots of a vital materialist celebration of the multiplicities and intensities of life.
Multiplicity and intensity are central to the animal encounters that Gilles
Deleuze and Félix Guattari theorise. Following in some senses from the non-
anthropocentric thinking Friedrich Nietzsche undertakes through the animals of
his Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883–5), Deleuze and Guattari propose human–
animal encounters where ‘each deterritorializes the other’ (1986: 22) and pro-
foundly disturb the boundaries between human and nonhuman. Deleuze and
Guattari’s accounts, in A Thousand Plateaus (1980) and elsewhere, imagine
assemblages of human and nonhuman animal, and intensive and affective prox-
imities and encounters, that challenge the ontological foundations on which
notions of stable subjects and categories of being are founded. Their ‘becoming-
animal’ (1988: 233ff.) functions as an influential means for reconfiguring the
fixed terms, positions and relations through which both ‘human’ and ‘animal’
have been defined. This becoming-animal is not about imitation or identity,
but about affective assemblages and proximities of human and nonhuman that
destabilise the privileged starting point of the human self.
Becoming with, and personal, everyday proximities with nonhuman animals,
such as her canine companion, Cayenne, are foundational to Donna Haraway’s
work, particularly The Companion Species Manifesto (2003) and When Species
Meet (2008). As she argues in the latter, ‘nothing is passive to the action of another
[. . .] the unfoldings can only occur in the fleshly detail of situated, material–
semiotic beings’ (263). Haraway’s ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’ (1985) did much of the
foundational work for (particularly feminist) posthumanism and animal theory.
The implications of Haraway’s ‘cyborg’ – who ‘appears in myth precisely where
the boundary between the human and animal is transgressed’ – to ‘signal dis-
turbingly and pleasurably tight coupling’ of ‘human and other living creatures’
(1991: 152) resonates through the work of others, such as Rosi Braidotti, and the
lineage is clear through to Haraway’s recent work. Thinking outside the ‘prick
tale’ of the ‘Anthropos’ (2016: 39) and in the face of the sixth great extinction,
Haraway urges that to ‘think-with is to stay with the naturalcultural multispecies

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 saskia mccracken and alex goody

trouble on earth’ (2016: 40). For her, ‘becoming-with’ also means encountering
the human as humus and becoming-with the assemblages of symbiotic, sympo-
etic, compost communalities.
A discussion of philosophers who have shaped animal studies would be
incomplete without mentioning Jacques Derrida; it is an encounter, naked, with
a companion species (a cat) in The Animal That Therefore I Am that leads him
to multiple questions about the human conceptualisation of animal life. The
gaze of the cat opens, for Derrida, into a theoretical and textual deconstruction
of the human/animal binary and a shift to thinking about animal perspectives
and meanings, and to speculating on response, responsibility and ethics beyond
the human realm. Derrida draws attention to the problems of thinking through
the ‘animal’ as category with his neologism animot, and suggests that the ‘abys-
sal ruptures’ between human and nonhuman be acknowledged along with a
realisation of the ‘heterogeneities’ of nonhuman animals in their alterity (2008:
30). Derrida’s work in animal theory thus not only deconstructs the binaries
that bind the animal, but also urges an ethics of ‘responsibility with respect to
the most dissimilar [. . .] the unrecognizable other’ (2009: 108). Derrida’s work
still carries weight in animal studies, but it is contemporary postcolonial and
critical race theorists who have asked the most significant questions about the
politics and ethics of the human/nonhuman divide.
Vital in recent animal theory are critics who examine how the subjugation
and othering of the nonhuman world is repeated in the logics of racial oppres-
sion and objectification. Maneesha Deckha appeals for a feminist postcolonial
approach to animal studies that can consider ‘how the social forces that code
and privilege whiteness inform questions related to the human/animal divide’
and an ‘awareness of how colonial logics fortifying a reified Western/non-
Western binary and civilisational discourses positioning Western culture as
superior to non-Western cultures continue to be formative in current debates/
ideas about human “nature” and human–animal relationships’ (2012: 530).
Bénédicte Boisseron, in revisiting the question of the animal and human
dynamic, and the nonhuman in the history of the Black diaspora, empha-
sises ‘interspecies connectedness’ (Boisseron 2018: xix) and ‘seeks to defy the
construction of blacks and animals as exclusively connected through their com-
parable state of subjection and humiliation, and instead focus on interspecies
alliances’ (Boisseron 2018: 36). Alexander Weheliye, who is also concerned
with resisting a reductive ‘comparison between human and animal slavery
[that] is brandished about in the field of animal studies’, examines the ‘racial-
izing assemblages’ at work in colonial modernity that construct a ‘hierarchical
ordering [. . .] into humans, not-quite-humans and nonhumans’ (2014: 10, 3, 8).
Crucial for Weheliye’s analysis is the recognition of ‘black studies as a mode
of knowledge production’ (19) – and the work of Hortense Spillers and Sylvia
Wynter in particular – in confronting ‘the barring of nonwhite subjects from

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 introduction

the category of the human’ (3). Bringing intersectionality into animal theory
means that it is possible, as Yamini Narayanan does, to recognise ‘anthropa-
triarchy’: that is ‘the human, gendered oppression, exploitation, and control
of nonhuman animals via their sexual and reproductive systems’ (Narayanan
2019: 196), and to think through, as Mel Y. Chen does, the ‘insistent collisions
of race, animality, sexuality, and ability’ and the ‘queerness of some human
racialized animalities’ (2012: 104). Challenging binary systems of difference
using these various approaches, as several of our contributors do, enables us to
reconsider the material and figurative politics of, and relations between, human
and nonhuman animals; they help to illustrate how we might ‘think differently
if nonhuman animals [. . .] and even inanimate objects were to inch into the
biopolitical fold’ (Chen 2012: 6).
These intersecting and often contrasting theoretical and critical perspectives
illustrate how strands of thought can and do diverge in animal theory; such
variance is one of the key strengths of animal studies as a mode of analysis that
resists closed debate. One way, perhaps, to approach the distinctive strands
that characterise animal studies is to consider the contrast that critical animal
studies (CAS) provides. Although CAS is not wholly distinct from the inter-
disciplinary fields of other forms of animal studies,2 it is more firmly rooted
in the questions of ethical responsibility, and the resistance to speciesism, that
are inherited from Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation (1975) and his subsequent
work. Nik Taylor and Richard Twine point out that ‘critical’ is used as a way
to express ‘the urgency of our times’ and to acknowledge that ‘the twenty-
first century represents a pivotal period in which ecology and animal life
face unprecedented threats’ (Taylor and Twine 2014: 2). The chapters in this
volume are not predominantly concerned, as CAS is, with practical and activist
responses to speciesism, but they do show, and Hovanec’s chapter on ‘Unhoming
the Pigeon: Ahmed Ali’s Twilight in Delhi’ exemplifies, how the theory of
animal studies is never separate from an ethics of life.
In this volume our contributors draw on the various theoretical currents in
animal studies as they unearth and examine some of the key issues related to
the animal turn in modernist studies. The chapters from leading figures in this
field sit alongside those from new and emerging scholars, and together they
delineate some significant dynamics and debates, and also decentre the can-
ons and geographies of modernism. Grounded in interdisciplinary approaches,
the chapters in Beastly Modernisms work with cultural history and theoretical
frameworks to unearth the multispecies dynamics of twentieth-century litera-
ture and culture conceived in broad aesthetic, temporal and geographical terms.
They are concerned with critical race studies, colonialism, and modernisms of
the global south and marginalised modernists. Our contributors cover a diverse
range of topics, from exploring dogs in Virginia Woolf to Republican China,
from animals and gender in surrealist Mexican work to African American texts,

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 saskia mccracken and alex goody

from Sámi reindeers to Stalinist rat propaganda, from modernist jellyfish to

metamodernist beasts, from 1940s poetry to Indian Partition stories. We aim
to provide a more comprehensive and global vision of modernist animal studies
than extant canonical scholarship, avoiding the pitfalls of Euro-American exclu-
sivity, an over-emphasis on domestic or wild species, and extremes of capitulat-
ing to, or outright rejecting, canonicity. Just as importantly, the animal always
already invokes the other, the marginalised. This other is racialised, gendered,
queered, colonised and so on. It makes sense, therefore, to focus on writers who
have been marginalised by canonisation, and who are othered in these ways, or
are preoccupied with such othering.
That said, this volume is not a completely comprehensive survey of global
modernist animal studies. Rather, it attempts to begin the process of broadening
the scope of the discipline. Various geographical fields, including African, South
American and Australasian modernist studies, are not included, and the focus
leans heavily towards Anglophone writers and artists. Likewise, Indigenous and
disability studies approaches are not represented as much as we would like. Our
volume is limited by length (some omissions are inevitable) but this is counter-
balanced by the diversity we do offer and the fact that the volume offers exciting
work across the spectrum from canonical to emergent fields. Nonetheless, it is
worth pointing readers to important literary animal studies scholars we have
not included in this volume, such as Belinda Kleinhans on German animal stud-
ies, Kaori Nagai on literary animals and empire, Jade Munslow-Ong on African
modernism, Maki Eguchi on sheep in Japanese literature, and Christopher Pexa
on Native American and First Nation animal literature. We also recommend
Stephanie Jenkins, Kelly Struthers Montford and Chloë Taylor’s edited volume,
Disability and Animality: Crip Perspectives in Critical Animal Studies (2020).
These scholars and works have been invaluable to our own research and are
making significant contributions to the field.

Volume Overview
This volume is divided into five sections: Companion Species; Beastly Traces;
Animal, Nation, Empire; Intersections, Encounters; and Extinction, War, Pro-
liferation, and concludes with an Afterword by founding literary animal studies
scholar Kari Weil. Each section takes a different approach to the figure of the
animal in modernist literature and culture. Our opening section, Companion
Species, uses Donna Haraway’s term, which offers a collaborative alternative to
the hierarchical, possessive and patronising word ‘pets’. This section considers
modernist writers and their companion species – marmosets, tortoises and dogs
– from Bloomsbury to China. Derek Ryan’s chapter on ‘Metamodernist Beasts’
considers anthropomorphic language and narrative techniques in relation
to nonhuman consciousness, imperialism, gender, sexuality, war and science in
Sigrid Nunez’s biography of Leonard Woolf’s marmoset, Mitz: The Marmoset of

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 introduction

Bloomsbury (1998), Ceridwen Dovey’s fictional memoir of Virginia Woolf’s pet

tortoise, Only the Animals (2014), and Woolf’s canine narrative, Flush: A Biog-
raphy (1933). In ‘Can Flush Count? Virginia Woolf, Animality and Numbers’
Jane Goldman considers canine counting and Woolf’s suspicion of measuring as
a patriarchal practice in relation to Derrida’s dictum, ‘Counting is a bad proce-
dure’. Juanjuan Wu’s chapter on women and dogs in China, which concludes
this section, examines anthropomorphic configurations of cross-species and
interracial relationships in Mary Gaunt’s travel writing from China (1913–14)
and Florence Ayscough’s The Autobiography of a Chinese Dog (1926). These
texts, Wu argues, respectively reinforce and call into question modernism’s
imperialist racialised binaries.
The second section of the volume, Beastly Traces, explores how animals
authorise, contaminate or unsettle structures of signification and subjectifi-
cation in the early twentieth century. Carrie Rohman’s ‘Making an Impres-
sion Deeply: Authorising Animals in D. H. Lawrence’ asks, drawing on the
work of Foucault and Derrida, how animals are represented or experienced as
authorising and as ‘authors’ in literature of the modernist period. In ‘Following
the Beast Familiar: Djuna Barnes’s Family Dramas’ Peter Adkins identifies a
beastly idiom across Barnes’s 1924 work, The Biography of Julie von Bart-
mann, first published in 2020, Ryder (1928) and The Antiphon (1958), which
runs through her fiction of the family unit. Paul Fagan’s ‘The Taxidermic Imag-
inary in Modernist Literature’ follows the traces of a taxidermal imaginary
from a realist Victorian writing, through early twentieth-century literature to
late modernism. Each of these chapters draws on modernism’s fascination and
unease concerning animality.
Our third section – Animal, Nation, Empire – considers how the figure of the
animal was central to discourses of modernity regarding national purity, belong-
ing, empire and colonisation. In her chapter on species cleansing, Gabriela
Jarzębowska shows that the rhetoric regarding a broad-scale rat extermina-
tion programme in Poland in 1945–56 was an extension of both antisemitic
discourse and the discursive strategies of Stalinist political purges. Beerendra
Pandey’s chapter on modernist Partition narratives focuses on the represen-
tation of animals in short stories by Saadat Hasan Manto (writing in Urdu),
Mohan Rakesh (in Hindi) and Mulk Raj Anand (in English). These animal fig-
ures, and all of those in this section, trouble binaries such as citizen–refugee,
animal–human and élite–subaltern, pushing back against imperial understand-
ings of the animal. Katharina Alsen, in her exploration of ‘Resistant Reindeers’
in the contemporary textile art of Britta Marakatt-Labba, reads these nonhu-
man animal figures as a critical commentary on the representation of Indigenous
Sámi culture in the early twentieth century and more recently. Alsen considers
how Sámi modern(ist) traditions and Marakatt-Labba’s embroidery challenge
stereotypical representations and offer strategies of resistance to, and subversion

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 saskia mccracken and alex goody

of, cultural subordination and (neo)colonial appropriation. Taken together, the

chapters in this section contribute to crucial current debates about the figure of
the animal in national and imperial discourse.
Following this, the subsequent cluster of chapters, Intersections, Encounters,
presents chapters that negotiate, in different ways, moments of human–nonhuman
contact, figured as points of metamorphosis, hybridity, affective communion
or a violent uncovering of bare life. In the first chapter of this section Lauren
Cullen examines turn-of-the-century Canadian wild animal narratives, focusing
on the short stories of Charles G. D. Roberts that sit, in terms of genre, on the
cusp of modernism. In her chapter, Cullen examines the uniquely Canadian style
of Roberts’s stories, showing how he draws on contemporary ideas about animal–
human continuity and animal psychology to confront and undermine the hierar-
chy of human superiority and animal victimhood, and to retrieve the agency of
the nonhuman animal. Karen Eckersley’s ‘Encountering Female Human Animal
Becomings in Leonora Carrington’s Surrealist Hybrid Tales’ explores Carrington’s
biocentric entanglements of human and nonhuman animal that cross the demarca-
tions of subject and species. Considering Carrington’s Virginia Fur and the epony-
mous Jemima from the short story ‘Jemima and the Wolf’, Eckersley locates, in
Carrington’s writings, a posthuman resistance to the tyranny of the phallocentric
anthropos. Also exploring a short story, Elizabeth Curry’s ‘Modern Intersections:
Reading Anita Scott Coleman’s Animals’ engages with Coleman’s avowal of the
animal (and animality) in the story ‘Three Dogs and a Rabbit’, published in The
Crisis in 1926, along with the poem ‘Idle Wonder’. In these texts, identifications
between human characters and animals are made prominent, animal characters
exhibit human-ness or human characters appear animalised, and they demon-
strate, Curry argues, how Coleman uses animal affinity rather than abjection to
explore the dissolution of human boundaries and hierarchies. Animal encounters,
then, have many potential resonances.
The final section, Extinction, War, Proliferation, contains chapters that range
across different visions of apocalyptic destruction, trauma, danger and adversity,
at the level of the individual, culture and species, finding protean animal figures
who offer an uncertain counter to the ravages of modernity. These chapters invite
us to consider literal and figurative animals in our recent past, present and future,
as well as the directions in which modernist animal studies may go. Exploring
birds and planes in Second World War poetry, Laura Blomvall’s ‘1940s Avian Noir’
considers the confusion of animal and machine in the recurrent images of avian
menace across the work of Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Muriel
Rukeyser work. Articulating the parallels between perceptual distortions in film
and in the poetic image, Blomvall argues that the oneiric and threatening aspects
of the noir aesthetic offer a compelling frame through which to read disjunctive
poetic representations of aerial war. In ‘Unhoming the Pigeon: Ahmed Ali’s
Twilight in Delhi’ Caroline Hovanec focuses on a specific avian species – the

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 introduction

pigeon – to consider the violent impacts of colonial modernity, imperial capitalism

and environmental catastrophe. Examining the concerns with cultural extinction,
loss and unhoming in Ali’s novel, Hovanec argues that Twilight in Delhi has an
important lesson for imagining survival in our own precarious world. Rachel
Murray’s ‘The Modernist Jellyfish’ explores how this gelatinous and strange
marine life form clogs up the workings of modernity, both as increasing jelly-
fish blooms that fill the oceans because of anthropogenic climate change, and as
symbolic disruptors of thought that produce moments of arrest, but also epiph-
anic flashes, for Wyndham Lewis, Marianne Moore and H.D. Finally, Kari Weil’s
Afterword invites us to reflect on the animal within, and on the volume as a whole,
grounding the politics of animality in the personal. These chapters encapsulate
some of the key themes that this volume explores and raise questions about the
present and future state of animals, animal figures and modernist animal studies.
This volume emerged from a site of dialogue and exchange, in a space and
time where we seemingly took for granted the opportunities for proximity and
scholarly community. Through the intervening time, as this book has come
to production, we have been made acutely aware of our own vulnerability as
embodied human animals, of the intense fragility of the natural world we share
with other life and of the importance of connection and communal responsibil-
ity. This awareness colours, however implicitly, the contributions gathered here
and has guided us in our curation of this volume. Thus, rather than being an
authoritative tome on the modernist animal, we intend the book to be a cata-
lyst for rich conversations, both on and off the page, that continue to uncover
and acknowledge a profusion of beastly modernisms.

Works Cited
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Adkins, Peter. 2022b. The Modernist Anthropocene: Nonhuman Life and Planetary
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Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Trans. Daniel
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Agamben, Giorgio. 2004. The Open: Man and Animal. Trans. Kevin Attell. Stanford:
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Barnes, Djuna. 1922. ‘A Portrait of a Man Who Is, At Present, One of the More Significant
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Derrida. Jacques. 2009. The Beast and the Sovereign. Vol. 1. Ed. Michel Lisse, Marie-Louise
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Foucault, Michel. 1990. The History of Sexuality: An Introduction. New York: Vintage.
Foucault, Michel. 1994. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences.
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Foucault, Michel. 2003. ‘Society Must Be Defended’. In Lectures at the Collège de
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Goldman, Jane. 2007. ‘“Ce chien est à Moi”: Virginia Woolf and the Signifying Dog’.
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Goldman, Jane. 2016. ‘Flush: A Biography: Speaking, Reading, and Writing with the
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 introduction

Haraway, Donna. 2003. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Signifi-
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Haraway, Donna. 2007. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Haraway, Donna. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene.
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Haynes, Alan. 1983. ‘Murderous Millinery: The Struggle for the Plumage Act, 1921’.
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Empire. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Narayanan, Yamini. 2019. ‘“Cow Is a Mother, Mothers Can Do Anything for Their
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Nicholson, Melanie. 2020. ‘Necessary and Unnecessary Monsters: Jorge Luis Borges’s
Book of Imaginary Beings’. Journal of Modern Literature 43.2: 134–51.
Nicholson, Robert. 2001. ‘“Signatures of All Things I Am Here to Read”: The James
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Ryan, Derek. 2013. Virginia Woolf and the Materiality of Theory: Sex, Animal, Life.
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

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 saskia mccracken and alex goody

Ryan, Derek. 2019. ‘Literature’. In The Edinburgh Companion to Animal Studies. Ed.
Lynn Turner, Undine Sellbach and Ron Broglio, 321–36. Edinburgh: Edinburgh
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and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
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in a More-than-Human World. Bielefeld: Transcript.
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Margins to the Centre. London and New York: Routledge.
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Human, 1–32. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
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University Press.
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University Press.

Notes
1. See, for example, the special issue of the Humanities journal (2017) on ‘Joyce,
Animals and the Nonhuman’, edited by Katherine Ebury; Cliff Mak, ‘Joyce’s
Indifferent Animals: Boredom and the Subversion of Fables in Finnegan’s Wake’
(2016); Lauren Benjamin (2020), ‘Circe’s Feral Beasts: Women and Other Animals
in Joyce’s Ulysses’, Journal of Modern Literature (43.2: 41–59); Annalisa Federici,
‘From Animal Anthropomorphism to Human Animality in Ulysses: Joyce After
Cervantes’ (2020–1); and Peter Adkins (2022), ‘Fourwalkers, Taildanglers, Head-
hangers: Labouring Animals in Ulysses’, Textual Practice (36.2: 186–204).
2. The distinction drawn here is not absolute and there are close intersections between
critical animal studies, human–animal studies and animality studies.

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 Part I

Companion Species

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 1

METAMODERNIST BEASTS, OR FLUSH’S

FUTURE: CERIDWEN DOVEY’S ONLY THE
ANIMALS AND SIGRID NUNEZ’S MITZ:
THE MARMOSET OF BLOOMSBURY

Derek Ryan

Flush: A Biography (1933) is the only work of fiction written by Virginia Woolf
that leaves readers oriented towards an earlier era. Where her other novels end
on or around the year of their completion, Woolf’s fictional biography of Eliza-
beth Barrett Browning’s cocker spaniel concludes with its protagonist’s death in
June 1854.1 The list of ‘Authorities’ that directly follows the description of Flush’s
demise reinforces the book’s historical gaze by listing the mid-nineteenth-century
publications Woolf relied on. Those ‘who would like to check the facts or to
pursue the subject further’ should, we are directed, consult two poems by Barrett
Browning, ‘To Flush, My Dog’ (1844) and ‘Flush, or Faunus’ (1850), various
editions of the Brownings’ letters, and Thomas Beames’s account of slums in The
Rookeries of London (1850) (Woolf 1998: 151). As Linden Peach, Jane Goldman
and I detail in the Cambridge Edition, Woolf’s misleading qualification ‘that there
are very few authorities for the foregoing biography’ (1998: 151) has thrown
readers off the scent of the numerous other Victorian sources she drew upon,
from Hugh Dalziel’s British Dogs: Their Varieties, History and Characteristics
(1888), key for her discussion of spaniel breeds, to Mrs Sutherland Orr’s Life
and Letters of Robert Browning (1891) and A. G. L’Estrange’s The Life of Mary
Russell Mitford (1870), which provide some of the details of Flush’s human com-
panions. The extent of Woolf’s research not only puts paid to the idea that Flush:
A Biography was merely a joke,2 but demonstrates that she was interested in
rescuing him from obscurity and inserting him into his rightful place in (literary)
history. As Woolf herself writes in one of her own notes on the text: ‘The whole

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 derek ryan

question of dogs’ relation to the spirit of the age, whether it is possible to call one
dog Elizabethan, another Augustan, another Victorian, together,’ she adds with
characteristic humour, ‘with the influence upon dogs of the poetry and philosophy
of their masters, deserves a fuller discussion than can here be given it’ (1998, 114).
But Flush: A Biography also looks forward and has itself been part of a
fuller discussion about human–animal relations sparked by the animal turn in
literary criticism. Woolf’s decision to write a life of Flush has been understood
as a device used to explore links between Victorian and Georgian private and
public spheres in terms of gender (Squier 1985; Goldman 2010) and class (Light
2007) oppression, and to explore networks of exploitation connected to slavery
(Peach 2000: 71), fascism (Snaith 2002) and eugenics (Peach 2013: 443–7).
The book is also now held up as a touchstone of the genre of animal biogra-
phy. When Woolf only half-seriously wrote in an unpublished note, originally
planned to accompany her list of ‘Authorities’, that she was ‘anticipating what
will be, in a few years, the rule, perhaps the rage: anyhow the necessity’ (1999:
101), she could not have envisaged that Flush would become, several decades
later, a celebrated work within a field dedicated to the study of the literature
and lives of animals.3 It is now part of textbooks on the topic alongside other
works that are said to ‘give voice to animals’ (DeMello 2013: 3; see also Weil
2012: 81–97) and is viewed as a complex exploration of canine subjectivity
that transgresses generic conventions and transforms the mode of biography
itself (Herman 2013; Kendall-Morwick 2014). Some scholars have argued that
she engages closely with the behavioural aspects of dogs, whether in relation
to comparative psychology (Hovanec 2013: 263–6) or evolutionary theory
(Dubino 2014; McCracken 2021: 106–48). Others have focused on how Flush:
A Biography pushes the boundaries of what we expect a dog’s experience to be,
by paying attention to smell (Booth 2000; Feuerstein 2013), desire (Smith 2002:
353), gaze (Ryan 2013: 143–150), logos and dreams (McCracken 2021: 126–7,
132–5), and reading and numeracy (Goldman 2016: 170–2). A bestseller in its
own time and more favourably received by critics than is often assumed, the
text’s ability to speak to the critical discourse on animality in the early twenty-
first century has gained it belated recognition within the modernist canon.
Flush: A Biography’s futurity is my main concern in this chapter. But rather
than critical fortunes, I focus on the book’s literary afterlife. Specifically, I con-
sider two contemporary works of fiction written by an American and a South
African–Australian author who follow Woolf in testing how far anthropomorphic
language and narrative technique might be used to explore both cross-species com-
panionship and violence. Rooted in what she calls, in her ‘Acknowledgments’, the
‘published fact’ of Leonard Woolf’s autobiography, Virginia Woolf’s letters and
diaries, and various other memoirs and biographies (Nunez 2019a: 149), Sigrid
Nunez’s fictional biography, Mitz: The Marmoset of Bloomsbury, first published
in 1998, tells the life of the marmoset the Woolfs acquired from Victor Rothschild

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 metamodernist beasts in ceridwen dovey and sigrid nunez

in 1934.4 Ceridwen Dovey’s fictional memoir of a tortoise, Plautus, kept by

Virginia Woolf (as well as the Tolstoy family and George Orwell, among others),
in a section of the 2014 short story collection Only the Animals, is more fantasti-
cal, playing fast and loose with fact in a manner that perhaps has more in com-
mon with Orlando: A Biography (1928) (though Woolf is surprisingly omitted in
her list of sources – her own kind of ‘Authorities’ note – published online).5 Both
texts do, however, make explicit reference to Flush: A Biography and as such are
examples of what Laura Marcus, in her essay on the legacies of the modernist
novel, calls ‘direct, rather than diffuse, influences’ (2007: 82). In what follows, I
suggest that their versions of fictional auto/biography bring modernist strategies
for writing about animals into the realm of contemporary literature. While Nunez
and Dovey draw on information about the lives of famous writers, animal fig-
ures are central to their forging the kind of ‘inventive, self-conscious relationship’
with modernist literature that David James and Urmila Seshagiri have termed
‘metamodernism’ (2014: 88), or that is revealed through Michaela Bronstein’s
definition of ‘transhistorical’ reading (2018: 7–8).6 These books should not be
read as merely paying homage to the past, but as making use of the archive of
experimental forms and styles from the early twentieth century – in this case,
beastly biography – in order to ‘reassess’, ‘reanimate’ and sometimes ‘repudiate’
modernism (James and Seshagiri 2014: 89), to show how the past ‘is re-enacted,
reused, repurposed, and reimagined by the present’ (Bronstein 2018: 1). This is
not to downplay the significance of Flush: A Biography’s Victorian context, but
to show how Woolf transforms Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s cocker spaniel into
a metamodernist textual beast written into history but ready to pounce on the
readers of the future.
Both Nunez and Dovey display a heightened awareness of what Woolf, in
the above-mentioned draft ‘Authorities’ note, described as the ‘anthropomor-
phic delusion’ that would view beasts as ‘merely extensions of our own identity’
(Woolf 1999: 101). While Mitz: The Marmoset of Bloomsbury has been recog-
nised as a work of ‘biofiction’ of primary interest to scholars for its portrayal of
Virginia Woolf,7 Nunez is clearly concerned with the roles nonhuman animals
play in storytelling. When asked in an interview what interested her in writing
about animals, she replied:

Everything. Animals are a great mystery to human beings. We know

they have feelings and we have ways of interpreting certain signs and
behaviors of theirs, but because they don’t have language we really don’t
know what goes on inside their heads. I have always loved animals and
been fascinated by them. (Nunez 2019b)

Lack of knowledge here fuels the desire to write about nonhuman animals rather
than hindering it, yet it also ensures a careful approach to, and self-conscious use

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 derek ryan

of, the inevitable anthropomorphism that comes with using human language to
explore nonhuman life. In the early reception of Only the Animals, meanwhile,
Woolf has been something of an understudy to a cast that includes Kafka (the
chapter inspired by his ‘A Report to an Academy’ is one of the collection’s
highlights), even and most notably in one recent book chapter that opens with
a discussion of Flush: A Biography and moves on to Dovey and other contem-
porary texts (see Herman 2018). But the section ‘A Terrarium of One’s Own’
is an example of her wanting, as she put it in an interview, ‘to short-circuit the
rational retelling’ of history centred on human events and experiences. Dovey
is cognisant of ‘the absurdity of a talking animal soul speaking from beyond
the grave’ (2014b). Nonetheless, in pushing anthropomorphic voice to a more
extreme level than found in Mitz: The Marmoset of Bloomsbury or, for that
matter, Flush: A Biography, Dovey chooses her narrative technique in the spirit
of modernism’s, and particularly here Woolf’s, experiments with an anthropo-
morphism that contests rather than confirms anthropocentrism.8
One strategy Nunez learns from Woolf in order to navigate through the
potential pitfalls of anthropomorphism is evident in her use of the interrogative
mood to pose questions about animal experience:

Virginia looked long upon Mitz very often. She wondered about Mitz as
she had wondered about the cats and dogs she had known all her life.
What was it like to be an animal? How did the world look through a
dog’s eyes? What did cats think of us? Without such wonder, it is doubt-
ful Virginia ever would have written Flush. Now it was Mitz’s walnut of
a head she wished to crack. Did marmosets dream? Did they remember?
Did they regret? What did marmosets want? (2019a, 58)

This passage invokes Woolf’s cautious approach to anthropomorphic projec-

tion in Flush: A Biography, wherein many of her speculations as to his won-
derings, observations and motivations are posed as questions. In front of the
mirror at the start of Chapter 3, we read: ‘Was not the little brown dog oppo-
site himself? But what is “oneself”? Is it the thing people see? Or is it the
thing one is?’ (1998: 32). Or in the closing pages we read of the biographer
imagining Flush dreaming: ‘was he dreaming that he hunted rabbits in Spain?
Was he coursing up a hot hill-side with dark men shouting “Span! Span!” as
the rabbits darted from the brushwood?’ (1998: 104). Significantly, human
language itself is also up for debate: ‘Miss Barrett once exclaimed after a morn-
ing’s toil, “writing, writing . . .” After all, she may have thought, do words say
everything? Can words say anything? Do not words destroy the symbol that
lies beyond the reach of words?’ (1998: 27). These questions, and the many
similar ones posed in Woolf’s and Nunez’s texts, expose the limits of human

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 metamodernist beasts in ceridwen dovey and sigrid nunez

knowledge at the same time as they multiply the possibilities of nonhuman

worlds. The biographers here place themselves in affinity with Mitz, who her-
self behaved ‘as if the world were a question’ (with the speculative ‘as if’ once
again used to imagine cautiously the animal’s perspective) (Nunez 2019a: 81).
The posing of such questions is not only a marker of modernism’s openness to
unknowability or unrecognisability but an anticipation of further questions to
come. In writing, for instance, that the conundrum ‘What was it like to be an
animal?’ was essential to Woolf’s completion of Flush: A Biography, Nunez
alludes to Thomas Nagel’s influential 1974 article, ‘What is it Like to be a Bat?’
and its sceptical exploration of the limits of anthropomorphism, which would
be famously interrogated by J. M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello (1999: 31–4) in
The Lives of Animals. These texts are also part of Flush: A Biography’s future.
Dovey’s Only the Animals plays on Woolf’s style in a different way by
raising concerns about how animal auto/biographies are often dismissed by
readers. An element of self-reflexivity can be detected in Dovey having Plautus
the tortoise recall his human keeper reading passages of Flush: A Biography
aloud:

She sensed that I didn’t like it when the tone veered towards the ironic,
tongue-in-cheek style that humans seem to adopt automatically when
writing from the perspective of an animal. It was a cheeky book, cer-
tainly, provocative even – it fit with her desire at the time to play with the
conventions of traditional biography – but that didn’t mean it couldn’t
also be moving. (2014a: 133)

Dovey’s response to concerns that writing about nonhuman animals might not
be taken seriously is to opt for a more and not less anthropomorphic narrative
voice for the tortoise, but she does so very deliberately to undermine anthropo-
centrism. Plautus points out that the best passages of Woolf’s fictional biography
are those that focus on smell:

I was most impressed by the passages in Flush: A Biography in which

Virginia attempted to understand at a sensory level what it might be
like for a dog to experience the world through smell. This was probably
due to my own similar hierarchy of senses, with smell right at the top.
(2014a: 134)

Dovey then quotes a passage from Woolf’s text that imagines what Florence
might smell like to Flush, and where these smells are somewhat abstract and
only vaguely identifiable to humans: we are told ‘how acid shade made the
stone smell’, and about ‘the purple smell’ of ripe grapes, the ‘raucous smells,

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 derek ryan

crimson smells’ of goat and macaroni (Dovey 2014a: 134; Woolf 1998: 87).
Earlier in the same passage Woolf’s biographer notes:

there are no more than two words and one-half for what we smell. The
human nose is practically non-existent. The greatest poets in the world
have smelt nothing but roses on the one hand, and dung on the other.
The infinite gradations that lie between are unrecorded. Yet it was in the
world of smell that Flush mostly lived. Love was chiefly smell; form and
colour were smell; music and architecture, law, politics and science were
smell. To him religion itself was smell. (Woolf: 1998, 86)

Dovey has therefore steered her readers to the space opened up in Woolf’s text
to imagine a canine sensory experience that evades human comprehension.
In their experiments in animal auto/biography, however, neither Nunez
nor Dovey goes as far as to present us with what David Herman refers to as
‘co-authored acts of narrating’ (2018: 194). Grace Moore is right to point
out in response to Herman that while attempts to depict cross-species interac-
tions are valuable, such interactions hold ‘subtleties’ that are beyond human
language; the notion of ‘joint authorship’ is as ‘disingenuous’ as it is ‘entic-
ing’ (2020: 212–3). But if both the cautious anthropomorphism of Mitz: The
Marmoset of Bloomsbury and extravagant anthropomorphism of Only the
Animals draw attention to the limitations of human language to convey non-
human animal narrative, to some extent they do, as the above passages show,
‘reflect and help constitute an alternative ontology’ that opens up versions
of selfhood for animals, as Herman claims of a later section of Dovey’s text
(Herman 2018: 195). Moreover, in adapting modernist strategies for writing
about nonhuman animals, Nunez and Dovey demonstrate how different modes
of being and narrative techniques are connected by Woolf, and in their own
texts, to material encounters with animals. Like many other works of beastly
modernism, Flush: A Biography not only is a text that probes ideas of species
boundaries but does so by attending to the matter of exploitation – whether
of ‘half famished, dirty, diseased, uncombed, unbrushed’ dogs at the hands of
dognappers (1998: 55), the cramped conditions of livestock ‘milked and killed
and eaten under the bedroom’ (1998: 52), or the cruelty of breeding clubs that
determine whether certain dogs will be ‘encouraged and bred from’ or ‘cut off’
(1998: 7). Nunez and Dovey manipulate anthropomorphic narration to expose
not only anthropocentric worldviews but also, we will see, the history of vio-
lence that is cause and consequence of them.
Beyond personality portraits and the companionship offered by the Woolfs’
marmoset in Mitz: The Marmoset of Bloomsbury, asymmetrical power dynamics
between human and nonhuman are uncovered. Some exploitative relationships
are only hinted at, such as when we read of Leonard eating ‘with delight, praising

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 metamodernist beasts in ceridwen dovey and sigrid nunez

the fish, the meat’ or of he and Virginia enjoying their ‘passion’ of pâté de foie
gras on a holiday in France (Nunez 2019a: 4, 102). More prominent throughout
the book are allusions to networks of colonial captivity. We are told of Leonard’s
‘mixed feelings’ about zoos; an incident in which he and Virginia witnessed an
ape who had escaped from the circus; a golden lion marmoset transported to
Europe in the mid-eighteenth century to be part of Louis XV’s menagerie; and the
demand for marmosets among sailors who would purchase them at low prices
and ‘sell them for a great deal more back home’ (Nunez 2019a: 26, 18, 52, 27).
The entire novel is framed around Mitz’s own story of capture. Echoing the
repeated emphasis on chains in Woolf’s Flush: A Biography, the opening chapter
informs readers that ‘Mitz had once been chained . . .’, with the ellipses then
filled in towards the end of the book through a detailed account of the horrid
conditions she experienced in South America. We read of ‘men with machetes,
men with nets’, and then of Mitz ‘scream[ing] herself hoarse’ as ‘She bit and
scratched at the hands that seized her’ and placed her in a box inside which ‘she
clawed at the bottom, the sides, the top. There was not enough air – yet her
lungs seemed full to bursting’ (Nunez 2019a: 7–8, 135). Any anthropomorphic
language used to imagine the experience of Mitz and her fellow simians captured
in this way – for example, when we are told that ‘Different stories were passed
from tree to tree about the monkeys that disappeared’ – only serves to under-
line the material violence they suffered. We soon discover that an unfed Mitz
was squeezed into a cage with other monkeys, ‘shrieking, as monkeys in terror
and confusion do’, and the footsteps of a knife-wielding man who would throw
burning ash on paws and bottles against cages (Nunez 2019a: 136–7). Just as
Virginia Woolf imagined Flush’s plight after being dognapped to an extent not
seen in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s letters (see Ryan 2019: 274–5), so here is
Mitz’s capture depicted with an intensity that surpasses the Woolfs’ own remarks
about their marmoset.
Plautus may not suffer as Mitz does, but the story she tells reveals how
tortoises have also been exploited by humans. In Dovey’s text, the tortoise
declares herself a lucky exception:

Many times during my happy years with Virginia, I was grateful for
the good fortune of having arrived on her doorstep and nobody else’s,
for this was London in the 1930s and the pet tortoise craze was in full
swing. Virginia followed the travesties of the tortoise trade as they were
reported in the papers: millions of us imported each year from North
Africa, arriving with broken limbs and shells from being packed into
crates one on top of the other; a thousand dead spur-thighed tortoises
discovered in baskets on the Barking foreshore. Hardly any that sur-
vived the journey made it through their first winter in Britain. Outside
schools you could buy a baby tortoise and a goldfish for sixpence, and

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 derek ryan

if they both died – as was likely – you could buy another pair the next
week. In any local pub, you could find pet tortoises being forced to race
across the billiard tables, and given a puddle of beer to drink at the end.
(2014a: 136)

Here is a stark example of an anthropomorphised voice being used to shed

light on the abuse of nonhuman animals. The passage seemingly alludes to
Woolf’s 1932 essay ‘Oxford Street Tide’, which she completed as part of a
series of essays on London that she wrote while she was working on Flush: A
Biography (the first draft of Woolf’s fictional biography was, in fact, written
in the same notebook as these essays, indicating that the two projects were
intertwined). Woolf writes of how ‘tortoises repose on litters of grass’ waiting
for ‘a woman [to] stop and add a tortoise to her string of parcels’, which ‘is
perhaps the rarest sight that human eyes can look upon’ (2010: 283–4).9 It
should be noted, however, that the Woolfs’ complicity in this trade in tortoises
– they purchased several over the years – is overlooked by Dovey’s description
of how sympathetic and caring Virginia was upon Plautus’s arrival. To Jacques
Raverat, for example, she writes on 30 July 1923 of having ‘a tortoise, bought
for 2/- yesterday in the High street’ (Woolf 1978: 58); while to Lydia Keynes
she writes on 5 June 1937 that ‘Leonard is engaged in putting his new tortoises
to bed in the lily pond. They – we bought 3 – are so active we cant keep con-
trol of them. I am perpetually being sent up the road in pursuit of the father
tortoise’ (Woolf 1980: 134). Similarly, Plautus’s belief that ‘in Bloomsbury,
during those years before the next war started, I was treated not as a mere
pet, but as the worthy subject of great art and poetry’ (Dovey 2014a: 136)
leaves us wondering if the irony is intended by Dovey, given that Woolf never
did write her own testudine story.10 Meanwhile, the notion that ‘Tortoiseshell
objects – hair combs, calling card boxes, the rare snuffbox – were banned in
my presence, Virginia made sure of it’ is contradicted by the fact that Woolf
herself owned fashionable tortoiseshell glasses (a pair of which are now in the
possession of the National Trust).11
If the examples given signal the wider colonial and capitalist networks of ani-
mal capture and trade, Nunez’s marmoset and Dovey’s tortoise are also placed
at the heart of encounters involving fascism and war. Mitz: The Marmoset of
Bloomsbury pieces together details from Leonard’s autobiography and Virginia’s
diaries to reconstruct a trip they took across Europe in 1935 with their mar-
moset in tow. In Downhill All the Way (1967), Leonard records that on
9 May they ‘passed in a few yards from civilization to savagery’ when they drove
across the Dutch border into Nazi Germany, armed only with a letter from
Prince Bismarck of the Foreign Office to explain their presence (Woolf 1970:
189). Entering the town of Bonn, they were confronted by German policemen
and a large group of ‘enthusiastic Nazis’ who had gathered to welcome the man

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 metamodernist beasts in ceridwen dovey and sigrid nunez

the Woolfs suspected must be Hitler (it turned out to be Hermann Göring). If
this seemed like a perilous situation for a prominent Jewish intellectual and an
eminent novelist, their fears soon subsided, thanks to an unlikely saviour:

When they saw Mitz, the crowd shrieked with delight. Mile after mile
I drove between the two lines of corybantic Germans, and the whole
way they shouted ‘Heil Hitler! Heil Hitler!’ to Mitz and gave her (and
secondarily Virginia and me) the Hitler salute with outstretched arm.
(Woolf 1970: 191)

As Virginia recorded in her diary that day while the events were unfolding: ‘We
become obsequious – delighted that is when the officers smile at Mitzi,’ with
this ‘obsequiousness gradually turning to anger’ (Woolf 1983: 311).
In Nunez’s dramatisation of the event, Mitz takes centre stage as the amuse-
ment the officers find in this animal and their embodiment of fascist politics are
disturbingly juxtaposed. An officer approaches:

He threw up his hands, he shook his fists, he lifted one knee and then
the other and stamped his feet. He was a swastika himself, all angles,
twisted, black and red. He bore down on the car. Leonard felt for the
letter in his pocket. Mitz, excited by the noise and the flags and now this
amusing fellow, leapt onto the steering wheel and screeched. The man
stopped in his tracks. Surprise, then puzzlement, then tenderness showed
in his face. ‘Ah – oh – ah!’ he cried. He clapped his hands like a child.
‘Das liebe kleine Ding!’
It was as if the Woolfs had vanished. The storm trooper had eyes
only for Mitz. He leaned into the car, and Leonard inhaled a mixture
of beer, onion, leather, pomade, and sweat. The man wagged a finger at
Mitz, and Virginia closed her eyes and sent up a prayer that Mitz would
not bite it. Bite it she did though – but this seemed only to increase his
delight. He burbled and cooed, offering wurst fingers to Mitz, one by
one. And what was the sweet creature’s name? When he heard it he
laughed and repeated it several times, slapping his thigh. He loved it –
loved it! At last he stepped back from the car, clicked his heels together,
and raised his arm. ‘Heil Hitler!’ (Nunez 2019a: 70–1)

Mitz’s anthropomorphic voice can be detected in Nunez’s free indirect discourse

– ‘now this amusing fellow’ seeming to be her own thoughts – and she appears to
be attuned to the man’s shifting emotions. Moreover, while Leonard takes a deep
breath and Virginia closes her eyes, the marmoset is the only one not rendered
passive in front of the transfixed storm trooper. The brief sentence ‘It was as if the
Woolfs had vanished’ is significant from the perspective of the past incident that

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inspired this part of Nunez’s book, as well as the future context in which Nunez
is writing. On the one hand, that is, it signals Nunez’s foray into more imagina-
tive terrain in focusing on Mitz’s experience of the event to a greater extent than
the Woolfs did in their written recollections; on the other, it points to the fact
that, far from receding from Nazi view, the Woolfs were, as noted a couple of
pages later, soon to be added to a Gestapo arrest list (2019a: 73).
Dovey writes of animals less fortunate than Mitz was at the hands of the
Nazis. When Plautus remembers ‘that Virginia had told Leonard the morning
before about the Nazis burning Swastikas into the backs of tortoises’ (2014a:
138), she does so while shielding herself from falling bombs. As we are told,

This lovely literary life with Virginia and the Bloomsbury Set was upended
by the London Blitz. I mean this quite literally. One moment I was sun-
ning myself in the Woolfs’ drawing room, the next I was buried in the
rubble of their home after a bomb hit it while they were out. I felt very
calm for the first day I spent hidden away in my shell in the darkness of
the ruins. (2014a: 137)

Dovey is not simply using the tortoise to convey the horrors of the war for
civilians on the Home Front; she is also alluding to the largely untold his-
tory of companion animals caught up in human wars. As historian Hilda Kean
powerfully argues, the Second World War is incorrectly labelled the ‘People’s
War’ because ‘experiencing bombardment was clearly a joint animal–human
activity’ (2017: 114). While Kean’s focus is primarily on dogs and cats, she
does touch on tortoises: ‘British propaganda asked pet owners to support the
war effort partly because of the threat to pets if the Nazis were victorious’, the
evidence of which included data collected from the occupied Channel Islands,
where ‘People queued in their hundreds to have their animals killed at the Jersey
Animal Shelter. About 2,000 dogs and 3,000 cats were destroyed in five days.
Pet tortoises were collected in tomato baskets and released daily’ (Kean 2017:
121). Plautus is, in the end, rescued by a mongrel dog named ‘Beauty’ – Dovey’s
nod to Anna Sewell signalling a further layer of transhistorical cross-species
alliance – and, via an improbably circuitous route that includes time with the
unsympathetic Orwell, a wildlife park in Wiltshire and playwright Tom Stop-
pard (whose 1993 play, Arcadia, Dovey took the tortoise’s name from), she
finds herself in the USSR being presented to the Soviet Space Programme. Here
Plautus will become one of those poignantly described as ‘one-way passengers’
who, at the same time, aided and were victims of the Cold War and its ‘Space
Race’ (Dovey 2014a: 146). Her own death is prefigured when she reflects on
the story of ‘Laika, the first animal to orbit the earth. She was a stray that Dr
Yazdovsky noticed lurking beside the rubbish bins outside the facility and on a
whim decided to put in the cabin of Sputnik II when it was blasted into orbit

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 metamodernist beasts in ceridwen dovey and sigrid nunez

around earth in 1957’ (2014a: 146). The matter-of-fact way in which we are
told that ‘The video recorders in the cabin revealed that she was quite happy
up there, able to move a bit, bark, and eat food pellets from an automatic dis-
penser’ becomes a darkly ironic kind of anthropomorphic projection when we
then read that ‘the oxygen in her capsule ran out and she died, but her capsule
stayed in orbit for months’ (2014a: 146). Plautus suffers the same fate, after
being sent up to space in 1968 in ‘a Noah’s rocket-ark of biological specimens’
which included the tortoise in her ‘terrarium’ (Dovey’s play on Woolf’s ‘a room
of one’s own’ in the section’s title now poignantly used to signal the tortoise’s
lack of freedom) (2014a: 149–50).
Mitz: The Marmoset of Bloomsbury and Only the Animals are, I have been
suggesting, examples of ‘contemporary fictions distinguished by inventive,
self-conscious relationships with modernist literature’ (James and Seshagiri
2014: 88), and specifically Woolf’s experiment in writing animal biography. As
metamodernist beasts, Mitz the marmoset and Plautus the tortoise also demand
a transhistorical reading as ‘an invitation to interaction with multiple historical
moments’ (Bronstein 2018: 8). If such an approach to contemporary literature
necessarily views modernism as a historical phenomenon dependent on partic-
ular cultural contexts, it does so precisely in order to mobilise its achievements
and gain a greater appreciation of its influence on the later twentieth and early
twenty-first century. Crucially, while Nunez and Dovey reanimate and revise
Woolf’s approach to writing animals in terms of technique and theme, they also
speak to their – and our – own moment in which there is increasing recogni-
tion of how, as philosopher Christine Overall puts it in introducing the volume
Pets and People, ‘Companion animals are both vulnerable to and dependent
upon us’ (2017: xvii). Overall asks foundational questions that animal studies
scholars and activists have been grappling with in recent years:

What responsibilities do we owe to them, especially since we have the

power and authority to make literal life-and-death decisions about them?
What kinds of relationships should we have with our companion animals?
What might we learn from them about the nature and limits of our own
morality? How should we (re)create our lives with them? (2017: xvii).

Indeed, Woolf herself wrote in an early draft of her fictional biography: ‘What
does one owe an animal trusted to ones [sic] care?’12 In responding to Flush: A
Biography’s future and raising such questions in contemporary fiction, Nunez
and Dovey teach us how to care about – and for – modernist beasts.

Works Cited
Booth, Alison. 2000. ‘The Scent of a Narrative: Rank Discourse in Flush and Written on
the Body’. Narrative 8.1: 3–22.

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 derek ryan

Bronstein, Michaela. 2018. Out of Context: The Uses of Modernist Fiction. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Coetzee, J. M. 1999. The Lives of Animals. Ed. Amy Gutmann. Princeton: Princeton
University Press.
DeMello, Margo, ed. 2013. Speaking for Animals: Animal Autobiographical Writing.
New York: Routledge.
Dovey, Ceridwen. 2014a. Only the Animals. London: Atlantic Books.
Dovey, Ceridwen with Potts Point Bookshop. 2014b. Interview. Available at: <https://
www.pottspointbookshopblog.com/blog/2014/05/interview-with-ceridwen-
dovey-author-of.html> (last accessed 28 June 2022).
Dubino, Jeanne. 2014. ‘The Bispecies Environment, Coevolution, and Flush’. In Virginia
Woolf: Twenty-First Century Approaches. Ed. Jeanne Dubino, Gill Lowe, Vara
Neverow and Kathryn Simpson, 131–47. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Feuerstein, Anna. 2013. ‘What Does Power Smell Like? Canine Epistemology and the
Politics of the Pet in Virginia Woolf’s Flush’. Special Issue: ‘Woolf and Animals’.
Ed. Kristin Czarnecki and Vara Neverow. Virginia Woolf Miscellany 84: 32–4.
Godioli, Alberto, Monica Jansen and Carmen Van den Bergh. 2020. ‘Thresholds and
Tortoises: Modernist Animality in Pirandello’s Fiction’. In Posthumanism in Italian
Literature and Film. Ed. Enrica Maria Ferrara, 51–71. Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Goldman, Jane. 2010. ‘Who Let the Dogs Out? Samuel Johnson, Thomas Carlyle,
Virginia Woolf, and the Little Brown Dog’. In Virginia Woolf’s Bloomsbury:
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Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Goldman, Jane. 2016. ‘Flush: A Biography: Speaking, Reading, and Writing with the
Companion Species’. In A Companion to Virginia Woolf. Ed. Jessica Berman,
163–76. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Herman, David. 2013. ‘Modernist Life Writing and Nonhuman Lives: Ecologies of
Experience in Virginia Woolf’s Flush’. Modern Fiction Studies 59.3: 547–68.
Herman, David. 2018. Narratology Beyond the Human. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Hovanec, Caroline. 2013. ‘Philosophical Barnacles and Empiricist Dogs’. Configurations
21.3: 245–69.
Ittner, Jutta. 2006. ‘Part Spaniel, Part Canine Puzzle: Anthropomorphism in Woolf’s
Flush and Auster’s Timbuktu’. Mosaic 39.4: 181–96.
James, David and Urmila Seshagiri. 2014. ‘Metamodernism: Narratives of Continuity
and Revolution’. PMLA 129.1: 87–100.
Kean, Hilda. 2017. The Great Cat and Dog Massacre: The Real Story of World War II’s
Unknown Tragedy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Kelley, Philip, Scott Lewis, Edward Hagan, Joseph Phelan and Rhian Williams, eds.
2013. The Brownings’ Correspondence. Vol. 20. Winfield, KA: Wedgestone Press.
Kendall-Morwick, Karalyn. 2014. ‘Mongrel Fiction: Canine Bildung and the Feminist
Critique of Anthropocentrism in Virginia Woolf’s Flush’. Modern Fiction Studies
60.3: 506–26.
Kersten, Dennis and Usha Wilbers. 2018. ‘Introduction: Metamodernism’. English
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Latham, Monica. 2012. ‘“Serv[ing] Under Two Masters”: Virginia Woolf’s Afterlives in
Contemporary Biofictions’. a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 27.2: 354–73.
Layne, Bethany. 2014. ‘“They leave out the person to whom things happened”:
Re-reading the Biographical Subject in Sigrid Nunez’s Mitz: The Marmoset of
Bloomsbury (1998)’. In Bloomsbury Influences. Ed. Elizabeth H. Wright, 30–45.
Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars.
Light, Alison. 2007. Mrs Woolf and the Servants. London: Penguin.
McCracken, Saskia. 2021. (R)evolutionary Animal Tropes in the Works of Charles Darwin
and Virginia Woolf. Doctoral Thesis, University of Glasgow.
Marcus, Laura. 2007. ‘The Legacies of Modernism’. In The Cambridge Companion to
the Modernist Novel. Ed. Morag Shiach, 82–97. Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press.
Moore, Grace. 2020. ‘“As Closely Bonded as We are”: Animalographies, Kinship, and
Conflict in Ceridwen Dovey’s Only the Animals and Eva Hornung’s Dog Boy’.
a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 35.1: 207–29.
Nunez, Sigrid. 2019a. Mitz: The Marmoset of Bloomsbury. New York. Soft Skull.
Nunez, Sigrid with Carrie Mullins. 2019b. Interview. Electric Lit. Available at: <https://
electricliterature.com/sigrid-nunez-mitz-is-a-story-about-virginias-woolf-pet-
monkey/> (last accessed 28 June 2022).
Overall, Christine, ed. 2017. Pets and People: The Ethics of Our Relationships with
Companion Animals. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Peach, Linden. 2000. Virginia Woolf (Critical Issues). New York: St Martins.
Peach, Linden. 2013. ‘Woolf and Eugenics’. In Virginia Woolf in Context. Ed. Bryony
Randall and Jane Goldman, 439–48. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Pollentier, Caroline. 2014. ‘Untimely Metamorphoses: Darwin, Baudelaire, Woolf, and
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Ziba Rashidian and Andrew Smyth, 155–75. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Rohman, Carrie. 2018. Choreographies of the Living: Bioaesthetics in Literature, Art,
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Ryan, Derek. 2013. Virginia Woolf and the Materiality of Theory: Sex, Animal, Life.
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Ryan, Derek. 2015. Animal Theory: A Critical Introduction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press.
Ryan, Derek. 2019. ‘“Was it Flush, or was it Pan?”: Virginia Woolf, Ethel Smyth, and
Canine Biography’. In Reading Literary Animals: Medieval to Modern. Ed. Karen
L. Edwards, Derek Ryan and Jane Spencer, 264–81. New York: Routledge.
Smith, Craig. 2002. ‘Across the Widest Gulf: Nonhuman Subjectivity in Virginia Woolf’s
Flush’. Twentieth-Century Literature 48.3: 348–61.
Snaith, Anna. 2002. ‘Of Fanciers, Footnotes, and Fascism: Virginia Woolf’s Flush’.
Modern Fiction Studies 48.3: 614–36.
Squier, Susan Merrill. 1985. Virginia Woolf and London: The Sexual Politics of the
City. Chapel Hill: University of North Caroline Press.
Vermeulen, Timotheus and Robin van den Akker. 2010. ‘Notes on Metamodernism’.
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Weil, Kari. 2012. Thinking Animals: Why Animal Studies Now? New York: Columbia
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Woolf, Leonard. 1970. Downhill All the Way: An Autobiography of the Years 1919–1939.
London: Hogarth Press.
Woolf, Virginia. 1978. The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Volume 3: 1923–1928. Ed. Nigel
Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
Woolf, Virginia. 1980. The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Volume 6: 1936–1941. Ed. Nigel
Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
Woolf, Virginia. 1983. The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Volume 4: 1931–1935. Ed. Anne
Olivier Bell, assisted by Andrew McNeillie. New York: Harcourt Brace & Company.
Woolf, Virginia. 1998. Flush: A Biography. Ed. Kate Flint. Oxford: Oxford University
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Woolf, Virginia. 1999. Flush: A Biography. Ed. Elizabeth Steele. Oxford: Shakespeare
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Woolf, Virginia. 2010. ‘Oxford Street Tide’. In The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Volume 5:
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Young, Peter. 2003. Tortoise. London: Reaktion.

Notes
1. The date is not given by Woolf, but Flush’s death is recorded in a letter Elizabeth
Barrett Browning sent to Arabella Moulton-Barrett, 17, 18, 20 June 1854 (see Kelley
et al. 2013: 248).
2. Woolf refers variously to Flush as a joke in letters to Ethel Smyth, Donald Brace,
Ottoline Morrell, Vita Sackville-West and Hugh Walpole. See Woolf, Letters 5:
140, 155, 161, 169, 177. At the same time, she repeatedly worries over the book’s
reception, evident in her diary entries in the days following its publication. See, for
example, Diary, 4: 184–6.
3. This ‘Authorities Note’ (in holograph draft, 31 July 1931, Berg Collection, New
York Public Library, 197–203) was originally planned to precede the list of sources
Woolf includes at the end of Flush. While never published in Woolf’s lifetime, the
‘corrected’ version I cite from here is helpfully reproduced in the source cited.
4. The 2019 reissued edition of Mitz, which I refer to in this essay, includes a letter
sent by Nigel Nicolson to Nunez upon the book’s original publication. In it, Nicol-
son writes that he thought the marmoset ‘horrible’ when he saw her, but that the
book itself was a ‘perfect little gem’. He adds: ‘I notice the debt it owes to Flush’
(Nicolson qtd in Nunez 2019a: 151).
5. Available at <https://www.ceridwendovey.com/assets/Uploads/Only-the-Animals-
sources.pdf> (last accessed 29 June 2022).
6. The term metamodernism has been defined in different ways by critics working in a
variety of fields. For a contrasting approach to James and Seshagiri see Vermeulen
and van den Akker (2010). For a discussion of ‘clashing interpretations’ of the term
and the work it yields see Kersten and Wilbers (2018).
7. Reading Mitz in relation to a range of contemporary texts that present an ‘amalga-
mation of biographical, historical, and scholarly research’, critics have emphasised
how fictionalising Virginia Woolf allows ‘her biographers [to] delve into her imaginary
inner life, construct an “as if,” and bring the reader into her psyche’ (Latham 2012:
356). Bethany Layne similarly urges us to read Mitz in relation to Virginia Woolf’s life

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 metamodernist beasts in ceridwen dovey and sigrid nunez

and writing: ‘Nunez’s novel thus straddles two different modes of engagement: the
adaptive, which engages with Woolf’s work, and the biographical, which engages with
her life.’ She does, however, note similarities and differences between the representa-
tions of animal consciousness offered by Nunez and Woolf, arguing that in Mitz we
find increased ‘imaginative empathy’ between species (2014: 30, 35).
8. My view of Woolf’s anthropomorphism contrasts with that of Ittner (2006). See
also Ryan (2013).
9. Focusing on the tortoises in Woolf’s essay, Caroline Pollentier argues that the
‘human and animal copresence destabilizes the distinction between thinking subject
and commodified object’ (2014: 166).
10. In this respect Woolf pays less attention to the artistic potential in tortoises than
contemporaries such as D. H. Lawrence or Luigi Pirandello (see Rohman 2018:
43–52 and Godiolo et al. 2020).
11. Available at: <https://www.nationaltrustcollections.org.uk/object/768389> (last
accessed 28 June 2022). On the history of tortoiseshell trade, see Young (2003:
98–100). Young’s book is one of Dovey’s listed sources.
12. Holograph draft, 31 July 1931, Berg Collection, New York Public Library, 83. Cited
from transcription by Jane Goldman and Saskia McCracken, published as part of the
Cambridge Edition of Woolf’s Flush: A Biography, co-edited by myself, Goldman
and Linden Peach. For a discussion of ‘pets’ and ethics see Ryan (2015: 85–99).

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 2

CAN FLUSH COUNT?:

VIRGINIA WOOLF, ANIMALITY
AND NUMBERS

Jane Goldman

‘Can Flush Count?’ The short answer is ‘Yes – But, in more ways than one!’
This essay counts some of the ways. The historical, lived dog Flush (c.1840–
54), companion of the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning, given to her by Mary
Russell Mitford and the subject of Virginia Woolf’s novel Flush: A Biography
(1933), was apparently taught to count. But this parlour game with a poet is
possibly the least interesting aspect of any investigation into numbers and ani-
mality in Woolf’s bestselling but least critically scrutinised novel. Canine count-
ing and Woolf’s own recorded suspicion of measuring – ‘Who shall measure
the heat and violence of a poet’s heart when caught and tangled in a woman’s
body?’ (Woolf 1929: 73) – is here considered in relation to Catullus’s famous
love lyric against counting and Derrida’s dictum ‘Counting is a bad procedure’,
to argue that Flush: A Biography, Woolf’s much neglected ground-breaking
work on animality, really does count.

Counting the Flushes

‘Can Flush count?’ supplements a previous question I asked elsewhere: ‘Can
Flush read?’. In attempting to respond to the latter I explored Woolf’s canine
novel in relation to Derrida’s animal turn (Goldman 2016). I concluded with
the short answer: yes, Flush can read (Goldman 2016: 172)! Flush can read
image; he can read humans; he can read human writing. But which ‘Flush’ can
read these things? For Flush is legion. Flush, too, is verb, noun and adjective.
Flush is text, and more importantly, intertext. How might we collate him?

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 virginia woolf, animality and numbers

How do we go about counting the number of Flushes that could come running
when we call that name? Flush: A Biography undermines our faith in a singular,
originary Flush.
Nor is Flush simply polysemic; rather, Flush is disseminated. Dissemination,
according to Derrida, in ‘diverging from polysemy, comprising both more and
less than the latter [. . .] interrupts the circulation that transforms into an origin
what is actually an after-effect of meaning’ (Derrida 1981: 21). ‘Counting is a
bad procedure’, Derrida writes in Dissemination (1981), citing Georg Wilhelm
Friedrich Hegel’s observation in Lectures on the History of Philosophy (1892):
‘The Spirit is certainly a trinity, but it cannot be added up or counted. Counting
is a bad procedure’ (Derrida 1981: 24).1 Derrida takes this up in his account
of dissemination itself: ‘Another way of working with numbers, dissemination,
sets up a pharmacy in which it is no longer possible to count by ones, by twos,
or by threes; in which everything starts with the dyad’ (Derrida 1981: 24). Here
he counters the possibility of synthesis or transcendence in Hegel’s dialectics:
‘The dual opposition (remedy/poison, good/evil, intelligible/sensible, high/low,
mind/matter, life/death, inside/outside, speech/writing, etc.) organizes a con-
flictual, hierarchically structured field which can be neither reduced to unity,
nor derived from a primary simplicity, nor dialectically sublated or internalized
into a third term’ (Derrida 1981: 24–5). Dissemination is the force that exposes
counting as a bad procedure: ‘Dissemination endlessly opens up a snag in writ-
ing that can no longer be mended, a spot where neither meaning, however
plural, nor any form of presence can pin/pen down (agrapher) the trace. [. . .]
This question can no longer be dissociated from a restaging of arithmos and of
“counting” as a “bad procedure”’ (Derrida 1981: 27).
Consider the following kinds of Flush:

F-1 = Flush.–1: Barrett Browning’s Flush was the puppy-son of Flush,

Mitford’s own dog, also known as Flush senior. The latter also sired
another puppy called Flush.
F0 = Flush.0: the real cocker spaniel, the historical lived dog, the compan-
ion of Barrett Browning, given to her by Mitford. As such Flush zero is
unknowable.
F1 = Flush.1: the dog as represented by Barrett Browning, in her writings and
drawings and in writings and photographs by others who encountered
Flush.0 in real life.
F2 = Flush.2: representations of Flush.1 by various hands, including Woolf’s.
F3 = Flush.3: representations of Flush.2 or representations of representations
of Flush.1.

Barrett Browning herself refers to and delights in a multiplicity of Flushes in her

letters to Mitford: ‘My Flush has no sons nor daughters that I know of. Yours

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 jane goldman

seems to increase & multiply by a very rapid course of arithmetic, indeed. Was
Lily my Flush’s mother? Not that I am jealous of the new puppies!’ (Browning and
Browning 1984–2020 [BC]: 1319).2 She marvels that ‘the brother of my Flush is
called Flush besides!’ (BC 1369). ‘Oh – do tell me the tale illustrative of the royal
race of Flush,’ she begs. ‘I am prepared for everything from “all the blood of all
the Flushes.”’ (BC 441). And on Flush senior: ‘as to Master Flush [. . .] he is a very
clever Flush [. . .] They are all clever Flushies in fact – & might be, if taken in time
as you say, very highly academical Flushies’ (BC 458). Who are ‘all’ the Flushes?
I have tried in vain to collate and count the different Flushes proliferating
from my reading, from F–1 to F3 and mutants beyond. F2 level representa-
tions include Woolf’s bitch cocker spaniel, Pinka, who was gifted to Woolf by
Vita Sackville-West, herself star of Orlando: A Biography (1928), Woolf’s own
textual predecessor for Flush: A Biography. Pinka posed as Flush for Flush: A
Biography, her image gracing the dust-wrapper and the frontispiece, perhaps
subversively displacing Flush himself as the real star of the book. The spaniel
posed as Flush on the dust-wrapper of the first American edition remains anony-
mous. Then there is the Flush of Rudolf Besier’s play, The Barretts of Wimpole
Street (1930) (F2), and the dog, actually named Flush, who played Besier’s Flush
in the Broadway production of the play (F3). This Flush who played Flush was in
turn immortalised in Flora Merrill’s book, Flush of Wimpole Street and Broad-
way (1933) – is that F4? In May 1933 Merrill’s book was previewed by Variety
magazine as one of three ‘Rival Flushes’, alongside Woolf’s Flush: A Biography
and Frances Theresa Russell’s Two Poets, a Dog, and a Boy (1933), which ‘also
has to deal with Browning’s spaniel. Every dog has his day, but Flush seems to
be getting three of them’ (Anon. 1933: 50). Merrill’s Flush of Wimpole Street
and Broadway is narrated in the first person by Flush, the actor, relating his life
and career on stage as the original Flush, and Merrill’s dog knows how to pre-
tend to pretend: ‘So I was to be an actor! [. . .] I knew that acting was a kind of
play. We used to act [in kennels]. I’d pretend I was a big, vicious dog and growl
at the other dogs, then I’d pretend I was afraid of them and run away. Acting
is playing what you are not. It’s a very nice pastime’ (Merrill 1933: 22). And in
this story the Flushes multiply further. At one point a ‘stuffed dog’ is considered
as an alternative to the live action Flush, but this is foiled when Flush the actor
has a son, ‘Junior, your namesake, and future understudy’ (Merrill 1933: 104).
Then there is the book Flush, subtitled A Biography, in which Woolf’s rep-
resentations of F1 are found. Flush the book is of a different order again to
Flush the dog found in its pages, in words and images. The Flush found in the
pages of Flush: A Biography is multiple. Indeed, he disappears in a mise-en-
abyme when he encounters, as Barrett Browning reports too (see below), his
own mirror image (yet another Flush!) in a series of revelations which unleash
his own ontological instability. To begin with, he finds his reflection to confirm
his class privilege, according to the eugenic measure of the Spaniel Club:

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No sooner had Flush got home than he examined himself carefully in the
looking-glass. Heaven be praised, he was a dog of birth and breeding!
His head was smooth; his eyes were prominent but not gozzled; his feet
were feathered; he was the equal of the best-bred cocker in Wimpole
Street. [. . .] When about this time Miss Barrett observed him staring in
the glass, she was mistaken. He was a philosopher, she thought, meditat-
ing the difference between appearance and reality. On the contrary, he
was an aristocrat considering his points. (Woolf 1933: 33)

Woolf’s narrative is an intertext with Barrett Browning’s letters, where we find

Flush before the mirror and dubbed a philosopher: ‘My Flush used to bark & howl
& whine & moan at the sight of his own reflection – but now he is a philosopher
& looks with complacency at his ears’ (BC 2122; and BC 976 quoted below). But
it is also an intertext with the breeding points of the Spaniel Club, as mediated
by Hugh Dalziel’s British Dogs (1888), including, for example, the ‘Standards of
Excellence’ (positive and negative) for the various breeds of spaniel (Dalziel 1888
1: 491–3). It is worth dwelling on ‘gozzled’ here. In fact, there is no such word
as ‘gozzled’ but the context would suggest that it is intended to mean standing
out like gooseberries (‘gozell’ derives from the French groseille for gooseberry or
currant), which a spaniel’s eyes apparently should not do (OED). Woolf’s source,
Dalziel, cites the Spaniel Club’s ‘description of the eye’ of the cocker spaniel and
points to the error: ‘the word “gozzled” is used but that I presume to be a misprint
for “goggled” – prominent, or staring – as there is no English word “gozzled,”
so far as I know’ (Dalziel 1888 1: 430). He then gives the Spaniel Club’s descrip-
tion of the ‘Eyes’: ‘Full, not prominent, hazel or brown-coloured, with a general
expression of intelligence and gentleness, though decidedly wide-awake, bright,
and merry; never gozzled or weak, as in the King Charles and Blenheim kinds’
(Dalziel 1888 1: 431). Woolf copies this verbatim in her reading notes (Woolf
[n.d.]: 30, 33). In having Flush look admiringly through his ungozzled eyes at his
ungozzled eyes, she appears to be deliberately perpetuating (gozzling) the misprint
here as a kind of genetic variant, as if pointing up a parallel between textual genet-
ics and dog breeding. Given that the Kennel Club (founded 1873), the Spaniel
Club (founded 1885) and Dalziel’s book (1888) all postdate Flush’s death (1854)
by some decades, Woolf is anachronistically imposing standards of which Flush
and his contemporary companions could know nothing.
There is a mirror scene to this mirror scene, so to speak, when in Italy the
flea-ridden Flush experiences a social levelling as he is shorn of his once mag-
nificent coat:

What am I now? he thought, gazing into the glass. And the glass replied
with the brutal sincerity of glasses, ‘You are nothing.’ He was nobody.
Certainly he was no longer a cocker spaniel. But as he gazed, his ears bald

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now, and uncurled, seemed to twitch. [. . .] To be nothing – is that not,

after all, the most satisfactory state in the whole world? (Woolf 1933: 127)

Here all the Spaniel Club breeding points are shorn away, but we would be
mistaken if we thought this denuded Flush somehow to be the Ur or pure Flush.
Likewise Flush: A Biography has its own complicated, textual stemma, record-
ing its genesis (and points) through serialised magazine publication to the first
edition, bifurcating into British and American lines (I cite here the first British
edition), the Uniform edition and numerous paperback editions. We might also
consider how critical writings on Flush and other Flush-related texts in a sense
produce further orders of Flush. All of these intertextual Flushes constitute a
proliferating interspecies community of ‘world-making entanglements’ or ‘con-
tact zones’ (Haraway 2007: 4; Goldman 2016: 172), in which figure-making,
and un-making and co-shaping of subjectivities, are in perpetual process. All
come running when we call ‘Flush’!
Thoroughly tangled in my own taxonomic and semiotic chains, I return to
Woolf’s slippery, ironic sentence on Flush’s literacy: ‘Flush could not read what
she was writing an inch or two above his head’ (Woolf 1933: 52). Woolf, who
draws heavily and often verbatim on Barrett Browning, may well be silently
nodding over our doggy heads. But did Woolf know from F1 that F0 appar-
ently had basic literacy? Did Woolf, who in 1906 had taught her own dog,
Hans (actually a bitch, despite the name), and thereafter ‘all her dogs’, includ-
ing Pinka, to ‘extinguish the match’ ‘every time she lit a cigarette’ (Adams 2007:
213), know that Barrett Browning had taught Flush, in 1843, the alphabet?
Yes, indeed! First she gave Flush arithmetic lessons, so that he could play domi-
nos (like a dog she had seen in a newspaper). ‘Spurred’ by success, she ‘next
taught Flush how to read by saying the name of a letter and having him kiss
the correct one, which for her brothers, she wrote [in 1843], “might be used
as straightforward evidence – (against not Flushie but me) of a ‘non-compos-
mentis’ case”’ (Adams 2007: 19–20; BC 1446). But nearly two centuries on,
such evidence graces serious scientific case studies of nonhuman animal minds,
consciousness, communicative behaviour, and cultures, and philosophical spec-
ulations on modern co-shaping communities, infolding, world-making encoun-
ters between species. Yes, as well as knowing the alphabet, the historical lived
dog Flush could indeed count, as in ‘practise arithmetic’ and ‘do sums’, or at
least ‘reckon numerically’ (OED). But Woolf does not mention these feats in
her own account of Flush. Cake is frequently mentioned in Flush: A Biography,
but not as reward for spelling; and nowhere does Flush perform counting.

Counting with Flush and Other Animals

‘By the way my Flush learnt to count to three, in ten minutes yesterday’ (BC
1441), his poet companion boasts to Mary Russell Mitford in November 1843,

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clarifying in another letter that ‘Flushie’s arithmetic is less complex than you
[. . .] imagine’:

I hold up a piece of cake, & say one, two, three; and after ‘three’, & not
sooner, he takes it. It is amusing to see him stir his little head at ‘two,’ &
then correct himself – and still more amusing to observe how, at every
unqualified success, he turns round & looks at Arabel for applause.
(BC 1446)

Barrett Browning’s inspiration is a M. Léonard, ‘who has a theory upon the

rationality & faculty of improvement in animals, & has educated two dogs
which he carries about with him’ (BC 1446). And so she ‘begin[s] arithmetic with
Flushie, – and am trying to teach him his letters, .. with a .. “Kiss A, Flush – and
now kiss B”’ (BC 1446). Furthermore, Léonard’s dog work was verified by The
Athenæum, which gave

a notice, & an acknowledgement, that they did, on such & such a day,
abase their editorial capacity unto the examination of these educated
dogs & were very nearly satisfied of there being no shadow of a ‘trick’
in them. The Athenæum proposed several hard words, which the dogs
spelt, and one or two sums, I believe, which they calculated, – & finished
these graver studies with a game at dominos, which was won by the
dogs. Whether they talked any dog-latin, I do not know – but if they did,
it was’nt [sic] a bit more wonderful than the rest. (BC 1446)

‘No such account is indexed in The Athenæum for the period 1841–43,’ note
the editors of The Brownings’ Correspondence (BC 1446). But The Athenæum
(17 December 1842), did indeed report that a ‘paper on the education of ani-
mals’, particularly the dog, was presented by M. Léonard (Anon. 1842a: 1092).
How splendid to conjecture that Flush may well have delivered this very item
himself to his mistress, since she reports in January 1842: ‘Papa has just sent up
the new Athenæum number by Mr Flush! He ran up stairs, struck his fore paws
against my door, sprang dancing with triumph upon the bed, & gave it into
my hands with a kiss!’ (BC 904). A mere seven months after the first advertise-
ment, The Athenæum (22 July 1843) reports:

M. Léonard is here again, having in the interim, tested his theories and
the skill of his methods, by applying them to the education (if it may be
so styled) of horses; and he is anxious to go, step by step, through his
process of training, in the presence of those whom it may interest, with
the view to promulgating principles which he believes capable of general
application. (Anon. 1843: 675)

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My digital searches find no account in The Athenæum of Léonard’s dogs

playing dominos, as Barrett Browning describes, but in ‘Cultivation of the
Canine Brain’, an anonymous correspondent for The Lancet (1841) reports
on Léonard’s private exhibition, witnessed by the writer ‘in an adjoining
street to Hanover square’, of his dogs Philax and Brac, who performed a
number of feats involving meat, bread and playing cards, ‘evincing the
wonderful sagacity and perception of the dogs’ (Anon. 1841a: 908), before
turning to dominos:

M. Léonard invited the writer to play a game of dominos with one of them.
The younger and slighter animal then seated himself on a chair at the table,
and the writer and M Léonard placed themselves opposite. Six dominos
were placed on their edges in the usual manner before the dog, and a like
number before the writer. The dog having a double number took it up in his
mouth, and put it in the middle of the table; the writer placed a correspond-
ing piece on one side; the dog immediately played another correctly, and so
on until all the pieces were engaged. Other six dominos were given to each
and the writer intentionally placed a wrong number. The dog looked sur-
prised, stared very earnestly at the writer, and at length growled and finally
barked angrily. Finding that no notice was taken of his remonstrances, he
pushed away the wrong domino with his nose, and took up a suitable one
from his own pieces and placed it in its stead! The writer then played cor-
rectly; the dog followed and won the game. (Anon 1841a: 908)

The piece concludes by emphasising that the dog’s ‘play must have been entirely
the result of his own observation and judgment. There was no trickery, no mes-
merism here.’ And Léonard furthermore was entirely unmotivated by money:
‘M. Léonard is a gentleman of independent fortune, and the instruction of his dogs
has been taken up merely as a curious and amusing investigation’ (Anon 1841a:
908). This Lancet report on the feats of Philax and Brac was widely disseminated
in an accumulating body of accounts of canine and animal intelligence.3
Barrett Browning’s Flush seems not to have achieved the intellectual prowess
of the legendary Philax and Brac, for there is no mention of his counting abilities
thereafter. What is going on here, it may be argued, is probably a parlour trick
that entirely depends on the numeracy of the human in this shared undertaking
between species. In this case, Flush cannot count; but he can read. That is, he
can read (without reading) his human companion, and collude with her charade
by following her prompts in such a way as to produce between them the pre-
tence of his counting. Do these actions by an applause-seeking dog amount to
(add up to) Lacan’s ‘pretending to pretend’, which he reserves only for human
animals (Derrida 2008: 128)? On the other hand, science has demonstrated
that some dogs can actually count and possess ‘visual numerosity’ (Aulet et

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al. 2019). The visual stimuli used for one investigation into the latter actually
resemble dominos. In canid circles, furthermore, a wolf has better numeracy
than a dog (Range et al. 2014). Perhaps, in its domestication, the dog shed some
of its ancestral powers of numeracy?

How Flush Counts

Flush: A Biography is beginning to count in another sense – as in ‘enter into the
account or reckoning’, to ‘count for something’ (OED). Until quite recently, in
the history of proliferating Woolf scholarship Flush has counted for very little
in critical opinion. Indeed, Flush literally was not counted by the editors of the
first Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf (2000), who numbered her nov-
els as nine! (Flush is chronologically the eighth of ten.) Flush, alas, is nowhere
to be found in the List of Abbreviations, although it does get respectful, if
passing, mention (twice) by Julia Briggs in her chapter on ‘The Novels of the
1930s’. Roe’s oversight apparently went unnoticed by reviewers and readers.
Ten years later, the Second Edition of The Cambridge Companion to Virginia
Woolf (2010), restores Flush to the List of Abbreviations and reprints Briggs’s
chapter, but also includes four pages of discussion of Flush in a bespoke subsec-
tion by Maggie Humm in her chapter on Woolf and visual culture.
Flush: A Biography did not count for most critics, then, but this work did count
in other respects that paradoxically explain its not counting for critics. Flush: A
Biography was a runaway bestseller for the Woolfs’ Hogarth Press. On first publi-
cation, the novel ‘was selected by the Book Society in England for October 1933,
and by the American Book-of-the-month Club for September’ (Hussey 1996: 89).
In the first six months it sold 14,390 copies (Willis 1992: 266), far outstripping the
expectations of its author, who had envisaged she would at most ‘net £2000 from
that six months dogged & dreary grind’ (Woolf 1977–84 4: 176).
‘Flush’s popularity soon proved a liability with some reviewers,’ Mark Hussey
has observed (Hussey 1996: 89), pointing to a review in Granta which Woolf
found particularly hurtful. It claims that ‘deadly facility [. . .] combined with its
popular success’ means Flush: A Biography represents ‘the end of Mrs Woolf as a
live force. We must mourn the passing of a potentially great writer who perished
for lack of an intelligent audience’ (F.C. 1933: 57; Woolf 1977–84 4: 186–7n).
However, it is worth noting that Granta reviewed Flush: A Biography under the
heading ‘Biography’ and alongside Orlando: A Biography and The Waves (1931),
the Uniform Editions of which had just been issued; and the critical stance that it
took toward Woolf’s work is not attributable only to Flush: A Biography:

Yesterday the Granta said I was now defunct. Orlando Waves Flush rep-
resent the death of a potentially great writer. This is only a rain drop;
I mean the snub some little pimpled undergraduate likes to administer,
just as he would put a frog in ones bed. (Woolf 1977–84 4: 186)

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The reviewer, ‘F.C.’, probably Frank Chapman, finds ‘Flush is related to

Orlando in more than the word “Biography” [. . .] and both are [. . .] pastiches
of Lytton Strachey,’ but invokes a minor journalist and fiction writer as the
measure of her lapsing talent (‘the amused condescending’ C. E. Montague):

It is an obvious comment on the state of literature to-day, when an

author capable of writing such fine work as To the Lighthouse can sink
to the level of Flush, and when the latter will obviously be the most
popular of her works – it is, inevitably, the choice of the Book Society.
(F.C. 1933: 57)

Here Flush: A Biography fails against not only the measure of Strachey but that
of Woolf’s earlier works. Yet, while reviewers were certainly sometimes scath-
ing, the overwhelming majority were very positive. E. J. Scovell, for example, in
Time and Tide (14 October 1933), counters anyone who thinks Woolf’s life of
a dog ‘strange, and perhaps even a little silly’ with a serious account of Woolf’s
concern in her novels ‘with the mind’s and body’s experience’ (Scovell 1933:
1234). If ‘psychological insight’ is the ‘heritage of this generation’ of writers,
then Woolf ‘has the poetic vision that sees its object whole [. . .] the mind gives
its colour to whatever comes to it, as well as to whatever it does. Mrs. Woolf is
less interested in the variety of experiences than in the personal life that assimi-
lates and colours it all’ (Scovell 1933: 1234). Furthermore, Scovell suggests
Woolf does not distinguish between human and animal ‘personal life’:

So it seems natural that she should be teased by the sight of a dog, going
with absorption about his own business, or watching men with intent,
melancholy eyes; and in writing about him she should imagine brilliantly
his strange existence, between human existence and a wild creature’s.
(Scovell 1933: 1234)

Vita Sackville-West, writing for The Week-End Review, similarly declares Woolf’s
‘dog is a dog throughout, not one of those deplorable freaks which exist solely,
but alas how plentifully, in the whimsical fancy of their creators’, and praises, like
many other reviewers, Woolf’s focalising of the dominant olfactory experience of
dogs: ‘it is always from the floor-level, in a world of smells and sensations, that
we are privileged to observe the two-legged figures towering gigantically and
incomprehensively above us’ (Sackville-West 1933: [n.p.]).
Flush: A Biography may well stand as the most widely reviewed of all
Woolf’s works. The archive of Monks House Papers at Sussex holds a folder of
nearly 200 press cuttings on this novel4 so neglected by subsequent academic
criticism. The reviews, then, were certainly not as sparse nor as negative as
Robin Majumdar and Allen McLaurin imply in Virginia Woolf: The Critical

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Heritage (1975). They write that ‘Virginia Woolf did not take [it] seriously,
nor did the reviewers’ (Majumdar and McLaurin 1975: 25), pointing in their
‘Introduction’ to the titles, rather than the content, of two reviews,5 and repro-
ducing (in part) only one review of Flush: A Biography in their volume, by Peter
Burra. Burra situates the novel in the context of Woolf’s previous works, call-
ing it ‘entirely beautiful; but it is a necessary pause, it is not a tour de force as
its predecessor [The Waves] was’ (Burra 1934: 113; Majumdar and McLaurin
1975: 321). But in a passage excluded by Majumdar and McLaurin, he makes
a serious and moving comparison between the closing scene of ‘infinite pathos’
in Jacob’s Room and that in Flush: A Biography: ‘The light has passed over
the surface and has utterly vanished. Flush is brought to an end in the same
way. “He had been alive; he was now dead. That was all”’ (Burra 1934: 117).
Majumdar’s and McLaurin’s egregious lack of serious attention to the novel
itself and to the record of reviews and criticism in such an influential scholarly
instrument doubtless contributed to the decades of scholarly neglect. In the
decades following Woolf’s death, sales of Flush: A Biography rapidly declined.6
Perhaps Woolf would take some comfort in seeing how much money a first
edition of Flush: A Biography fetches these days. Because of the big print run,
a first edition in dust jacket is not that rare, but in fine condition currently sells
for around £500.7 Compare the value of the dog himself, who cost his owner at
least £20 ‘to the dog-stealers’ in ransom money, as Woolf records in her notes
to the novel (Woolf 1933: 154). By Barrett Browning’s reckoning, it was 20
guineas.8 Woolf’s notes also pointedly document that Barrett Browning’s maid,
Lily Wilson, was ‘“an expensive servant” – her wages were £16 a year’ (Woolf
1933: 155). In the opening chapter, Woolf has Mitford opine that ‘to sell Flush
was unthinkable. He was of the rare order of objects that cannot be associated
with money. Was he not of the still rarer kind that, because they typify what is
spiritual, what is beyond price’; and she concludes chiastically, ‘Yes; Flush was
worthy of Miss Barrett; Miss Barrett was worthy of Flush’ (Woolf 1933: 19).
That opening, affirmatory ‘Yes;’, which introduces but also unbalances the
dyadic chiastic clauses that follow, might be read with Derrida, who declares, in
‘A Number of Yes (Nombre de Oui)’, ‘Already but always a faithful countersig-
nature, a yes can never be counted. Promise, mission, emission, it always sends
itself off in numbers’ (Derrida 1988: 132). Mitford’s ‘yes’ to the dyad of Flush
and Barrett Browning reverberates throughout the novel. Derrida rehearses
how this performative affirmatory term is both language and not language,
and never singular; how a ‘“second” yes is a priori enveloped in the “first.”
The “first” would not take place without the project, the bet or the promise,
the mission or the emission, the send-off of the second which is already there in
it’ (Derrida 1988: 131). Woolf’s three semi-colons perform a kind of repeated
affirmation, like a series of yeses, or indeed kisses, which raise woman and dog
above commodification and fiscal evaluation to a status beyond the countable.

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Not Counting with Catullus

Catullus V
vivamus mea lesbia atque amemus
rumoresque senum severiorum
omnes unius aestimemus assis
soles occidere et redire possunt
nobis cum semel occidit brevis lux
nox est perpetua una dormienda
da mi basia mille deinde centum
dein mille altera dein secunda centum
deinde usque altera mille deinde centum
dein cum milia multa fecerimus
conturbabimus illa ne sciamus
aut ne quis malus inuidere possit
cum tantum sciat esse basiorum

Catullus 5
we must live my lesbia and we must love
and the loose talk of torn-faced old farts
will be worth fuck all to us
suns can set and suns can rise
but once that short light has set for us
the night is one never ending sleep
so give me a thousand kisses then a hundred
then another thousand then a second hundred
then yet another thousand then a hundred
then when we’ve made many millions
we must mix them all up so we don’t know
and no other fucker can be jealous knowing
just how many kisses it is9

The speaker of Catullus 5 knows the fatal and ill-starred risks of setting finite
limits by counting precisely the number of kisses he shares with his lover Lesbia.
Yet he seems to be tempting those very fates in speaking his desire to ward them
off in the strict and counted measures of hendecasyllabic quantitative Latin metre.
The poem speaks everywhere of exceeding the measure of its own eleven-syllable
line by piling up kisses most ill-advisedly in neatly calculable, thrice repeated mul-
tiples of eleven: ‘da mi basia mille deinde centum’ ‘give me a thousand kisses then
a hundred’. On the other hand, the hendecasyllabic line itself performs structural
excess, and Catullus’s Phalaecian hendecasyllables are notoriously close to the
variable pattern of Sappho’s. The reader who manages to count, in the poem’s
invoice-like repetition of figures, the three lots of 1,100 (MC) kisses (which comes
to 3,300 or MMMCCC kisses) is nevertheless soon utterly confounded by lines

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ten and eleven: ‘dein cum milia multa fecerimus/ conturbabimus illa ne sciamus’
(‘then when we’ve made many millions / we must mix them all up so we don’t
know’). Like Derrida’s yes, Catullus’s kiss is never singular, and we might fuse
both by saying: ‘Already but always a faithful countersignature, a kiss can never
be counted. Promise, mission, emission, it always sends itself off in numbers.’
Flush’s kissing is likewise excessive and uncountable both in Barrett Brown-
ing’s correspondence and in Woolf’s novel. In the former’s letters Flush does
more kissing than anyone else bar Robert Browning:

He is such a companion to me all day long – lying close beside me – &

when I move to the sofa, leaping there, beside me still, and always mark-
ing his sense of the change of place, by kissing me in a dog-way, most
expressively. (BC 833)

But Barrett Browning soon drops the distinction of ‘dog-way’ kissing:

he can’t bear me to look into a glass, because he thinks there is a little

brown dog inside every looking glass & he is jealous of its being so close
to me. He used to tremble & bark at it, but now he is silently jealous, &
contents himself with squeezing close, close to me & kissing me expres-
sively. (BC 976)

Drawing on this letter almost verbatim, Woolf introduces this expressive kiss in
the later drafts of the novel, augmenting Flush’s kisses for the published version:

Then she would make him stand with her in front of the looking-glass
and ask him why he barked and trembled. Was not the little brown dog
opposite himself? But what is ‘oneself’? Is it the thing people see? Or is
it the thing one is? So Flush pondered that question too, and, unable to
solve the problem of reality, pressed closer to Miss Barrett and kissed her
‘expressively.’ That was real at any rate. (Woolf 1933: 45–6)

The poet’s letters are teeming with Flush’s kisses, reporting, for example, how
Flush on instruction ‘came, galloping & prancing, kissed me on my lips, & ran out
again’ (BC 1000) and, unbidden, ‘never sees me shed tears without running to kiss
me & rub his little brown ears against my face’ (BC 1084).10 Yet in the constrain-
ing form of Barrett Browning’s coy sonnet ‘Flush, or Faunus’, later embedded in
Woolf’s prose (Woolf 1933: 149), itself saturated in the poet’s kiss-filled prose cor-
respondence, the word kiss does not appear (Barrett Browning 1890 3: 78):

You see this dog. It was but yesterday

I mused forgetful of his presence here
Till thought on thought drew downward tear on tear,
When from the pillow, where wet-cheeked I lay,

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 jane goldman

A head as hairy as Faunus, thrust its way

Right sudden against my face – two golden-clear
Great eyes astonished mine – a drooping ear
Did flap me on either cheek to dry the spray!
I started first, as some Arcadian,
Amazed by goatly god in twilight grove;
But, as the bearded vision closelier ran
My tears off, I knew Flush, and rose above
Surprise and sadness – thanking the true Pan,
Who, by low creatures, leads to heights of love.

The proximity of dog’s face to human’s at lines six and seven may well sug-
gest interspecies kissing, but the poem does not explicitly mark a kiss. Here
Flush becomes two ancient pagan deities (the Roman Faunus, half human, half
beast, and the equal of the goatly Greek god Pan), intruding on to the pillow
of the woman poet with animal force, while disrupting the sonnet’s own form
of counting. The regular iambic pentameter is disrupted by the hypersyllabic
line 5 ‘A head | as hair | y as | Faunus,| thrust its | way’. Scanned as a catalectic
hexameter, the word ‘Faunus’ thrusts its way centre stage, as the heads of dog
and poet now share the horizontal plane of the pillow. It is possible to scan the
line with five feet if ‘as hairy | as Faunus’ is read as two amphibrachs, but this
substitution lessens the powerful chiastic internal rhyme of ‘us’ in ‘Faunus’ and
‘thrust’ (reverberating too in Flush), restricting the animal excess of Faunus.
Woolf pointedly alludes to this poem in the second and third chapters of her
novel. But she waits until the end of the book to cite the poem in full, enclos-
ing, or indeed thrusting, it into the middle of the final death scene between a
sentence already anticipating the poem’s own ‘thrust’ – ‘Then as he leapt on to
the sofa and thrust his face into hers, the words of her own poem came into her
mind:’ (Woolf 1933: 149) – and one recalling the scene and mood of the poem’s
composition – ‘She had written that poem one day years ago in Wimpole Street
when she was very unhappy’ (Woolf 1933: 149). The death scene that imme-
diately follows restages or disseminates the poem’s primal scene along with the
novel’s re-echoing scenes and sentences of parallel, chiastic intimacy between
dog and woman. Is one final kiss being intimated here?

She bent down over him for a moment. Her face with its wide mouth and
its great eyes and its heavy curls was still oddly like his. Broken asunder,
yet made in the same mould, each, perhaps, completed what was dor-
mant in the other. But she was woman; he was dog. Mrs. Browning went
on reading. Then she looked at Flush again. But he did not look at her. An
extraordinary change had come over him. ‘Flush!’ she cried. But he was
silent. He had been alive; he was now dead. That was all. The drawing-
room table, strangely enough, stood perfectly still. (Woolf 1933: 150)

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 virginia woolf, animality and numbers

Woolf’s closing sentence insists on the finality of Flush’s death. He has not
returned as a spirit to leave a message ‘conveyed by the legs of tables’, as
Barrett Browning might have hoped, and we are returned to the earlier account
of her ‘table-spinning’ obsession: ‘Thus if asked the age of a child, the table
“expresses itself intelligently by knocking with its legs, responses according to
the alphabet.” And if a table could tell you that your own child was four years
old, what limit was there to its capacity?’ (Woolf 1933: 140). Here the table is
credited with the same rudimentary ability to spell and count as Flush himself is
alleged to possess. Unlike the dog’s, however, the table’s numeracy and literacy
remain unvindicated by modern science. Woolf shows Flush a cynical material-
ist when confronted by his mistress’s spiritualism:

There was something in the room, or in the table, or in the petticoats and
trousers, that he disliked exceedingly. [. . .] That, to Flush, was a highly
unpleasant way of spending a quiet evening. Better far to sit and read
one’s book. (Woolf 1933: 143, 144)

How does interspecies kissing count, then, for Barrett-Browning and Woolf?
Without enumerating them, Woolf makes legible the kisses qua kisses Flush
seems to have lavished on the poet, who in her poems and letters withholds or
only elliptically hints at the term kiss and all it might suggest of interspecies
reciprocity. Earlier, Woolf cites Barrett Browning’s self-portrait as Flush in a
letter whereby the dog counts for more than her equal by her own estimation:

She had drawn ‘a very neat and characteristic portrait of Flush, humor-
ously made rather like myself,’ and she had written under it that it ‘only
fails of being an excellent substitute for mine through being more wor-
thy than I can be counted’. (Woolf 1933: 38; BC 1393)11

This hybrid canine–human self-portrait, then, co-shaped by dog and woman, is

a form of affirmatory kissing as their mouths merge into one physiognomy, one
flesh. And at this very scene of inscription, to which the final passage returns,
Woolf inserts again the sonnet’s primal pillow scene where dog kisses woman:

She was lying, thinking; she had forgotten Flush altogether, and her
thoughts were so sad that the tears fell upon the pillow. Then suddenly a
hairy head was pressed against her; large bright eyes shone in hers; and
she started. Was it Flush, or was it Pan? Was she no longer an invalid in
Wimpole Street, but a Greek nymph in some dim grove in Arcady? And
did the bearded god himself press his lips to hers? For a moment she was
transformed; she was a nymph and Flush was Pan. The sun burnt and
love blazed. (Woolf 1933: 38–9)

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 jane goldman

In referring back to this episode, Woolf explicitly states: ‘Once he had roused
her with a kiss, and she had thought that he was Pan’ (Woolf 1933: 68). It is
impossible to count the kisses here. Woolf’s question, ‘And did the bearded god
himself press his lips to hers?’ seems to ask whether the pressing lips are Pan’s
or Flush’s, not doubting that a kiss has occurred, as the retrospective comment
confirms. Woolf is ribbing the table-turning Victorian poet’s recourse to mythol-
ogy and spiritualism (Flush has been made the medium of Pan). Barrett Browning
has kissed a dog and she liked it. Why pretend it was Pan? Why not call it a kiss?
The interspecies kiss is here much more explicit than in Barrett Browning’s own
account of the primal pillow scene in her letter to Mitford (October 1843):

I, who had had my heart full for hours, took advantage of an early
moment of solitude, to cry in it very bitterly. Suddenly a little hairy head
thrust itself from behind my pillow into my face, rubbing its ears &
nose against me in a responsive agitation, & drying the tears as they
came. I had forgotten Flushie, & was startled at the apparition, or rather
the sensation, of the hairy head——it was a Faunus or a Pan! In a few
moments however, my heart was led away from itself into an assuaging
of Flushie, who, if I were determined to cry, was bent upon crying too.
Flushie was my Faunus, & powerful for the occasion (.. for ‘cutting the
knot’ as the dramatic critics say, ..) as any sylvan god of them all. (BC
1390)

Yet the rubbing of his ears and nose into her face, the reader infers, comes
pretty close to osculation, so too the reciprocal ‘assuaging of Flushie’. If Woolf’s
twentieth-century prose flushes out the term ‘kiss’ from the elliptically sug-
gestive cover of Barrett Browning’s nineteenth-century poems, with the aid of
her posthumously published canid-kissing letters, the mutually pressing lips of
dog and woman gaining explicit and disseminated representation in Flush: A
Biography, how much more explicit is Donna Haraway, in the early twenty-
first century, on kissing with her own canid companion, Cayenne Pepper, whose
‘darter-tongue kisses have been irresistible’:

Her red merle Australian Shepherd’s quick and lithe tongue has swabbed
the tissues of my tonsils, with all their eager immune system receptors
[. . .] We have had forbidden conversation; we have had oral intercourse
[. . .] We are training each other in acts of communication we barely
understand. We are, constitutively, companion species. We make each
other up, in the flesh. (Haraway 2003: 2–3; emphasis in original)

Better to be kissing than counting! Already but always a faithful countersigna-

ture, a yes and a kiss and a Flush can never be counted.

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 virginia woolf, animality and numbers

Works Cited
Adams, Maureen. 2007. Shaggy Muses: The Dogs Who Inspired Virginia Woolf, Emily
Dickinson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Edith Wharton and Emily Bronte. New
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Anon. 1841a. ‘Cultivation of the Canine Brain’. The Lancet 2: 907–8.
Anon. 1841b. ‘Cultivation of the Canine Brain’. The Veterinarian 13.166 (September):
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Anon. 1842a. ‘Miscellanea: Paris Academy of Sciences’. The Athenæum 790 (17
December): 1092.
Anon. 1842b. ‘Sagacity of Dogs’. The St Petersburg English Review 1: 87–90.
Anon. 1843. ‘Our Weekly Gossip’. The Athenæum 820 (22 July): 674–5.
Anon. 1933. ‘Literati: Rival Flushes’. Variety (2 May): 50.
Aulet, Lauren S., Veronica C. Chiu, Ashley Prichard, Mark Spivak, Stella F. Lourenco and
Gregory S. Berns. 2019. ‘Canine Sense of Quantity: Evidence for Numerical Ratio-
Dependent Activation in Parietotemporal Cortex’. Biology Letters 15.12 (December).
Available at: <https://doi.org/10.1098/rsbl.2019.0666> (last accessed 28 June 2022).
Barret Browning, Elizabeth. 1890. The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
6 vols. London: Smith, Elder & Co.
Browning, Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. 1984–2020. The Brownings’ Corre-
spondence [BC]. Vols 1–8, ed. Philip Kelley and Ronald Hudson; vols 9–14, ed.
Philip Kelley and Scott Lewis; vols 15–19, ed. Philip Kelley, Scott Lewis and Edward
Hagan; vols 22–23, ed. Philip Kelley, Scott Lewis, Edward Hagan, Joseph Phelan and
Rhian Williams; vols 24–27, ed. Philip Kelley, Edward Hagan and Linda M. Lewis.
Kansas: Wedgestone Press. Available at: <https://www.browningscorrespondence.
com/> (last accessed 28 June 2022).
Burdett, Osbert. 1933. ‘A Storyteller’s Holiday’. The Listener, 11 October: Supplement xi.
Burra, Peter. 1934. ‘Virginia Woolf’. The Nineteenth Century and After 115.683: 112–25.
Catullus, Tibullus. 1913. Catullus. Tibullus. Pervigilium Veneris. Trans. F. W. Cornish,
J. P. Postgate and J. W. Mackail, rev. G. P. Goold. Loeb Classical Library 6. Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Child, Harold Hannyngton. 1933. ‘Brown Beauty’. Times Literary Supplement 1653
(5 October): 667.
Dalziel, Hugh. 1888. British Dogs: Their Varieties, History, Characteristics, Breeding
Management, and Exhibition. Second Edition, 3 vols. London: L. Upcott Gill.
Derrida, Jacques. 1981. Dissemination. Trans. Barbara Johnson. Chicago and London:
University of Chicago.
Derrida, Jacques. 1988. ‘A Number of Yes (Nombre de Oui)’. Trans. Brian Holmes. Qui
Parle, 2.2, SILENCE AND INTERVENTION (Fall): 118–33.
Derrida, Jacques. 2008. ‘And Say the Animal Responded? [to Jacques Lacan]’. In The
Animal That Therefore I Am. Trans. David Wills, ed. Marie-Louise Mallet, 119–40.
New York: Fordham University Press.
F.C. [Frank Chapman?]. 1933. ‘Biography’. Granta 153.966 (25 October): 57.
Goldman, Jane. 2016. ‘Flush: A Biography: Speaking, Reading and Writing with the
Companion Species’. In A Companion to Virginia Woolf. Ed. Jessica Berman,
163–75. Oxford: Blackwell.

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Haraway, Donna. 2003. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant
Otherness. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press.
Haraway, Donna. 2007. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press.
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. 1955. Lectures on the History of Philosophy. Trans.
E. S. Haldane, 3 vols. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Hussey, Mark. 1996. Virginia Woolf A to Z : The Essential Reference to Her Life and
Writings. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Majumdar, Robin and Allen McLaurin, eds. 1975. Virginia Woolf: The Critical Heritage.
London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Mepham, John. 1991. Virginia Woolf: A Literary Life. Basingstoke: Macmillan.
Merrill, Flora. 1933. Flush of Wimpole Street and Broadway. New York: Robert M.
McBride.
Range, Friederike, Julia Jenikejew, Isabelle Schröder and Zsófia Virányi. 2014. ‘Differ-
ence in Quantity Discrimination in Dogs and Wolves’. Frontiers in Psychology
(18 November). Available at: <https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01299> (last
accessed 28 June 2022).
Richardson, H.D. 1847. Dogs; Their Origins and Varieties. Dublin: James McGlashan.
Roe, Sue and Susan Sellers, eds. 2000. The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Sackville-West, Vita. 1933. ‘Lives of the Obscure: Flush: A Biography’. The Week-End
Review (7 October): [n.p.]. SxMs-18/3/B/11, Monks House Papers, The Keep,
University of Sussex.
Sample, H. 1869. The Art of Training Animals. New York: Jesse Haney.
Scovell, E. J. 1933. [Review of Flush], Time and Tide, 14 October: 1234.
Sellers, Susan, ed. 2010. The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf. Second Edition.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Sherer, John. 1868. Rural Life. London: London Printing & Publishing Co.
Willis, Jr, J. H. 1992. Leonard and Virginia Woolf as Publishers. Charlottesville: Uni-
versity of Virginia Press.
Woolf, Leonard. 1968. Downhill All the Way: An Autobigraphy of the Years 1919–
1939. London: Readers Union/Hogarth Press.
Woolf, Virginia. 1928. Orlando: A Biography. London: Hogarth.
Woolf, Virginia. 1929. A Room of One’s Own. London: Hogarth.
Woolf, Virginia. 1933. Flush: A Biography. London: Hogarth.
Woolf, Virginia. 1977–84. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell and
Andrew McNeillie. 5 vols. London: Hogarth Press.
Woolf, Virginia. [n.d.]. BERG M12: Flush Holograph and typewritten reading notes 35
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Youatt, William. 1845. The Dog. London: Longmans.

Notes
1. See Hegel (1955 1: 89): ‘In Religion the three make their appearance in a deeper
sense as the Trinity, and in Philosophy as the Notion, but enumeration forms a bad
method of expression.’

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 virginia woolf, animality and numbers

2. For full bibliographical details see Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning
(1984–2020) in Works Cited. All in-text references [BC followed by Letter number]
are to the online edition of this work, available at: <https://www.browningscorre-
spondence.com/> (last accessed 28 June 2022).
3. See Anon. (1841b); Anon (1842b); Youatt (1845: 162–4); Richardson (1847: 106–7);
Sherer (1868: 450–2); Sample (1869: 96–7).
4. Monks House Papers, The Keep, University of Sussex: SxMs-18/3/B/11. The con-
tents are listed and discussed in the forthcoming Cambridge University Press edition
of Flush: A Biography, ed. Linden Peach, Derek Ryan and Jane Goldman.
5. See Child (1933); Burdett (1933).
6. Along with her other two bestselling books in her lifetime, Orlando: A Biography
and The Years, sales of Flush: A Biography in the decades following Woolf’s death
fell far behind the likes of Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse (L. Woolf 1968:
147–8; Mepham 131).
7. See AbeBooks.co.uk. In 2014–15, the antiquarian bookseller Peter Harrington was
advertising a copy at £1,250.00: Available at: <http://www.peterharrington.co.uk/
rare-books/catalogue-106-christmas-2014/flush-3/> (last accessed 2014).
8. See BC 2585: ‘Six guineas, was his ransom – & now I have paid twenty for him to
the dogstealers.’
9. My translation of Catullus V. See Catullus (1913: 6, 8).
10. See also Flush kissing and kissed: BC 840, 841, 853, 957, 1057, 1099, 1118, 1306,
1436, 1458, 2777, 2803, 2816, 2836.
11. Available at: <https://www.browningscorrespondence.com/amplify/file-store/Browning
Correspondence/scans/WPFigures/1558–1.jpg> (last accessed 29 June 2022).

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 3

CANINE COMPANIONS, RACE AND

AFFECTIVE ANTHROPOMORPHISM IN
FLORENCE AYSCOUGH’S THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY
OF A CHINESE DOG (1926) AND MARY GAUNT’S
A BROKEN JOURNEY (1919)

Juanjuan Wu

In Flush: A Biography (1933), an underdog work that recently entered the mod-
ernist canon (Ryan 2013: 132), Virginia Woolf configures the ways that border-
crossing journeys can lead to agency, conflating Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s
newly found freedom with that felt by Flush, a cocker spaniel. After being released
from a box to which he was confined while travelling from London to Pisa, Flush
dashes across the street to explore Italy. With each fresh sensory experience comes
a sense of change. ‘And just as Mrs Browning was exploring her new freedom and
delighting in the discoveries she made, so Flush too was making his discoveries
and exploring his freedom,’ Woolf writes (Woolf 2016 [1933]: 76). Flush, a ‘snob’
and an ‘aristocrat’ back in Victorian upper-class London, becomes ‘daily more and
more democratic’ in this new world (76). The ‘moment of liberation’ comes with
an epiphany as he runs and races, his ‘coat flashed’, ‘eyes blazed’ – ‘He was the
friend of all the world now. All dogs were his brothers’ (77). Class and species
boundaries disintegrate. Flush’s canine subjectivity, along with travel as a trope of
agency, serves allegorically and anthropomorphically in Woolf’s ‘ironic critique of
Victorian constructs of class, rank, and gender relationships’ (Ittner 2006: 189).
Woolf is not alone in this regard. In fact, seven years prior to Flush: A Biography,
Florence Wheelock Ayscough (1878–1942) employed elements of anthropomor-
phism to create a canine protagonist who, unlike Flush, who does not speak, has
his own voice, to serve a similar and yet different cause.
In Ayscough’s The Autobiography of a Chinese Dog (1926), Yo Fei, a Chinese
dog who crosses the Pacific from Shanghai to New Brunswick, Canada, also

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 canines and race in florence ayscough and mary gaunt

enjoys the freedom and excitement foreign travels and new sensory experiences
can offer. Amid the ‘aromatic scent of spruce trees and balsams’, Yo Fei, the nar-
rator, tells us ‘I dashed about, my tail uncurled, and rolled in [the snow] with joy’
(Ayscough 1926: XIII). However, contrary to Flush, who has fled Victorian soci-
ety’s ‘corrupt aristocracy’ (Woolf 1933: 77), leaving behind all forms of social
constraints, to have ‘the fullest, the freest, the happiest years of his life’ in Italy
(77), Yo Fei’s freedom in Canada is not so unequivocally happy. Instead, in the
first place, his emotional attachment to his past is enduringly deep, and it some-
times weighs him down, in many ways binding him to his homeland, his culture
and his ‘countryman’ in particular (Ayscough 1926: 65), all that makes him what
he is: namely, ‘a Chinese dog’, a racial identity Ayscough configures for him and
underscores by the book title and throughout the entire narrative. Second, Yo
Fei’s subjectivity is intricately intertwined with a pedagogical project. Ayscough’s
Yo Fei, well travelled and immersed in Chinese literature, history and folklore, is
bestowed with an ethical responsibility to illuminate racial and species relations:
‘Does it not seem reasonable that I should share my experiences with those less
travelled and less cultivated than myself?’ (Foreword i). If race is not an issue
Woolf explicitly addresses through Flush, Ayscough gives it serious consideration
through Yo Fei, calling Western racism and speciesism into question.
In modernist studies increasing attention has been paid to illuminating how
‘the discourses of race, gender, and animality are mutually deployed’ in literary
works (Rohman 2008: 30). In aligning with this critical trend, this chapter explores
the relationship between anthropomorphism, affect and (anti-)imperialism in nar-
ratives featuring transcultural encounters in the age of accelerating border-crossing
movements that defined modernity in the early decades of the twentieth century.
Through a comparative study of the literary representations of two dogs – Yo Fei
in Ayscough’s The Autobiography of a Chinese Dog (1926) and James Buchanan
in Mary Gaunt’s A Broken Journey (1919) – this chapter illuminates the com-
plex roles played by anthropomorphism and animal configurations in Western
women’s adaptive negotiation of racial, cultural and species alterity and self-
representation.
Over the last few decades, traditional anthropomorphism, where the ani-
mal is deprived of its own agency and humanised, has been considered to have
the potential danger to widen, rather than close, the human/animal divide. In
addressing the risks anthropomorphism can pose for reinforcing an anthropo-
centric complacency, recent scholarship, informed by ‘the New Anthropomor-
phism’ in science, as Marjorie Garber describes it in Dog Love (1996), starts to
address the subversive potential of forms of anthropomorphism connected to
empathising imagination. As Dan Wylie argues, anthropomorphic writing can
‘embody the proposition that animals – at least certain animals – are in some
sense understandable, and have much in common with us to demand an ethi-
cally equivalent response and sense of responsibility from others’ (2002: 116).

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 juanjuan wu

This is echoed by Jane Bennett, whose configuration of ‘vital materialism’ in

Vibrant Matter (2010) further inspires new perspectives on anthropomorphism.
While commenting on how Charles Darwin’s ‘inveterate anthropomorphism’
backfired, propelling him to see in his worms ‘an intelligence and a wilfulness
that he recognized as related to his own’ (Bennett 2010: 99), Bennett argues for
the significance of a degree of anthropomorphism for challenging anthropocen-
tric bias and human privilege. ‘In a vital materialism’, she maintains, ‘an anthro-
pomorphic element in perception can uncover a whole world of resonances and
resemblances – sounds and sights that echo and bounce far more than would
be possible were the universe to have a hierarchical structure’ (2010: 99). Such
recent re-evaluations of anthropomorphism inform this chapter and my exami-
nations of animal figurations in relation to race and emotions.
I begin by demonstrating how Ayscough and Gaunt both configure the
human–animal bond, one which is forged and consequently deepened during
foreign travels, to challenge and transgress discursive assumptions about the
human–animal divide, inviting new ways to rethink animal–human relations.
I then move on to analysing the ways in which the two different women writ-
ers, Gaunt aligned with modernism’s imperialism and Ayscough with cosmo-
politanism, employ different strategies of anthropomorphism to project their
contradictory conceptualisations of race. For Gaunt, I argue, instead of displac-
ing animality on to Chinese people, she strategically filters and constructs an
animal identity alien to her Chinese dog. In doing so, she displaces her racial
anxiety as a white woman, a proto-feminist incapable of feeling for Chinese
people and especially her Chinese sisters. For Ayscough, retaining Yo Fei’s
Chinese identity is a necessary precondition for her to turn away from impe-
rialist discourses, Western racism and speciesism. The constructed canine sub-
jectivity of Yo Fei, one which is deeply rooted in Chinese ways of life and
culture, calls into question modernism’s imperialist racial binaries. In explor-
ing the intersection between cross-species relations and interracial dynamics,
this chapter sets out to bring a transnational and comparative perspective to
‘beastly modernisms’, enriching studies of the animal in its relation to race,
emotions and transnational modernisms.

‘They don’t think much of animals’

Before this chapter goes into a detailed examination, some historical and bio-
graphical information about the two authors is helpful for situating their animal
configurations within the racial discourses on China in the early decades of the
twentieth century. Florence Ayscough, daughter to a wealthy Canadian member
of the élite amongst Shanghai’s earliest and most prominent settlers, spent her
entire childhood in Shanghai and later devoted herself to learning local languages
and classical literature under the instruction of a Chinese mentor, Mr Nung Chu.
With local assistance, she collaborated with her friend, imagist poet Amy Lowell,

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 canines and race in florence ayscough and mary gaunt

in translating Chinese classical poetry, which led to the well-received Fir-Flower

Tablets (1921). She later moved on to translating more Chinese classical poems,
introducing Du Fu (712–770), one of the most iconic poets of China’s Tang
Dynasty, and his poetry to Western readers in Tu Fu: The Autobiography of a
Chinese Poet (1929) and Travels of a Chinese Poet: Guest of Rivers and Lakes
(1934). Ayscough’s immersion in Chinese language, literature and local ways of
living arguably offers her a vantage point, one which inflects her informed, intel-
lectual and sympathetic perception of China, and her openness to and keen inter-
est in its cultural difference on the one hand, and, on the other hand, shapes her
self-identity and self-fashioning as ‘a citizen of the world’ (Ayscough 1932: 11).
Unlike Ayscough, who enjoyed socio-economic privilege, Mary Gaunt
embarked on her transnational mobility from economic necessity, one tied to
the social inequality and restricted social mobility of middle-class women in
the colonial settlement. After her husband’s early death, Gaunt exiled herself
from colonial Australia, her homeland, to metropolitan London in 1901, the
year when the Australian federal movement passed the Immigration Restric-
tion Act as part of the simmering White Australia policy that rigidly excluded
people of colour, especially the Chinese. Depressed by the precarity entailed as
an immigrant female writer in London’s tight and male-dominated market, she
embarked on journeys to the empire’s periphery, including Africa, primarily to
search for materials for new books to secure an income (Hickman 2014: 180).
Living a life as an ‘unhoused widow’, Gaunt often found her state of ‘homeless-
ness’ looming ever larger in alien lands (1911: 5). Emotional pain became the
price she paid to live a life adrift. As a feminist, she was also wary of the uni-
versal subjugation of women. Both emotional forces were at work in her travels
in China. Gaunt’s A Broken Journey (1919), an emotional, appealing travel
memoir, is constituted in two parts, the first half recounting her lonely, anxiety-
ridden wanderings in an unknown part of northern China and the other half
depicting the treacherous return journey to England via Europe on the eve of
the First World War. James Buchanan, a small local dog, was her only compan-
ion, as she claimed.
Ayscough’s The Autobiography of a Chinese Dog and Gaunt’s A Broken
Journey differ in aspects of genre, subject matter and emotional tone, but the
two texts share common ground at least in configuring and foregrounding the
animal presence and the sustained emotional relationship of human and non-
human animal, though to different degrees. Both Yo Fei and James Buchanan
are acquired in China: Yo Fei, a brown dog of the famous Lo-sze breed from
Shantung province, was first presented as a gift to a foreign lady by a young
Chinese male student who studied Western medicine and was later adopted by
Ayscough; James Buchanan was acquired in Peking by Gaunt in 1912. Gaunt
does not give us much detail about James Buchanan. In fact, rarely does she
pay attention to depicting what he looks like, except for a passing note that he

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is ‘white and black’ and approximately ten months old when taken as a travel
companion. Nevertheless, she foregrounds the episode in which her dog was
badly hurt: James Buchanan was ‘badly bitten by a dog, so badly he could no
longer walk’ and was carried around on a cushion (Gaunt 1919: 36). Gaunt
takes care of him, fearing he is going to die. Yet oddly enough, Gaunt lays bare
that what really terrifies her is not James Buchanan’s death itself, but what
loss his death would cause for her. In noting that ‘I was terrified lest he should
die, and I should be alone in the world’ (36), she registers the uses, albeit the
emotional ones, to which the dog is put, revealing that her evocation of James
Buchanan is, in fact, relentlessly self-serving.
Ayscough likewise evokes a pattern of sentimentality, one which involves
the trope of rescuing the suffering animal, as an affective medium to register
human–animal intimacy and bonding, but she turns to a different narrative
strategy that registers a sense of reciprocity in her relationship with Yo Fei.
Taken away from his family and new to his ‘foreign home’ with his first foreign
owner (Ayscough 1926: 3), the rebellious Yo Fei (at the time he was named
Buster) attempts to run away before falling seriously ill. Feeling abandoned
and not willing to settle into his foreign home, he ‘decided to die’ (8). Ayscough
found him and nursed him back to life, and from hence, he ‘made friends’
with her – his mistress (8). The bond between them then starts to grow deeper
as time passes. Later, when Ayscough is taken down by illness, Yo Fei keeps
her company day and night, reversing the mode in which humans relieve the
suffering of animals in pain. In doing so, Ayscough seems to place the dog at
the centre of this animal–human relationship, inviting readers to perceive him
‘as a subject and agent contributing to the encounters (Nyman and Schuur-
man 2016: 2), as if this relationship is a result of co-production, with the dog
taking charge. In reversing the conventional dynamic of how humans ‘made
friends’ with nonhuman animals, Ayscough seems also to imply that there is
a higher degree of reciprocity in their mutual care and companionship, from
which arises a sense of equality in this human–animal relationship. By this
logic, there is less of the one-sidedness that dominates Gaunt’s interactions with
James Buchanan. In Gaunt’s case, the one-sidedness becomes excessive, causing
damage to the agency of the nonhuman animal with his disadvantage mired in
a relationship resting upon an anthropocentric value system.
Even when they register the animal and human friendship, Ayscough and
Gaunt differ from each other in the degrees of self-indulgence that characterise
their writing about these canine companions. Ayscough appears largely to refrain
from using the nonhuman animal as a site of affect in terms of showing her emo-
tional attachment. On the one hand, there is the inconvenience of making Yo Fei,
the focal point of the narration, see into Ayscough’s own emotional world, and on
the other hand, she is less keen on making the book a projection of herself and,
by extension, the world inhabited and dominated by white, Western men and

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 canines and race in florence ayscough and mary gaunt

women. As a result, readers access the consciousness and point of view of the dog
more than the human. This forms a sharp contrast to Gaunt’s text. Gaunt, in her
own voice, shows her capacity for self-indulgence, so that her narrative borders
on being narcissistic. She frequently draws readers’ attention to James Buchanan’s
affective significance to her as her ‘only companion and friend’ (1919: 30), and
highlights that he ‘loved [her] as no one in the world has ever loved [her]’ and con-
stantly gives her ‘great comfort’ (96). It is important to note here that, quite unlike
Victorian female travellers who often resort to the conventional tropes of feminin-
ity such as self-effacement, Gaunt is open about how she feels and thinks, often
overtly foregrounding her emotional sufferings when wandering in a strange land
and among people speaking foreign languages (Wu 2021: 732–3). In this vein, she
uses the affectionate dog as a site of affect, where her loneliness, insecurity and
anxiety among an alien people are projected, displaced and manipulated so that
she can fashion herself to fit the persona of a pained Western woman travelling
alone in China. This is a persona already well constructed in A Woman in China
(1914), to which A Broken Journey is a sequel.
It is true that, like Ayscough, Gaunt also intentionally avoids the discourses
of ‘mastery’ which, as some feminist ecocritics such as Val Plumwood have
highlighted, license ideas of human domination over nonhuman lives (2002:
45). However, throughout A Broken Journey, James Buchanan’s emotional
‘utility’ to Gaunt overtakes anything else, as if he is no more than a source of
‘affection’ and comfort, a form of emotional ‘resources’ for the human:

And if anyone thinks I make an absurd fuss about a little dog, I must
remind him that I was entirely alone among an alien people, and the
little dog’s affection meant a tremendous deal to me. He took away all
sense of loneliness. Looking back, I know now I could not have gone on,
this book would never have been written, if it had not been for James
Buchanan. (Gaunt 1919: 96)

Even in this passage that seems to concern James Buchanan most, readers see
Gaunt’s self, her ‘loneliness’ and the use of the dog looming ever larger. It
reveals an obsession with human rather than animal emotions. The emotional
reciprocity between human and nonhuman animals, is frequently disrupted.
More importantly, Gaunt fails to explore the dog’s complex interior life, unable
to imagine canine subjectivity and nonhuman agency.
In the above passage, Gaunt also seems impelled to pre-emptively defend her
making ‘an absurd fuss about a little dog’. Arguably, she is clear-eyed about how
nonhuman animals like dogs are generally treated with indifference by humans.
In her own understated words, people ‘don’t think much of animals’ (148). She
appears to react against this prevailing denigration of animals, a denigration
stemming from the hierarchical dualism enshrined in Western philosophy since

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René Descartes that defines human superiority, animal insignificance and the
maintenance of this hierarchy. Gaunt’s resistance is poignantly articulated in her
account of the treacherous journey taking a small dog with her on various trans-
port vehicles crossing Siberia and Europe before reaching England on the eve
of the First World War. During this process, the dog’s life and his value are con-
stantly slighted, neglected and pitted against human life and value. As a dog, he is
not allowed to board the trains and has to be drugged to keep quiet, hidden in a
small box and smuggled into the vehicles, a reminder of how nonhuman lives are
perceived as lesser than humans’, especially in a time of crisis. Echoing Gaunt,
Ayscough also demonstrates her awareness and disapproval of this hierarchical
dualism. This sentiment is already clear at the outset of The Autobiography of
a Chinese Dog when Ayscough, citing the Chinese folklore of the weaving lady,
poses the question, ‘And who shall say that only human beings are of importance
in the pattern she weaves?’ (Foreword i). Ayscough thus takes a step further as
she attempts to challenge the ‘alleged human monopoly over reason’ (Nyman
2016: 66). Both Gaunt and Ayscough, through recounting their affective rela-
tions to dogs, make efforts to confront the thin boundary between the animal
and the human, forcing us to attend to the significance of the nonhuman other.

‘[H]e had entirely forgotten his origin’

Race fundamentally marks Ayscough and Gaunt’s animal figurations. For Gaunt,
her racial identity is that of a white woman who appears to believe in and support
the necessity and justice of racial difference with its inherent hierarchy. In fact, in
the latter half of A Woman in China and across A Broken Journey, Gaunt uses her
narration to echo the narrow racism she ascribes to Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936),
whose poems she quotes frequently. Uppermost is Kipling’s ‘The Ballad of East and
West’ (1889). Oddly enough, Gaunt’s quotation stops at its first line, ‘East is East,
and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,’ which can be read as an explicit
support of the idea that racial and cultural difference between East and West is
unbridgeable. She appears to have completely missed the third and fourth lines
of the opening stanza: ‘But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor
Birth/ When two strong men stand face to face, though they come from the ends of
the earth!’ (Kipling 1989 [1889]: 233). Apparently, Gaunt skirts around Kipling’s
caution that differences in race, ethnicity, nationality and even birth do not mat-
ter and should be supplanted by individual personality, prowess and integrity as
criteria for judging one another. In ignoring what Kipling conveys in the remaining
part of the poem, Gaunt makes ‘East is East, and West is West, and never the twain
shall meet’ a motto directing how she thinks, feels and reacts to Chinese people as
racial others.
Racial perceptions undergirding a mentality of the essentialised hierarchical
difference between East and West profoundly problematise Gaunt’s representa-
tion of her dog, whose Chineseness must be subsumed, assimilated by whiteness.

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 canines and race in florence ayscough and mary gaunt

In fact, she subjects the animal to racial politics. In addition, the animal is con-
stantly instrumentalised to express Gaunt’s own racial identity, projecting her
mounting racial anxiety as she journeys farther into China’s hinterland and
away from European presence. This can be seen in various narrative strate-
gies she uses rhetorically to racialise a Chinese dog into non-Chineseness. First
and foremost, her naming practice is revealing. Gaunt’s first introduction of
her dog is already striking, for he bears a name utterly Western and essentially
Anglophone. More than that, historically, James Buchanan (1791–1868), the
fifteenth president of the United States, was infamous for his ambiguous attitude
towards slavery and for his inaction regarding averting the American Civil War
(1861–5). Readers can only speculate on what made Gaunt name her Chinese
dog after James Buchanan in the first place. However, intentionally or not, this
naming practice, with its strong connection to rhetorical colonialism as identi-
fied by Mary Stuckey and John Murphy (2001: 82), suggests Gaunt’s intention
to assimilate a Chinese dog discursively into the Western world, one that deci-
sively sets him apart from the Chinese world, as I discuss later in this chapter.
In addition to establishing racial boundaries through naming, Gaunt in A
Broken Journey subjects James Buchanan the dog to a progressive erasure of
cultural memory. From the outset of their journeys, James Buchanan is said to
have ‘entirely forgotten his origin’ (1919: 16), an origin that means not only
where he came from – namely, his physical birthplace – but also his racial and
cultural origin. One immediate consequence of entirely losing his race memory
is that he no longer has an emotional bond with the Chinese people amongst
whom he grew up. This is evident in behaviours such as rejecting any forms
of physical proximity to Chinese people, either Gaunt’s servants or random
people they encounter en route. For instance, readers are frequently told that
the small dog, despite being admired by the Chinese, who show their fondness
of him, ‘utterly declined’ to walk with them (96) and ‘declined to trust himself
with them unless I walked too’ (96). Gaunt reminds readers that the reason
that James Buchanan does not bite her Chinese servant, Mr Wang, is ‘simply
because he despised him so’ (16) since he is Chinese and, worse still, he is from
the lower class. The only occasion on which James Buchanan shows a small
dose of willingness to accept the Chinese servant’s touch, as Gaunt clarifies,
is when he is treated as if he was ‘a prince of the blood at least’ (96). In both
episodes, class-bound pride and vanity are invoked to complicate the racialised
reactions towards Chinese people.
On another occasion, Gaunt conflates her abjection of Chinese women with
anthropomorphism regarding her depiction of James Buchanan. She recounts
her encounters with a native sewing woman when travelling in a boat:

She [the native woman] had had her feet bound in her youth and was
rather crippled in consequence [. . .] She was a foolish soul, like most

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Chinese women, and took great interest in Buchanan, offering him

always a share of her own meals, which consisted apparently largely of
cucumbers and the tasteless Chinese melon. Now James Buchanan was
extremely polite, always accepting what was offered him, but he could
not possibly eat cucumber and melon, and when I went to bed at night I
often came in contact with something cold and clammy which invariably
turned out to be fragments of the sewing-woman’s meals. (143)

In this episode, Gaunt reduces the sewing woman, who is ‘exceedingly useful
to the missionaries’ (143), as she points out, to ‘a foolish soul’ who is ‘crippled’
from binding her feet in youth. Her comments that this woman is a representa-
tive of ‘most Chinese women’ discloses her general and race-bound contempt
for Chinese women as a whole. Indeed, throughout A Woman in China and A
Broken Journey, readers can easily form an impression of Gaunt’s perception
of Chinese women. Chinese women are homogenised into a hopeless, helpless
group centring around their bound feet, a sign of their ‘usual agonies’ (1914:
170) and ‘cruel suffering’ (1919: 128). Depicted merely as ‘toys and slaves’
(1919: 84), Chinese women are pitted against white women, who, exemplified
by Gaunt herself, are portrayed as modern citizens, emancipated, mobile and
embodying women’s rights achieved in a progressive era. A racial boundary is
ever present to separate Chinese women from the Western self. Interestingly,
Gaunt uses James Buchanan to project her abject feelings towards Chinese
women, thus widening, rather than closing, the racial gap. This is clear if we
read this episode alongside an earlier one in A Woman in China in which Gaunt
describes her irritation at being offered food and help by a ‘little maimed one-
eyed old woman up in the hills of China’ (1914: 192). In both cases, local
hospitality and good-will from Chinese women, in a morsel of food or other
forms, must be politely rejected, so that the boundary between the superior self
and the abject other is not collapsed.
In addition to invoking contempt springing from her perceived racial supe-
riority, Gaunt features other economies of emotions closely assigned to racial
emotions, to configure James Buchanan’s affective reactions towards the Chinese
as a means for projecting and solidifying her own racialised feelings. Sociologists
such as Eduardo Bonilla-Silva have theorised ‘racialized emotions’ as emotions
constituting the ‘fundamental social forces shaping the house of racism’ (2019:
2). In echoing Sara Ahmed, who singles out the ‘economies of fear’ that bear on
how ‘the language of racism sustains fear through displacement’ (2004: 126),
Bonilla-Silva uses racialised fear arising from the phenomenon wherein ‘Whites
fear Blacks in interracial encounters’ as an example to illustrate the process of
‘race-making’ (2019: 3). If we change the ‘Blacks’ into ‘Chinese’, it holds true
for Gaunt’s interracial interactions, in which fear ‘works to differentiate between
white and [Chinese] bodies’ (Ahmed 2004: 126). The difference is that Gaunt

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 canines and race in florence ayscough and mary gaunt

displaces her racialised emotions on to the animal other, using James Buchanan
to mediate her vexed racial relation to Chinese people. She first emphasises that
James Buchanan always casts his ‘doubtful’ look on Chinese people, who he
perceives as ‘alien’ (Gaunt 1919: 16). As her journey progresses, contempt and
doubt are magnified and impinged on by fear. After he is badly hurt by a Chinese
dog – a symbolic episode that suggests deep-seated worries over the imminent
danger of being left alone among the Chinese – James Buchanan lives in fear of
Chinese people. Gaunt renders the sensation of fear on the dog’s part most pal-
pable when she, for the first time using direct quotation to invite readers to see
into James Buchanan’s inner world, records his entreaty: ‘Don’t leave me, don’t
leave me to the mercy of the Chinese’ (36). As such, the Chinese are imagined,
felt and perceived as the very objects of fear, the incarnation of barbarism and
capable of nothing but brutality and atrocity.
In fact, Gaunt penned her narratives in the 1910s when, uppermost in her
impressions of China was the anti-imperialist Boxer Rebellion, staged between
1899 and 1901, a historical trauma to many Westerners, who perceived
from afar the alleged savagery of the Chinese mob as depicted by the West-
ern press. In 1900 the Boxers, determined to expunge foreign influence from
China, besieged the foreign legations in Peking, killing a dozen Westerners
and many Chinese Christians in the rest of the country. The popular narrative
of the Boxer Rebellion strongly reinforced racist stereotypes of the Chinese
as a Yellow Peril, a racial ideology feeding on Western ‘racist terror of alien
cultures, sexual anxieties, and the belief that the West will be overpowered
and enveloped by the irresistible, dark, occult forces of the East’ (Marchetti
1994: 2). What Gaunt terms ‘the Boxer trouble’ surfaces and resurfaces in
both A Woman in China and A Broken Journey to an alarming extent: she
evokes tales told by missionaries ‘who had actually suffered almost to death
at the hands of the Boxers’ (1919: 133), documents places nearly razed to the
ground by frantic Boxers, and recounts conversations with individuals who
witnessed the ‘troubles and dangers of the Boxer time’ (112). In so doing, the
history becomes ‘alive in the present’, shaping the surface of bodies (Ahmed
2004: 126). The passing of a decade does not mean the waning of fear for
Gaunt; instead, racist fear circulates and moves across time and space as his-
tory becomes ‘sticky’, to use Ahmed’s term (146), and racist fear sticks to the
Chinese as a whole. In some sense, the history of ‘the Boxer Trouble’ that
sticks becomes the lens through which Gaunt sees and perceives her Chinese
encounters, mediating her interracial interactions and the boundary she uses
to set herself apart from the Chinese. If Gaunt, in the former half of her jour-
ney, is able to repress her racist fear and anxiety, the moment she is left alone,
surrounded by Chinese men and women, racialised emotions erupt, and James
Buchanan is passively used as a tool, with attributed emotional value, to artic-
ulate her otherwise suppressed feelings towards the Chinese other. The canine

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 juanjuan wu

companion in Gaunt’s text is therefore anthropomorphised into a racialised

projection appearing to embody imperialist modernist culture.

‘A Chinese Dog’
While in Gaunt’s A Broken Journey, James Buchanan can be read as a caricature
of racialised emotions in the narcissistic and imperialist distortion, Ayscough in
The Autobiography of A Chinese Dog takes a very different approach insofar
as she largely reverses Gaunt’s mode. On the one hand, she brings into view the
canine subjectivity and agency denied in Gaunt’s narrative; on the other hand,
she grounds her animal figuration, closely connected to elements of anthropo-
morphism, and positive to a great extent, in her cosmopolitan vision regarding
China’s racial and cultural alterity. As a ‘citizen in the world’, she develops not
merely a keen interest in, but also profound respect for, the Chinese difference
manifest in Chinese culture in its complex forms. In other words, her immer-
sion in Chinese literature, culture and ways of living provides her with a ‘liberal
education’ (Ayscough 1926: 19), from which she cultivates a responsibility for
introducing Chinese cultural difference to the West without subsuming it to
increase the sameness of world culture. Ayscough’s animal figuration is entan-
gled with this cosmopolitan project.
To portray the canine consciousness and agency upon which Yo Fei’s Chine-
seness is dependent, Ayscough creatively employs a host of narrative strategies
in ways that are significantly different from those used by Gaunt. Instead of
rendering the animal other voiceless, Ayscough provides Yo Fei with a voice, a
history and a capacity for storytelling, thus redrawing the division between the
human and the animal. In this way, Yo Fei illustrates what Donna Haraway
theorises as ‘figures [that] are not representations or didactic illustrations, but
rather material-semiotic nodes or knots in which diverse bodies and meanings
coshape one another’ (2008: 4). As a sign of this strategy, at the outset of the
narrative, Yo Fei the dog, in his own voice, traces his own life trajectory origi-
nating from Shantung, a province known as the birthplace of Confucianism,
the hallmark of Chinese traditional culture. As Yo Fei narrates,

the great Confucius [551–479 bc] was born in Shantung . . . so was his
disciple Mencius [372–289 bc], and in their days, dogs of my breed, the
Lo-sze were used in the pursuit of game, so naturally I have a love of the
chase in my very blood. (Ayscough 1926: 3)

Blending the origin of Confucianism with that of the Lo-sze dog imparts
an important message that the human has been living with the animal since
ancient times and that animals are inevitably entangled within human history.
In this regard, Ayscough anticipates Erica Fudge, who argues that ‘it is impos-
sible to understand human history without also understanding the role that

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animals played in that history because animals have always held key positions
in so-called human society’ (2014: 27). Yet as Grace Moore warns, such ‘asser-
tions of coexistence sit uncomfortably alongside notions of the “utility” of the
animal’ (2020: 214). It is true that when Ayscough evokes this cross-species
coexistence, the notion of ‘utility’ is not sidestepped, as we are told that the
Lo-sze dogs were ‘used’ by the humans since Confucius’s time. She later returns
to the coexistence issue, devoting an entire chapter, through Yo Fei the focaliser,
illustrating how dogs, particularly Yo Fei’s ‘ancestors’, his ‘lineal and collateral
kinsmen’ (Ayscough 1926: 51), were domesticated and evolved under the influ-
ences of human activities such as religion, imperial preference and selective
breeding through China’s long history of different dynasties (53).
Ayscough is concerned with how the human and the canine have co-evolved
over time upon the premise that the animal is cared for and ‘canine feelings’ are
noted, understood and respected in ways within human power. For instance,
she returns to Confucius, Yo Fei’s ‘great compatriot’, to illustrate her point:

[Confucius] seems to have had a very real comprehension of canine feel-

ings . . . As he understood dogs so well, it was but natural that he should
care for them; and it is recorded that he entirely approved the customs of
burying a dear ‘house-dog’ in an old official canopy [as a way of show-
ing respect to the dead]. (52)

Apparently, here the domesticated ‘house-dog’ is elevated to the status of an

honourable man with respectable social status, demonstrating that the fre-
quently emphasised animal subordination in the West may not always apply to
the East. This structure of feeling is immediately reinforced by the moving story
of a dog in the imperial court in China’s Sung Dynasty (960–1279). When an
Emperor died, his Lo-sze dog ‘whined, moaned, and refused to eat’ (52). Sensing
its ‘pitiful state’ (52), the old Emperor’s son, now the new Emperor, decreed that
the dog be placed on the white mourning cushions and carried in the imperial
chair to the royal tomb. The small dog died there, and he was wrapped ‘in a
royal canopy and buried beside its master’ (53). To deny that animals are sub-
ordinated might risk romanticising humans’ treatment of animals in the East.
However, gleaning such affective stories from China’s long history does suggest
that Ayscough believes in the value of other ways of thinking, feeling and living
with nonhuman animals as much as there are other kinds of histories, cultures,
civilisations and ways of living outside Euro-America.
In conferring on Yo Fei a profound sense of history, both of Chinese culture
and of the canine species, Ayscough makes it possible to enact a cultural and
racial identity that is Chinese on the dog’s side. This is evident in the narrative
strategy Ayscough employs to make Yo Fei a Chinese dog altogether, from
his name to his heart. To begin with, like Gaunt, she also turns to the naming

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practice but approaches it differently. She, through Yo Fei’s voice, explains that
she changes his name from ‘Buster’, a name given by the dog’s first adopter, to
‘Yo Fei’ because the latter is ‘more in keeping with my personality’ (10). The
narration then goes on to recount how Ayscough’s Chinese mentor tells the
story of Yo Fei, a Chinese historical figure esteemed as ‘the hero of the twelfth
century, who devoted his life to the defence of his country’ (11). In the newly
established Republican China (1912–49), Yo Fei’s story was remembered and
conjured back from history, and the spirit of Yo Fei, admired as ‘the Prince of
Loyalty and Courage’, was admitted to the Military Temple in Peking in 1915,
as part of the ‘Cult of Heroes’, to raise public patriotism and nationalism to
reinforce China’s independence from the West’s semi-colonial rule as a new
modern state (12). To some extent, Ayscough also attempts to make Yo Fei the
dog a defender of his own country in cultural terms.
In this regard, Yo Fei is configured as Chinese not only in origin, in his
name, but also in his psychology, which shapes his ability to compare Chi-
nese and Western cultures and reveal the diversity of world cultures free from
racial dogmatism. For instance, in a humorous tone, Yo Fei the Chinese dog
makes fun of this ‘strange Western custom’ of naming pets after famous peo-
ple, noting that it is ‘incredibly disrespectful in the eyes of my country-people’
(12). On another occasion Yo Fei grounds his comparison and value judge-
ment upon his own lived experiences in both China and Canada. As he tells
Western readers, ‘In China no hedges divide one man’s property from that of
his neighbours, only raised paths are used for landmarkers; no white boards
such as I have seen here [Canada] state “Trespassers Will be Prosecuted”;
I could race and race for miles on end’ (38). Such comparisons serve peda-
gogical purposes. On the one hand, it educates Western readers on Chinese
customs relating to matters of private property, which are not necessarily
inferior to the Western idea of property rights; on the other hand, his com-
ment that he could race freely in Shanghai illustrates a yearning for a world
untainted by a colonial modernity that is propelled by industrialisation and
aggressive modernisation.
An affective intimacy between Yo Fei and what he calls ‘my country-people’,
amongst whom he flourishes, significantly marks him as distinct from James
Buchanan. Ayscough, throughout The Autobiography of A Chinese Dog, uses
plural pronouns such as ‘[w]e the Chinese dog’ (8), ‘we Chinese’ (3; 12; 18)
and ‘my countrymen’ (38: 69; 72; 73) to show Yo Fei’s identification with his
Chinese origin and racial belongings as much as his emotional closeness to the
Chinese. In doing so, Yo Fei is represented very differently from Gaunt’s James
Buchanan, who grows increasingly distant from, and nurtures contempt and
fear for, Chinese people in the wake of the obliteration of his cultural and racial
memory. While James Buchanan finds working-class Chinese people repulsive,
fearsome and too low to deserve his attention, Yo Fei recognises a natural

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affective community with them, including Ayscough’s servants and other disad-
vantaged groups. For example, Yo Fei tells of the ‘dreadful’ life of the ‘rickshaw
coolie’ who lives in a city. The primary source of a rickshaw coolie’s dread, as
Yo Fei informs us, is ‘the people whom he draws in his carriage’ because they
are ‘often thoughtless and cruel; urging him on, swearing at him, prodding
him, and sometimes striking him’ (14). Here the trope of cruelty links the coo-
lies with animals such as horses as they are configured in Anna Sewell’s Black
Beauty (1877). In this sense, Ayscough appears to reveal, through Yo Fei’s voice
and his sympathy, the inhuman treatment of the lower-class Chinese workers as
much as cruelty against nonhuman animals.
Through comparatively reading animal figurations in Mary Gaunt’s self-
centred travel narratives and Florence Ayscough’s canine autobiography
across a span of a decade, this chapter has demonstrated an explicit paradigm
shift in forms of anthropomorphism regarding canine subjectivity, agency and
animal–human relationships, as well as interracial dynamics in the literary
imaginary of the early twentieth-century modernist culture of mobility and
intercultural encounters. Gaunt’s account of James Buchanan, the voiceless
dog wanting cultural, racial memory, falls into the inevitable trap of a form
of traditional, old-fashioned and ultimately destructive anthropomorphism
inflected by mounting racial anxiety. Her style of anthropomorphising the dog
extolls human significance and white exceptionalism at the price of the animal
and the non-white. On the contrary, in rejecting such a disservice, Ayscough
brings to the view the ways in which the performance of Yo Fei’s subjectivity,
value system and racial and cultural identity links to an egalitarian, cosmo-
politan fashion of perceiving cross-species and interracial relationships. In
doing so, she strives to close the human–animal divide as well as the alleged
racial, cultural, hierarchical structure between the white and non-white.
Her work registers a new fashion of affective, constructive anthropomor-
phism that acknowledges distinctive animal subjectivity and agency, which
enables her to uncover and present a ‘world of resonances and resemblances’
(Bennett 2010: 99). Moreover, she champions the importance of an empa-
thetic human imagination which respects the coexistence, co-evolution and
interaction of the animal and the human, and those of different races and
cultures. Ayscough’s work provides an anticipatory discourse of ‘companion
species’, to use Haraway’s term, that encapsulates the idea that our existence
is constantly constitutive with other species. It can be said that Ayscough’s
positive anthropomorphism encourages what Haraway calls ‘an ethics and
politics committed to the flourishing of significant otherness’ (2003: 3), and in
this case, the significant other refers to both nonhuman species and non-white
races. In this sense, a degree of empathetic anthropomorphism can be under-
stood as contributing to the mutual understanding of companion species and
the course of the flourishing of nonhuman others.

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 juanjuan wu

Works Cited
Ahmed, Sara. 2004. ‘Affective Economies’. Social Text 22.2: 117–39.
Ayscough, Florence. 1926. A Chinese Mirror: Being Reflections of the Reality Behind
Appearance. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin.
Ayscough, Florence. 1926. The Autobiography of a Chinese Dog. Boston and New
York: Houghton Mifflin.
Ayscough, Florence. 1932. Firecracker Land: Pictures of the Chinese World for Younger
Readers. New York: Houghton Mifflin.
Bennett, Jane. 2010. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC, and
London: Duke University Press.
Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo. 2019. ‘Feeling Race: Theorizing the Racial Economy of Emotions’.
American Sociological Review 84.1: 1–25.
Fudge, Erica. 2014. Pets (The Art of Living). London: Routledge.
Garber, Marjorie. 1996. Dog Love. New York: Touchstone.
Gaunt, Mary. 1911. Alone in West Africa. London: T. W. Laurie.
Gaunt, Mary. 1914. A Woman in China. London: T. W. Laurie.
Gaunt, Mary. 1919. A Broken Journey. London: T. W. Laurie.
Haraway, Donna J. 2003. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People and Significant
Otherness. Vol. 1. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press.
Haraway, Donna J. 2008. When Species Meet. London: University of Minnesota Press.
Hickman, Bronwen. 2014. Mary Gaunt: Independent Colonial Woman. Melbourne:
Melbourne Books.
Ittner, Jutia. 2006. ‘Part Spaniel, Part Canine Puzzle: Anthropomorphism in Woolf’s
Flush and Auster’s Timbuktu’. Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal 39.4:
181–96.
Kipling, Rudyard. 1989 [1889]. Complete Verse. Definitive Edition. New York:
Anchor Books.
Marchetti, Gina. 1994. Romance and the Yellow Peril: Race, Sex, and Discursive Strategies
in Hollywood Fiction. Oakland: University of California Press.
Moore, Grace. 2020. ‘Animalographies, Kinship, and Conflict in Ceridwen Dovey’s
Only the Animals and Eva Hornung’s Dog Boy.’ a/b: Auto/Biography Studies
35.1: 207–29.
Nyman, Jopi. 2016. ‘Re-reading Sentimentalism in Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty: Affect,
Performativity, and Hybrid Spaces’. In Affect, Space and Animals. Ed. Jopi Nyman
and Nora Schuurman, 65–79. New York: Routledge.
Nyman, Jopi and Nora Schuurman. 2016. ‘Introduction’. In Affect, Space and Animals.
Ed. Jopi Nyman and Nora Schuurman, 1–11. New York: Routledge.
Plumwood, Val. 2002. Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason. London:
Routledge.
Rohman, Carrie. 2008. Stalking the Subject: Modernism and the Animal. New York:
Columbia University Press.
Ryan, Derek. 2013. Virginia Woolf and the Materiality of Theory: Sex, Animal, Life.
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Stuckey, Mary and John Murphy. 2001. ‘By Any Other Name: Rhetorical Colonialism
in North America’. American Indian Culture and Research Journal 25.4: 73–98.

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 canines and race in florence ayscough and mary gaunt

Woolf, Virginia. 2016 [1933]. Flush: A Biography. London: Penguin Classics.

Wu, Juanjuan. 2021. ‘A Broken Journey: Emotions, Race, and Gendered Mobility in
Mary Gaunt’s Narratives of China’. Women’s Studies 50.7: 727–46.
Wylie, Dan. 2002. ‘The Anthropomorphic Ethic: Fiction and the Animal Mind in
Virginia Woolf’s Flush and Barbara Gowdy’s The White Bone’. Interdisciplinary
Studies in Literature and Environment 9.2: 115–31.

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Beastly Traces

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 4

MAKING AN IMPRESSION DEEPLY:

AUTHORISING ANIMALS IN
D. H. LAWRENCE

Carrie Rohman

In recent work on animality in modernism and in performance, I have been

reframing aesthetic practice as a fundamentally more-than-human undertak-
ing. In that work I assert that human creativity is only the most recent iteration
of an artistic impulse that belongs to the living in general. Aesthetics from this
perspective must be understood as bioaesthetics, wherein a ‘bio-impulse’ at the
root of the aesthetic itself connects human artistic propensities to animality
through strategies of excess, display, and intensification.1 This work of revis-
ing our understanding of creatural aesthetic capacities, of re-envisioning the
aesthetic domain itself as transhuman in scope, is ethically charged because we
must acknowledge the shared status of art-making, one of our most hallowed
and formerly ‘exceptional’ activities. Thinking through the bioaesthetic powers
of other animals has led me to consider the ways in which animals might be
said to ‘authorise’ creative projects or practices. This discussion is thus a first
step in thinking through what I am calling animal authority in literary and
performative practices.
The idea of animals as authors, or as authorising, raises interesting ques-
tions about the qualities of authority that are called upon when animals become
sources of sanctioning, knowledge or permission, and how those differ from
human authorisations. Moreover, suggesting that animals might be authors in
some way is more radical than suggesting that they can write or mark because
it dares to view animals through a humanised lens of intention or purpose,
however much we have problematised those categories as literary scholars. If

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we were to reframe something like Michel Foucault’s outlining of an ‘author-

function’ in discursive practices to accommodate animal authority, the question
of the author becomes a much more radically open question than Foucault could
have anticipated (Foucault 1969). For instance, how do animal authorities affect
the kinship between writing and death that Foucault and Roland Barthes have
elaborated? What replaces the apotheosis of écriture in an animalised frame-
work? Is it Jacques Derrida’s animot? Is it a zoopoetics that bears witness to
humans’ entanglement with life, as a repressed or disavowed given of writing?2
And is the evocation of an animal authority in creative or artistic work a radical
refusal of the proper name, of the individual mark, or does it rather concede that
the operations of authentication and verification (tied to self-presence, in at least
some sense) ought to be accorded to animals, also? While this discussion will
not answer all of these questions, I hope that it might provoke further consider-
ations of what it can mean to think about animals as authors, particularly in the
modernist context. Modernism, as I have suggested elsewhere, is itself a bioaes-
thetic becoming-other, with an emphasis on innovation and becoming-new, so
the authorship of modernist animals is of particular interest.
In general, I am proposing that the bioaesthetic critical wager, which
locates the fundamental artistic impulse well beyond human capacities, could
be understood to signal the ends of human aesthetic authority. In exploring
animals as aesthetic authorities, I am keen to take the entire concept of ‘author-
ship’ outside of an exclusively human framework, to reconfigure and query it
in a more-than-human register. D. H. Lawrence’s work is a good foundation
for this inquiry because Lawrence wrestles with animal powers, both within
and alongside the human, in highly complex ways throughout his writing. His
intricate embrace of embodied and intuitive forms of consciousness, and his
understandings of human ontology as always embedded in creatural and eco-
logical networks, align with some of his vivid renderings of animal authorship
in the modernist era.
Women in Love (1920) uses a multitude of encounters with nonhuman ani-
mals that are bioaesthetic in nature, but one set is highly charged around the
question of authorship. Chapter 18, ‘Rabbit’, sits in the exact centre of the
novel, at page 235 out of 480 pages in the Cambridge edition. This placement
had not occurred to me in the last twenty-five years or so of reading, reread-
ing and teaching the novel, until I started thinking about animal authors in
Lawrence. The ‘Rabbit’ chapter seals the erotic intentions between Gudrun
and Gerald, and so it contains a set of critically outworn sexual implications,
based on the perception of rabbits as highly propagative, and therefore highly
erotic. But as I often remark about Lawrence’s work, it is not that the sexual
proper is not central: it is rather that the sexual proper must be understood to
signal so much more, and so much more richly, in the context of ecological and
creatural registers.

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The context for the dramatic action of the chapter should be recalled,
importantly, as framed by the child Winifred. Winifred, the youngest child in
the Crich family, is described as ‘detached’ and ‘ironic’, and as one who does
‘not notice human beings, unless they were like herself, playful and slightly
mocking’ (Lawrence 1920: 235). Further, ‘the serious people of her life were
the animals she had for pets’ (235). Winifred’s posture toward animals is not
necessarily or evenly elevated by Lawrence’s treatment of her, but it is crucial
to note that the novel’s most charged instance of an authorising animal occurs
in this chapter, saturated by the child’s views. The child’s attentions are specifi-
cally artistic ones, at that, first to her Pekinese dog, Looloo, and then to the
rabbit, named Bismarck.
Both of these creatures have proper, capitalised names, which obviously
marks them as domesticated by humans. But this detail has further implica-
tions around the role of the proper name in specific relation to authorship.
Foucault clarifies that the proper name and the author’s name share the oscilla-
tion ‘between the poles of description and designation’ (Foucault 1969: 1480).
That is, the author’s name signals that this writing (or speech) is extraordinary,
lasting, something to which others ought to attend. Thus, formally naming
Looloo and Bismarck signals this extra quality to the reader, in a way that sim-
ply using ‘the dog’ and ‘the rabbit’ would not. We might also note that these
are attentions to domesticated animality, mediated largely through a child and
a woman. Perhaps these details can be seen as a mode of Lawrence’s femi-
nism: the extensive focus here on women and children, and domesticated ‘pets’,
would typically be coded as feminine.
The whole chapter is framed by Winifred and Gudrun trying to sketch these
two companion animals, in the first drawing and modelling lesson that has been
arranged for the child. This is, therefore, a highly self-reflexive chapter, show-
casing the making of artwork within an artwork. We might say, then, that the
bioaesthetic becomes doubly charged in this portion of the novel. That charge
is intensified by the fact that Gudrun is specifically known for her sculptured
animal figures. Gerald informs Winifred, his younger sister, that Miss Brangwen
‘makes animals and birds in wood and clay, that the people in London write
about in the papers, praising them to the skies’ (235).
In its initial segments, as the ladies each draw a portrait of Looloo the dog,
Lawrence’s chapter vacillates to some degree between staid classical portraiture,
with a more conventional subject/object dynamic, and a bioaesthetic acknowl-
edgement of animal agency and power. In connection with the latter, Winifred
herself suggests that they are aiming to capture or get Looloo’s ‘Looliness’ (235)
in their drawings, which at least nods toward an individual subjecthood that is
unique to this dog. She also introduces the term ‘awful’ when she worries aloud
that her own sketch of the creature is ‘sure to be awful’ (236). As I will suggest,
this term is significant in multivalent ways for the discussion of animal authority.

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Hints of the dog’s point of view emerge in Lawrence’s descriptions: ‘He

sat all the time with the resignation and fretfulness of ages on his dark velvety
face’ (236), and ‘He turned his head aside as in chagrin and mortification’
(236) when Winifred holds the drawing of him ‘under his nose’, for Looloo
to admire. Looloo the dog also looks at the child ‘with reproachful, saturnine
eyes, vanquished in his extreme agedness of being’ (236). Moreover, the narra-
tor’s description, which coincides with Gudrun’s initial viewing of Winifred’s
drawing, turns further toward a reciprocal sense of creatural entanglement: ‘It
was a grotesque little diagram of a grotesque little animal, so wicked and so
comical, a slow smile came over Gudrun’s face, unconsciously’ (236). Gudrun
ultimately agrees that the likeness of the dog is significant.
The repetition of the descriptor ‘grotesque’ could be misleading here. It
is important to recall that Birkin is described in the ‘Water-Party’ chapter as
standing before Ursula with ‘a sardonic, flickering laugh on his face. And in
another second, he was singing softly to himself, and dancing a grotesque
step-dance in front of her, his limbs and body shaking loose, his face flickering
palely . . . like a shadow’ (168–9; emphasis added). Birkin is further described
in this scene as malevolent and mocking. In previous work, I have argued that
Birkin’s grotesque mocking dances are examples of Deleuzean immanence:
impersonal antimetaphorical becomings-imperceptible that are highly valued
in the novel’s framework.3 The posture or temperament of the dog is perhaps
grotesque in the same valued sense. There is a further vacillation, however,
that it seems important to mark. When ‘a slow smile came over Gudrun’s face,
unconsciously’ (236), at seeing the grotesque little diagram Winifred has made
of the dog, there seems an irreverent moment of relishing the wickedness or
mischief involved in representation itself. If we are considering whether ani-
mals partake in such activities as writing and authoring, the scamp or rascal
quality of making a likeness here seems notable.
The early portions of this chapter also contain more overt bioaesthetic
linkages between Winifred and her companion animals. For instance, the ‘child
wore a dress of black-and-white stripes’ (237), just as Bismarck is described
as ‘the great black-and-white rabbit’ (239). Thus, the child’s garments mirror,
to a significant extent, the creature’s own embodied designs, or fur markings,
which in bioaesthetic terms are often responsible for the lurings, attractions
and becomings-artistic that animals perform in order to attract sex partners,
and perhaps in order for the rhythmic pleasures alone that these becomings
enact. There is clearly some flickering of the child/animal boundary here. That
the girl and the rabbit are visually black and white – specifically, the colours of
parchment and ink, of the printed page or written word – is especially compel-
ling in reading Bismarck as an authorising force.
The broader significance of bioaesthetic markings is reinforced in Gud-
run’s characteristic colourful attire. She is described early in the chapter

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as ‘dressed in blue, with woollen yellow stockings, like the Blue coat boys.
[Gerald] glanced up in surprise. Her stockings always disconcerted him, the
pale-yellow stockings and the rather black shoes’ (237). Further into the
chapter, when the erotic tensions between the two adults are more activated,
Gerald watches the

soft, full, still body of Gudrun, in its silky cashmere. How silky and rich
and soft her body must be. . . . And it did rather annoy him, that Gudrun
came dressed in startling colours, like a macaw, when the family was in
mourning. Like a macaw she was! He watched the lingering way she
took her feet from the ground. And her ankles were pale yellow, and her
dress a deep blue. Yet it pleased him. It pleased him very much. He felt
the challenge in her very attire – she challenged the whole world. And he
smiled as to the note of triumph. (239)

The repetition of ‘challenge’ signals the territorial aspects of a creatural bioaes-

thetics. As Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari explain, the artist is

the first person to set out a boundary stone, or to make a mark. Property,
collective or individual, is derived from that, even when it is in the service
of war and oppression. Property is fundamentally artistic because art is
fundamentally poster, placard. As [Konrad] Lorenz says, coral fish are
posters. The expressive is primary in relation to the possessive. (Deleuze
and Guattari 1987: 316)

Elizabeth Grosz helpfully glosses this concept by explaining that the:

boundary is not self-protective but erotico-proprietorial: it defines a

stage of performance, an arena of enchantment, a mise-en-scène for
seduction that brings together heterogeneous and otherwise unrelated
elements: melody and rhythms, a series of gestures, bows, and dips, a
tree or a perch, a nest, a clearing, an audience of rivals, an audience of
desired ones. (Grosz 2008: 48)

Again, the piquing element here in relation to authorship is the possessive

and forceful enactment of one’s ‘startling colours’: that is, of one’s particular
aesthetic being. This enchanting, erotico-proprietorial staging of the artistic
‘self’ seems especially charged in the animal scenes of Women in Love, where
creatures both human and animal perform and judge others’ performances,
and where an aesthetic ‘outwardness’ tests the becomings of individuals, as
conventions are surpassed and ‘rivals’ overcome. When Birkin moves in and
out of his ‘grotesque step-dance’, in which ‘his body seemed to hang all loose

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and quaking in between, like a shadow’, he responds to Ursula’s assertion that

‘we’ve all gone mad’ with ‘[p]ity we aren’t madder’ and a sudden kissing of
her fingers (168–9). He puts his face near hers here, and would have kissed her
again a few moments later, ‘had she not started back’ (169). The ‘outlandish’
quality is like that of a ‘mad macaw’, which Gerald associates with Gudrun, a
quality that he both admires and is startled to perceive. Bismarck the rabbit’s
‘madness’ is also a central issue in the chapter, and I will return to that.
The scenes with Bismarck are much more extended, and occupy a larger
portion of the chapter, than the portions concerning Looloo. At the outset
of this segment, I want to mention that the rabbit’s powerful authoritative
actions ultimately delay the humans’ sketching plans, and so, because the
rabbit makes its ‘mark’ in the chapter, the humans’ intentions to make their
likenesses of the rabbit are indefinitely deferred. One of Winifred’s initial
outbursts about drawing Bismarck turns on the framework of the ‘awe-ful’.
When Gudrun confirms that Winifred wants to take up the rabbit as their next
drawing subject, the child responds, ‘Oh yes – Oh I do! I want most awfully
to do Bismarck. He looks so splendid this morning, so fierce. He’s almost
as big as a lion’ (237). These remarks correspond with Lawrence’s vacilla-
tions around animals and animality in his broader work, where his narratorial
voices and characters display a ‘tension between destroying and acknowledg-
ing the radical alterity of the animal other’ (Rohman 2009: 100).4 Moreover,
when the child continues to suggest that ‘He’s a real king, he is’ (237), her
claim directly echoes the well-known lines in Lawrence’s poem ‘Snake’, in
which he describes the serpent as

like a king,
Like a king in exile, uncrowned in the underworld,
Now due to be crowned again. (Lawrence 1923d: 305, ll. 69–70)

Despite the narratorial presentation of the child’s views as ‘hyperbole’ here, the
reverence for animal being and subjectivity is marked.
Bismarck is also repeatedly described as a wonder, a mystery, which further
aligns with Lawrence’s tendency to acknowledge a threshold for human pre-
eminence, along species lines. That is, ‘At times, Lawrence’s [work] acknowl-
edges the radical alterity of animal others and deconstructs the typical humanist
subject-who-knows by framing the limits of human epistemology’ (Rohman
2009: 64). The ‘awe-ful’ qualities are recapped and recited in Lawrence’s hall-
mark repetitious style, a style that, in part, can be seen as an attempt to pro-
duce multivalent meanings, to resist standard concepts and linguistic codes.
The section emphasising Bismarck’s ‘mystery’ is partly written in French, as it
includes the French governess’s comments, and is worth reproducing here at
some length, in its translated form:

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‘Good-day miss,’ . . .
‘Winifred does so want to do Bismarck’s portrait – ! Oh, but all morn-
ing it’s . . . Bismarck, Bismarck, always Bismarck! It’s a rabbit, isn’t
it miss?
‘Yes, it’s a big black and white rabbit. Haven’t you seen him?’ . . .
‘No, miss, Winifred has never wanted to show it to me. Many’s the time
I’ve asked her, “What is this Bismarck, Winifred?” But she wouldn’t
tell me. Her Bismarck, it was a mystery.’
‘Yes, it’s a mystery, really a mystery! . . .’
‘Bismarck . . . it’s a mystery, Bismarck, he is a marvel,’ . . .
‘Yes, he is a marvel,’ . . .
‘Is he really a marvel?’ . . .
‘Certainly!’ . . .
‘However, he isn’t a king . . . he was only a chancellor.’
‘What’s a chancellor?’ (French and German) (558, explanatory note for
238)

The reprisal of Bismarck’s mysterious nature recalls another important

moment of vacillation in Lawrence’s work, in the poem ‘Fish’, originally pub-
lished in 1922 and reprinted in 1923. There, the narrator moves from a posture
of envying the fish’s vibrancy, to instances of trite anthropomorphism, to an
ending posture of awed ignorance. In the poem, the narrator announces toward
the ending segments, ‘I left off hailing him’ (Lawrence 1923e: 292, l. 108). As
I have suggested elsewhere, this occasion of humility involves the relinquishing
of humanist mastery and autonomy, so that the poem ends by destabilising the
conventional ways in which human knowledge and cognition supersede non-
human forms of being and knowing.5
On the other hand, the rabbit’s alignment with the historical Otto von
Bismarck, Prince of Bismarck, Duke of Lauenburg, humanises this creature
in a highly authoritative way. A conservative Prussian statesman who domi-
nated German and European affairs from the 1860s until 1890, he was the
first Chancellor of the German Empire between 1871 and 1890. And so, there
is a clear tension between the mysterious alterity of the rabbit and its name-
sake’s role as a highly decorated and powerful political figure. This tension,
however, is not unusual in Lawrence. Again, his work often invokes conflicted
and ambivalent views of animal power and human relations to that power. The
particularity of the designation chancellor is also interesting for the question of
animal authority: when Winifred asks Gerald what a chancellor is, he replies a
‘sort of judge’ (238).
The rabbit’s power and authority, his ability to make ‘judgements’ on some
level, are very much at issue throughout the chapter. Winifred, in her ‘childish’
wisdom, suggests to Gudrun that they ought to leave the rabbit in its hutch and
draw him ‘listening’; ‘he listens with so much of himself,’ she notes, a powerful

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suggestion around this creature’s authority (239). But Gudrun wants to bring
the rabbit out and asks if they can remove him from his hutch. Winifred warns
her, he is ‘very strong. He really is extremely strong’ and the child looks at
Gudrun ‘in an odd calculating mistrust’ (239; emphasis in original). Note here
the child’s suspicion of human motives and the implied faith in nonhuman
powers. Yet Winifred’s own desires to control Bismarck also flicker in and out
of this chapter. As is usually the case in Lawrence’s work, no character is ‘clean’
in any discourse. With another warning about his fearful kicking, they unlock
the door and the ‘rabbit exploded in a wild rush round the hutch’ (240). And
here, in anticipation of the writing to come, Winifred exclaims, ‘He scratches
most awfully sometimes’ (240: 5; emphasis added).
The next few lines trace a kind of sadistic insistence inherent in the human
characters’ desires to control the rabbit for their own ends. By delaying the
dangerous encounter with Bismarck for several sentences, and by emphasising
the dispositions of the two female characters, the novel makes it clear that the
authoritative creature ought really to be left alone:

Winifred looked up at Gudrun with some misgiving in her wild excite-

ment. Gudrun smiled sardonically with her mouth. Winifred made a
strange crooning noise of unaccountable excitement. . . . ‘Shall we take
him now?’ she whispered excitedly, mysteriously, looking up at Gudrun
and edging very close. ‘Shall we get him now?’ –She chuckled wickedly
to herself. (240)

There is a distinct linkage between ‘mysterious’ childhood and animality in the

text, but there also seems a linkage here between the wickedness of seizing a resis-
tant animal – an actual nonhuman animal – and the ‘unaccountable excitement’
of initiating an instance of writing, authoring or representing.
The energetic response of the rabbit to being seized by Gudrun is rendered
in great and intensive detail by Lawrence:

Gudrun thrust in her arm and seized the great, lusty rabbit as it crouched
still, she grasped its long ears. It set its four feet flat, and thrust back.
There was a long scraping sound as it was hauled forward, and in
another instant it was in mid-air, lunging wildly, its body flying like a
spring coiled and released, as it lashed out, suspended from the ears.
Gudrun held the black-and-white tempest at arms’ length, averting her
face. But the rabbit was magically strong, it was all she could do to keep
her grasp. She almost lost her presence of mind. (240)

I want to suggest that we might read this description as rendering the forces of
writing or proto-writing, in a very Derridean sense, wherein an arche-materiality

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or technicity/prosthetics of language systems precedes speech and writing.6 We

can frame the rabbit’s ‘madness’, its bodily lunging and wild lashing out, as signal-
ling the primordial pan-creatural bid and struggle to write, the creatural attempt
to authorise an idea or a text of some kind. This moment can also be read as
registering the violence inherent in all acts of writing.
As Gudrun loses her presence of mind while grasping the lunging rabbit,
Winifred describes the creature in this way: ‘Bismarck, Bismarck, you are behav-
ing terribly . . . Oh do put him down, he’s beastly’ (240; second emphasis added).
If we stay with the Derridean framework that scholars such as Cary Wolfe privi-
lege, we might say the terrible, beastly experience hints at ‘our subjection to and
constitution in the materiality and technicity of a language that is always on
the scene before we are, as a precondition of our subjectivity’ (Wolfe 2010: 89).
Note also that the redressing of the rabbit’s behaviour is mixed with the implied
reprimand of human intervention: ‘Oh do put him down.’
Just after this moment, we have the first overt image of what I am calling
animal writing or authorship in the novel.

[Gudrun] stood for a moment astounded by the thunder-storm that had

sprung into being in her grip. Then her colour came up, a heavy rage came
over her like a cloud. She stood shaken as a house in a storm, and utterly
overcome. Her heart was arrested with fury at the mindlessness and the
bestial stupidity of this struggle, her wrists were badly scored by the claws
of the beast, a heavy cruelty welled up in her. (240; emphasis added)

If writing, like other forms of art-making, must also be understood as having

its origins in the becoming-aesthetic of all living creatures, and if modernism
is particularly ‘beastly’ in its attentions to human and nonhuman evolution-
ary and affective linkages, this scene might be read as one of literature’s high-
voltage descriptions of the dangerous, territorial becoming-other of all crea-
tures in their moments of creative marking.
What might it mean to read this instance of scratching and scoring as
an example of writing, authorship or literacy that is animal or creatural in
nature? The rabbit scrawls out a text on the arm of a human, writing in claw
and blood. This interpretation surely reverberates in profound ways with
Lawrence’s own investment in his concept of blood-consciousness, the vital
instinctual ‘knowledge’ or bodily unconscious that he theorised in his books
Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious (1923a) and Fantasia of the Unconscious
(1923b), as a challenge to Freudian views. In this connection, the work of Bess
Van Asselt on cutting as a form of literacy among queer of colour youth provides
an insight into how we might further construe the question of animal agency
in such instances of authorising. I want to tread as carefully as possible here,
while using this analogy, since cutting as a practice is upsetting, controversial,

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harmful and self-destructive. I am not suggesting a simplified concurrence of

practices; nor am I intending to animalise the often marginalised individuals
that Van Asselt considers in her discussion. And thus, it may be that this
analogy itself is controversial, on some level. The meanings of cutting practices,
however, can provide some useful frameworks for thinking about authorship in
the present context, as long as we are very clear about the ethical complexities
involved in making such a comparison. Van Asselt emphasises the ‘tearing and
healing’ of skin in tattooing and cutting as related to agency, narrative, and
storytelling (81). According to Van Asselt, tattoos are considered a validated
form of bodily modification in the field of psychology, counting as artefactual
literacy. But she argues that no one has framed cutting as literacy, despite its
similarity to the act and process of tattooing:

While the two acts are not completely aligned, it is worthwhile to under-
stand that viewing the manipulation of the flesh as a text pushes us to
see and hear a different story told by marginalized queer and trans*+
youth of color. (81)

One important overlapping question around these concerns (human cut-

ting, animal writing) is the question of agency. Van Asselt suggests that when
queer of colour youth cut themselves, and one another, ‘they can make sense of
their world and change their world, if only for a moment’ (79). This claim has
potential resonances with the question of Bismarck’s agency and power in Law-
rence’s scenes. Certainly, this rabbit makes his impression upon the humans
who attempt to control him; he changes his world, if only for a moment.
Residually, the implied question of physical scarring from an animal swipe
in Lawrence’s chapter raises the spectre of a permanent reminder of animal
‘authorship’, written on the body of a human, a permanent reminder of ani-
mals’ attempts to change their worlds, to turn the angle of a narrative at any
given moment. Scarring might also raise the question of legibility in complex
ways, in thinking about animal writing and authorship.7
The power of this particular animal is something that Lawrence returns to
again and again in his own characteristic repetitive and incantatory prose: ‘The
rabbit made itself into a ball in the air, and lashed out, flinging itself into a bow.
It really seemed demoniacal. Gudrun saw Gerald’s body tighten, saw a sharp
blindness come into his eyes’ (241). The image of a bow aligns with many clas-
sic images of the pen and sword, the writing implement as powerful, as weapon
(and we should continue to acknowledge the fraught complexity of these mas-
culinist images of writing and power). If writing is carving out some space of
territory, some territory of meaning, then once more, it is difficult to talk about
writing without talking about power and force. Gerald’s response to the rabbit
becoming-bow – ‘I know these beggars of old’ (241) – is perhaps, among other

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things, an acknowledgement of the ancient creatural desire to be an agent, to

have some capacity to mark, trace, make an impression. This desire is inher-
ently territorial and thus inherently proprietary, and even antagonistic, to some
degree. Again, the ‘madness’ of these desires is distinctly rendered by descrip-
tors like ‘demoniacal’.
Lawrence continues to use images of animal power as he writes about
Gerald’s confrontation with the rabbit:

The long, demon-like beast lashed out again, spread on the air as if it
were flying, looking something like a dragon, then closing up again,
inconceivably powerful and explosive. The man’s body, strung to its
efforts, vibrated strongly. Then a sudden sharp, white-edged wrath came
up in him. Swift as lightning he drew back and brought his free hand
down like a hawk on the neck of the rabbit. Simultaneously, there came
the unearthly, abhorrent scream of a rabbit in the fear of death. It made
one immense writhe, tore his wrists and his sleeves in a final convulsion,
all its belly flashed white in a whirlwind of paws, and then he had slung
it round and had it under his arm, fast. It cowered and skulked. His face
was gleaming with a smile. (241; emphasis added)

Here we have strike two: Bismarck makes his mark on another human, and the
term ‘writhe’ suggests a kind of embodied cursive or script that the rabbit per-
formatively scrolls into the human’s flesh-canvas. Gerald comments to Gudrun,
‘You wouldn’t think there was all that force in a rabbit’ (241). This particu-
lar moment plainly has erotic connotations, as the subterranean and ‘obscene’
(242) connection between the two lovers is sealed or sanctioned by the rabbit’s
marks. But when Gudrun looks ‘unearthly’ and when the ‘scream of the rabbit,
after the violent tussle, seemed to have torn the veil of her consciousness’, we
can also read the violent tear as that of the work of writing.
There is something about the simultaneity and temporality of the rabbit’s
scoring that resonates with Roland Barthes’s discussion of the modern scriptor,
who is

born simultaneously with the text, is in no way equipped with a being pre-
ceding or exceeding the writing, is not the subject of the book as predicate;
there is no other time than that of the enunciation and every text is eter-
nally written here and now’ (Barthes 1968: 1324; emphasis in original)

The rabbit’s writhing immediacy, the flashing ‘white’ belly in a whirl of paws
that scratch and tear both flesh and cloth: these images evoke the simultaneity
of Barthes’s scriptor, as opposed to the pre-existing ‘author’ or ‘Author-God’
who holds a premeditated meaning in the mind (Barthes 1968: 1324).

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I want to continue with a sort of dogged use of Barthes, for a bit longer.
Barthes employs the image of tissue several times in his classic discussion of
authorship, saying the ‘text is a tissue of quotations’ (Barthes 1968: 1324), the
book itself only a ‘tissue of signs’ (Barthes 1968: 1325). The black and white
Bismarck literalises Barthes’s tissue of signs as he tears and marks the fleshy
tissue of other living beings. Provocatively, perhaps, I propose that the rabbit
Bismarck is also shown to undergo what Barthes calls the death of the author, the
title of his famous 1968 essay that elevates writing or language itself above the
prestige, interiority and ‘genius’ of the venerated Author. Once Gerald quells
the rabbit’s power, the chapter continues as such:

‘He shouldn’t be so silly, when he has to be taken out’ Winifred was

saying, putting out her hand and touching the rabbit tentatively, as it
skulked under his arm, motionless as if it were dead. ‘He’s not dead, is he
Gerald?’ she asked. ‘No, he ought to be,’ he said. ‘Yes, he ought!’ cried
the child with a sudden flash of amusement. (241)

Barthes suggests that ‘Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space

where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting
with the very identity of the body writing’ (Barthes 1968: 1322). And, more
famously:

As soon as a fact is narrated no longer with a view to acting directly on

reality but intransitively, that is to say, finally outside of any function
other than that of the very practice of the symbol itself, this disconnec-
tion occurs, the voice loses its origin, the author enters into his own
death, writing begins. (Barthes 1968: 1322)

Moreover, Foucault has famously elaborated upon Barthes’s ideas, noting

that:

Writing is now linked to sacrifice and to the sacrifice of life itself; it is a

voluntary obliteration of the self . . . Where [in the past] a work had the
duty of creating immortality, it now attains the right to kill, to become
the murderer of its author. (Foucault 1969: 1477)

There is something uncanny about the judge-like Bismarck, a rabbit, being

rendered as if dead just after his own moment of potent and profound scoring
and marking.
The powers of animal scoring and jabbing are further rehearsed by Lawrence
in the poetry of Birds, Beasts, and Flowers (1923). In particular, ‘Humming-Bird’
presents a fantasy of a primordial humming-bird

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in some other world

Primeval-dumb, far back
In that most awful stillness
that only gasped and hummed,
Humming-birds raced down the avenues. (Lawrence 1923c: 323, ll. 1–4)8

The use of the term ‘awful’ in this poem resonates with the most awful scratching
of Bismarck, and with Winnie’s repeated descriptions of that creature as awful.
The lines that immediately follow these opening descriptions are of interest
because they productively align with current vital materialisms, to some degree.9
That is, these lines challenge the traditional view of matter as inanimate:

Before anything had a soul,

While life was a heave of Matter, half inanimate,
This little bit chipped off in brilliance
And went whizzing through the slow, vast, succulent
Stems. (324, ll. 5–8)

The first line here (line six of the poem), with its use of ‘anything’ instead
of ‘anyone’, points to Lawrence’s entangled animism, his more-than-human
understanding of spirit and soul, which is evident in this often-cited excerpt
from his last book, a work of nonfiction called Apocalypse:

That I am part of the earth my feet know perfectly, and my blood is part
of the sea. My soul knows that I am part of the human race, my soul
is an organic part of the great human soul, as my spirit is part of my
nation. In my own very self, I am part of my family. There is nothing
of me that is alone and absolute except my mind, and we shall find that
the mind has no existence by itself, it is only the glitter of the sun on the
surface of the waters.
So that my individualism is really an illusion. I am part of the great
whole, and I can never escape . . . (Lawrence 1932: 149)

The poem continues to elucidate the hummingbird’s tracing/writing:

I believe there were no flowers, then,

In the world where the humming-bird flashed ahead of creation.
I believe he pierced the slow vegetable veins with his long beak.
(324, ll. 9–11)

This description calls to mind the Derridean framework referenced throughout

this discussion, in which an arche-materiality or technicity is understood to be
that which all living creatures are subjected to, a primary or primordial system

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of communication that is prosthetic in nature.10 Reading the beak as a form of

non-handed handiness, as an outward exteriorising implement or writing ‘tool’
that triggers the tracing and iterability at the heart of writing seems productive in
this case.11 Lawrence’s stark line ‘Probably he was a jabbing, terrifying monster’
(324, l. 14) further rehearses, in relation to the hummingbird, the awful carving,
tearing violences that he centres in Bismarck’s demonic, dragon-like scribing.
Ultimately, I am offering a kind of slant bioaesthetic interpretation of writ-
ing and authorship in Lawrence’s work, as the blossoming, embodied eroticism
of Gerald and Gudrun is scored and underscored by a sanctioning rabbit. The
highly self-reflexive framework of artistically rendering Looloo and Bismarck
in a sketching tutorial, with a child and a sculptor of animals, provides a potent
commentary on aesthetic animals who authorise, mark and write. Moreover,
the privileged textual example of the rabbit’s scoring and marking showcases
his making an impression deeply, in a bloody and demoniacal manner that
results in a death of sorts. We can see this scene – akin to the monstrous jab-
bing of the hummingbird – as Lawrence’s perhaps unwitting reflection on the
creatural excess, agony, self-obliteration and self-othering at the heart of all
writing, all writing by animals and human animals, too.

Works Cited
Barthes, Roland. 2010 [1968]. ‘The Death of the Author’. In The Norton Anthology of
Theory and Criticism. Second Edition. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch, William E. Cain, Laurie
A. Finke, Barbara E. Johnson and John McGowan, 1322–6. New York: Norton.
Bennett, Jane. 2010. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press.
Coole, Diana and Samantha Frost, eds. 2010. New Materialisms: Ontology Agency, and
Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizo-
phrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Driscoll, Kári and Eva Hoffman. 2018. What is Zoopoetics? Texts, Bodies, Entangle-
ment. New York: Palgrave MacMillan.
Foucault, Michel. 2010 [1969]. ‘What is an Author?’ In The Norton Anthology of Theory
and Criticism. Second Edition. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch, William E. Cain, Laurie A.
Finke, Barbara E. Johnson and John McGowan, 1475–90. New York: Norton.
Grosz, Elizabeth. 2008. Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth.
New York: Columbia University Press.
Lawrence, D. H. 1987 [1920]. Women in Love. In The Works of D. H. Lawrence. Ed. David
Farmer, John Worthen and Lindeth Vasey. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lawrence, D. H. 2004 [1923a]. Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious. In Psychoanalysis
and the Unconscious and Fantasia of the Unconscious. Ed. Bruce Steele. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Lawrence, D. H. 2004 [1923b]. Fantasia of the Unconscious. In Psychoanalysis and
the Unconscious and Fantasia of the Unconscious. Ed. Bruce Steele. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.

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Lawrence, D. H. 2013 [1923c]. ‘Hummingbird’. In The Poems. Vol. 1. The Works of

D. H. Lawrence. Ed. Christopher Pollnitz. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lawrence, D. H. 2013 [1923d]. ‘Snake’. In The Poems. Vol. 1. The Works of D. H.
Lawrence. Ed. Christopher Pollnitz. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lawrence, D. H. 2013 [1923e]. ‘Fish’. In The Poems. Vol. 1. The Works of D. H. Lawrence.
Ed. Christopher Pollnitz. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lawrence, D. H. 1980 [1932]. Apocalypse and the Writings on Revelation. Ed. Mara
Kalnins. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Morton, Timothy. (2010). ‘Guest Column: Queer Ecology’. PMLA 125.2: 273–82.
Rohman, Carrie. 2009. Stalking the Subject: Modernism and the Animal. New York:
Columbia.
Rohman, Carrie. 2014. ‘No Higher Life: Bio-aesthetics in J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace’.
Modern Fiction Studies 60.3: 562–78.
Rohman, Carrie. 2018. Choreographies of the Living: Bioaesthetics in Literature, Art,
and Performance. New York: Oxford University Press.
Ryan, Derek. 2015. ‘Following Snakes and Moths: Modernist Ethics and Posthumanism’.
Twentieth Century Literature 61.3 (September): 287–304.
Thacker, Eugene. 2010. After Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Van Asselt, Bess Collins. 2022. ‘Cutting as a Literacy Practice: Exploring the Fractured
Body, Desire, and Rage through Queer and Trans*+ Youth Embodiments’. Taboo:
The Journal of Culture and Education. 21.1: 74–98.
Wolfe, Cary. 2010. What is Posthumanism? Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Wolfe, Cary. 2013. Before the Law: Humans and Other Animals in a Biopolitical
Frame. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Notes
1. See Rohman, Choreographies of the Living: Bioaesthetics in Literature, Art, and
Performance (2018). I first used the term bioaesthetic in a 2014 publication to
signal a cross-species concept of the aesthetic impulse (Rohman 2014: 562–78).
My usage of this term counters trends in ‘neuroaesthetics’ that regard all artistic
capacities as exclusively human.
2. For important work on zoopoetic readings of literature, see Driscoll and Hoffmann
(2018).
3. See Rohman (2018: 57–62).
4. See Chapters 3 and 4 of Rohman (2009) for an extended discussion of Lawrence’s
species discourses. See also Derek Ryan (2015).
5. See Rohman (2009: 91–9).
6. See Cary Wolfe, who discusses the trans-species subjection to an ‘arche-materiality’
that is the basis for living beings to ‘engage in communication and social relations
at all’ (Wolfe 2013: 63), and his discussions of ‘the radically ahuman character of
what Heidegger called Dasein in relation to technicity and temporality . . . that in
no way can be rigorously reserved for the “human”’ (74).
7. I want to thank Peter Adkins for suggesting the question of legibility in relation to
this work.
8. See also my discussion of the ‘dumb’ in Lawrence’s poem ‘Tortoise Shout’, as this
concept relates to questions of creatural ‘intelligence’ (Rohman 2018: 44–5).

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 carrie rohman

9. For work in this subfield see, for instance, Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political
Ecology of Things (2010); Eugene Thacker, After Life (2010); Timothy Morton,
‘Guest Column: Queer Ecology’ (2010); and Diana Coole and Samantha Frost,
New Materialisms: Ontology Agency, and Politics (2010).
10. For a helpful discussion of these prosthetic qualities, see Wolfe (2013: 73–86).
11. I have made related claims about the beak and the signature in Merce Cunning-
ham’s animal drawings; see Rohman (2018: Ch. 5).

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 5

FOLLOWING THE BEAST FAMILIAR:

DJUNA BARNES’S FAMILY DRAMAS

Peter Adkins

The unsigned reader report for Djuna Barnes’s three-act play, Biography of
Julie van Bartmann, strikes a note of hesitant praise that would become all too
familiar to the author when dealing with publishers and editors in the coming
decades:

This play contains some of the most vigorous and pungent writing that
has come to my attention in some time. [. . .] I do not claim to be able
to state clearly the theme and the plot of this play. [. . .] The play would
be perplexing to an audience, but for the reader it has many stimulating
qualities in the midst of a little that is confusing. (Barnes 1924: n.p.)

An ‘eloquent and revealing commentary on the more passionate zone of life’

(Barnes 1924: n.p.), the play presents the narrative of a world-famous opera
singer, Julie van Bartmann, paying a visit to a small American farmstead run
by an eccentric and visionary farmer named Basil Born, along with his children
Gart, Gustava and Costa. Despite the mixture of admiration and ambivalence
in the reader’s report, the play was neither published nor performed in Barnes’s
lifetime. Her first novel, Ryder (1928), also set on a farm under the rule of an
unconventional patriarch, Wendell Ryder, recycled material from Biography of
Julie van Bartmann and garnered a similar mixed reception. When her editor at
Boni and Liveright, Donald S. Friede, read it, he complained that he ‘did not like
it half as much as [he had] expected to’, voicing his disapproval of its collage

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 peter adkins

of literary ‘effects’ and fearing that it might be ‘the type of book whose sale is
purely problematical’ (Friede 1927: n.p.). And when, in the 1950s, Barnes once
again mined material from her childhood to be reimagined within her drama
The Antiphon, T. S. Eliot continued the trend. On receiving a typescript of the
play in 1954, he explained that he was struggling to comprehend both its lan-
guage and its plot, and felt it to be extremely obscure.1 The initial blurb that
Eliot wrote for the play ahead of its publication by Faber and Faber in 1958
would reiterate the backhanded compliments of the unsigned reader report for
her earlier attempt at a three-act drama, describing it as ‘shocking’ but ‘tedious’
and warning potential readers that they ‘will not understand it’ (quoted in
Herring 1996: 276). The Antiphon, Eliot suggested, in a sentence that was
cut but which has unfortunately stuck, demonstrates the work of a writer for
whom ‘so much genius [has] been combined with so little talent’ (quoted in
Herring 1996: 276).2
This chapter argues that the responses elicited by these three texts, all of
which refashion events from Barnes’s unusual upbringing, point to a distinctly
beastly literary style. This is beastliness understood as a textual sensibility, in
which formal innovation and linguistic experimentation challenge received
ideas of animality, human identity and familial relations. As Margot Norris
observes in Beasts of the Modern Imagination, writers at the turn of the twentieth
century, influenced by evolutionary and psychoanalytic discoveries, became
interested in developing a form of literature in which they could write ‘with
their animality speaking’ (Norris 1985: 1). And as I have argued elsewhere,
Barnes developed a beastly idiom over the course of her writerly life, with her
repeated and multiple use of beastly tropes creating a rich textual aesthetic
in which beastliness becomes a way of challenging both anthropocentric and
androcentric configurations of the human (Adkins 2022: 89–117). Daniela
Caselli has also pointed to the way in which Barnes was preoccupied with a
literary history of beastly figures, from medieval bestiaries to John Donne and
W. B. Yeats (Caselli 2009: 179). Similarly, Bonnie Kime Scott, in a ground-
breaking work on Barnes and other female modernist writers, has argued
that it is precisely through her use of beastly and animal figures that Barnes
challenges binary oppositions between human and animal life (Scott 1995:
71–122). Barnes’s interest in the beastly foreshadows the rise of animal stud-
ies within literary criticism but also resists a straightforward endorsement of
trans-species harmony or a legible animal ethics that sometimes is found in
such work. Her beasts often carry a negative charge and, as Carrie Rohman
has argued, discard a humanist notion of the human for a mode of ‘subjectiv-
ity as nonidentity’ experienced as ‘anonymity, self-obliteration, movement and
change’ (Rohman 2009: 151; 158).3 Barnes’s beasts more often than not work
to undo structures and categories, posing problems and difficulties rather than
resolving them. Barnes’s beastliness is in this sense akin to what Caselli has

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 djuna barnes’s family dramas

described as Barnes’s ‘improper’ mode of modernism, a ‘poetics of impropriety,

which permeates all aspects of her work and her figure as a modernist author’
(Caselli 2009: 2).
This chapter examines the way in which a beastly form of writing is
central to Barnes’s two family dramas, Biography of Julie van Bartmann and
The Antiphon, arguing that these semi-autobiographical works are premised on
exploring the ‘beast familiar’ (Barnes 2000: 176). This turn of phrase, uttered
by Miranda in The Antiphon, points to the proximity between the human and
the beast as well as the importance of the animal to Barnes’s reimagining of
familial relations. It also, this chapter argues, speaks to the way in which to
read across the breadth of Barnes’s oeuvre is to encounter moments of beastly
familiarity, where repeated lines, scenes and characters present moments of
what Julia Taylor describes as self-referential, ‘affectively complex’ ‘linguistic
echoes from earlier works’ (Taylor 2012: 66). In the same way that scholars
now see the ceaseless processes of revision that characterise Barnes’s late poetry
as integral to an open-ended poetics (Herring 2015), this chapter suggests that
the repeated fictionalised retelling of events from her childhood present a simi-
lar aesthetic, in which revision and composition are similarly fundamental to a
mode of beastly writing.

‘The Beast Salutes You!’: Biography of Julie van Bartmann

Biography of Julie van Bartmann was written by Barnes in late 1923 and early
1924, begun while she was living in Paris and finished in Cagnes-sur-Mer on the
French Riviera. Until recently, those who wanted to read the play had to travel
to Barnes’s archive at the University of Maryland, which houses the typescript.4
One of Barnes’s earliest attempts to write longform narrative, it establishes a
mise-en-scène that would recur again and again in her later works.5 Basil Born,
visionary yet myopic smallholder, lives with his three children, Gart, Gustava
and Costa, enjoying a leisurely life on his farm in rural north-eastern America,
where he can practise his personal philosophy of free love while those around
him suffer its consequences. The arrival of opera singer Julie van Bartmann,
famous for both her talent and her reputed lasciviousness, and invited by Basil
to the farm with the hope that she might perform a private concert for him,
is the catalyst for the Born children to see through their father’s self-serving
ideology. The play ends with Gart shooting his father with a pistol off-stage.
Yet, Basil, as his daughter Gustava fears, ‘cannot die’ and staggers back on to
the stage for the final extended speech of the drama, exclaiming to the depart-
ing Bartmann that he ‘would have honoured you like a man’ but now can only
acknowledge her as an injured ‘beast’ (Barnes 2020: 89, 95).
In many respects, the play looks ahead to the publication of Barnes’s first
novel, Ryder, with Wendell Ryder being a clear refashioning of Basil Born, and
there are a number of textual parallels between the two narratives. The scene

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 peter adkins

in Ryder where the local education authorities arrive to demand that the Ryder
children attend school first occurs as a speech in the play (2020: 23–6), while
just as the polygamous Ryder sets his wives to work in the pigeon loft, the wid-
owed Basil obliges Gustava to undertake the same duties. Indeed, Basil uses the
exact same phrase in relation to Gustava that Barnes will have Wendell make
of his daughter, Julie Ryder, describing how she will be like ‘her mother’ in that
she will ‘eat, function, die, looking neither backward nor forward’ (2020: 31).6
Basil, like Wendell Ryder, locates his daughter within a personal philosophy in
which sexual freedom is equated with fecundity and procreation. A distorted
amalgamation of transcendentalism and Darwinian evolution, it places human
life within a continuum of animal sexuality, in which, rather than overturning
patriarchal power, loosened sexual mores enable the proliferation and deepen-
ing of patrilineal genealogies. Importantly, in these shared aspects, Julie van
Bartmann does not just look ahead to Barnes’s later works, but back to her
childhood experiences of family life as dictated by the similar philosophies and
polygamy of her father, Wald Barnes. Barnes’s childhood in rural New York
was part-Thoreauvian exercise in self-reliance and part-experiment in a form of
socially progressive free living. Barnes’s career as a writer was launched under
what her biographer Phillip Herring describes as the ‘emotional duress’ (1996:
41) of having to leave the farm abruptly for New York City when Wald Barnes
was threatened with prosecution for bigamy and chose to abandon Barnes’s
mother.7 Julie van Bartmann, then, stands as an important early example of
what Taylor calls a ‘non-dichotomous relationship’ between ‘auto/biography
and fiction’ in Barnes’s writing, where, rather than narrative standing in for
autobiography, the text becomes a space for creative retelling and interrogation
of personal history (Taylor 2012: 92).
As in many of her subsequent works, Julie van Bartmann establishes the
linguistic and semantic multivalence of the term beast. Basil Born, like Wendell
in Ryder and Titus in The Antiphon, goes by the name of ‘the beast’ (2020:
22). A red-haired, short-bodied man, he is associated with an animal vitality
and aspires to a masculinity associated with force, strength and butchery. In the
opening scene, Basil introduces himself to the newly arrived Julie by describing
how he ‘kill[s] his own beef’ before pickling and smoking it (2020: 29).8 Scorn-
ful of the mannered social conventions of modern life, with ‘people in high
hats bowing to each other [and] forgetting they have functions’ (2020: 86),
Basil believes the farmstead presents an environment that he can design accord-
ing to his principles of animal husbandry, both human and nonhuman, where
‘freedom exists in keeping the wood cut, the fire lit [and] the animals produc-
tive’ (2020: 32). His beastliness, importantly, is not a disavowal of culture, but
rather an attempt to marry the natural with the cultural, especially his love of
music and the arts. Again, like Wendell, Basil is a figure of vital animality but
also artistic sensitivity. The presentation of Basil’s two sons, Gart and Costa,

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 djuna barnes’s family dramas

his beastly progeny, are figurative of an impossibility to reconcile these two

aspects of his identity. Gart, a talented pianist, is presented as a figure of cul-
tural sensitivity who shrinks from the fear that he has ‘become abject’ under his
father’s education of ‘hid[ing] nothing’ (2020: 58). Costa, on the other hand, is
presented as barely human, described by Julie as ‘a brute, a beast, a beast [who]
understands without thought, all the ageless sorrows of simple functions, life,
death’ (2020: 51) and later as a ‘boy with a bull neck and a passion for rape’
(2020: 72). These competing aspects of Basil, as symbolised in the schematic
presentation of the two sons, represent the irreconcilable contradictions inher-
ent in the concept of beastliness itself. Indeed, this is made explicitly clear in
the opening moments of the drama where Gart, playing the piano, engages in
a playful tête-à-tête with his brother about the art of courtship versus a primi-
tive desire to reproduce, establishing the structural opposition that will motor
the play’s narrative. As Jacques Derrida observes, the ‘beast is not exactly the
animal’, since it is replete with its own connotations, associations and linguistic
history (Derrida 2009: 1). An important part of the semantics of beastliness,
Derrida points out, is an internal contradiction around who or what can be
properly described as beastly. If la bête (the beast) generally designates nonhu-
man animals, it is notable that the near-sounding and etymologically linked
term for stupidity, bêtise, cannot apply to them since it implies a transgression
and so requires ‘regime of propriety’ that is, according to a binary understand-
ing of human–animal relations, only found ‘in the order of the human’. As
such, in French to behave in a beastly (bête) way ‘no longer refers at all to the
essence of the beast’ (2009: 138–9). One of the implications of this contradic-
tion is that the more one tries to embrace one’s animality, the greater the risk
of entrenching one’s distance from nonhuman animal life since it will always
implicitly uphold the idea of the human from which one is looking to depart.
Barnes appears to intuit not only this contradiction in Julie van Bartmann, but
also the tragic vicissitudes and instabilities it produces, especially in the kind of
pseudo-Darwinian transcendentalist philosophies that were circulating in the
late nineteenth century of her childhood. It is precisely the hypocrisy of Basil’s
beastly philosophy that produces the drama’s violent denouement, with Gart’s
rejection of the abject ‘devilry’ of his father’s teaching, in which women are
likened to ‘beasts in the field’, providing the motive for his attempted murder
of Basil (2020: 85–6).
Importantly, Basil’s animalisation of the women in his life points to a fur-
ther instability inherent to a notion of beastliness, this time along the fault
lines of gender. Gustava is associated with an animalised sexuality throughout
the play, described by Basil as ‘over fond of the sight of the blood [. . .] simple
and great, like a Greek horror’ with ‘her large pale head’ and ‘wide-set, uncal-
culating eyes’ (2020: 29). Later, in Act II, Basil will draw upon the analogy of
‘prize’ livestock ‘acquisition’ when discussing whether Julie is ‘a good woman’

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with Gart (2020: 60–2). Both moments establish a theme that is returned
to in Ryder and, most explicitly, in one of the early drafts of The Antiphon,
where Miranda is described as having been made ‘made mutton at sixteen’
and offered in ‘exchange [. . .] for a goat / With that old farm-hand, Jacobsen’
(quoted in Taylor 2012: 43). A further example of what Scott has described as
‘a repeated Barnes plot’ of ‘girls hunted in the field and brought down to earth,
to childbed and even death’ (1995: 73), the play also offers an insinuation of
the most beastly form of sexuality: incest.9 The opening dialogue on the merits
of courtship versus acting on sexual desire, for instance, sees the brothers draw
on their sister’s virginity for their example of how one should treat female sexu-
ality, while the conversation between Basil and Gart about Julie, in Act II, takes
place with father and son having got into bed together at daybreak. Unlike The
Antiphon, where we find a greater degree of coherence in terms of how power
and agency are mapped on to gender and sexuality, Julie van Bartmann locates
all of its characters within an economy of animalised sexuality that is change-
able from one moment to the next. Basil wants to enjoy the fruits of an animal
sexuality, while also associating the body and its functions with an abject femi-
ninity that he wishes to distance himself from, grasping at distinctions such as
while woman is ‘monstrous, beautiful, man is active’ (2020: 32).
Julie van Bartmann is presented, at least initially, as a figure in the tradition of
the femme fatale. She is a ‘tall handsome woman of thirty-eight dressed in a long
trailing gown of saffron, over which is a chinchilla wrap reaching to her feet’, at
whose ‘knee boys have trembled, and girls become hysterical’ (2020: 25; 56).10
Her arrival on the farm is both desired by Basil and a challenge to his authority.
A good shot, she goes hunting with him, appropriating both the phallic authority
and literal power of the gun. Later, even more explicitly, during a discussion of
his shortcomings as a father, Basil will complain that he doesn’t like the ‘shape of
[her] rapier’ (2020: 76). Basil is both repulsed by and drawn to this aspect of Julie,
confiding to Gart that he finds her all the more ‘erotic’ and ‘beautiful’ because she
is ‘damaged’ (2020: 60). Julie as a femme fatale occupies a kind of beastly sexual-
ity that Basil lusts for but cannot permit, accusing her of ‘com[ing] to destroy’ but
warning her that ‘we shall outlast you’ (2020: 31), an assertion not only of Basil
as manager of his own farmstead, but of the endurance of his name promised by
patrilineal genealogy (the latter of which will become a full-blown obsession in
the mind of Wendell Ryder). The play’s ending both confirms and complicates
Basil’s confidence in the family name. Staggering on stage, having been shot, he
moves to kiss the hand of Julie but, wounded, ‘slips [. . .] and falling on all fours,
head lowered, is silent for a long moment’ before acquiescing to apparent defeat
in his assertion that ‘The Beast salutes you!’ (2020: 95). A tableau that looks
ahead to the endings of Ryder and Nightwood (1936), which both conclude with
protagonists descending to an apparently primitive animality, Basil is reduced
to the abject beastliness that he has, until this point, only selectively embraced.

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 djuna barnes’s family dramas

Basil’s philosophy of animal vitality, free love and procreation is beastly exactly
because it relies on abjecting that which it cannot assimilate within the anthropo-
centric patrilineal genealogy of which it refuses to let go. The play’s tragedy, thus,
comes not from Gart’s attempted assassination of his father, but from the fact
that, despite the intervention of Julie, who is the catalyst for the children to rise up
against their father, the family name persists (this will also become a prominent
theme in Ryder, articulated even in its title). Gustava, speaking ‘quietly, almost
dully’ to Julie after her father’s animal descent, tells her: ‘Go, go, it is all over. You
see what he has managed – accomplished. Go, go, take everything and go. You see
yourself – we are reunited – we need nothing – it is all finished – settled –’ (2020:
95). As Gustava’s sentiment suggests, Basil’s descent, ambiguous as it is, holds
the potential to signify not defeat but rather a reconciliation of animality with
abjection in a fashion that he could not previously achieve. Taking on the name
of ‘The Beast’, Julie’s arrival has not displaced Basil’s authority but transformed
and deepened it.

‘A Beastly Brawl in Nature’: The Antiphon

Barnes’s final drama, The Antiphon, written three decades after Biography of
Julie van Bartmann, further develops the beastly idiom we find in her earlier
three-act play, while also departing from it in significant respects.11 The action
has moved from rural New York in the early twentieth century to the ruins of
Burley Hall in Rutland, England, during ‘the war of 1939’ (2000: 6), where,
on the pretext of a family reunion, the Burley Hobbs family have gathered.
Unlike in Julie van Bartmann or Ryder, however, the patriarch of the family,
Titus Hobbs, cut from the same cloth as Basil and Wendell, is present only in his
absence.12 And while the legacy of Titus’s actions and ideas continues to propel
the events of the narrative, his widow, Augusta, and daughter, Miranda, are
afforded more prominent voices in the story being told than the female figures of
Barnes’s earlier family narratives.13 The Antiphon also differs from Barnes’s ear-
lier play in form. A drama written in blank verse, with characters whose names
carry clear Shakespearean allusions, and utilising an archaic form of English
that also looks back to early modern dramatists, the play eschews the modernist
take on melodrama of Julie van Bartmann for what Meryl Altman describes as
a narrative of ‘symbolic intensity’ (1991: 272), in which sense is often obscure
and requires the active attention and participation of the audience or reader.
One of the central symbols in this family drama is a ‘beast-box’ (2000:
144), a doll’s house first mentioned in Act I and brought on stage at the climax
of Act II. Presenting the family history in miniature, Augusta, Titus’s widow,
discovers the house to contain a doll resembling him, seven of his mistresses
and the stick he used to beat her. The only thing missing is the ‘stallion yard’,
or bull’s penis, of which he was so proud that ‘He asked to be but laid aside it
in the grave’ (2000: 145), aligning Titus with an animalised phallic symbolism

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much like his literary predecessors. Pressing her eye against the miniaturised
‘cock-loft’, however, Augusta ‘recoil[s]’ in horror at an image of the ‘profaned
monstrance’ of a reconstruction of the rape of Miranda, her daughter, overseen
by Titus (2000: 148–50). Miranda’s brother Jeremy, wearing the disguise of a
coachman and going by the name of Jack Blow, has orchestrated this moment,
explaining that the scene in miniature shows her daughter ‘not yet seventeen /
Thrown to a travelling Cockney thrice her age’ (2000: 144). Miranda, he con-
tinues, acted ‘like the ewe’ in not fighting but offering ‘up her silly throat for
slashing’ and making ‘that doll’s abattoir a babe’s bordel’ (2000: 151). The
beast-box, elsewhere referred to as ‘Hobb’s Ark’ (2000: 144), is beastly not
only because of what it contains but also because it is, in its stature, a synec-
doche for the drama itself. This family drama in miniature, which compels the
characters to peer in voyeuristically through the invisible fourth wall, becomes
a symbol of the beastly acts of witness and complicitly inherent to drama itself
and which, as Alex Goody has argued, Barnes is self-reflexively exploring in the
play (Goody 2014: 359).
The doll’s house is but one of several beastly symbols in the drama that oper-
ate at a linguistic, thematic and formal level, which, combined, allow Barnes
not only to tell the tragedy of the Burley Hobbs family, but to examine what it
means to be a writer with a beastly preoccupation with telling this same family
drama over and over. Importantly, these beastly tropes do not combine to make
a harmonious or stable system of signification, but, like the set of Burley Hall,
remain a ‘horrid wrack’ of fragments that threaten to topple down upon one
another at any given moment (2000: 54). Burley Hall, a location that resembles
a ‘beastly brawl in nature’ (2000: 30), where ‘standing before a paneless Gothic
window [is] a dressmaker’s dummy, in regimentals, surrounded by music stands,
horns, fiddles, guncases, bandboxes, masks, toys and broken statues, man and
beast’ (2000: 7), like the doll’s house, is a space that invites reflection on the
past and the remnants of it which are carried into the present. It is no longer
the actions of the patriarch in themselves that are the focus of the narrative,
but rather the trauma he has inflicted, and through which his surviving family
members are working. As in Julie van Bartmann and Ryder, a key aspect of
this trauma is a distorted Darwinism that animalises human sexuality. Augusta
draws on an image of animalistic engorgement when describing how at Titus’s
‘rough unbridled head [she] dwined [sic] / At his fast leisure’, later adding that
Titus believed ‘he was the stud to breed a kingdom’ (2000: 108). The correla-
tive to this is – as Dudley, her son, brutally jokes – that when, in Titus’s eyes,
she resembled an ‘Old barren ox’, no longer fit to produce young, and therefore
milk, she was cut loose and abandoned (2000: 97). A similar rhetoric of live-
stock and slaughter is used to frame Miranda’s upbringing, in which she was the
‘loved’ ‘lamb’ until ‘she turned to mutton’ (2000: 98), a reference to her rape,
which, her mother and brothers imply, soured her unfairly against them.

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As I briefly noted in the previous section, Barnes revised the description

of Miranda’s assault several times, with the earlier, more explicit drafts more
clearly framing her attack through the language of animal slaughter. In one ver-
sion, Titus is described having

Hauled her in a hay-hook to the barn

Left her dangling, while in the field below
He offered to give her, to the farm-hand, for a goat, —
You know, I’ve seen heifers dangling from an halter
Just like that, while he charged the rape blade in. (Quoted in Curry
1991: 291)

This excised speech is spoken by Dudley, who, along with his brother Elisha,
taunt and torment their mother and sister over the course of the play. If Costa
and Gart in Julie van Bartmann are presented schematically, each representing
one aspect of their father’s split personality, standing for the bestial and the
sublimated respectively, Dudley and Elisha are more complex in The Antiphon,
although no less figurative. Central to their complexity is the degree to which,
like Titus, they occupy an uneasy relation between an anthropocentric patriar-
chal authority and a wish to acknowledge their animal desires. While outwardly
they appear more conventional their than father, Dudley is an ‘executive, heavily
set’, who arrives on stage ‘chewing a cigar’, while Elisha is ‘younger and on the
smarter side’ (2000: 29), like Miranda and Augusta, they carry the trauma of
their childhood with them. Dudley, in one of his first lines of dialogue, states: ‘if
I saw myself, backward, in the mirror, / I am not so sure what sort of beast I’d
see’ (2000: 32). Here, as in Julie van Bartmann, there is an uneasy acknowledge-
ment of a family resemblance to their father and, if not an ambivalent desire
to continue his legacy, then, at the least, a sense that they cannot entirely free
themselves of it.
As such when, in one of the play’s central moments of drama, the brothers emu-
late their father in a sexualised attack on their mother and sister, it is significant that
they don animal masks, with Dudley taking on the appearance of a pig and Elisha
an ass. Aligning themselves with animals that have specific cultural connotations
of beastliness, insofar as the former is associated with excess and the latter with
stupidity, it stands as an act of dissimulation that sanctions their actions and insists
on a separation between this beastly act and their true selves.14 With Elisha forcing
Miranda on to her ‘four feet’ with her ‘rump’ in the air – declared by Dudley to
be her ‘best position’ – while Dudley ‘makes darting motions’ at Augusta with a
whip (recalling the ‘rape blade’ used against Miranda in the excised version of her
assault) (1998: 176), the masked brothers not only re-enact scenes likely witnessed
in childhood but punish the childless Miranda for transgressing their father’s
philosophy of animal procreation.15 Immediately prior to the attack, Dudley has

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 peter adkins

decried the ‘depopulation in [Miranda’s] yaw’ (2000: 135), while moments later,
Elisha, holding Miranda down, angrily denounces her ‘starving puss’ (2000: 140),
suggesting not only an unhealed, weeping wound but a crude framing of both her
perceived promiscuity and her childlessness. Calling her a ‘Manless, childless, safe-
less document’, Elisha taunts his sister that despite her ‘rank continence to stay /
The generations’, he intends to ‘staff’ her (2000: 141).
It is significant that Barnes suggests the failure of the animal masks to pro-
vide the brothers with a sense of absolution for their actions or to safely distance
their beastly aspects from their human identities. Despite the two men being
masked, the stage directions call for it to be clear that Elisha is ‘weeping as he
mauls [Miranda]’ (2000: 141). As Julie Taylor has argued, this stage direction
points to the ‘complexity of emotions’ in the scene, insisting that the roles of
victim and perpetrator are not distinct or oppositional since it implies that
the brothers are also ‘victims of Titus’s abuse’ (Taylor 2012: 64). Although
it is clear where the audience’s sympathy should lie in what is the play’s most
disturbing scene, it is also a moment when we are confronted with the destruc-
tive inheritance of their father’s beastly philosophy for his sons, as well as his
daughter and wife. The beastly currency of these particular animal masks are
key here, insofar as they offer a visual metaphor for what was Titus’s (and
Basil’s and Wendell’s) desire to be simultaneously at one with an animal iden-
tity and to enjoy the autonomy of choosing when to remove this identity in
favour of the sovereignty of a male, human authority. Here Barnes’s autho-
rial decisions are again ahead of contemporary work on beastliness within the
field of animal studies. Derrida singles out Titus Hobbs’s namesake, Thomas
Hobbes, as one of the architects of modernity’s configuration of sovereignty in
which the sovereign asserts his power by means of a claim to natural author-
ity, placing himself above the law: a move which insists on his male, human
priority but also creates a ‘troubling resemblance’ between sovereign and beast
(Derrida 2009: 17). Both are ‘outside the law’ by way of a claim to their place
within the order of divine creation, which means they ‘strangely resemble each
other while seeming to be situated at the antipodes’ (2009: 17). As Jacques de
Ville notes, Derrida here points to the way in which figures such as Hobbes, in
their construction of modern philosophy, chased ‘after animals to make them
flee, to forget them, to repress them, but at the same time also to capture and
domesticate them’ (de Ville 2012: 359). While Basil, Wendell and Titus all
take the diametrically opposite tack, chasing after the beast so as to better
shore up their sense of patriarchal sovereignty, Barnes nonetheless foreshadows
Derrida’s ‘attempt to establish the “law” of this contradiction’ (de Ville 2012:
359) at the heart of a certain type of beastly masculinity.
This contradiction, or dividedness, is captured tropologically in one of
The Antiphon’s central visual set pieces: the two halves of a Gryphon carousel
car that are positioned at ‘either end’ of ‘a long table’ on stage (2000: 7). This

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fairground representation of a mythical half-eagle, half-lion stands as a split

figure that literally frames the drama.16 One the one hand, it serves as a visual
metaphor for the inability of Titus, or his progeny, to reconcile the contradic-
tions inherent in adopting a beastly identity and their impossible desire for
an idea of human animality based on sovereignty (Titus is said to have been
responsible for its having been ‘sawed’ in half [2000: 108]). On the other hand,
it gestures towards the ever-fragmenting, unstable beastly idioms that Barnes
herself was aware had become more and more fractured over the course of her
writing. The gryphon also takes on an important dramatic function, becoming
imbued with a beastly authority as the play progresses. Augusta, ‘inspecting the
gryphon’, declares it ‘a solid beast, an excellent stage, fit for a play’ (2000: 158),
as if its imposing presence is that which both sanctions and delimits the family
drama which is unfolding. Similarly, Jack Blow, the clandestine brother and
agent of the play’s events, early on in the narrative stands ‘before the winged
half of the gryphon’ and soliloquises on having once

seen a judge
Sitting in the credit of his chair,
So abandon justice that his ears
Stood in abdication, on his head. (2000: 23)

These moments are two of several instances when Barnes encourages her
audience to see the gryphon as standing in judgement over the play’s events,
foreshadowing the way in which, in the final moments, it will dispense a
beastly form of justice. The beast becomes the lens through which the familial
drama is resolved, offering a judicial alternative to the legal system (derived
from patrilineal conventions of property that Titus and his textual predeces-
sors are so invested in), able to pass judgement in a way that the law cannot
and without the pretence of a fair ruling.
The second act concludes with the goodly uncle, Jonathan Burley, Augusta’s
brother, requesting that Miranda push the two halves of the gryphon together
and ‘help [him] make of this divided beast / An undivided bed’ (2000: 155).
This well-intentioned attempt to repair the unheimlich ‘rip in nature’ (2000:
8) within which the play is suspended, as well as the divided family, sets the
course for the play’s tragic ending. Act III opens with the direction that the
stage now shows that the ‘gryphon has been brought together’, with Miranda
sleeping within it (2000: 156). A unified figure at last, when Augusta arrives
on stage and climbs into the carousel with her daughter, the play appears
to tease divisions reconciled and harmony over fragmentation. It is a peace
that does not last, however, with Miranda unwilling to provide the absolu-
tion Augusta so desires, while the latter remains in denial of her complicity in
Miranda’s childhood abuse and subsequent misery. In her ‘Cautionary Note’

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 peter adkins

prefacing the drama, Barnes outlines how, for Miranda and Augusta, ‘[t]heir
familiarity is their estrangement’ (1998: 79), a sentiment that is declared aloud
when Miranda remarks to her mother that ‘It has been remarked from advent
to the terror / Woman is most beast familiar’ (2000: 176). Here familiarity
breeds beastliness in the sense of estrangement and horror, adding to the sense
of fatalism and inevitability produced in the play’s linguistic circularity and
refrains, as well as in its apocalyptic setting. In the play’s climactic moments,
the women struggle with each other on the stairs leading to an upper floor,
until Augusta brings a large bell down on Miranda and ‘[b]oth fall across the
gryphon, pulling down the curtains, gilt crown and all’ (2000: 201). It is a
bleak final image of a unified beastly trope: this ‘solid’ beastly figure watches
with a degree of judicial authority as Dudley and Elisha escape unscathed and
then entombs the female members of the family. With the play encouraging its
audience to see this final act of violence against women as having been orches-
trated by Jack Blow, the figure most frequently aligned with the gryphon in the
first act, the beastly tomb provides the visual accompaniment to his departing
speech. Returning to the image of the ‘beast-box’, this time framed as ‘a doll’s
hutch’, Blow’s final lines declare it to be the ‘hour of the uncreate’, in which
‘villains’ are caught, before he exits the stage with what, in the stage direc-
tions, is described as an apparent ‘indifference’ (2000: 202–3).
The play’s conclusion, then, is beastly not just in its tropes but also in its
form of justice that cannot be mapped on to an idea of just deserts. The doubled,
contradictory idiom of the beast insists on both closure and open-endedness,
making for a dramatic structure that T. S. Eliot saw as likely to confuse, and
which critics have seen as enacting an aesthetics of improperness or ambiva-
lence. Critical appraisals of the play often look to theorise its titular emphasis
on antiphony (understood as a musical response made by a voice or choir to
another) to provide some form of palatable exegesis. Taylor, for instance, sees
antiphony as signalling the way in which trauma requires witness and response
(2012: 38–40), while Goody has argued that the play’s intended antiphony
comes from the audience, who have been ‘confronted with the cruelty of their
spectatorship [. . .] [as] wolfish pursuers whose insatiable desire for a salacious
or shocking entertainment both produces and is produced by an exploitative
culture of the spectacle’ (2014: 358). While these readings offer convincing
theories for antiphonic structures in the play, I want to conclude by suggesting
one further antiphony akin to what Barnes, in a poetic fragment from her later
years, described as ‘a beast / lowing in the isle of [its] dimension’ (Barnes n.d.:
n.p.). This is the beastly roar that, although unheard, reverberates through the
play, the ‘gross quiet’ (2000: 8) that signifies the absent presence of Titus, the
unspoken trauma of his surviving family and the wordless gryphon passing its
terrible judgement. It is also a roar that provides an antiphonic response to
Barnes’s beastly oeuvre, seeming to promise resolution to this on-going retelling

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 djuna barnes’s family dramas

of a family drama told through the prism of beastly tropes and narratives, but
also keeping everything in suspension, necessarily unresolved and open to fur-
ther reiteration. Notable as Barnes’s final attempt to produce a narrative telling
this autobiographical story, it is a beastly antiphon to all that has gone before
and will come afterwards. Basil Born, Wendell Ryder and Titus Hobbs stand as
figures unable to live up to their aspirations of a transcendent animality, hob-
bled by the contradiction inherent to such a configuration. Barnes’s own writ-
ing, instead, embraces the negations, instabilities and paradoxes that come with
exploring beastly territories. Her family dramas serve as clear examples of an
approach to thinking about animals and animality that resists resolving formal,
thematic or tropological components into harmony. She leaves them instead in
a state of productive, generative overdetermination and fragmentation, in which
an attempt to narrate always seems to call for a further beastly response.

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Herring, Phillip. 1996. Djuna: The Life and Works of Djuna Barnes. New York and
London: Penguin.
Herring, Scott. 2015. ‘Djuna Barnes and the Geriatric Avant-Garde’. PMLA 130.1: 69–91.
Kalaidjian, Andrew. 2016. ‘The Black Sheep: Djuna Barnes’s Dark Pastoral’. In Creatural
Fictions: Human-Animal Relationships in Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century
Literature. Ed. David Herman, 65–87. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Norris, Margot. 1985. Beasts of the Modern Imagination: Darwin, Nietzsche, Kafka,
Ernst and Lawrence. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Potter, Rachel. 2019. ‘Nightwood’s Humans’. In Shattered Objects: Djuna Barnes’s
Modernism. Ed. Elizabeth Pender and Cathryn Setz, 61–74. University Park, PA:
Penn State University Press.
Rohman, Carrie. 2009. Stalking the Subject: Modernism and the Animal. New York:
Columbia University Press.
Scott, Bonnie Kime. 1995. Refiguring Modernism Volume 2: Postmodern Feminist
Readings of Woolf, West and Barnes. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Taylor, Julie. 2011. ‘Revising The Antiphon, Restaging Trauma; or, Where Sexual Poli-
tics Meet Textual History’. Modernism/modernity 18.1: 125–47.
Taylor, Julie. 2012. Djuna Barnes and Affective Modernism. Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press.

Notes
1. See the letter from Eliot on 24 August 1954, stored in Barnes’s archive at the Uni-
versity of Maryland.
2. Barnes’s correspondence with Eliot reveals the degree to which the proposed blurb
was deeply wounding, with her response describing how she could not ‘recall seeing
a “blurb” (which I had always thought a means of promoting a book) so tailored
to a jacket that so resembles a shroud; and with such fine cruel work of approval
and displeasure’ (Barnes 1957: n.p.). Eliot’s response was defensive, stating that it
had been received well by the Faber and Faber board but that he would write some-
thing more conventional and shorter in order to please her, sending an abbreviated,
austere version of the blurb in the summer of 1957. See correspondence from Eliot
to Barnes on 7 February 1957 and 4 June 1957.
3. The rise of modernist animal studies has seen critics re-evaluate Barnes’s oeuvre
and its implication for our understanding of both modernist studies and literary
animal studies. Of particular note is Andrew Kalaidjian’s analysis of Barnes’s ‘dark

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 djuna barnes’s family dramas

pastoral’ (Kalaidjian 2016), Robert Azzarello’s argument for the inherent queerness
of Barnes’s interest in human animality (Azzarello 2012), Rachel Potter’s account
of beastliness within social constructions of human identity in Nightwood (Potter
2019) and Alex Goody’s discussion of how fashion and clothing mark an uncertain
border between the human and the animal in Barnes (Goody 2021).
4. The typescript for the play is in the Djuna Barnes Papers at the University of
Maryland. Although the typescript is dated ‘November 1923–April 1924’ on the
final sheet, it is not clear when it was typed and corrected, as Barnes retyped many
of her earlier works in the later decades of her life. There are a number of minor
corrections to the play in green ink in Barnes’s hand, similar to those she made
from the 1950s onward, while the last page features extensive corrections to Julie’s
final speech in black ink that appears to have been written earlier. Green Integer
published the play for the first time in 2020.
5. Barnes had previously written a number of one-act plays which, as Goody writes,
‘challenged conventional sexuality and morality and refused the Freudian family
romance’ (Goody 2014: 340). The only longer drama Barnes had written prior to
Julie van Bartmann was the unpublished and undated Ann Portuguise, which Phillip
Herring suggests was written around 1920 (Herring 1996: 270).
6. As I have argued elsewhere, this phrase also foreshadows Matthew O’Connor’s
animalised descriptions of Robin in Nightwood (Adkins 2022: 130).
7. As Herring notes, Barnes continued to write to her father and paternal grandmother,
Zadel, for many years after leaving, corresponding ‘about the farm animals and dogs’
but carrying a ‘deep sense of grievance’ that her career as a writer had begun out of
the economic necessity to provide for her mother and siblings (Herring 1996: 41).
8. In this aspect, Basil differs from the lapsed vegetarian Wendell Ryder, who cannot
stand the sight of blood and who leaves the messier aspects of livestock raising to
his wives and children. For another Barnes narrative which explores what Carol
Adams has called the ‘association between meat eating and virile maleness’ (2010:
25) see her 1917 story, ‘The Rabbit’.
9. Claude Lévi-Strauss famously asserted that the ‘incest taboo’ was one of the uni-
versal features of all human cultures, setting the human apart from other animals.
Much speculation has been made about sexual abuse and incest in Barnes’s own
childhood (see Herring 1996: 55–8; Taylor 2012: 7).
10. In this same respect, Julie does not occupy the role of an empowering surrogate
mother for Gustava. When, at the end of Act I, Gustava goes to Julie’s room and
climbs into bed with her, she discovers during their intimate conversation together
that Julie is not the great all-consuming figure of female agency that she has long
imagined the famous opera singer to be.
11. Barnes started writing The Antiphon in earnest in 1950, producing a first draft in
1954 that was subsequently revised multiple times, with editorial input from Eliot
and Edwin Muir. For the compositional history of the play see Curry (1991) and
Taylor (2011).
12. Like Basil and Wendell, Titus ran ‘a farm he never farmed’ (2000: 72).
13. Indeed, the character that Miranda most resembles in Barnes’s previous work is
Robin from Nightwood, since she is aligned several times with canine imagery;
she is described, for instance, by Augusta as ‘the terrier [who] runs back without

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 peter adkins

the bone’ (2000: 187). Miranda’s sustained election of silence in Act II also echoes
Robin’s silence through Nightwood.
14. As Goody has shown, earlier drafts of the play find Barnes experimenting with
different animal masks, the brothers taking on the appearance of a wolf and a kite,
and demonstrating that the degree to which the particular symbolism the masks
would elicit was highly considered and influenced by her reading in early modern
literature (Goody 2014: 352–3).
15. The dialogue describing Miranda’s ‘rump’ and ‘best position’ were added to the
revised version of the play that Barnes produced for her 1962 Selected Works.
16. Bonnie Kime Scott interestingly notes that Barnes had a similar fairground gryphon
in her Paris flat in the 1920s. She reads the gryphon differently to me, suggesting it
should be understood as a figure of familial unity (Scott 1995: 120–1). Caselli has
suggested, on the other hand, that Barnes was drawing on the moment in Dante’s
Purgatorio when the gryphon appears to take Beatrice to heaven (Caselli 2019: 157).

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 6

THE TAXIDERMIC IMAGINARY IN

MODERNIST LITERATURE

Paul Fagan

This chapter foregrounds taxidermy’s function in the development of the modern-

ist human–nonhuman imaginary through a new materialist theoretical lens. In it, I
map the shifting poetics, politics and problematic ethics of taxidermy in modernist
literary expression from the 1860s to the 1950s. This expanded historical scope,
beyond the standard limits of the modernist period, allows me to trace the relation
between four significant discursive shifts concerning the literary representation of
taxidermied bodies: first, the ‘enchantment with the authenticity of actual animal
bodies’ (Bezan and McHugh 2019: 133–4) that the taxidermied animal-as-object
introduces to museum dioramas and commodity objects in the nineteenth century;
second, the popularity of Victorian anthropomorphic taxidermy, which, in its con-
fusion of taxonomic boundaries and hierarchies, alters the literary representation
of both human and nonhuman animals from Charles Dickens to Lewis Carroll;
third, an emergent modernist reconsideration of the taxidermied nonhuman ani-
mal as a figure of uncanny inauthenticity, an assemblage of deceitful and ideo-
logically loaded signifiers; and fourth, a late modernist taxidermic literary mode
which explores the intersecting topoi of the human becoming-animal, becoming-
object and becoming-dead as reflection points for the posthuman themes of liv-
ing posthumously and the transgressed limit. Within this framework, I historicise
the discursive and material interfaces between taxidermic and literary practices
in the modernist and late-modernist era through close readings of representative
short stories and novels by H. G. Wells, Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf and
Myles na Gopaleen (Flann O’Brien). To diverse ends, and with varying degrees of

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 paul fagan

complicity, the texts under analysis interrogate taxidermied objects as commodi-

ties through which certain discourses of hygiene, humanism, science, colonialism,
race, gender and class gain an unearned legitimacy in the public imagination, with
material consequences for both human and nonhuman bodies.

Arrangements of Skin: Historicising Taxidermy

Taxidermy’s emergence as a modern technological and commercial practice is
marked by Louis Dufresne’s 1804 use of the term taxidermie from the Greek
taxis (to arrange) and derma (skin), in place of the then common French appel-
lation empailler (to stuff with straw) (Aloi 2018: 49). The French naturalist’s
coinage reflects a change in the art’s underlying material practices: while the
first documented European natural history collections to include specimens
mounted with wires and preservative spices date back to the sixteenth cen-
tury, it is in the period of industrialisation that methods of preservation were
advanced that used stronger chemical poisons, such as arsenical soap, to ward
off ‘the deterioration of the skin, the odour that came from this deterioration
and insect attacks’ (Péquignot 2006: 246–7). Yet, Giovanni Aloi identifies this
conceptual shift from the craft of stuffing bodies to the art of arranging skins
as ‘a point at which a new discursive formation begins to emerge’ which ‘sepa-
rated the older practices [. . .] related to hunting’ from the modern ‘epistemic
focus of scientific taxidermy mounts’ (2018: 51). These material and discursive
transformations are deeply intertwined in the Victorian imaginary, in which
the taxidermied nonhuman animal functions simultaneously as an index of the
ideological structures of scientific realism and as an ‘effigy of man’s subjugation
of nature’ in industrial and colonial contexts (Aloi 2018: 70).
Pauline Wakeham observes that taxidermy bears a ‘doubled status’ as ‘both a
specific technology of representation (the literal stuffing of epidermal shells) and
[. . .] a sign system that travels beyond this material practice [. . .] across a range
of cultural texts’ (2008: 6). In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries,
‘modern’ scientific conservation techniques were disseminated through handbook
publications and treatises, as naturalists began to provide private collectors and
museums with specimens of skins and mounted nonhuman animals. The result-
ing specimens and tableaux served, in turn, as models for the visual illustrations
and scientific texts that shaped Victorian understandings of the ‘animal’, ‘nature’
and the ‘human’. John James Audubon developed his own ad hoc method of
holding dead birds in life-like poses using wires and threads while he drew them,
and many of his influential illustrations in The Birds of America (1827–38) were
based on joint hunting expeditions and exchanged knowledges and specimens
with English taxidermist John Ward and his children. John Gould’s celebrated
ornithological illustrations in A Century of Birds from the Himalaya Mountains
(1831–2) drew on a collection of exotic bird skins he accessed through his posi-
tion as taxidermist to the Zoological Society of London. Robert Havell Jr sold

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 the taxidermic imaginary

ornithological drawings in his Zoological Gallery on Oxford Street, side by side

with ‘the birds themselves, stuffed and posed, along with skins and feathers’
(Mellby 2012: 486). This circulation of posthumous nonhuman bodies within
and between technological, economic, discursive and semiotic systems renders
taxidermic practice and modern cultural representations of nonhuman animals
inseparable.
The assemblage of organic materials, body parts, chemicals and technologies
that was presented to the public as the taxidermied ‘animal’ offered a new form
of indexicality that bolstered the cultural capital of optical and literary realism.
Naturalist and museal taxidermy claimed to grant the viewer access to the ‘extra-
discursive field of “the real”’ (Gregory and Purdy 2015: 63) via an auratic object
of ‘“authentic” animality’ that presents itself, through the material index of the
skin, as the animal, not a mere representation (Young 2017: 50). Thus fetishised
as an index both of the real material animal body and of science’s power to arrest
time’s flow and conquer the materiality of bodily change, the mounted nonhuman
animal corpse functioned as a screen on to which a series of narratives could be
projected ‘at the complex crossroads of Enlightenment science, colonial trophy
hunting and hypermasculine interior design’ (Nixon 2011: 316, n3). Even as they
come to be recoded as kitsch, even distasteful, in their direct form, these Victorian
taxidermic narratives and imaginaries – with their strict anthropocentric taxono-
mies and ideological coupling of optical realism, scientific knowledge and power
over nonhuman bodies – continued to be reproduced in diverse twentieth-century
media and commodities ‘through malleable semiotic codes’ (Wakeham 2008: 6).
As such, historical taxidermy artefacts present the modernist critic with a
simulacrum of nonhuman bodies ‘that can enable the retrieval of discursive
formations, cultural conditions, practices and power/knowledge relationships
between humans and animals’ (Aloi 2018: 53). Historicising taxidermic prac-
tices and their ideological constructions across the modernist period will allow
me to connect discrete literary representations of variously exploited, stuffed,
mounted, displayed, objectified, and commodified bodies to the specifics of a
shifting taxidermic imaginary, in which the material and discursive limits of
human and nonhuman skins are constantly redrawn. By paying close attention to
the relationship between their writing and these discursive shifts, I will trace the
diverse ways in which modernist writers deconstruct scientific, colonial and com-
modified representations of the mounted animal-as-object. While these forms
of representation variously silence and abstract the material reality of violence,
modernist depictions work to disclose taxidermy’s unspoken discursive and
technological linking of power to human and nonhuman bodies.

Animal Objects: Victorian Anthropomorphic Taxidermy

The 1851 Great Exhibition in Hyde Park introduced the Victorian public to the
taxidermy of Hermann Ploucquet, a naturalist at the Royal Museum of Stuttgart.

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 paul fagan

While the majority of the mounts were ‘realistic’ tableaux, what caught the
public imagination were Ploucquet’s ‘comical groups’, including ‘frogs having a
shave, kittens serving tea, and a marten acting as a schoolmaster’ (Morris and
Ebenstein 2013: 4–5). A decade later, Walter Potter’s The Death and Burial
of Cock Robin (1861) recreated each stanza of the macabre nursery rhyme in
a tableau featuring ninety-eight species of embalmed birds (Morris and Eben-
stein 2013: 9), mounted in anthropomorphic poses (in the mourning procession,
bearing the coffin, digging the grave), meant to charm and entertain rather than
to inform and enlighten their audiences. Potter’s subsequent tableaux mounted
locally sourced nonhuman animal corpses (squirrels, rats, rabbits, kittens) in
increasingly anthropomorphised, class-based and gendered scenes of daily
‘British’ life (school, tea and croquet parties, cricket games, the gentleman’s
club, weddings) that endure in the popular cultural imaginary today through
toys such as Sylvanian Families.
Indeed, anthropomorphic taxidermy further commodified the art, fuel-
ling the nineteenth-century trend ‘to turn animals in to functional objects like
lamps, hardened horse-hoof inkwells, bird hats, beetle dresses’ (Pyke 2014:
n.p.). Magazines such as Cassell’s Household Guide provided instructions to
amateurs for flaying, gutting and stuffing nonhuman animal corpses to pro-
duce ‘authentic’ decorative art objects for the home, and for transforming the
leftover body parts into accessories such as ‘fish-scale embroidery and pigeon-
feather screens’ (Young 2017: 50). At the same time, James Rowland Ward’s
evocatively named Piccadilly shop, The Jungle, commodified and domesticated
the bodies of exotic large game in items such as ‘a bear as a dumb waiter hold-
ing a tray of glasses’ and ‘umbrella stands made from the feet of elephants’
(Jackson 2006: 9). Sourced from throughout, and reflecting the growing reach
of, the British Empire, such Wardian furniture ‘provided the Victorians with
an outlet to act out different dimensions of the colonial experience’ (Wirtén
2008: 94), and thus normalised and legitimised the colonial project. By these
means, the taxidermied nonhuman animal was transformed from a display in
the public spaces and scientific frameworks of the museum exhibit to a tangible
commodity in overlapping commercial and domestic spheres. Thus, taxidermy
becomes a site of binding economic relations, social codes and cultural prac-
tices across public and private spheres that ‘records and shapes social identity’
(Haraway 1997: 261).
Anthropomorphic taxidermy displays and commodities also transformed
the semiotics of human and nonhuman assemblages in the Victorian literary
imaginary. Scientific trophy taxidermy is ‘boundary-establishing’, in so far as
it establishes ‘clear hierarchies and subdivisions’ between the human and the
nonhuman, civilisation and the wild, life and death, the subject and object
of the gaze (Jackson 2006: 336). As such, it reinforces the logics of optical
and literary realism. Shelley Jackson theorises anthropomorphic taxidermy, by

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 the taxidermic imaginary

contrast, as ‘boundary blurring’ (2006: 336), confusing the museum’s ‘vision

of a natural world marked by clean boundaries between types and species’
(Henning 2007: 673) and drawing ‘attention to the links between humans and
animals and anxieties related to humans’ place in the natural world’ (Talairach-
Vielmas 2014: 124). As such, anthropomorphic taxidermy creates a cultural
imaginary in which the logics of optical and literary realism might be upended
in carnivalesque play.
Lin Young observes the boundary-blurring influence of anthropomorphic
taxidermy on the ‘tangled hierarchy of consciousness’ in Carroll’s Alice’s
Adventures in Wonderland (1865), expressed through flamingo croquet mal-
lets, hedgehog croquet balls, ravens that may or may not be like writing desks
and other forms of sentient Wardian furniture (2017: 47). The taxidermist Mr
Venus in Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend (1864–5) is surrounded by both the
trophies of his art and anthropomorphic images such as that of ‘two preserved
frogs fighting a small-sword duel’ (Dickens 1997: 83). Published three years
after the Cock Robin exhibition, Dickens’s novel depicts a comparable scene in
which Potter’s anthropomorphic tableau is transformed into a defamiliarising
zoomorphic scene:

a pretty little dead bird lying on the counter, with [. . .] a long stiff wire
piercing its breast. As if it were Cock Robin, the hero of the ballad, and
Mr Venus were the sparrow with his bow and arrow, and Mr Wegg were
the fly with his little eye. (Dickens 1997: 84)

In their distinct literary manifestations of the Victorian anthropomorphic taxider-

mic imaginary, both Carroll and Dickens speak to a confusion of previous semiotic
and ontological orders of human and nonhuman bodies. Yet, even as anthropomor-
phic taxidermy inspires literary representations that play at and with borders of the
human and the nonhuman, vibrant and dead matter, in ways that can trouble the
assumptions of realism, these representations continue to idealise taxidermy as a
narrative- and comedy-generating device. Despite their real differences from these
practices, these images from Carroll and Dickens reinforce the fetishism of taxi-
dermy’s naturalist, anthropomorphic and commercial modes that veils the material
conditions and realities under which nonhuman bodies are transformed into auratic
objects and commodities in cycles of production and consumption. They operate at
a level of figural abstraction that, even when comic or satirical, fails to test distinc-
tions between the material real and phantasmatic anthropomorphic or zoomorphic
performances or inversions of human social codes and discourses. The abject fake-
ness of the discursive reality created through taxidermy’s material assemblages
remains to be more rigorously deconstructed and exposed. It is towards this task,
I suggest, that modernist literary representations of taxidermy are orientated, with
varying degrees of sincerity and irony, complicity and resistance.

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 paul fagan

Modernist Poetics: The Hoax of Taxidermy

A proto-modernist poetics of the fake drives H. G. Wells’s ‘The Triumphs of

a Taxidermist’ (1894). This anonymously published ‘interview’ between the
narrator, Bellows, and a practising taxidermist in the Pall Mall Gazette feigns
to disclose ‘the secrets of taxidermy’ as an art of forgery (Wells 1904: 53).
Deception, the taxidermist insists, is endemic to the practice, as ‘half the great
auks in the world are about as genuine as the handkerchief of Saint Veronica,
as the Holy Coat of Treves’ (Wells 1904: 56). Roland Barthes reminds us that
the function of the relic is ‘to signify that the event represented has really taken
place’ (1986: 140). Here, Wells’s language foregrounds taxidermy’s status as a
secularised relic: a hyperreal object whose auratic status is divorced from its
material reality and history yet which serves powerful discursive and institu-
tional functions through its constructed indexicality and authenticity, even as
it threatens ‘to lapse from art into deception, from life to upholstered death’
(Haraway 1985: 40). Along with these dubious holy relics, the story is pep-
pered with allusions to actual taxidermy hoaxes. The reference to taxidermied
mermaids likely alludes to the Feejee mermaid hoax, in which the torso and
head of a monkey was sewn to the back half of a fish and exhibited in P. T.
Barnum’s American Museum in 1842, and the interviewee’s claim to have
stuffed a dodo evokes taxidermist Abraham Dee Bartlett’s life-size reconstruc-
tion of the extinct bird at the 1851 Great Exhibition.
Wells’s taxidermist declares that the motivation to forge taxidermied non-
human animals is financial in nature; he notes an auk egg has recently fetched
£300 and describes sham porcelain eggs as ‘brittle capital’ (Wells 1904: 56).
The economic benefits on both ends of this arrangement mean that the taxider-
mist has little fear of exposure, as scientists and museum curators ‘will hardly
care to pull a nice specimen to bits’ to discover the fraud (Wells 1904: 56). Yet,
the ambitions of Wells’s taxidermist are greater than merely to ‘imitate nature’
for financial gain. He declares himself an artist, whose taxidermied mermaids
and hyperreal forgeries of non-existent birds are his ‘masterpiece’ (Wells 1904:
59). His artistry is shown, in turn, to advance and to legitimise the ambitions
of anthropocentric scientific humanism: he has recreated dead matter and, he
declares, in the process ‘beaten’ nature (Wells 1904: 58). He insists that he has
‘made’ a great auk (declared extinct in 1844), as well as a dodo (extinct since
the seventeenth century), and he plans to ‘forge a complete stuffed moa’ (extinct
c.1500) (Wells 1904: 57). Each of these birds was driven to extinction through
human cultural and economic practice: the moa was eradicated by hunting and
habitat reduction in its native New Zealand; the dodo’s natural habitat was
destroyed by human settlement on Mauritius; the auk was hunted for food,
fishing bait and down, and its eggs became collector’s items. Taxidermy’s prom-
ised power to arrest time’s passage by having ‘the animal’ live on after death

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 the taxidermic imaginary

is exposed in Wells’s tale as a fake, a fantasy in which nonhuman genocide is

reframed, perversely, as a technology of de-extinction.
Thus, Wells identifies taxidermy’s ‘illusion of reality’ as an act of bad faith,
‘an appearance of authenticity, which is fabricated through the “narrative art”’
by which ‘stretched, stitched, and stuffed, taxidermy hides themselves hide,
conceal and secret away their stories’ (Bezan and McHugh 2019: 132–3). Yet,
this revelation is cannily folded back into the author’s own art of writing. As
Zoé Hardy shows, Wells’s text problematises the intertwined representational
authenticity of taxidermy and literature across three levels of authorship: first,
the taxidermist, who ‘attempts to deceive his audience – scientists – into believ-
ing in the authenticity of his creations’; second, Bellows, who, ‘in his position
as a witness narrator, tries to convince his readers of the veracity of his tale’;
and third, Wells, who, by presenting his anonymous faux interview alongside
advertisements, non-fiction essays and journalism ‘printed on the same page’
of The Pall Mall Gazette ‘adds to the story’s hybrid status between fact and
fiction’ (2018: 24).
Wells’s turn to hoax poetics marks the emergence of a modernist taxider-
mic imaginary that is distinguishable from the nineteenth century’s dominant
realist, anthropomorphic and comic modes. John Attridge identifies modern-
ism’s ‘preoccupation with masks, hoaxes, role-playing, pseudonymity and
other forms of imposture’ and details a ‘subversive counter-modernism that
loves a lie’ (2014: 38– 9), as demonstrated by the ‘Spectrist’ and ‘Ern Malley’
volumes of faux-modernist ‘poetry’; the notorious Bloomsbury Dreadnought
Hoax; Samuel Beckett’s lecture to Trinity College Dublin on the invented fig-
ure of du Chas; Oscar Wilde’s and James Joyce’s creative interest in the James
Macpherson Ossian scandal; and diverse modernist parodies, travesties and
frauds (see Diepeveen 2014). I have argued elsewhere that ‘the power of the
false to reorganise and constitute reality is a modernist theme [. . .] that shares
a lineage with historical forms of hoax literature’ (Fagan 2018: 164). Key to
linking Wells’s story to this specifically modernist strand of literary hoaxing
is the taxidermist’s claim to have created ‘New birds. Improvements. Like no
birds that was ever seen before’ (Wells 1904: 58; emphasis in original). Thus,
‘The Triumphs of a Taxidermist’ explores not only the modernist project of
exposing the bad-faith constructedness and ideological function of realism,
but also the modernist theme of the power of the fake performatively to pro-
duce reality.
By these means, Wells’s short story marks the emergence of a proto-modernist
self-reflection on the similarities between the arts of the taxidermist and the lit-
erary practitioner, for whom ‘a real artist in the art’ (Wells 1904: 59) conceives
their goal not as the bad-faith capturing of ‘objective reality’ but a poetics of
self-aware fragmentation that attends to underlying material realities and pro-
cesses. Yet, this pre-eminently modernist theme remains thoroughly implicated in

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 paul fagan

taxidermy’s position at the nexus of ‘both biological tissue and discursive schema
overdetermined by colonialism’s obsession with racial and species categorisation’
(Wakeham 2008: 25). The most shocking aspect of Wells’s story is the taxider-
mist’s claim to have stuffed a black man ‘and used him as a hat rack’ (Wells 1904:
54), an image that grotesquely lampoons yet remains complicit with taxidermy’s
status ‘as a prominent emblem of imperialism’ which ‘gives form to racism’s
skin fetish’ (McHugh 2019: 241). The appalling image of the black man as
Wardian furniture discloses taxidermy as a practice that not only gives cover to
but actively fetishises the technological and discursive links between animal com-
modification and brutal racial dehumanisation.
The taxidermist dismisses Bellows’s characterisation of his grotesque creation
as ‘unpleasant’, glossing over its racist overtones to present human taxidermy
in positivist utopian terms as ‘a promising third course to burial or cremation’:

You could keep all your dear ones by you. Bric-à-brac of that sort stuck
about the house would be as good as most company, and much less
expensive. You might have them fitted up with clockwork to do things.
(Wells 1904: 55)

The image recalls the oft-rehearsed literary anecdote in which Dickens had
a single paw of his deceased companion cat, Bob, stuffed and attached to an
ivory blade which was engraved ‘C.D. In Memory of Bob 1862’. Jenny Pyke
distinguishes Dickens’s cat-paw letter-opener from the common nineteenth-
century practice of memorialising pets by stuffing and displaying them on
account of ‘its tactile softness and emotional tenderness’ as ‘an object meant
to be held daily’ (2014: n.p.). Yet Wells’s emphasis on the utilisation of human
bodies, and particularly colonised bodies, to work on, zombie-like, after
death, challenges, even unwittingly, the speciesism at play in such an implicit
emotional distinction between tenderness – when the practice is applied to
nonhuman animal bodies – and grotesqueness – when applied, even specula-
tively, to human bodies.
Wells’s human hat-rack is an ambivalent figure that simultaneously lam-
poons and reinforces the dominant logic of scientific racism, as well as emer-
gent anxieties about a posthuman future. It is an abject figure of humanity’s
uncertain self-distinction from the nonhuman, and from other humans who
are categorised as less-than-human, that must be mastered either through a
utopian humanism that doubles down on scientific and colonial violence, or
through the realisation of kinship between human and nonhuman animals. At
the outset of the modernist era, taxidermy comes to function as an index of the
intersecting colonial, racial and patriarchal discursive and material practices
in which the exploitation and commodification of real human and nonhuman
bodies are inextricably linked.

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 the taxidermic imaginary

Modernist Dioramas: The Skin Fetish of Race,

Gender, Class
As a response to the conceived unscientific fakeness and cheap gimmickry of
anthropomorphic taxidermy and Wardian furniture, an emboldened move-
ment towards taxidermic realism was initiated in the US by Henry Augustus
Ward in the 1860s. This American realist tradition culminated in the most
renowned disciple of Ward’s Natural Science Establishment in Rochester, New
York, and the most acclaimed twentieth-century practitioner of the art, Carl
Akeley, whose sculptural technique for taxidermy is celebrated by the Ameri-
can Museum of Natural History as having ‘elevated the practice from a crude
craft to an art form’ (2016). The identification of Akeley as the ‘father of mod-
ern taxidermy’ marks the discursive construction of a new point of origin in the
practice, which in fact reiterates previous such declarations by Dufresne and
others. In each case, more than a century apart, the function of this discursive
move remains the same – to indicate that the practice of conserving the nonhu-
man animal body has been perfected, as its application has been rendered more
artful, scientifically more precise, more civilised, more modern.
Akeley’s ‘masterpieces’ were the African habitats that he prepared using
the ‘Akeley method’ on nonhuman animals he and his team had killed on
expeditions to Africa. These dioramas were mounted in the Field Museum of
Natural History in Chicago – where Akeley was chief taxidermist from 1896
to 1909 – and New York’s American Museum of Natural History, where he
proposed the Hall of African Mammals in 1909 (completed in 1936, a decade
after his death). However, this realist project was troubled by contradictions
inherent to it. In his practice and its presentation, Akeley ‘set himself against
faking’ and ‘wanted no part of the great circus magnate’s cultivation of the
American popular art form, the hoax’ (Haraway 1985: 40), yet he first made
his name by mounting Barnum’s Jumbo. Despite the dioramas’ pretences
to scientific objectivity and their connotations of an antimodern return to
nature, Akeley’s constructed scenes bore all the hallmarks of the narrative
trends and cinematic imaginaries of the twentieth century, arranged dramati-
cally to achieve a ‘climactic effect’ (Brown 2018: 74).
Donna Haraway reads Akeley’s project to ‘manipulate nature to tell the
story of a fierce and savage Africa’ as a manifestation of fin-de-siècle racial
discourses concerning ‘genetic hygiene’ and ‘the politics of eugenics’ (1985:
40: 20–1). The African dioramas of the Akeley Hall of African Mammals, set
amid the urban jungle of New York, exhibit a romanticised nostalgia for an
‘imagined hygienic, pre-Industrial America’ and are tasked with the ‘regenera-
tion of a miscellaneous, incoherent urban public threatened with genetic and
social decadence, threatened with the prolific bodies of the new immigrants,
threatened with the failure of manhood’ (Haraway 1985: 38, 23). Thus, even
as Akeley’s work presents itself as a denotational sculptural material practice,

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‘its connotative specters revise fantasies of white male supremacy in “the sport-
ing crucible” of colonial mastery over nature’ (Wakeham 2008: 5).
Ernest Hemingway’s writing exhibits the most direct influence of Akeley’s
‘realist’ taxidermy, and the patriarchal naturalist ideology out of which it
emerged, on modernist literature. Marcelline Hemingway Sanford’s mem-
oirs document family trips to the Field Museum, where she and her brother
encountered ‘stuffed animals looking lifelike in their original hides’ (1999: 38).
Kenneth Lynn notes the Hemingway children’s fascination with the stuffed
elephant that had been killed by Teddy Roosevelt and adds that ‘by the time
he was ten, [Ernest’s] favorite room was the Hall of African Mammals’, where
Akeley’s dioramas were on display (1987: 15). The fascination extended into
the author’s later life, as ‘Akeley’s memoir, In Brightest Africa, was part of
Hemingway’s adult library’ (Beegel 2000: 77). Specifically, the masculinised
‘dangerous game’ at the centre of each of Akeley’s dioramas, which ‘catches the
viewer’s gaze and holds it in communion’ (Haraway 1985: 25), is speculated
by Michael S. Reynolds to have ‘caught and held [Hemingway’s] imagination
forever’ (1986: 230).
Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926) explicitly evokes the theme of
taxidermy in Jake and Bill’s encounter with a stuffed dog in the window of a
taxidermist’s shop on their last night in Paris. Over the course of their discus-
sion, Bill draws an overt connection between taxidermy and naturalist writing:
‘Going to give all my friends stuffed animals. I’m a nature-writer’ (Hemingway
1926: 76). Stephen Gilbert Brown theorises the influence of Akeley’s dioramas
on the ‘aesthetic ideology’ of Hemingway’s work as a point of intersection
between the ‘naturalist story-teller’ and the modernist writer (2018: 71; 74):
the projected realism of Akeley’s taxidermy influences Hemingway’s sparse,
incisive, naturalist writing, as the frozen dramatic scenes of Akeley’s diora-
mas inform Hemingway’s ‘iceberg theory’ of modernist story composition. As
in Wells’s tale, the connection that Bill draws between these arts is linked to
economic pressures that drive the artist–taxidermist to transform the dog’s
material body into both an aesthetic object and a commodity: ‘Simple exchange
of values. You give them money. They give you a stuffed dog’ (Hemingway
1926: 74).
In the scene, Hemingway applies a literary version of the ‘Akeley method’ to
the taxidermic afterlives of specific nonhuman animals from both private and
public spheres. Carlos Baker contends that the image was inspired by Heming-
way’s Paris landlady’s stuffed pet dog (1969: 144), while William Adair identi-
fies it as a reference to ‘America’s celebrated war dog, Sergeant Stubby, who died
16 March 1926, and was then stuffed and mounted preparatory to being placed
in the American Red Cross Museum in Washington, D.C.’ (2014: 76). The latter
allusion figures the dog in the window as a grotesque parody of fetishistic war
propaganda – Stubby ‘was awarded medals for heroism, marched in parades,

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appeared in newsreels, and was photographed with three U.S. presidents’ (Adair
2014: 76) – which elucidates the war-wounded Jake’s resistance to buying
the dog, and to buying into the discourses and narratives projected on to its
taxidermied body.
Beyond anchoring the novel to certain taxidermic aesthetic ideologies and
their economic and discursive contexts, the taxidermied dog serves as an index
of the gendered logic of the gaze that organises both Akeley’s dioramas and
the recurrent imagery of ‘Trophy Hunting as a Trope of Manhood’ in Heming-
way’s writing (Styrchacz 1993: 167). Jake’s aversion to the stuffed dog as a
figure of the war’s butchered bodies, revived and exhibited towards propagan-
distic ends, extends the motif of the emasculating genital war wound that he
has suffered while posted at a ‘joke front’ (Hemingway 1926: 31). Brown reads
Akeley’s dioramas as offering Hemingway a masculine ideal towards which his
emasculated protagonists can strive:

At the center of the diorama, constituting its dramatic core, is a domi-

nant male whose prowess is a monument to ideal maleness. [. . .] In this
gaze between naturalist hunter and male beast, preserved in the frozen
time of each diorama, the self is reborn to the vanishing ideal of frontier
masculinity – under radical assault since the turn of the century from the
excesses of the Machine Age and the advent of the Suffragette Move-
ment. (2018: 75–6)

In The Sun Also Rises, this logic culminates in the scene in which the mata-
dor Romero is ‘reborn to masculinity in the “gaze of meeting” with the bull’
(Brown 2018: 76): ‘The bull watched him. [. . .] The bull charged and Romero
waited, sighting along the blade’ (Hemingway 1926: 222). This masculinised
exchange of gazes with the ‘wild’, nonhuman animal is contrasted with Jake’s
emasculated deferred gaze from the taxidermied ‘pet’. The unmediated encoun-
ter with death in the crucible of the bullring enables a rebirth of masculine
prowess through a romanticised vitalisation of the exchanged gaze between
hunter and beast that is captured in Akeley’s taxidermy.
This fantasy, which, in both Akeley’s dioramas and Hemingway’s texts, is
presented formally as naturalist realism, comes under greater scrutiny in a strand
of modernist writing in the 1920s which defamiliarises and ironises the domes-
ticated naturalist diorama as an index of colonial nostalgia and modern con-
sumerism. As a representative example, Virginia Woolf’s Orlando: A Biography
(1928) opens with a scene of racial trophy hunting, as the young protagonist is
discovered ‘in the act of slicing at the head of a Moor which swung from the raf-
ters’ (Woolf 2007: 403). The Moor’s decapitated head is presented in nonhuman
terms, compared in colour and shape to ‘an old football’ or ‘a cocoanut’ (Woolf
2007: 403). However, this fantasy is quickly deflated, as it is revealed that while

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the head had been ‘struck [. . .] from the shoulders of a vast Pagan [. . .] in the
barbarian fields of Africa’ by his forefathers, Orlando can do little more than
‘steal away from his mother and the peacocks in the garden and go to his attic
room and there lunge and plunge and slice the air with his blade’ (Woolf 2007:
403). As this act of colonial savagery is first staged and then collapsed as childish
fantasy and play, the scene depicts both the real violence against, and grotesque
displays of, ‘less-than-human’ bodies that facilitated Orlando’s inherited class
position, and the ways in which these discursive and material histories continue
to be narrativised and simulated in the cultural imaginary.
Orlando’s racial, patriarchal and class-based desire for colonial adventure
and trophy hunting is sublimated into the acquisition of consumer objects,
in the form of Wardian furniture such as ‘sofas, resting on lions’ paws with
swans’ necks curving under them’ or beds ‘of the softest swansdown’ (Woolf
2007: 450). The refurnishing of Orlando’s ancestral home testifies to the
overlapping historical disappearance of wildlife from everyday human life
and proliferation of nonhuman animal bodies in the household as nostalgia-
laden commodities that serve both as overt markers of class position and
as indexes of colonial, patriarchal and racial fantasies. Orlando’s metamor-
phosis, accompanied by ‘her Seleuchi hound, which had never left her bed
all these days’ (Woolf 2007: 467), entails a transgression of both sex/gender
boundaries and human/nonhuman limits that further deflates this masculinist
fantasy. And yet, even in this scheme, Orlando’s encounter with the twentieth-
century department store has the same quality as Akeley’s dioramas, in its
transformation of natural materials into not only displayed objects, but com-
modities of nostalgia:

each time the lift stopped and flung its doors open, there was another slice
of the world displayed with all the smells of that world clinging to it. She
was reminded of the river off Wapping in the time of Elizabeth, where the
treasure ships and the merchant ships used to anchor. (Woolf 2007: 544)

Across the many centuries of Orlando’s life, Woolf’s mock biography

reverses and discloses the ideological trajectory displayed in The Sun Also
Rises, in which an encounter between the emasculated soldier and objecti-
fied dog moves towards a revitalising and remasculinising fatal encounter
between the matador and the bull. Orlando: A Biography, by contrast, opens
by deflating trophy hunting as a masculinist fantasy embedded in colonial
and racial discourses and practices, and proceeds to queer the binary anthro-
pocentric and gender articulations upon which this fantasy turns. At the same
time, a figurative contrapuntal arc traces how the trope of trophy hunting
human and nonhuman bodies as a revitalisation of patriarchal colonialism
is sublimated, first, into the second-hand experience of colonial adventure

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 the taxidermic imaginary

offered by Wardian furniture, and then into the commodity fetishism of the
department store’s modern dioramas.

Human Objects: Becoming Nonhuman in Late Modernism

In late modernist literary encounters with taxidermy, the figure of the taxider-
mied human animal emerges to interrogate the interfaces between technologies
and bodies and to disturb the discursive limits between living and dead matter.
In this figure of the human becoming-animal, becoming-object and becoming-
dead, literary taxidermy becomes not only a scene of the Othering and subjuga-
tion of nonhuman and less-than-human bodies, but also the site of a profound
self-Othering and self-mourning for the ‘human’. Myles na Gopaleen’s short
story ‘Two in One’ is at once representative of this late modernist taxidermic
imaginary and a text that engages in a revealing conversation with the proto-
modernist forms of Wells’s ‘Triumphs of a Taxidermist’.
‘Two in One’ is the murder confessional of a taxidermist who presents himself
under the fake name of ‘Murphy’. The confession, however, is delayed by the
murderer’s long progressivist disquisition on the practice’s history from the six-
teenth century onwards (O’Brien 2013: 84). The material practice of taxidermy
itself is as much the text’s subject as a set-up for its pot-boiler scenario. While
critics have discussed the diverse manifestations of murder that the text puts on
display – from Murphy murdering his boss, Kelly, to his final capital punishment
for the crime – to date scholarship has not included taxidermy itself within the
story’s thematics of violence. The entry point to a de-anthropocentrised reading
of the macabre late modernist gothic story is not that the murderer is a taxider-
mist, but that the taxidermist is a murderer.
Murphy’s feelings of superiority in his craft – which, he boasts, ‘combine[s]
the qualities of zoologist, naturalist, chemist, sculptor, artist, and carpenter’
– are slighted in the willing denial of his creative expression by his superior,
Kelly: ‘He knew I had a real interest in the work and a desire to broaden my
experience. For that reason, he threw me all the common-place routine jobs
that came in’ (O’Brien 2013: 84–5). Murphy’s resentment turns upon a specie-
sist hierarchy of animal bodies in terms not of commercial but rather of artistic
capital, aligned with the cultural capital attributed to modernist difficulty, that
nevertheless maps on to a distinction between the local banal and colonial
exoticism:

If some old lady sent her favourite terrier to be done, that was me; foxes
and cats and Shetland ponies and white rabbits – they were all strictly
my department. I could do a perfect job on such animals in my sleep and
got to hate them. But if a crocodile came in, or a Great Borneo spider, or
(as once happened) a giraffe – Kelly kept them all for himself. (O’Brien
2013: 85)

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As this persecution plays itself out, Kelly figuratively gets under his assistant’s
skin until Murphy literally gets under Kelly’s: killing his boss with a taxidermy
instrument and disposing of the traces by disguising himself in, and fusing him-
self with, his victim’s skin, thus ‘BECOM[ING] Kelly!’ (O’Brien 2013: 86).
Contemplating himself in the glass, Murphy evaluates his transformation into
the dead spit of Kelly to be ‘perfect in every detail’ (O’Brien 2013: 86). His gro-
tesque taxidermic masterpiece thus doubles for his macabre ‘literary labours’
(O’Brien 2013: 84) in a way that is comparable to Wells’s taxidermist’s self-
evaluation as ‘a real artist in the art’ and his appraisal of his hoax creations
as his ‘masterpiece’ (Wells 1904: 59). Yet the distinctions between the two
stories charts the trajectory of the taxidermic imaginary that has been the sub-
ject of this chapter: while Well’s taxidermist boasts of having defeated nature
through hyperreal forgeries of non-existent birds and taxidermied mermaids, na
Gopaleen’s presents an abject eco-/body horror at the realisation of the continuity
between human and nonhuman life.
Yaeli Greenblatt notes that ‘[f]or Murphy, his victim’s remains are both
comparable with clothing and practically treated as such, as is apparent in his
depiction of ‘having “dressed”’ in Kelly’s skin (2020: 133). The conflation also
brings to the fore the unspoken exploitation of nonhuman animal bodies in
the technologies of clothing. Elsewhere, the continuity between the human and
nonhuman is foregrounded in Murphy’s decision to ‘treat Kelly the same as
any other dead creature that found its way to the workshop’ and in his descrip-
tion of his method of skinning Kelly: ‘I applied the general technique and flay-
ing pattern appropriate to apes’ (O’Brien 2013: 86). From anthropomorphic
Victorian mounts through Well’s human hat-rack to Hemingway’s encounter
with the wild animal as the human masculine ideal, there has been an implica-
tion that has been redirected at all turns into other anthropocentric discourses
(humanism, science, colonialism), but never entirely expunged: namely, that
the carefully constructed limits between the human and nonhuman are always
liable to be exposed as a construction of underlying economic structures and
their discursive linking of knowledges and bodies to power. This implication is
foregrounded and complicated in na Gopaleen’s image of the human as taxi-
dermied object, as animal.
Na Gopaleen’s tale anticipates the late twentieth century’s taxidermic
imaginary as a site both of kitsch neo-Victorianism and of uncanny eco-horror
and abject body horror, especially when applied to the human body, as in
Psycho (1960) and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974). Yet it also reflects
backwards on how modernism’s proximities to taxidermic material practices
reveal a more capacious literary movement than standard accounts, one which
develops through diverse points of encounter with naturalism and realism,
inhabiting and deconstructing their discursive modes through the hoax poetics
of fake interviews, faux biographies, spurious confessions. What distinguishes

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these modernist writers from purely parodic or satirical approaches to writing

taxidermy is their interest in de-fetishising economic processes and material
bodies; in reflecting on the resonances between the taxidermist’s and the
writer’s art; in exploring the posthuman intersection between animal, human,
technology and object; and in foregrounding taxidermy as a speculative
tool for ‘questioning our modes of perceiving, constructing, and consuming
animals’ (Aloi 2018: 34) by harnessing its self-contradictory capacity both to
enforce rigidly and to disturb uncannily the coordinates of the living human
subject and the inanimate nonhuman object.
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Dickens, Charles. 1997. Our Mutual Friend. London: Penguin.
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 Part III

Animal, Nation, Empire

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 7

SPECIES CLEANSING: THE RHETORIC OF RAT

CONTROL IN THE PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF
POLAND 1945–1956

Gabriela Jarzębowska

This chapter examines the rhetoric regarding the eradication of rats in Poland
between 1945 and 1956, when a broad-scale rat extermination programme
was undertaken.1 There was an intensification of rat control campaigns in
Poland at the turn of the 1950s, which can be explained by a sharp increase in
the rat population during the period of the war. However, the co-occurrence of
the anti-rat propaganda with political purges, as well as strategic and rhetorical
resemblances between these two operations, cannot be ignored. Consequently,
this Polish case study can be seen as a starting point for analysing how political
discourses can shape existing environmental policies and how dominant politi-
cal narratives influence pest control and sanitary programmes. The exploration
of animal figuration in this chapter, therefore, takes a cultural approach to the
beastly modernisms that concern the volume as a whole, tracing out the impli-
cations of both meanings of that word beastly: cruel and animal-like.
Genocide studies and, most notably, Holocaust studies, have already identi-
fied the connections between discursive mechanisms of modernity (including
metaphors of purification) and militarised narratives. As I will demonstrate, a
similar mechanism may be at play in debates over environmental management
and the figuration of nonhuman animals as pests. Rats were traditionally con-
sidered vermin and this status was highlighted in the postwar period, when two
parallel discourses that shaped the public debate at the time were fused in pest
control rhetoric. These discourses were military, promoting the active pursuit
of real or imagined adversaries, and the euphemistic discourse of sanitation

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 gabriela jarzębowska

and epidemiology. I will argue that the rat control discourse which developed
during the Stalinist era clearly replicates linguistic and visual tropes of political
purges and ethnic cleansing politics. The way that nonhuman animals figure
in the rhetoric regarding the management of urban rat populations can thus
provide a proper model for investigating how cultural policies of political
exclusion work and what kind of persuasive strategies they may follow. My
aim is not to discount the real risks associated with the proximity between
humans and rats; nor do I compare pest animal species to excluded groups of
human individuals. My objective, rather, is to map out strategies of exclusion
which draw on beastly figurations that may be common to ethnic and political
cleansing and certain strategies of environmental management. I demonstrate
how negative ramifications tied to interspecies cohabitation (such as competi-
tion over resources and exposure to pathogens) are translated according to nar-
rative schemas that reveal fear, prejudice and biases dominant in their historical
moment and embedded in specific political narratives.
My analysis begins by outlining the broader historical context of rat con-
trol programmes in early postwar Poland. I provide both an international and
a national background for pest control and argue that the latter should be
considered as decisive for shaping rat management discourse in this era. I then
proceed to rat control discourse analysis, identifying two cultural scripts that
shaped social perception of these animals: namely, rat as an enemy and rat as
a (disembodied) pathogen. Afterwards, I take a step back to see from which
cultural imaginaries of prewar or war origin these scripts come. I argue that
they replicate genocidal logic, being the extension of antisemitic discourse on
the one hand, and the rhetoric of Stalinist political purges on the other. In the
last section I broaden my analysis in order to see how this phenomenon can
be situated within the larger cultural landscape of the mid-twentieth century.
I argue that anti-rat discourse has deeper underpinnings that exceed strictly
genocidal logic and should be considered as an inseparable component of
modernity – specifically, modernity’s combatant and utilitarian concepts of
human relations with a nonhuman world.

Historical Background
The period spanning 1949–56 in Poland witnessed an unprecedented and never
since repeated surge in the desire to exterminate rats. Although it was the pre-
war period that marked the beginning of coordinated rodent control measures
in Poland, it was not until the early postwar era that pest control became scien-
tific. What I mean by ‘scientific’ here is that from being a rather chaotic, reac-
tive and hit-or-miss campaign, pest control was transformed – or at least was
meant to be transformed – into a rational, coordinated, proactive effort, based
on scientific experiments regarding both the ecology of rats and the effective-
ness of particular rodenticides. This was a reflection of a worldwide tendency,

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as the 1940s marked a widespread interest in rat control science on both sides
of the Iron Curtain. In particular, ground-breaking research programmes were
undertaken in Baltimore by scientists such as Curt Richter (who invented the
toxin alpha-naphthylthiourea, or ANTU) and David E. Davis, John Emlen and
John Calhoun with their Rodent Ecology Project (Keiner 2005; Biehler 2013).
Due to geopolitical circumstances, Polish scientists were influenced mainly by
Soviet colleagues such as Ivan Pavlov and his concept of classical conditioning.
No evidence proves that they were familiar with Davis’s or Emlen’s writings.
However, they did make references to Charles Elton (often referred to as the
father of modern animal ecology), which demonstrates that the ideas of mod-
ern ecology were already present in Polish pest control discourse at that time
(Czyżewski 1953; Rybicki 1956).
Although global tendencies should not be under-estimated while looking
into postwar rat control discourse in Poland, one needs to stress that the his-
torical context was entirely different. The two critical factors that shaped pest
control rhetoric were the Second World War, leaving Poland in a state of total
destruction and post-Holocaust trauma, and the Stalinist regime which followed
right after. The late 1940s saw huge reconstruction programmes, especially the
rebuilding of Warsaw, almost totally destroyed after the Warsaw Uprising in
1944. Those programmes were based on strong social mobilisation, aimed at
giving hope to war-traumatised people. However, they were also used as a tool
for a symbolic consolidation of a new, Stalinist regime. Propaganda materials
portrayed the efforts not only as a reconstruction but as a process of modernisa-
tion: building a new, brave, socialist world, emerging from the ashes of the war.
And rats were a crucial part of this story.
Polish professional materials from the late 1940s and 1950s emphasised
that rat infestations were prevalent during the war and immediately after. This
might have been the case, considering the scale of destruction and the number of
human and nonhuman bodies buried under the ruins, providing food for scaven-
gers. One needs to remember, however, that, unlike in Baltimore, there were no
research programmes in Poland before and right after the war that might have
provided specific statistics to prove the population upsurge. Moreover, while rat
infestation in the wake of wartime destruction was already clear by 1945, it was
not until 1949 that the anti-rat campaign began on such a broad scale. This may
support my hypothesis that the nature of this campaign was political and clearly
linked to the consolidation of the Stalinist regime that followed in late 1940s,
especially as the campaign became distinctly less fervent after the Khrushchev
thaw in 1956. What I mean by saying that the rat control campaign was politi-
cal, is that the Stalinist regime was centred around chasing true or imagined ene-
mies, in order to consolidate the nation around the Party. These foes were mainly
human (Germans, Americans, capitalists, ‘Kulaks’2 and so on), but this combat-
ant logic soon began to incorporate nonhuman actors as well. As a troublesome

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species, destroying the property of humans and spreading disease, rats made a
perfect enemy, along with the potato beetle, allegedly dropped by Americans to
destroy Polish crops (Steciąg and Wodzińska 2016: n.p.).
As a consequence, propaganda materials from the early postwar period
explicitly emphasised the presence of rats in neglected areas as a sign of back-
wardness and under-development, making rats (or, rather, their absence) a
gauge of modernisation processes. As creatures that pose a considerable threat
to both public health (as we share pathogens with them) and the national econ-
omy (as our competitors for resources), rats can be perceived as embodiments
of challenges to be confronted by a state devastated during the war. The vast
campaign of didactic propaganda – posters, pamphlets, lectures, commissioned
press materials and radio broadcasts – sent a strong message to the public
that the extermination of rats was imperative. The key slogan coined in the
1950 was ‘Tęp szczury!’ (which can be translated as ‘Kill rats!’ or ‘Eradicate
rats!’), and it was subsequently included in almost all materials of this type.
This extensive campaign, known as ‘deratisation’,3 was made possible only by
the total centralisation of the profession, scientists’ engagement, the introduc-
tion of new rodenticides4 and, last but not least, change in the language used
to describe these nonhuman animals. Not a mere nuisance any more, rats were
transformed on a linguistic and visual level into a harmful, deceitful foe or a
disembodied problem to be solved. This rhetorical shift was possibly due to the
symbolic denigration of the rat and the fact that rat population management
was combined with a discourse of sanitation.

Two Strategies for the Symbolic Denigration of the Rat

To define species cleansing5 as a term relevant to the eradication of rats in social-
ist Poland, we must first examine how the mechanisms of symbolic devaluation
work. In the case of methodically executed acts of genocide targeting humans, a
common precondition is the dehumanisation of individuals or groups perceived
as harmful or threatening to the social order. This concept is typically defined as
the denial of a certain person or group’s humanity, either uniformly or within
a circumscribed context (Oliver 2011: 86). In his writing on the Holocaust,
Zygmunt Bauman emphasises the technical and administrative nature of the
dehumanisation that precedes genocide, which allows its agents to disregard
ethics in their categorisation of human beings (Bauman 1989). Dehumanisation,
moreover, carries the linguistic stigma of ‘the Other’. One common strategy lik-
ens the real or imagined enemy to a nonhuman animal – usually one burdened
with negative cultural connotations, such as a cockroach, pig or rat. From this
perspective, dehumanisation operates along the border between humans and
nonhumans.
However, as Tyler Joshua Kasperbauer aptly demonstrates, similar mecha-
nisms of symbolic denigration can be at play in the way nonhuman animals are

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portrayed. Being an equivocal example of ‘the Other’, the animal is deprived of

its agency while its death is portrayed using technical terms (Kasperbauer 2018).
Of course, nonhuman animals are not homogenous as a group – some of them
are denigrated and devalued more than others. Expanding on Giorgio Agam-
ben’s figure of homo sacer, Robin Mackenzie proposes the term bestia sacer,
meaning ‘subanimals’. For Mackenzie, this category includes species and popula-
tions whose welfare is not protected by legislation and whose exploitation has
never been legally defined. The category is a dynamic one: within its framework,
certain groups or individuals are symbolically excluded from the animal com-
munity, depending on their socio-economic or environmental context, often due
to the potential harm they cause to the ecosystem or their usefulness to humans
(Mackenzie 2011). This concept may help us understand the mechanisms of the
symbolic devaluation of rodents in deratisation campaigns. Moreover, in the case
of rats, these mechanisms operate beyond the legislative level with deep cultural
underpinnings. In the decades discussed here, these precedents were reinforced
by extensive propaganda. The tendency to describe the extermination of rodents
using language associated with hygiene rather than environmental management
reflects the symbolic process by which the rat had been excluded from the verte-
brate community and demoted to ‘subanimal’ status.
Of the two strategies of symbolic devaluation I have identified, the first – ‘rat
as enemy’ – reveals a tendency to anthropomorphise these animals. Anti-rat
educational materials from the Stalinist era often used militaristic language
portraying rats as invaders:

For centuries, rats have oppressed us with the plague, attacking mankind
with their invisible army of murderous fleas. (Ślusarski 1950: 147)

The society whose individuals fail to form a unified front to implement

wide scale rat eradication will remain at the mercy of any rat left alive.
(Brodniewicz 1953: 11)

Rats wage their own imperialist war, and despite the ceaseless efforts of
man, to date, they have not yet been defeated. (Rybicki 1954: 3)

Each and every citizen of our Nation must join in battle, for only then
will victory be achieved. (Ślusarski 1952: 12)

Tellingly, scientific arguments about rats and their necessary eradication were often
substantiated by emotional ones that merged descriptive and normative styles:

A detailed psychological analysis and more scrupulous review of the

biological attributes of this rodent, his habits, mode of existence, and

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behavior toward other kinds of animals as well as members of his own

species suggest that the rat is a crafty and refined aggressor. Threatened
by predators or starvation, they become cruel and bloodthirsty murder-
ers. (Kloniecki 1955: 8)

In these linguistic practices, conventional human archetypes (‘thief’, ‘enemy’,

‘murderer’) are applied to nonhuman animals, who thus absorb traits typically
associated with Homo sapiens (‘crafty’, ‘malicious’, ‘irreverent’). We might
therefore read this anthropomorphic tendency in deratisation propaganda as
a form of false ennoblement. It resembles ennoblement on a symbolic level,
insofar as rats are ascribed human traits. Yet this ‘elevation’ is only superficial,
for it aims to denigrate the animals morally. The objective is to accentuate their
otherness and monstrosity to portray them as valueless and worthy of ruth-
less extermination. A necessary step in this process is the act of exclusion. In
the logic of human genocide, the symbolically dehumanised enemy is less than
human and therefore devoid of moral value. The function of zoomorphism is
to emphasise symbolically the object’s severance from human society. In the
case of deratisation, the rat is not fully animal, for it has no sentimental, utili-
tarian or ecological value to humans. This narrative sets the rat apart as an
isolated entity: humanity’s mortal nemesis, pest and ‘subanimal’. The function
of anthropomorphism is to eject the rat from the animal world and imbue it
with new meaning: the phantasm of the enemy.
While this paradoxical strategy of ‘denigrating anthropomorphism’ is mainly
specific to militaristic narratives, the second strategy for degrading the rat is tied
to narratives of hygiene and epidemiology, according to which these nonhuman
animals symbolically disappear. This may be related to a linguistic phenomenon
from the late 1940s and early 1950s that conditioned social perceptions of the
ethics of rat extermination in Poland as they persist today. I am referring to the
acronym DDD (disinfection, disinsection, deratisation), which was often used in
former socialist countries to describe discrete campaigns to exclude unwanted
nonhuman forms of life (micro- (germs), meso- (insects) and macro-organisms
(rodents)) from anthropogenic environments for sanitary and economic reasons.
The formation and persistence of this notion were crucial factors shaping the
socio-cultural perception of rat extermination in postwar Poland.
This narrative strips the rat of its nuances as animal and symbolically aligns
it with the pathogens it carries. The extermination of rats, insects and microbes
was consolidated in one term – a gesture that expels the rat from the realm of
urban fauna and absorbs it into a hygiene narrative, where it is defined as haz-
ardous filth or waste. In this way, the eradication of rat populations correlates
to attempts to purge certain areas of undesirable elements. Killing nonhuman
animals has been described euphemistically as a ‘set of coordinated activities’
represented visually using graphs, tables and infographics (Fig. 7.1).

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 rat control in poland 1945–1956

Figure 7.1 Anon. Map. Courtesy of the Polish National Archive, Szczecin.

This strategy runs counter to anthropomorphism. The analogy to pathogens

is very different from false ennoblement, for here, a nonhuman animal with
advanced cognitive abilities is metonymically linked to disease. In contrast to
cases of anthropomorphism, this correlation is rarely explicit and never adopted
as a conscious propaganda tactic. Rather, it is an unconscious psychological
mechanism organising discursive practices of deratisation that is catalysed by
the advent of the term DDD. The rat’s inclusion in hygiene narratives gave rise
to a new set of concepts that organised the perception of rats in the collective
imaginary by symbolically identifying them with medical conditions. No longer
were rats merely a nuisance (as they had been for centuries). Absorbed into a
system of bureaucratically organised hygienic and epidemiological practices,
they became a problem to be solved. Recalling Bauman’s definition, they were
‘reduced to a set of quantitative measures’ (Bauman 1989: 102), for their death
was measured in kilograms, square metres of collected bodies or total tonnage
of rat poison consumed.
In sum, the moral denigration that occurs in deratisation rhetoric entails the
symbolic exclusion of an entire species from the animal sphere. In militaristic
narratives, the rat becomes ‘something more’ than an animal, for it is symboli-
cally defined as an anthropomorphic adversary of the human species. In the

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hygiene narrative, however, the rat is ‘something less’ than mere animal, for
it is redefined as a pathogen and classified as a technical issue. In both cases,
however, the rat ceases to be an animal on the discursive level.

The Rat as ‘the Other’: Mechanisms of Ethnic and Political Cleansing in

Deratisation Rhetoric
Images of the rat from Stalinist times clearly use the rhetoric of Othering. They
reproduce the narrative schemas and projected images of groups that have been
morally denigrated and dehumanised by twentieth-century totalitarianisms in the
context of genocide or other forms of political exclusion. They are structurally
analogical to ‘hygienic’ metaphors often used to describe ethnic cleansing, as well
as the militaristic terminology of political purges. Consequently, they followed
two cultural schemas dominant in mid-twentieth-century Poland: the figure of the
Jew in prewar and wartime antisemitic propaganda and the figure of the enemy in
Stalinist propaganda. In the first instance, deratisation uses iconographic motifs
and linguistic templates that invoke the rhetoric of prewar antisemitism. Nazi
propaganda frequently portrayed Jewish people as rats, and many scholars have
noted the ecological underpinnings of the Holocaust (Bauman 1989; Neumann

Figure 7.2 Bogdan Nowakowski. Rozwój. 1925. Courtesy of the

Poster Museum, Wilanow. Public Domain.

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 rat control in poland 1945–1956

2012). Here, I will examine two portraits predating 1945 in order to link postwar
deratisation rhetoric to prewar antisemitism.
The first portrait is a cover of the magazine Rozwój (meaning ‘Development’)
from 1925 (Fig. 7.2), illustrated by Bogdan Nowakowski and depicting a swarm
of rats. The rats are fleeing a house, where a man in uniform banishes them by
throwing flaming torches. The eagle emblem from the Polish national flag on the
man’s door suggests that the building symbolises Poland. On closer investiga-
tion, we see that the rats have certain traits associated with Jewish stereotypes:
payot, caricaturised facial features, and stars of David printed on their hats. This
image of rat extermination is rather specific, for the object of extermination is, by
implication, the Jewish people, now dehumanised and portrayed as rodents. The
image links the rhetoric of pest eradication to a political rhetoric that, like Nazi
propaganda, treats Jews as harmful, unsanitary animals that must be eradicated
so the modern nation can be built. The extermination of rats-as-Jews is portrayed
as an attempt to cleanse Poland-as-home of undesired elements by literally herd-
ing them beyond the threshold of the home (extermino as exile).
In my second example, a poster advertising ‘Delicia’ poison (Fig. 7.3), anti-
semitic and deratisation rhetoric again coincide. The poster is undated but is

Figure 7.3 Anon. Szczury tępi Delicia. Undated [c.1940s]. Courtesy of the
Polona Archive, Narodowa Library. Public Domain.

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 gabriela jarzębowska

likely to be from the time of the Nazi occupation. It portrays two rats in realistic
detail – a level of realism conspicuously undermined by the rats’ unnaturally red
pupils. Even more interesting than the rats themselves are the poster’s graphics.
Its colour scheme and typography distinctly resemble Nazi aesthetics. While
antisemitic allusions may be less evident here than in my previous example,
the choice to link rat extermination to Nazi aesthetics would have conjured
unambiguous connotations. The relationship between these illustrations lies in
their rhetorical contrast: while the earlier image uses the narrative schema of
rat eradication to convey an antisemitic message, the ‘Delicia’ poster references
Nazi aesthetics to transpose the logic of extermination (and its attendant emo-
tions) to the animal context. Both posters are therefore visual amalgams of anti-
semitic and deratisation narratives.
Postwar deratisation propaganda grew out of this historically drawn link
between the denigrated figures of the rat and the Jew. I do not suggest that the
portrait of the rat in Stalinist propaganda conceals latent antisemitic messag-
ing, but rather that on an iconographic and linguistic level it absorbs motifs
and structures that originated in racist rhetoric. I am speaking specifically of
motifs such as the image of the rat as thief, epidemiological hazard and threat
to the national economy. Today, these analogies may seem less obvious, but
we can infer that they were intelligible to the average addressee of deratisation
propaganda in the postwar period.
The second linguistic and iconographic tradition that laid the groundwork
for postwar deratisation propaganda was Stalinist propaganda about ‘the
enemy’. This motif offers another context for understanding how the political
and the biological intertwine in postwar Polish deratisation rhetoric. While the
tendency in totalitarian systems to cast political enemies as vermin has been
the subject of extensive scholarship, scholars have not yet acknowledged the
practice’s bilateral nature.
Rhetoric casting the rat as enemy is rooted in the phantasm of the politi-
cal enemy circulating in Polish propaganda in the 1950s. This phantasm had
a specific function during Stalinism: to mobilise society against real or fab-
ricated threats. Socialist propaganda often used military terminology. For
instance, the word walka (meaning combat, fight or struggle) was applied to
even trivial affairs, such as the fight against alcoholism, minor thefts or poach-
ing. According to this discourse, the enemy can be easily singled out, for they
carry repulsive physical traits that reflect their inferior character. To understand
the convergence of biological and political narratives in Stalinist deratisation
propaganda, we must first consider the notion of ‘social vermin’ (meaning,
roughly, ‘social parasite’), common in socialist rhetoric of this period. This term
was reserved for individuals who actively harmed the social good (causing eco-
nomic losses and other kinds of damage) out of negligence, selfishness or loy-
alty to enemies of the system. These actions would be portrayed as intentional

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 rat control in poland 1945–1956

Figure 7.4 Włodzimierz Zakrzewski. Demokracja Buduje. 1945.

Poster Museum, Wilanow.

and malice-driven acts of sabotage. The parasite could be a thief, ‘Kulak’ or

poacher, although these details would sometimes be left visually vague, to be
filled in later ad hoc with the negative archetype most relevant to the moment.
On a visual level, the social vermin were often dehumanised and given traits
resembling ill-favoured animals.
One instance of the rat motif’s presence in Stalinist political propaganda
is a poster by Włodzimierz Zakrzewski from 1945 (Fig. 7.4). Zakrzewski
depicts a rat gnawing at the foundations of a home. The poster reads:
‘Democracy builds, the opposition wants to destroy.’ Oppositional forces are
portrayed as a rodent destroying the newly erected foundations of the social-
ist system. While the social vermin concept is not made verbally explicit,
the familiarity of the rat-pest archetype makes this connection legible to the
poster’s addressees. Reading this poster in the context of deratisation rheto-
ric reveals interesting connections. While deratisation propaganda materi-
als use the stereotype of the enemy to incentivise exterminating rats, the
poster inverts this operation: by invoking the negative stereotype of the rat
as vermin, it morally condemns ‘social vermin’. As was the case with images
reproducing antisemitic messaging, the poster relies on a reciprocal relation.

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The metaphor functions both ways: the rat is compared to the Jew/social
vermin/enemy, while simultaneously, the Jew/social vermin/enemy is likened
to the rat. As a result, identifying the source metaphor is no easy task, for it
seems to draw from dominant cultural schemas for excluding the Other that
devalue individuals or groups within the hierarchy of a given historical and
cultural context. The construction of such hierarchies is therefore a dynamic
process conditioned by its specific cultural context and the objectives and
nuances of the political agenda involved. Degrading a targeted social group
by likening its members to rats can simultaneously occur through a counter-
rhetoric that devalues nonhuman animals by anthropomorphising them and
aligning them with the enemy. In these metaphors the signifier and signi-
fied may switch places, yet they both remain discursively bound together by
association.
The figure of the Jew in Nazi propaganda and the enemy in Stalinist pro-
paganda have much in common: the dehumanisation of the members of a
specific group, the belief that their actions harm the society/nation, and finally,
a clear connection to the discourse of hygiene and metaphors of cleansing.
Of course, there are also obvious differences between these two figures. For
instance, Nazi genocidal discourse had an extensive biological basis (to invoke
Bauman again, it was framed as ‘a matter of pulling out the weeds’) (Bauman
1989: 92), while the rhetoric of Stalinist purges was premised on a political
logic that defined the enemy not by their ethnicity but according to their atti-
tude toward the system. In this sense, the rhetoric of the Holocaust coincides
with the mechanisms of ethnic cleansing, while Stalinist rhetoric belongs in the
category of political purges.
I argue, however, that in the specific case of deratisation propaganda, these
two narratives have fused on the rhetorical level. Rat extermination is a bio-
logically oriented operation based on species identity. In this way, it is implic-
itly pseudo-ethnic, for it does not combat a targeted rat population that has
exceeded critical mass and poses a potential threat. On the contrary, it combats
rats in general. The rhetoric calling for the eradication of these nonhuman ani-
mals suggests that annihilation was the ultimate goal. According to this logic,
rats’ potential harm is a congenital trait embedded in their species affiliation.
At the same time, this perception of rats reproduces the rhetorical schemas
used to describe enemies of the system in Stalinist propaganda. This militaristic
rhetoric and the consolidation of the rat and social vermin as figures suggest
that there is something more to this relation than mere analogy. In Stalinist pro-
paganda, the rat not only resembles the political enemy, but it literally becomes
the enemy, absorbing semantic connotations from the image system of political
propaganda. In this sense, deratisation rhetoric is doubly derivative: it appro-
priates the genocidal, ‘hygienic’ narrative of antisemitism and Stalinist depic-
tions of political enemies.

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 rat control in poland 1945–1956

Species Cleansing as a Militaristic Dimension of Modernisation

For the reasons outlined above, I propose the term ‘species cleansing’ to
describe the methodical extermination of nonhuman animals based on their
species identity and the terminology of annihilation coupled with the large-
scale social mobilisation accompanying this practice. Stalinist-era propaganda
visualises species cleansing according to rhetorical strategies that parallel those
of genocide: the symbolic exclusion from society (or, in this case, symbolic
exclusion from the community of vertebrates), shifting collective blame for
social calamities to one group (scapegoating), and incensing the public actively
and enthusiastically to contribute to extermination programmes. The symbolic
status of the ‘subanimal’ was constructed according to cultural conceptions of
impurity and purification. This logic, of course, has deep cultural roots tied to
a conception of dirt that Mary Douglas has described as the disruption of social
order and as ‘matter out of place’ (1966: 36). Yet species cleansing was made
possible only as a consequence of a scientific hygienic superstructure (which,
in turn, followed the emergence of germ theory) that informed the cultural
schema depicting rats as vectors of disease. This superstructure allowed these
nonhuman animals to be fully absorbed into ‘hygienic’ discursive practices.
The consolidation of discourses of war, sanitation and epidemiology is rel-
evant beyond the specific case of rat extermination. It also impacted antisemitic
Nazi rhetoric. Saul Friedlander has argued that it drew its strength from the dis-
cursive fusion of older religious and cultural antisemitic tropes (describing Jews
as Christ killers, well poisoners, traitors and forces of evil in Western history
and society) with ‘scientific’ or ‘biological’ narratives exploiting sanitary meta-
phors. In fact, these two narratives reinforced one another. It was the fusing of
the two strands, according to which ‘modern’ tactics were used to appeal to old
prejudices, that made the antisemitic message so powerful (Friedlander 2007).6
This fusion, however, has larger cultural underpinnings that exceed strictly
genocidal logic. Susan Sontag, for instance, has pointed out that the language
surrounding disease also gravitates toward militaristic metaphors. We speak
of the ‘invasion’ of an illness and an organism’s ‘defence mechanisms’. Sontag
notes that the basic metaphors for cancer are directly sourced from militant
language. Medicinal terms have a similar inflection: radiotherapy uses met-
aphors of aerial warfare, according to which patients are ‘bombarded’ with
toxic rays. Chemotherapy, meanwhile, is described as poison-based chemical
warfare (Sontag 1978: 65).
Incorporating troublesome nonhuman animals into hygiene rhetoric repro-
duces this logic. As an embodiment of disease, the alleged pest becomes the
object of practices repeating the mechanisms of war. In his comparative analy-
sis of pesticide use and chemical weapons in the twentieth century, Edmund
Russell has drawn extensive parallels between his two subjects on the level of
propaganda, institutions and actual methods employed. Russell insists that the

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analogy works both ways: the war with the enemy is portrayed as a war against
pests, while the war on pests is conceived according to the schema of the war
with the enemy (Russell 2011: 99). As I have demonstrated, this rhetorical
reciprocity is also at play in Polish discourse on the elimination of enemies and
pests. It reflects a broader mechanism tied to dynamics of modernisation, par-
ticularly in the socialist context. Even this brief overview of Polish propaganda
materials from 1945 to 1956 reveals how metaphors of cleansing and purifi-
cation appear frequently in language describing the war on fascism, wartime
profiteers, social vermin and other pejorative archetypes. For all these reasons,
the language of sanitation and modernisation is deeply tied to military rhetoric.
The rhetorical unification of military and hygiene narratives in Stalinist
language is not exclusive to the discourse of rat extermination, although it
is particularly evident in this case. This may be because Stalinist propaganda
portrayed nature as intensely and intrinsically antimodern – a force that must
be tamed and exploited in the name of progress. Such rhetoric conceptual-
ises the natural environment as a dangerous adversary, a residue of the pre-
revolutionary past that must undergo socialist industrialisation. Consequently,
language describing humanity’s struggle against nature often draws on military
rhetoric to mobilise the public and convince people that they are under siege.
Nature became the new enemy for the socialist world (replacing the Third
Reich), and the only way to conquer it was to force its unconditional surrender
(Gończyński-Jussis 2016: 46; see also Brain 2010).
In this light, we can see how rats (nonhuman animals burdened with nega-
tive cultural connotations and disrupting the modernisation regime) are a
useful counterpart for the figure of the enemy. By extending the Stalinist por-
trayal of nature, the territory rats inhabit can be framed as backward and
undeveloped, while the reconstruction and modernisation of cities call for the
species’ annihilation. Socialist modernisation wages war against the rat as a
symbol of poverty, disease, wartime destruction and unhygienic backward-
ness. To paraphrase Bauman’s words on genocide again, we might say that
killing these nonhuman animals was depicted as an act of creation rather
than destruction, for it was linked to the creation of a better, healthier and
more modern society (Bauman 1989: 92).
We should bear in mind, however, that the consolidation of military and
hygiene rhetoric in environmental discourse of this period is not specific to
the Eastern Bloc and belongs in the broader context of modernisation. The
mid-twentieth century witnessed a sharp rise in the deployment of combative,
violent language to describe relations between humans and their environment.
This trend prevailed in countries on the other side of the Iron Curtain, par-
ticularly in the United States. In the 1940s and 1950s, there was a sudden
rise in unregulated pesticide usage and a new sense of faith that humankind
could fully conquer nature (Russell 2011). This process paralleled trends like

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the emergence of factory farming and the rapid development of laboratory test-
ing on animals. In these same decades, the notion of ecological invasion was
used to describe ecological dynamics in military terms. Neel Ahuja has noted
that in twentieth-century American politics, the management of species poten-
tially carrying harmful pathogens (understood as the management of biological
risk) coincides with the country’s territorial and economic expansion (Ahuja
2016). All these trends may stem from a belief system specific to this period
that represents humanity’s domination over nature (often expressed through
military symbols) as an instrument of modernisation and progress. We can read
the concerted efforts to exterminate rats in the USA in the 1940s (such as the
Baltimore programmes) as a product of these processes. What is more, on both
sides of the Iron Curtain, rat extermination propaganda shares this militaristic
tone. Lianne McTavish and Jingjing Zheng have demonstrated that extermina-
tion campaigns in Alberta in the 1950s (like Stalinist campaigns in Poland)
also portrayed the rat as enemy. Their research reveals a clear link between
Cold War rhetoric and anti-rat campaigns, while on a visual level, the latter
references American propaganda from the Second World War that depicted the
Japanese as rats (McTavish and Zheng 2011).

Rat Rhetoric Today

The antagonistic rhetoric used to describe rat extermination in the Stalinist
era is therefore the product of several determinants. At the most basic level, it
reveals the effects of the escalated language of public debate of this period that
castigated the enemy and used military metaphors. More broadly, it is shaped
by the Soviet conception of nature in militaristic terms and prewar and war-
time visual and linguistic clichés that were often racist in origin. On a broader
level, however, it may also be tied to a specific feature of the axiology underly-
ing modernity’s antagonistic attitude toward the natural environment and the
belief that humans can fully subordinate nature to their needs. This trend thus
reflects the overall escalation of public discourse precipitated by the two World
Wars followed by the Cold War, and scientific progress, which had seeded the
hope that new, chemical methods for exterminating harmful organisms would
enable humanity’s total emancipation from environmental constraints.
In this light, the escalation of extermination campaigns in postwar Poland
and the militaristic and hygiene-oriented rhetoric they employed reflect a spe-
cific developmental stage of modernity where military terminology converged
with narratives of hygiene and modernisation. In the United States, this nar-
rative was gradually dismissed from the late 1950s. The publication of Rachel
Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) is often cited as a watershed moment in this
incremental rhetorical shift in humans’ relationship to the environment. In
Poland, a similar discursive shift was prompted by the political transforma-
tions following the Thaw.

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 gabriela jarzębowska

Yet, the figure of the enemy-rat did not disappear from rat control propa-
ganda completely. Indeed, the highly euphemistic, biopolitical narrative of rats as
pathogens distinctly shapes public perception of the species today and on-going
eradication programmes. Yet, tellingly, this narrative is often replaced (or at least
complemented) by a militaristic one when the problem is perceived to have grown
severe and more concerted extermination efforts are attempted. When rat control
ceases to be taboo (veiled in sterile, sanitary discursive practices) and becomes an
issue of public debate, it can transform into a confrontational narrative that uses
militaristic metaphors to stoke social fears. Bill de Blasio’s $32-million dollar plan
announced in 2017 to increase rat control in New York City may be a case in
point, for it is clearly framed as ‘a war’ (Alkousaa 2017).
Therefore, while ‘hygiene’ discourse has, to a vast extent, taken over con-
temporary rat-related imaginaries, the military rhetoric still lurks under the
surface, to be invoked whenever rat problems appear to get out of control.
Further research is needed on the interconnections between contemporary rat
control rhetoric and deprecatory rhetoric targeting excluded and under-privi-
leged social groups, such as racist and anti-immigrant discourse. I suspect one
could establish clear links between these two narratives, however vastly their
dynamics and constitution may differ from Stalinist rhetoric. The latter was the
product of a particular historical and geopolitical context – namely, the violent
language of a totalitarian regime. But the incorporation of problematic nonhu-
man animals into political imaginaries and the resulting replication of ‘other-
ing’ rhetoric can also be observed in contemporary public debate. It could be
productive to identify these similarities through cross-species meta-analysis not
only to determine how environmental management is discursively organised,
but also to explore how the politics of exclusion operate.
Translated by Eliza Rose
The project ‘Species Cleansing: The Political Dimension of Rat Extermi-
nation after 1945’ was funded by the National Centre of Science (Narodowe
Centrum Nauki) and its Preludium Competition according to decree 2017/27/N/
HS3/00013.

Works Cited
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of Species. Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press Books.
Alkousaa, Riham. 2017. ‘New York City Declares War on Rats with $32 Million Plan’.
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BN19X2YR> (last accessed 7 July 2022).
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Biehler, Dawn. 2013. Pests in the City: Flies, Bedbugs, Cockroaches and Rats. Seattle:
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Brain, Stephen. 2010. ‘The Great Stalin Plan for the Transformation of Nature’. Envi-
ronmental History 15: 670–700.
Brodniewicz, Aleksander. 1953. Dlaczego należy tępić szczury? Biblioteka Popularno-
Naukowa Zarządu Dezynfekcji, Dezynsekcji i Deratyzacji w Warszawie, Warsaw.
Czyżewski, Janusz Antoni. 1953. ‘Zwalczanie szczurów na dużych obszarach’. Przeglad
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Douglas, Mary. 1966. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and
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Franklin, Adrian. 2011. ‘An Improper Nature? Introduced Animals and “Species
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Gończyński-Jussis, Filip. 2016. ‘Przeobraziciele przyrody: Motyw kształtowania
środowiska naturalnego przez ludzi radzieckich i ich polskich naśladowców
w propagandzie stalinizmu’. Historyka: Studia metodologiczne 46: 115–33.
Kasperbauer, Tyler Joshua. 2018. Subhuman. The Moral Psychology of Human Attitudes
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of Chemical Rodenticides’. Endeavour 29.3: 119–25.
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Mackenzie, Robin. 2011. ‘How the Politics of Inclusion/Exclusion and the Neurosci-
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McTavish, Lianne and Jingjing Zheng. 2011. ‘Rats in Alberta: Looking at Pest-Control
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Oliver, Sophie. 2011. ‘Dehumanization: Perceiving the Body as (In)human’. In Humiliation,
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Hannes Kuch, Christian Neuhäuser and Elaine Webster, 85–100. Dordrecht: Springer.
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Biblioteka Popularno-Naukowa Zarządu Dezynfekcji, Dezynsekcji i Deratyzacji
w Warszawie.
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cum dezynfektora, dezynsektora i deratyzatora. Ed. Stanisław Rybicki. Warsaw:
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Ślusarski, Wiesław. 1952. Szczury!!! Patrz, jaki los chcą nam zgotować te wojownicze i
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Sontag, Susan. 1978. Illness as Metaphor. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Steciąg, Magdalena and Sylwia Wodzińska. 2016. ‘The Colorado Beetle’s Attack or the
Potato Bug in the Cold War Propaganda Service in Poland’. Language & Ecol-
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Notes
1. This chapter is the product of dissertation research conducted in the following
archives: Central Archives of Modern Records, National Archive in Łódź, Te
National Archive in Szczecin, National Library, Museum of Disinfection, Disin-
section and Deratisation, and Poster Museum at Wilanów. In my study, I offer a
semiotic and iconographic analysis of propaganda ephemera about rats and derati-
sation from 1945 to 1956 (posters, pamphlets, proclamations, expert reports, radio
commentaries, documents). The actual analyses are omitted from this chapter for
the sake of brevity. Here, I attend to the conclusions and conceptual ramifications
of my analyses of historical sources and situate these findings within their broader
cultural context.
2. A term from Stalinist propaganda referring to land-owning peasants who resisted
giving up their land to the state during the postwar land reforms.
3. In Poland’s prewar discourse on this problem, the notion of ‘deratisation’ was not
yet in circulation. At the time, the term was already used in several other languages
(such as French) and, sporadically, in English, although it was never fully adopted
into the English lexicon. It did, however, catch on in Polish, and in the first decade
following the war, it became the universal term for the extermination of rodents.
4. Such as ANTU (with the Polish names Anfantina and Antuder) and, in the 1950s,
warfarin (with the names Kumader and Kumatox).
5. It was Adrian Franklin who first used the term ‘species cleansing’ to describe man-
agement policies for introduced species in Australia (Franklin 2011).
6. I would like to thank Ethan Kleinberg for suggesting that I use Friedlander’s frame-
work to complement this analysis.

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 8

THE BARKING DOG AND CRYING BIRD

IN PARTITION STORIES: BEASTLY
MODERNISM AND THE SUBALTERN
ANIMISM OF MANTO, RAKESH
AND ANAND

Beerendra Pandey

Literary writings on the Partition of India generally portray the horrific vio-
lence of the watershed event as beastly instead of tracing it to the beast in the
human species. This deflection, with its scapegoating of beasts and Othering
of beastliness, masks the grisly deportment of humans towards the Other. In
an exception to this trend of blaming the beasts, some modernist writers from
India, like Saadat Hasan Manto, Mulk Raj Anand and Mohan Rakesh, appeal
to ‘subaltern animism’ (Narayanan 2017: 488). Narayanan derives this notion
of subaltern animism from the concept of subaltern urbanism to recognise the
citizenship, agency and resistance of the nonhuman animals in Indian urban
spaces in line with the personhood and agency of the marginalised and dispos-
sessed humans in Indian towns and cities.
Subaltern animism does not, however, entail a liberatory promise as much
as ‘a sensibility toward the nonhuman that has left vestiges among subaltern
peoples’ (Keller 2005: 129). Although it cannot recover a lost relational living,
it does underscore the need for a relational epistemology in the face of what
Catherine Keller calls the theology of empire that explains the killing of people
and wildlife as manifest destiny and justifies pre-emptive action and demonisa-
tion of the Other. The Indian modernist writers I explore in this chapter depict
the trauma of Partition violence in deference to a relational epistemology. As
they do so, they use disjunctive irony which helps reveal the shared embodi-
ment – animality and humanity – in a paradoxical poise, thereby heightening
the effect of both irony and trauma. The intensification of irony and trauma,

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 beerendra pandey

by their mutual interactions, shocks the reader into a critical engagement with
their own animality – a compelling confrontation which recovers subaltern
animism from the margins of humanism. The beastly modernism of Manto,
Rakesh and Anand acknowledges the shared conditions of human and animal
existence, including their marginalisations. My exploration of the language
of beastly modernism here first considers two of Manto’s stories in Urdu, a
vignette titled ‘Sharing the Loot’ (1948) in Black Margins and the ‘The Dog of
Tetwal’ (1951), then Anand’s story in English ‘The Parrot in the Cage’ (1954),
and finally Mohan Rakesh’s two stories in Hindi – ‘The Owner of the Rubble’
(1957) and ‘God’s Dog’ (1958).
Manto, considered to be a rebel in his lifetime, reposes no faith in a human-
ism rooted in religion and philosophy. He shows little deference to God and
challenges Him with a Devil-like arrogance: in his own epitaph, he ‘wonder[s]
if he is a greater short story writer than God’ (qtd in Ispahani 1988: 193).
Manto’s seemingly devilish ego here actually ‘expresses the predicament of a
creative human spirit that must continue the work of the creation in a world
which, it believes, has been permanently abandoned by god’ (Chatterjee 2001:
18). Manto does the god’s work by using black humour to laugh at the dark
sides of humanism modelled on the divine. His configuration of the experiences
of subaltern humans and nonhuman animals during the Partition riots swerves
away from metropolitan modernism’s élitist bludgeons to moral corrections
which do not, however, actualise: in Eliot’s The Waste Land (2001) the much-
awaited rain, after all, does not fall.1 Manto’s irony in ‘Sharing the Loot’ and
‘The Dog of Tetwal’ diagnoses a humanism diseased by religious restraints and
political pieties with a sharpness which, on the one hand, undercuts the closed
space between the human and the animal and, on the other hand, dramatises
the open space that man and beast co-inhabit.
Manto’s black humour communicates the trauma of Partition violence in
a way that interrogates the value system of his readers even as he makes them
laugh: the mélange of irony’s grotesqueness and humour’s joyousness produces
only a ‘dianoetic laugh’ (O’Neill 1983: 160), which leaves readers ‘laughing
so hard they feel as grave as corpses’ (Woolf 1979: 299). Manto’s irony does
not imagine a correction of the grotesque affairs of the world but confronts
them with an intensity reminiscent of a Western modernist response ‘to a crisis
of consciousness that is his bedeviling sense of an irreducible breach between
a need for order [. . .] and the disorderliness of reality’ (Kadir 1994: 117).
The force of the grotesque overwhelms the humorous; so much so that the
latter’s corrective potency diminishes. What emerges is a disjunctive irony which
transmutes the absurdities, brutalities, perversions and traumas into ‘an equal
poise of opposites: the form of an unresolvable paradox’ and without much
amelioration (Wilde 1981: 10). The intensity of this irony coalesces with the
trauma of Partition violence to produce an affect of shock at the crumbling of

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 the subaltern animism of manto, rakesh and anand

humanism. In ‘Sharing the Loot’, for example, a biting discrepancy ironises the
whole concept of the human and the nonhuman animal in critical situations,
when the animal in the man arises and the human in the animal is spontane-
ously expressed. In ‘Sharing the Loot’, a houseowner helps a group of raiders
to loot his own valuables while his dog demonstrates a hostility towards them.
There is a telling divergence between the plunderers’ display of animalism and
the dog’s revelation of humanism in his sense of loyalty. The houseowner turns
the adverse situation to his favour by complying with the wishes of the looters.
This way, he prevents them from harming him and facilitates the intervention
of the dog. He loses many of his valuable belongings to the humans but, in con-
trast, he gets in compensation the love, loyalty and protection of the animal.
The polarity, at the centre of which lies the anthropomorphic recognition of the
dog’s affection and loyalty, relates back to the title, which hints at men shar-
ing both their animality and the booty with other fellows, but not the human
attributes of care for and loyalty to the Other that a nonhuman animal – the
dog – displays.
If the canine in the vignette is a companion animal, his counterpart in the
story ‘The Dog of Tetwal’ is an anonymous stray which becomes an unfortunate
victim of crossfire in the 1948 war between India and Pakistan over territorial
rights in Kashmir. Tetwal is the name of a village that lies inside the military
line of control in Pakistan. Hostility between the Indian and Pakistani soldiers
permeates the story, which narrates the entry of a dog into a camp of frustrated
Indian soldiers, who befriend it and attach a label to it bearing an Indian name.
When the dog returns, with the label, to the Pakistani side after an absence of a
few days, the Pakistani soldiers respond with another label bearing a Pakistani
name. As the dog again returns to the Indian side, the poor creature that has
been merely looking for companionship becomes an alibi for a bout of crossfir-
ing which terrorises and eventually kills the stray animal. As Hannah Arendt
notes, a stray dog has a lesser ‘chance to survive’ because he is ‘just a dog in
general’ (Arendt 1973: 287), and the general public place upon stray dogs the
disgrace of ‘worthlessness, ugliness and randomness’ (McHugh 2004: 142) and
they are tainted as ‘trespassers’ (Narayanan 2017: 480). Nevertheless, quite a
few individuals in South Asia give stray dogs food and do not report them to
the municipality for confinement to ‘worse conditions than the streets, or more
likely extermination’ (Fortuny 2014: 276). Stray dogs, thus, oscillate between
the zones of disposable and protected life, an ambivalence that makes visible the
biopolitics of power and powerlessness vis-à-vis humans and canids.
‘The Dog of Tetwal’ opens on a strikingly ironic note: the open space of the
hills ‘in roseate hue’ and the ‘thin, light clouds [. . .] in the blue sky’ come out
in sharp contrast to the ‘entrenched’ space of the soldiers (Manto 2007: 80).
The life forms, including animal lives, pulsate with their own particular poten-
tiality: the ‘chirping birds’, the ‘bloom[ing] flowers’ and ‘honey-bearing bees’

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 beerendra pandey

are agreeably ‘immersed in [. . .] necessary work’ (80). Manto’s description of

the animal environment here produces a state of what Giorgio Agamben terms
‘captivation’, or predetermined behavioural reflexes to fixed stimuli (Agamben
2004: 52). Captivation is a mode proper to the animals – an absorption which
translates as an ‘incomparable wealth’ for them but which in humans registers
as an utter ‘poverty’ (60). As such, a new difference between the human and the
nonhuman animal is that the human is ‘simply an animal that has learned to
become bored’ (70). Manto, like Agamben, compares animals’ natural captiva-
tion with human boredom:

For several days now, the soldiers on both sides of the mountain had been
restless, as no decisive action was taking place. Lying in their positions,
they would get bored and then attempt to recite sh’ers2 to one another. If
no one listened, they would hum to themselves. They remained lying on
their stomachs or backs on the rocky ground, and when the order came,
let off a round or two. (Manto 2007: 80)

At ironic odds with the animals’ disinhibiting environment are the situ-
ational enclosures of the soldiers’ ‘safe positions’ (80), which inhibit them in a
captivated condition evocative of that of nonhuman animals, whom humans
misapprehend as having no interest other than foraging and coupling. The
jaded soldiers do nothing except for erratic firing and irregular singing. Despite
a separation between the animals and the soldiers, a striking proximity between
them is disclosed in boredom, where humans find themselves ‘delivered over
to things that refuse themselves’ (Agamben 2004: 65). Boredom has bound
the soldiers to things that nonetheless offer them nothing; they are taken up
by things that refuse their revelation. Thus, the point of Manto’s irony, which
emerges from the zone of indistinction – the humAnimal – turns on the soldiers’
animal-like betraying of a behavioural reflex to the fixed stimulus – firing at
the perceived enemy. They are unable to kill their boredom, which foregrounds
itself as ‘the autoimmune disease of the anthropological machine – the surplus
of animality that is disavowed’, which results in biopolitical counterreactions
(Lewis 2012: 294). When the machine takes over, its ironic character comes
to the fore: while safeguarding the human, it forces out and externalises the
underlying animal. Manto, like Agamben, makes his readers realise that the
human merely resides in a suspension of that animality which would render
inoperative the anthropological machine of humanism.
In a biopolitical counterresponse to boredom, Indian soldier Banta Singh
catches a stray dog by his tail and says: ‘The poor thing is a refugee!’ (Manto
2007: 82). He names him Chapad Jhunjhun and cuddles him. The affectionate
attitude of the Indian soldiers is not, however, simply an act of compassionate
humanitarianism; instead, it is bound up in the nation-state’s obsession with

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 the subaltern animism of manto, rakesh and anand

affixing identities. Fellow Indian soldier Jamadar Harnam Singh, who tenta-
tively takes the dog to be Indian, correlates his sniffing face with language and
an articulation of his desire for leftover food, but he consistently ignores the
gesture embodied in the canine’s wagging of his tail. Giving importance to the
signification of the dog’s face, Harnam Singh gives him a biscuit to eat but he
immediately doubts the canine’s Hindustani identity. Overcome with misgiv-
ings, he summarily dismisses the gesture of wagging, which, in Agambenian
logic, is ‘pure praxis’ (2000: 79): an unfolding of an ontological realm of ethics,
the ironic absence of which, in the nationalistic naming of the canine refugee,
exposes the statist, teleological and identarian philanthropy of the warring sol-
diers. Nationalism is the palpable butt of Manto’s irony: he scorns the fasten-
ing of nationalist labels on the dog by both the Indian and Pakistani soldiers.
The Pakistani soldiers even ludicrously replace the dog’s Indian name with a
nonsensical name of their own – Sapar Sunsun. Besides the implied ridicule, the
naming also amounts to rendering the dog as a pet, which connotes the owner’s
biopolitical dominance over the animal as a piece of movable property.
In ironic contrast to the identarian blindness of the soldiers on both sides,
the dog sees them as humans, and not as Indians or Pakistanis. He expects them
to mete out to him the usual human treatment as per the age-old trust between
canids and hominids. This canine–human trust is based on mutual give and
take; the dog reciprocates for the crumbs and the cuddles with a ‘cheerful’
companionship vis-à-vis the bored soldiers (Manto 2007: 83). Such a symbiosis
seems to substantiate companionable thinking, but Manto indicates that the
soldiers do not qualify for universal shareability, because the logic of Partition
has so amplified alterity that even the common heritage of ‘Heer’3 song looks
ironically incongruous (81). The absurdity of alterity and Partition logic also
leads to the ridiculous division of even the dog as ‘Hindustani or Pakistani’
(83). Such assertions of absolute difference make the soldiers suffer from ‘soul
blindness’ ‘with respect to non-human animals’ (Cavell 2008: 93). Manto uses
the imagery of darkness as an objective correlative to the soldiers’ internal
negativity, and pits it against the imagery of light in order to dramatise its cut-
ting contrast: ‘In the blink of an eye, just as when one presses a button and
the electricity generates light, the sun’s rays flooded the mountainous region of
Tetwal’ (Manto 2007: 83). Whereas light suggests the positive vibrations in the
natural nonhuman world, its counterpart reveals the negative dynamics of the
human world.
Manto’s irony challenges this disavowed underside of humanism that rein-
forces prejudice and the ideological logic of Otherness, a belief system which
legitimates the atrocities enacted on both underdogs and nonhumans. It is highly
ironic that when the winter and summer work out ‘peace with one another’
(80), the Indian and Pakistani soldiers, through their soul-blindness, maximise
difference despite their sameness. They shut their eyes to the moral beauty of

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 beerendra pandey

the canine wisdom; the stray dog recognises no alterity and provides compan-
ionship to whichever of the two groups he is with. The chilling irony is that he
is killed for this very reason – his scrambling to both sides makes the militarised
line of the divide look patently preposterous. The soul-blind soldiers see the
politics of universal shareability inherent in the companionable deportment of
the dog, but they fail to recognise the dog as a subject. Their uncanny way of
seeing everything and yet seeing nothing keeps Manto’s irony in a disjunctive
equilibrium – an unresolved incongruity verging on the pessimistic. His ironic
prose makes the readers bear witness to the monstrousness of Partition. The
story ends with an irony-intensified shock at human insensitivity: ‘Jamadar
Harnam Singh took the warm barrel of the gun in his hand and said, “He died
a dog’s death”’ (87). The ironic intensity here – that foregrounds the soldier’s
brutal behaviour and the victim’s abject position of voicelessness – challenges
the complacency of humanism with the agency of subaltern animism.
Like Saadat Hasan Manto, Mulk Raj Anand’s beastly modernism in ‘The
Parrot of the Cage’ is evident in his ability to blend incisive irony with trau-
matic shock, a key feature of his subaltern animism. Similar to Manto, Anand
uses an ironic register to shock an evasive humanity into an engagement with
the Other – a homeless old woman and a caged parrot. Evasiveness and engage-
ment are closely connected through the creatural vulnerability the old woman
shares with her companion bird.
The parrot acts as a surrogate – a substitute child – to Rukmani, a wrinkled
and toothless woman who waits for the Deputy Collector of the City of Amrit-
sar in the hope of compensation. Finding himself in alien surroundings, the
parrot keeps bursting into two cries, ‘Rukmaniai ni Rukmaniai!’ and ‘Ni tun
kithe hain?’4 (Anand 1995: 53, 54). After ignoring the parrot’s repeated cries
for a long time, she finally answers back – an answer in which she reveals her-
self as a refugee, who had escaped from the Partition riots in Lahore only the
previous night on a train. The nearby gram-seller mocks her for waiting there
and, instead, advises her to go to the Durbar Sahib temple for food. Rukmani,
however, continues to wait and when finally the Deputy Collector comes out of
his office to go elsewhere in his official car, she runs towards the vehicle where
the lathi5 is being wielded on the crowd of refugees who are clamouring for
help. The state apparatus is portrayed as callous and brutal. While the cries of
the refugees that are ringing in the air – ‘Hujoor, Mai-Baap, hear us! Sarkar!
Dipty Sahib!’6 – do not reach the ears of the Deputy Collector, the police action
triggers a melee in which Rukmani is trampled. Meanwhile, the parrot flaps
feverishly as his frequent cries – ‘Rukmaniai! Ni Rukmaniai!’ and ‘Ni tun kithe
hain! . . . Ni tun kithe hain!’ – take on a shrill tone (57). The gram-seller thinks
that the old woman has been killed in the stampede.
The possible death of the woman in the eyes of the gram-seller spontaneously
elicits his sympathetic response. In a moment he changes from a well-meaning

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mocker trying to make the gullible woman see her harsh reality into an empathetic
rescuer. He pushes forward to take charge of her, but then, to his pleasant sur-
prise, she shows signs of life. He drags her away to a safe spot and simultaneously
offers gram to the parrot. The gram-seller’s gesture, compelled by his surrender
to the immediate danger for the endangered and the distraught, foregrounds his
empathy – a natural perception of the Other’s pain – against the most dehumanis-
ing tendency of modern bureaucracy, which is, at the same time, its most ratio-
nalising quality. The intensity of the irony in the valorisation of the gram-seller’s
momentary but timely intervention, in contradistinction to the Deputy Collector’s
callousness, galvanises responsibility towards the Other – both humans and non-
humans. The story, however, concludes on an uncertain note for the refugee – to
the parrot’s incessant cries, Rukmani finally answers: ‘. . . I do not know where
I am! I do not know . . .’ (57). As the story ends with these words, Rukmani
remains without shelter, the implication being that the parrot will keep on crying.
Anand configures the eponymous parrot as a crying companion, a disruptive
doppelgänger, an allegory of entrapment in general and, in the case of Rukmani,
an externalisation of her confinement within a desperation exacerbated by a
false hope of receiving monetary help from the Deputy Collector. The official’s
unfeeling attitude stands in sharp and ironic contrast to the genuine, immedi-
ate surrendering of the subaltern gram-seller to the situation of creatural life in
crisis. The political edge of the irony, however, lies not so much in the contrast
obtaining as in the rupture of the given discourse of humanism by a moment of
pure praxis.
Another partition story which valorises subaltern animism is Mohan
Rakesh’s ‘The Owner of the Rubble’. My reading of the story focuses on the
shock stemming from an ironic (dis)similarity between animal and human
behaviour – an (in)congruity which coalesces with the traumatic situation.
The cumulative effect generated by this irony gathers such momentum that it
exposes the language of xenophobia mystifying the Indian historiography of
Partition. The intensity of the demystification dizzies the Indian reader’s con-
sciousness, lulled to moral smugness vis-à-vis the Pakistanis.
The story starts on a note of shock for Gani Miyan and other fellow
Pakistanis, who have come back to Amritsar after seven and a half years. The
city, once their home and hearth, lies transformed into a city of only Indians, to
a few of whom they are ‘guests’ (Rakesh 2007: 93), but to most of whom they
are strangers, ‘watched’ with ‘eagerness and curiosity’ and feared as the Demon
Other from whose proximity the city-dwellers ‘turn away’ (91). Post-Partition
Amritsar, which had been so severely hit by vicious riots against Muslims, is on
the cusp of remaking its own notion of the community: as Gyanendra Pandey
writes, ‘Frequently “our people” and “theirs” are being reconstituted, different
senses of “us” and “them” are in contention’ (1999: 44–5). The community
forges itself as the subject of history – a rut into which the official historiography

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of Partition has fallen – by demonising the outsiders (externally the Pakistanis

and internally the antisocial elements who had contributed to the ferocity of
the riots). The community engages in this realignment in order to recreate, after
the big rupture, a coherent and stable identity of its own. Demonisation of the
Other, particularly the external Other, by their animalisation as a snake or a
dog goes a long way towards reshaping both the community and its history.
An implied demonisation of the visitors from Pakistan at the outset of the story
works as a ploy to transfer the city-dwellers’ own barbarous actions of murders
and usurpations to the humans-reduced-to-animals – the Muslim Other – so
that the perpetrators may feel absolved of their own bestiality. Rakesh inti-
mates this through the trope of xenophobia on the one hand and references to
the perpetration of violence against the Muslims during the Partition riots on
the other hand.
The irony underpinning the attitude of the ‘still so suspicious’ city-dwellers
in ‘The Owner of the Rubble’ is that they fail to see not only the surprise
and sadness of the visiting Muslims at the land grab, arson and usurpation,
but also the tell-tale signs of mayhem still visible in ‘the still piles of rubble
everywhere’, in the ‘midst’ of which ‘the new buildings present a strange sight’
(93). That ethnocentric Othering that lies at the centre of the Amritsarians’
fear of the Muslims becomes ostensible in a young sister’s rebuke of her crying
child brother, who has bumped into Gani in Bansan Bazar Lane: ‘Stop crying,
you little devil! If you don’t, that Muslim will catch you and take you away!’
(93). This perception of Gani as a source of evil is ironically antithetical to the
old man’s own fear of and trauma at the Indians’ raptor-like preying on the
Muslim body and scavenging of their property: ‘His throat was dry, and his
legs were shaking [. . .] Two well-fed kites were sitting absolutely still on the
electric wires running past the house’ (93). Here, Rakesh displaces human-to-
human violence to a voracious nonhuman animal world – the kites function as
agents of torment and torture. Gani shakes with trepidation at the possibility
of the Indian community’s aggression transposed on to the rapacity and vio-
lence of a bird of prey that would pluck out human flesh in a frenzy. Despite
his fear, he moves on but halts when he comes across his erstwhile neighbour,
Manori (a child then but now a young man), near what used to be his house.
The trope of xenophobia strategically returns as they reach the spot: a rumour
about an attempted abduction of a crying child is aimed at investing Gani (and
his ilk) with malevolent monstrousness so that the Indians’ own involvement
in or complicity with the annihilation of the Muslim Other remains nullified in
their own eyes. Rakesh subtly ironises the ideology of scapegoating as a way of
normalising the Indians’ own moral turpitude.
Having thus subtly challenged the politics of the construction of the Other,
Rakesh steers readers towards the climax when Manori points out to Gani a
heap of rubble which the young man identifies as the old man’s erstwhile house.

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Its dilapidated condition shocks Gani even more than the homicide of his son,
daughter-in-law and grandchildren. Shock, the cognition of trauma, manifests
somatically in his dry mouth and infirm knees. The house, now mere debris,
ironically disinters the trauma buried deep inside him: he starts sobbing as he
rests his head against the still standing but charred doorframe. Gani stands at a
crossroad: whether to move towards a normalisation of the trauma, or towards
finding out the perpetrator as is expected by his former neighbours, peering
from their windows. Rakesh indicates Gani’s choice of the first route through
the symbolism of ‘a long worm’ issuing from the doorframe and squirming
towards an open drain (95). The choice allows Gani to plumb the depths of
his traumatic past and to wriggle through it so that he may eventually exorcise
his ghosts.
It is, however, difficult for Gani to reconcile himself to the trauma, for there
are no willing mourners with whom to grieve over the monumental tragedy.
The community remains bolted inside, waiting for some histrionics to unfold.
At this juncture, the narrator apprises readers of the gruesome dinner-time mur-
der of the entire family by Rakkha, and of the callous conduct of the commu-
nity members who had witnessed the incident through their windows but with
closed doors and locked hearts. The narrator also relates the ransacking and
torching of the house by members of the community and Rakkha’s sole owner-
ship of its remains – the heap of the rubble. Since the arson, Rakkha, however,
has been displaying dog-like aggressive protection of his territory against any
intruders. But with Rakkha still uninformed of the goings-on at his claimed
property, Gani has an opportunity for unhindered mourning. However, with
the house now in ruins and no one to join him in his bereavement, the theatre
of mourning becomes, ironically, the debris itself and the co-mourner turns out to
be the lone doorframe: ‘Then he put his arms around the doorframe and wailed,
“Speak to me, Chirag! Say something! Tell me where you are. O Kishwar!
O Sultana! My children! O God, why is Gani still alive?”’ (96). Irony here
intensifies and adds to the shock of the trauma; what should have been a col-
lective sharing of Gani’s grief is reduced to an unattended and unheard cry of
pain. Rakesh here foregrounds the reality of the disassociation of the experi-
ential with the intra-personal7 in the process of mourning in the immediate
aftermath of post-Partition Amritsar.
Ironically enough, the very killer – the much-maligned wrestler, Rakkha –
substitutes for the community in Gani’s grieving process. This man, to whom
the community has attributed the rampaging animality of ‘the wild bull’, comes
to the site with a ‘grunt’ (97). By so banishing Rakkha to the Otherness of
the nonhuman animal world, the community not only ‘distances’ itself from
the troublemaking of the Partition riots but also ‘consign[s] the violence to a
domain “elsewhere”’ (Pandey 1999: 27): ‘the handiwork of “outsiders”’ (26).
The arrival of the troublemaker, residing outside the mainstream of the mohalla

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(community), raises the possibility of a showdown, but the community is disap-

pointed to see Gani extend his arms towards Rakkha and evacuate his trauma:

‘Tell me Rakkha, how did it happen?’ Gani asked as he wiped his eyes.
‘You loved each other like brothers. Couldn’t he have hidden in your
house? . . . Rakkha, he depended on you. He used to say that, as long as
Rakkha was around, nobody would dare to hurt him. But when death
finally came, even Rakkha couldn’t help.’ (Rakesh 2007: 97–8)

The irony of the very predator innocently being perceived as the protector jolts
the murderer, such that he whispers to God for mercy. The more the unsus-
pecting father grieves before him with an intercession for forgiveness for the
killer, the more shocked the wrestler becomes. This shock produces sparks in
Rakkha’s dormant humanity: ‘Gani noticed that Rakkha’s lips had become dry
and that deep, dark circles hung under his eyes’ (98). This stands in strikingly
ironic contrast to the inhumanity of the community, which has been Othering
the wrestler as a marauding bull. Alterations become noticeable in Rakkha’s
face and he undergoes a transition from the condition of his animalistic preda-
ciousness to an upwelling of shame and sorrow that shows up in the affective
changes to his lips and eyes. Gani’s mournful face catches Rakkha ‘naked’, ‘ini-
tiating in him a process of reversal’ (Derrida 2004: 114). The day Gani leaves
for Pakistan, somewhat unburdened of the trauma, Rakkha too remembers his
‘pilgrimage [. . .] to Vaishno Devi’ (Rakesh 2007: 99). The divesting mourning,
to which Rakkha has contributed, definitely calms the devil in him; his memory
of the difficult pilgrimage to the shrine located in the Trikuta hills for a blessing
for an elimination of a demonic streak points to a softening of the hardened
heart of the bully.
Though softened, Rakkha’s dog-like propensity to react to any intrusions
into his territory continues. He ‘instinctively’ lashes out at a buffalo near his
rubble with a stick and produces a bark-like sound, ‘Tat, tat, . . . tat, tat!’, in
what looks like a protective display of belligerence (Rakesh 2007: 99). That
his body language no longer smacks of predatory aggression, though, is rein-
forced with a masterstroke of irony at the finale. A dog resting in a corner of
the debris, flustered by Rakkha’s presence there, barks at him and chases him
away, in order to announce his own unequivocal ownership of the rubble –
a supremacy he seals with a continued ‘growl’ (99). The mongrel goes on a
barking spree, which attests to the ruffian’s culpability. As a result, Rakkha
experiences further remorse. The dog’s barks become an incitement to a new
ethic as the canine testimony helps complete the process of reversal in Rakkha,
who, therefore, concedes his ownership of the rubble to the barking beast. The
dog’s role in Rakkha’s turnaround, unlike the community’s failure to enable a
change of heart in either the wrestler or themselves, stands out. Rakesh here

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accords ethical pulchritude to the mongrel and the scoundrel – both of them
now inhabiting an indeterminate zone of the humAnimal, which registers as a
trenchantly ironic absence in the community.
The climactic irony of the story, disjunctive in nature and typical of modern-
ism, does not, however, resolve the paradox between hospitality and hostility
towards the stranger that it posits, even as it ruptures the language of Otherness
embedded in Indian post-Partition discourse. The irony functions pointedly to
seek a shift of register from animalisation of the Other towards humanisation
but, at the same time, it recognises that the traumatised Indian self remains
trapped in a circle of knowledge and ignorance. Rakesh’s modernism demysti-
fies the discourse of Otherness shoring up the Indian historiography of the
trauma of Partition while paradoxically suggesting a continuity of ignorance,
since the text shows no inkling of a reversal in the xenophobic attitude of the
mohalla. The disjunctive irony merely heightens awareness of destabilising the
rigidity of a self-arrogated moral subjectivity.
A similar disjunctive-ironic dramatisation of the rigidity of the community
and, conversely, the Other’s (Rakkha’s) propinquity to canine becoming fea-
tures in Rakesh’s story ‘God’s Dog’. The disjunctive irony in this tale threatens
to rise to the level of satire. The butt of the joke is the corrupt Indian bureau-
cracy to which the task of allocating land to the evacuees from the other
side of the border has devolved. Rakesh makes the apathetic, corrupt officials
reveal themselves so that their outrageous deviation from Gandhian ethics as
the cornerstone of India’s independence is transparently exposed. Thus, the
protagonist, while feigning animality with the performativity of a dog – as we
shall see – wonders ‘if Mahatma Gandhi struggled for freedom so that these
people could misuse the freedom he won for us? Corrupt it? Give it a bad
name? Tie it up in their petty files and let it rot?’ (Rakesh 1994: 124). Sluggish,
bribery-ridden bureaucracy has been adding to the trauma of the hapless refu-
gees from Pakistan. What this analysis spotlights is Rakesh’s reprehension of
bureaucracy and community while, at the same time, his irony fails to effect
a regeneration.
The locus of irony in ‘God’s Dog’ turns out to be ‘naturism’ – a cosmol-
ogy, according to which ‘this enigmatic, earthly cosmos’ strips itself in a way
that tantalises us with becoming animal, becoming ‘a part of the inanimate
world whose life swells within and unfolds all around us’ (Abram 2010: 77, 3).
Amidst the civilised activities going on in the office compound, which forms the
setting of the story, what stands out is the contrasting natural world:

It was September and the entire compound was bathed in sunlight. A

few baby sparrows, who were learning how to fly, had hopped down
from the branch of a tree and were trying to reach it again. A few large
crows were strolling up and down the porch. (Rakesh 1994: 119)

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This invitation to become animal, however, goes unnoticed by the community

that has collected there for office work. It does not dawn upon the people that
this nonhuman animal world, ‘lively, creative and filled with unexpected pos-
sibilities’, can bring sudden illumination about new ‘forms of agency’ (Calarco
2021: 28). Their adaptation to the established system of office trappings makes
them bribe the officials in order to get them to accomplish their official tasks –
and that after a lot of kowtowing to them.
The protagonist, a middle-aged man, stands as an exception to the grovel-
ling community. Fed up with the office system which has reduced him and his
family to a dog’s life, he arrives in the compound with his entire family – an
elderly widow, her young daughter, and his sick son. He has decided to turn
literally into a dog with the purpose of really becoming agentive with regard to
his application for replacing an allotted piece of land, which is nothing but a
pit-like hollow, with a smaller chunk of arable land. For two years, the applica-
tion has made no headway because, without bribery, it cannot ‘travel from one
room to the next’ and ‘move from one desk to the next’ (Rakesh 1994: 121).
Feigning a canine self, he says that he is God’s dog and that he will go barking
on His behalf until the officers’ eardrums split, no matter how severe a punish-
ment he attracts for this action. He also takes off his shirt and tries to unknot
his tehmat8 to go completely naked. His performance of animality here shows
him in a state of what Søren Kierkegaard terms ‘negative freedom’, since ‘there
is nothing that holds him’ (Kierkegaard 1989: 166, 262) – not even his clothes,
which he has decided to discard to be naked like a dog. He remains in the
interstices between actuality when he presses for prompt action on his applica-
tion and performativity as he threatens to go naked while producing dog-like
barks. The end result of these two selves of the protagonist – the empirical self
as man and the performing self as dog – brings about a double demystification:
first, the actuality of the bribery-ridden trappings of a government office, and
second, the poignant exposé of the underdog’s half-starved status. The demysti-
fication, catalysed by the ‘moment of ironic performativity that makes possible
ethics as a form of radical self-formation, as opposed to the mere adherence
to preexisting codes, norms, and other constructions’, ‘stings us to wakeful-
ness’ (Miller 2009: 68–9). This stinging arousal from slumber makes us see our
nakedness even when we are clothed.
The performance of irony by the protagonist of ‘God’s Dog’ works to
undress officialdom and the community whose possible repugnance towards
him has no meaning. As he tells the chaprasi (clerk), neither coercion nor dis-
gust matters for him any longer because he has become ‘shameless and fear-
less’ (Rakesh 1994: 121). After having dehumanised himself, he has become
empowered enough to maintain his composure, which ironically registers as a
woeful lack in both officialdom and members of the community that quickly
gather at the spot to project their disapproval of his behaviour:

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‘You are not the only son of a bitch here. All of you here are dogs’, the
man continued. ‘All of you are dogs, and I am also a dog! The only dif-
ference is that you are the dogs of the government – you tear people to
bits and bark at the orders of the government! I am a God’s dog. I live
by his grace and bark at his command . . . Pet dogs of man, go and chew
on the bones thrown away by him; go wag your tails and beg . . .’ (122)

In this passage, degradation takes canine form and the dog marks a shrinking
from the human to the animal. Here, the protagonist, in a process of ironic
dédoublement, laughs at the jest of his own debasement. The intra-subjective
compass of irony at work here renders the self-humiliation both subject and
object of the comedy. He, like the government personnel and the common peo-
ple, has already fallen to the stature of a dog. The whole point of the irony here
is the dichotomy of a self that oscillates between being God’s watchdog and
being a pet dog, between moral beauty and moral ugliness.
The protagonist’s canine comedy, buttressed with the threat to go naked,
embarrasses the officials. Their embarrassment, which stems from their
apprehension that the performativity contravenes the prohibition of bribery,
especially awakens the Deputy Collector from his stupor. Subsequently, the
‘files move’ and ‘within half an hour’ the middle-aged petitioner is allotted
a piece of arable land for which he has been applying for two years (125).
The promptness evinced by the nodal officer is, however, not due to his lajjA
(shame), which ‘becomes the internal governor that guides one not only in not
doing what is inappropriate, but also . . . for not doing what is appropriate’
(Bhawuk 2017: 117), but an unexpected occasion of climactic embarrassment
that the dog-man’s stripping induces in this so-called ‘textile’ man. After this
awkward moment of interruption, the usual situation of bribery will continue;
neither the Deputy Collector’s nor the crowd’s clothes cover their inescapable
nakedness. The protagonist’s animalistic behaviour does not spark in them the
shame that is an internalised reaction to the consciousness of exposure. This
is what Jacques Derrida means by his famous statement: ‘An animal looks at
us and we are naked before it. Thinking perhaps begins there’ (2004: 122).
Thinking, which arises from the interstitial space between the animal and the
human, is where the ethical regime begins. But Rakesh dramatises its denial in
both officialdom and the community. For the regime of thinking to take over,
the prerequisite, as Bhawuk implies, is ‘lajjA . . . wisdom [which] guides us to
choose desires that are appropriate and those that are not’ (2017: 123). The
crowd in ‘God’s Dog’ – the second target of the protagonist’s performativity –
abjectly lacks the lajjA and is deaf to the performer’s repeated calls for
barking. The irony generated by his animalistic performance, despite being so
incisive and affective, does not jolt the community towards the wisdom of no
longer pandering to bribery. The overall effect of the dissimulative irony on

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 beerendra pandey

the readers, however, is not ‘the gloom’ once again enveloping the office com-
pound but the potential ethical radiance (Rakesh 1994: 125).
The modernist irony of Mohan Rakesh, Mulk Raj Anand and Saadat Hasan
Manto cannot dispel the despair brought about by the ego of humanism. But,
by unravelling the limits of humanism and dramatising its affinity with ani-
malism, this irony makes the hitherto disavowed beastliness a most striking
site for a rethinking of humanist subjectivity at the time of Partition, when the
inhuman within the human had manifested in the outbreak of violence. Unlike
metropolitan modernism’s irony, which displaces animality to the margins of
society and merely prescribes a correction from an élitist position, the irony
of these writers derives its potency from their subscription to subaltern ani-
mism. Though disjunctive in nature, their irony confronts the chaotic world
head on from the lowly position of the beast and, from inside it, clinches an
ethically aesthetic closure which acts as a shock to the thought of a post-
Partition public fed a diet of the high politics of Partition marred by commu-
nal, national and élite relapsing into blame, countergame and demonisation.
The shock jolts them into cognition of the subaltern animism which recog-
nises both the animality that is intrinsic to the human and the humanity that
is immanent to the animal. The meta-ironic shockwaves produced by Manto
and Rakesh gesture towards the alternative politics manifested in the moral
agency of the commonplace dog. Their historiography of subaltern animism
explodes the high politics of historical debate that elides the commoners – the
subalterns – who have been the parties directly affected by the watershed event
that many people understand as South Asia’s Holocaust. Manto and Rakesh’s
representation of the trauma of Partition arises from their deep embeddedness
in the composite culture of undivided India. And this is why Anand also suc-
ceeds in his own way in trenchantly representing the sense of confusion and
uprooting that many in North India faced at the time of Partition. As Anand
uses the caged parrot as an allegory to reveal that the core of the refugees’
identity exists in their ancestral place, he plays out the crisis in humanism
which, as I have shown, also turns out to be humanism not in crisis. Human-
ism, for Anand, emerges as a dialectical concept, evoking both approval and
disapproval. Anand’s Partition stories expose humanism’s underside of suffer-
ing and oppression, towards which the State apparatus shows apathy. But the
story also uncovers a subaltern animal-humanism wherein a common person
absorbed into humanism reinfuses it, through a spontaneous intervention,
with practical meaning.

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Notes
1. Noted Hindi critic Namwar Singh finds that Manto’s vernacular modernity of
class consciousness and well-established positions on community rights – those of
the Hindus and the Muslims in the 1920s–1940s – veers ‘towards the real’ (Singh
qtd in Kumar1990: 5). The tendency to be realistic is a far cry from the West’s
modernism which struggles with papering over an ugly reality even as it enters the
literary consciousness.
2. An Urdu word, meaning poems.
3. A poetic narration, written in 1766 by Waris Shah, of the popular tragic Punjabi
romance between Heer Sial and Dheedo Ranjha.
4. A Punjabi expression, meaning ‘Where are you?’
5. A lathi is a heavy stick, often made of bamboo bound with iron, used in India as a
weapon, especially by the police (as in dispersing a crowd).
6. These three italicised expressions are used in rural part of India to refer to a person
who helps the poor or the needy.
7. Mourning, in South Asia, is basically a community affair: the neighbourhood
gathers together at the residence of the deceased for a period of mourning, con-
sisting of prayers and other cultural customs.
8. This is the Punjabi version of the lungi; it has folds at the front and is traditional
dress for Punjabi men.

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 9

RESISTANT REINDEERS: HUMAN–ANIMAL

RELATIONS AND CULTURAL
SELF-APPROPRIATION IN SÁMI ART
AND LITERATURE

Katharina Alsen

At the centre of the small-scale embroidered scene is a solid brownish entity,

depicted in abstract and minimalist form. It is shaped like a bottleneck with a
sketchy crown at the top, which almost doubles its total size. As if the figure
was wrapped in barbed wire, it is surrounded by amorphous black lines which
create a physical distance from the other pictorial actors: to the left and the
right, there are three identifiably human figures, two adults and one infant.
These three are shown in more detail than the first figure, with distinct facial
and sartorial attributes.1 Although there is no further indication of body struc-
ture, the context makes it clear that the abstract brownish entity is supposed to
(re)present a reindeer torso and head, and the surrounding black lines show a
number of reindeer antlers.
The composition defies easy interpretation. Is the nonhuman animal meant
to be alive or dead? Do we look at them from the side or below, indicating
either a same-level or an inferior positioning (and perspective) of the spectator?
Although the stylised reindeer seems to be bound in chains, immobilised and
exposed to human-driven violence, they are displayed in a powerful topological
arrangement and posture. The crowned torso is placed in an elevated position,
the human figures kneel down facing them as if they were some sort of ritual
sculpture or higher being. The composition recalls the symbolic imagery of
sacrifice or martyrdom. The attitude towards the nonhuman animal figure can
be read as both humiliating and submissive.

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 katharina alsen

In addition, the vast number of antlers render the reindeer visible not only
as an individual animal, but also as a representative of their species. A plurality
of reindeers is suggested by pictorial means: while the antlers are depicted, the
animate bodies they once grew out of and were connected to are absent and
gesture towards an absent presence. The antlers – which both male and female
reindeers grow and shed annually – convey ambiguous meaning, oscillating
between life and death, agency and objectification, resistance and surrender.
The narrative embroideries by textile artist and painter Britta Marakatt-
Labba (b. 1951), whose works were among others exhibited at Documenta 14
(2017) as part of Sámi Artist Group, show motifs of traditional Sámi lifestyle
in cyclical and linear arrangements. Above all, they depict the close relationship
between human and nonhuman animal life in barren landscapes, epitomised
by reindeers who coexist and interact with human figures in various ways.
Modern transformation of living conditions and society, however, which accom-
panied the industrialisation and urbanisation of the European mainland, does
not play a pictorial role. The absence of dominant features of Western modern
life and the very medium of embroidery, which has become relatively rare today,
may at first glance seem to establish a rather antimodern(ist) attitude and sug-
gest a romanticised, somewhat ahistorical reading of ‘natural’ environments.2

Figure 9.1 Marakatt-Labba, Britta. 2003–2007. Historjá (History) (Detail).

Embroidery, print, applications and wool on linen. 39 cm × 23.5 m. Oslo:
KORO Public Art Norway. © Britta Marakatt-Labba / BONO, Oslo 2022.
Photo: Cathrine Wang.

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 human–animal relations in sámi art and literature

Figure 9.2 Marakatt-Labba, Britta. 2003–2007. Historjá (Overview at The Arctic

University of Norway, Tromsø). © Britta Marakatt-Labba / BONO, Oslo 2022.
Photo: Larissa Acharya.

On closer inspection though, many of Marakatt-Labba’s motifs are anything

but pastoral and tranquil. Instead, they portray a highly constructed notion of
‘nature’, unfolding scenes of violence, pain and collective mourning for both
animals and humans, and equally addressing issues of environmental pollution
and climate change.3
In the 23.5-metre-long, multipart frieze History (2003–7), there are both
scenes of reindeers fighting against acts of domestication and scenes of appar-
ently balanced interspecies life and work routines. Power relations and the
sense of community are never simple matters in Marakatt-Labba’s critical visual
storytelling. History gives an insight into complex networks, entanglements and
dependencies as heterogenous forms of human–animal encounter (Böhm and
Ullrich 2019: 2) and combines literal with metaphorical dimensions. The scene
outlined above, depicting an enchained reindeer surrounded by antlers and three
human figures, allows for diverse interpretations and indicates different stages of
conflict escalation compressed in just one embroidered detail.

Approaching Reindeers: Key Arguments

The Sámi are an Indigenous people who inhabit the transnational area of
Sápmi (previously also referred to by the exonym ‘Lapland’) in northern
Norway, Sweden, Finland and the Russian Kola peninsula.4 The history of the
Sámi across national borders has been a long one of territorial and cultural
colonialism, forced assimilation and construction ‘as the racialized others’
(Heith 2012: 159). Mobility, hunting and reindeer herding have, among other
things, always been central features of the Sámi lifestyle.
The textiles by Marakatt-Labba can help address a set of critical research
questions. For this chapter, I will read the works as reverberations of Nordic

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 katharina alsen

modern art and literature, more precisely as critically affirmative commentaries

on the dominant representation and reception of Indigenous Sámi culture from
the first decades of the twentieth century. Not only negative forms of critique,
but also (hyper-)affirmation, including methods of imitative exaggeration, over-
serious realism or over-identification, can act as strategies of subversion and
resistance, especially in the context of repressive political systems (Arns and
Sasse 2006: 444–5). Recurring representational features of Sámi culture, which
have often been stereotyped and romanticised by non-Indigenous modern
artists and publics, involve a semi-nomadic, transhuman lifestyle, the above-
mentioned absence of modern urban influence and a mythologically charged,
intimate relation to what is perceived as ‘nature’. The latter also includes the
regional fauna of Sápmi. Since reindeers are the most common megafaunal spe-
cies, they have become significant symbols for northern Scandinavia and been
framed as charismatic ‘animal landmarks’ of the whole region,5 most notably
in the (originally non-Sámi) tradition of national romanticist landscape paint-
ing since the early nineteenth century.
As I have argued, human–reindeer encounters are significant, yet ambiva-
lent, motifs in Marakatt-Labba’s visual worlds. In so doing, I understand her
artistic approach as showing (so-called) antimodern ‘natural’ environments
and cultural practices in a (so-called) premodernist medium as a strategy of
subversive affirmation and cultural self-appropriation which challenges domi-
nant conventions of representing and imagining Sámi lifestyle now and then.
Cultural self-appropriation has been described as a critical epistemic practice
by dominated and hermeneutically marginalised social groups which aims at
revealing and overcoming hermeneutical gaps and (re)gaining interpretational
sovereignty (Serrano Zamora 2017; Fricker 2007). In this case, the strategy is
also connected to the wider theoretical and historical context of appropriation
art (Puranen 2009).
However, theories of cultural self-appropriation and subversive affirmation
do not answer only to contemporary Sámi art in which the entanglements of
history and present, of ‘nature’ and politics, become particularly tangible – as
seen in Marakatt-Labba’s embroideries. In fact, this theoretical perspective can
also shed new light on the modern(ist) precursors. The three first, and so far
most studied, Sámi modern artists – at least in the narrow sense of Western
modern art – are Johan Turi (1854–1936), Nils Nilsson Skum (1872–1951)
and John Savio (1902–38). Their works will be included in my analysis as
examples of the variety and multidimensionality of Sámi depictions of human–
reindeer relations, and specifically the animal agency in these portrayals. It is
important to recognise that there is no such thing as modernism in the singular,
but rather a diversity of international modernist aesthetic practices that makes
it necessary to speak of modernisms in the plural (Harney and Phillips 2018: 3).
In addition to a critical art historical approach informed by postcolonial theory

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 human–animal relations in sámi art and literature

and Indigenous studies, this chapter focuses on issues from the cross-disciplinary
field of human–animal studies and addresses three key arguments.
First, the very subject matter of reindeers in modern(ist) works by Turi,
Skum and Savio can be read as motifs of resistance, reclaiming the power
of interpretation of cultural symbols which have been assimilated into the
Western canon, and opting for interpretive pluralism. In this light, dominant
non-Sámi pictorial conventions have been transferred into testimonies of
painterly self-(re)presentation with emancipatory effect. Animals used to serve
as identity-creating elements in the iconography of national romanticism and
helped coin the typical ‘brand image(ry)’ of Nordic nations and their respec-
tive cultural majorities. Typical landmarks in flora and fauna, among them
reindeers, which are intimately linked to the life of the Sámi, were taken over
by non-Sámi artists. At the turn of the century, the landscape was consid-
ered ‘the genre of Nordic painting’, conveying ‘the impression of a symbiotic
relationship between man and nature in the north of Europe’ (Alsen and
Landmann 2016: 136), most often without regard to cultural differences and
underlying political hierarchies.
The Sámi settlement areas, however, are not and have never been equivalent
to a nation-state, and thus pursue(d) different aesthetics and political targets.
Depending on the definition from either a geographical, linguistic or politi-
cal viewpoint, Scandinavia is a subregion in northern Europe with varying
dimensions. Norway, Sweden and Denmark are traditionally regarded as the
core Scandinavian countries. Together with Finland and Iceland, they form the
Nordic countries. The Nordics also include Greenland (with the Indigenous
Inuit) and the Faroes as autonomous territories of Denmark and Åland as a
Swedish-speaking autonomous region of Finland. Sápmi has for centuries been
divided between different nation-states, with the Sámi on the receiving end of
oppressive colonising policies.
Second, many works by modern Sámi artists do not show the semi-
domesticated species of reindeers in situations free from conflict but in vivid
scenes of rebellion against and in opposition to the dominating group of humans.
This too contradicts the popular animal brand imagery of national romanticist
iconography with its atmospheric landscapes and idyllising, homogenising ten-
dencies. Sámi depictions of conflictual human–reindeer interaction, especially
in the oeuvre of John Savio, exhibit a resistant subtext which seems to mirror
the socio-political positioning of human Sámi life in the context of restrictive
assimilation policies within the Nordic national states. In that light, the motif
of reindeers rearing back and fighting against attempts at domestication can
be read as images of both nonhuman animal and human self-empowerment in
the wider sense. The images demonstrate that cohabitation has many faces and
that power relations are always more complex than they may seem from the
perspective of the (societal) majority.

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 katharina alsen

In terms of the ideologies and practices of colonialism, the Nordics have

for a long time claimed the status of a so-called ‘Nordic exceptionalism’ within
European colonising countries. The (neo-)colonial entanglements within and of
the North and the (ongoing) history of marginalisation of the Sámi and other
minorities or Indigenous peoples, however, have attracted increased schol-
arly and public attention during the last decade (Loftsdóttir and Jensen 2012;
Körber and Volquardsen 2014).
My third aim is to examine the agency of the depicted reindeers beyond
their mere illustrative and conventional metaphorical level. In doing so, I will
harness the concept of ‘material metaphor’, which goes beyond simple logics of
substitution and asks about expectations and effects of relational agency instead
(Steinbrecher and Borgards 2016). The perspective of nonhuman animals as
material metaphors in art and literature concerns forms of tacit agency follow-
ing the ideas of new materialism. In the Sámi artworks considered here, both
explicit and implicit narratives of resistance are linked to the (re)presentation of
reindeers, thereby countervoicing dominant narratives of cultural subordination
as well as modernist aesthetics.

Self-Reflective Note: Decentring Perspectives

Writing about Indigenous art as a non-Indigenous scholar requires ‘critical
care’ (Garneau 2020) in several respects. Academic cultural analysis ‘has a
long history of analysing the “other”’ (Svalastog et al. 2021) and is prone to
perform practices of (explicit or tacit) exclusion (Crowther 2003: 121). Prac-
tices of ‘othering’ most often ignore the socially constructed privileges they are
based on; they can provoke reiterations of hegemonic power and a patronising
attitude. Exclusion also involves ‘soft’ factors such as governance of terminol-
ogy or methodology, and the predominance of selected mainstream scientific
communities. Since the Western academic world has for a long time claimed
‘theory as thoroughly Western, [and] has constructed all the rules by which
the indigenous world has been theorized, indigenous voices have been over-
whelmingly silenced’ (Smith 1999: 29). In the process, Indigenous cultures and
knowledges have been instrumentalised and appropriated by members of the
majority society, which has been described as the phenomenon of an ‘ongo-
ing epistemicide of Indigenous thought’ (Svalastog et al. 2021). In the last few
decades, however, cross-disciplinary scholarship in Indigenous studies, critical
race and critical whiteness studies, and postcolonial and decolonial theory have
disclosed and reframed the asymmetries of knowledge production in many
regards. Bearing this in mind, notions such as ‘resistance’, which I deploy as
a key term in this chapter, take on a multidimensional meaning which non-
Indigenous writers cannot fully grasp (Garneau 2020). The critical concept
of a ‘double perspective’, for instance, frames the multiplicity of Indigenous
knowledges and stories, which reach beyond a Western perspective on time,

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 human–animal relations in sámi art and literature

space and place, as ‘not two perceptions of the same world, but the parallel
existence of two (possibly overlapping) worlds at the same time’ (Svalastog et
al. 2021). This concept supports the idea of Indigenous resistance in (ongoing)
colonial experiences in the sense that

[n]on-Indigenous people do not need to fully understand Indigenous peo-

ples’ unique double perspectives, for if they did, the knowledge contained
therein would be open to dominant system colonization. Indeed, our goal
is not to ask individuals to increase their own understanding of the exotic
‘other’. Rather, we ask for recognition that the double perception exists
and is a valuable cultural tool. (Svalastog et al. 2021)

As a non-Indigenous scholar, I have no first-hand knowledge of Sámi cul-

tures. I have been able to educate myself only through mediated forms of exper-
tise (academic courses, books, museum tours, verbal exchange). Within the field
of Indigenous studies, it has become common practice to outline the biographi-
cal background of the respective author as a sign of cultural responsibility. This
can help establish a relational positioning for the researching subject and avoid
the illusion of academic neutrality or objectivity (Smith 1999: 137–8). The
reading of Sámi visual art and literature I undertake in this chapter is hence to
be understood as an interpretative approach among many other possible read-
ings. In brief summary, this means: ‘[A]s a non-Indigenous scholar you have to
decentre yourself’ (Skille 2021: 10). The move towards a decentralisation of
‘familiar’ epistemological frameworks can be tackled with the so-called ‘four
Rs’: reciprocity, relevance, responsibility and reverence (Pidgeon 2018). As a
complement to this, most recent scholarship has added a critical understanding
of heterogeneity to the list (Skille 2021: 2), acknowledging the complexity of
heterogeneity in Indigenous communities, involving different subgroups and
individuals – as well as unique artistic productions.
Working towards a decentralisation of established knowledge is, in a differ-
ent context, also a key concern of the cross-disciplinary field of human–animal
studies. The objective is to establish a framework for more-than-anthropocentric
research which balances out the relationalities and entanglements of human and
nonhuman animal life and agency. As literary scholar Roland Borgards (2017:
53) has pointed out, a distinction has to be drawn between different concepts of
anthropocentrism. While the perspectives of an ontological anthropocentrism
advocate the status of human exceptionalism in a rather naive way, epistemo-
logical anthropocentrism helps reflect on the conditions and limits of (more-
than-)human knowledge production. As long as it is human actors who conduct
research, epistemological anthropocentrism will be ineluctable to some extent.
This makes it all the more important to avoid imperial strategies of thought, to
develop a sensitivity for the powers and asymmetries of knowledge production

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 katharina alsen

in research, and to work towards a constant decentralisation of one’s own per-

spectives by methodological means.

Modern(ist) Sámi Art and the Ethnographic Eye

The subject matter and mode of (re)presentation in Marakatt-Labba’s embroider-
ies take up different features from Sámi art and literature of the early twentieth
century, in which reindeers and human–animal relations had already been key ele-
ments. In 1910, it was self-taught writer Johan Turi (1854–1936) who published
the first ever secular book in a Sámi language, Muittalus samid birra (An Account
of the Sámi), with the assistance of non-Sámi ethnographer and artist Emilie Dem-
ant Hatt (1873–1958).6 The aim of the project was to introduce the richness of
Sámi knowledges to a wider, non-Indigenous public. In correlation with the written
part of the book, Turi produced a set of ink drawings which stylistically resemble
ancient northern rock and parietal art. For the most part, the illustrations show
large groups of reindeers, humans and some accompanying dogs from a great
distance. In terms of style, Turi’s visual narratives of human–animal interaction
in An Account of the Sámi seem to exhibit a rather countermodernist approach
and clearly differ from the pictorial principles of the contemporary European
avant-garde movements. His drawings abjure techniques of central perspective
or deep-view effects, and make use of fine lines and two-dimensional silhouettes.7
The illustration for the instructive chapter ‘Reindeer Corral in Autumn’, however,
experiments with a bird’s-eye view. It shows the traditional practice of separating
groups of reindeers who migrate from north to south in winter, in order to allocate
them to the different Sámi siida, the local communities. The spectator looks down
at a circular corral which is divided into three parts and filled with reindeers and
human figures who are, quite surprisingly, not seen from above but modelled from
a lateral line of sight. While most of the human figures, both male and female,
hold sticks in their hands and seem to be moving around, the reindeers’ positions
are rather static; they seem to stand still next to each other. In the bottom and one
top corner, there are a few reindeers and dogs located outside of the corral, which
has no visible entrance. Turi’s small-scale, detailed image composition, comprising
a large number of similar-looking, nearly stereotyped figures in interaction, stylis-
tically resembles the embroideries by Marakatt-Labba. The scenes of both artists
transport tranquil, somewhat mute atmospheres, which seem to be charged with
extra meaning: the circularity of Turi’s corral, for instance, bears similarities to the
pictorial principles of ritual objects in Sámi cosmology. Traditional depictions of
ceremonial Sámi drums featured a similar oval shape filled with human and non-
human animals and functioned as objects of embedded knowledge (Joy 2018:
173–85). Besides Marakatt-Labba, contemporary artists such as Keviselie / Hans
Ragnar Mathisen (b. 1945), who was also a founding member of the Sámi Artist
Group and exhibited at Documenta 14, have taken up the cosmologically charged
circular structures and cyclical storytelling for their work.

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 human–animal relations in sámi art and literature

Figure 9.3 Johan Turi. 1910. Reindeer Corral in Autumn. Ink drawing. Illustration
from Muittalus samid birra (An Account of the Sámi).

Turi’s début in 1910 was a success at the time and has subsequently been
translated into numerous languages. For a long time, however, the book was
investigated only from an ethnographic perspective,8 and, in consequence, has
often been rashly misread as ‘mere’ functional writing and handicraft, disregard-
ing the literary and art historical relevance in its own right. Such hierarchical
value judgements, seeking to perpetuate a clear distinction between art and craft –
or, more precisely, between supposedly ‘high’ fine art of aesthetic value and
‘low’ applied art serving only a practical function – are nothing new and have
a long discursive tradition, especially in art criticism and mainstream academic
discourses about cultural minorities and Indigenous cultures. The established
categories and canons of Western art, however, do not represent the actual diver-
sity of cultural practices in diverse societies. The Sámi term for fine art in the
Western sense, dáidda, is a Finnish-based neologism that was added to Sámi
languages only in the 1970s, in addition to duodji, the original word for craft.9
Such rigid conceptual boundaries, however, do not correspond to the multidi-
mensional logics and aesthetics of Turi’s artistic production. Due to conceptual
misunderstandings, modern and traditional art from Sápmi, and also from the
Inuit in Greenland, has ‘has long been reduced to the constructed pair of aes-

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 katharina alsen

thetics and ethnology’ (Alsen and Landmann 2016: 282). The same applied to
the artistic works by autodidact Nils Nilsson Skum (1872–1951), who is today
considered one of the central agents of modern Sámi art. In 1938, he published
the book Same sita (Sámi Village), exhibiting verbal and visual narratives of
Sámi lifestyle, which was by then persistently under threat due to the restrictive
assimilation policies of the national states. Skum’s central motifs are large rein-
deer herds roaming through barren, hilly and snow-white landscapes, seen from
a far distance. With their works, Turi and Skum created countervoices to the
external representation and foreign interpretation of their cultures. Still, a

problem in the reception of art of indigenous provenance has always

been the (generally unreflected) attribution of a representative character
to it – in this reading, an artwork stands as representative for the entire
culture [. . .]. The artistic quality and meaning of the works is shelved
and the superordinate factor of presumed authenticity emphasized,
which amounts to an abbreviated and inadequate reception. (Alsen and
Landmann 2016: 57)

John Savio (1902–38)10 is considered the first Sámi artist with a formal arts
education and is known for his expressionist woodcuts, similar in style and tech-
nique to works by influential representatives of (Nordic) modernism such as
Edvard Munch (1863–1944). The motifs of Savio’s graphics range from rein-
deer wildlife to cohabitation of reindeers, dogs and humans, including scenes
of dynamic and conflictual human–reindeer interaction. Such scenes of tumult
most often show domestication attempts by human figures with the aid of ropes
or other tools which are physically resisted by the reindeers. Physical confronta-
tion and violence, however, are not in general shown as something extraordinary
or only belonging to the interaction between human and nonhuman animals. In
Savio’s works, violence asserts itself as an integral part of reindeer wildlife, too, in
particular in the form of ritualised antler fights as a common behavioural pattern.
Until today, antler fights haven often been misinterpreted as ‘unnatural’, deficient
behaviour by human spectators, as, for example, the audience’s reactions to the
installation Soma (2010) by German artist Carsten Höller (b. 1961) have shown.
In this installation, Höller let living reindeers dwell in an artificial paddock at
the Hamburger Bahnhof museum in Berlin for three months. Audience members
were even allowed to stay overnight to watch the ‘aesthetic actors’, the reindeers,
around the clock.11 A striking formal feature of Savio’s woodcuts, however, in
particular in comparison to his early contemporaries Turi and Skum, is the picto-
rial focus on individual nonhuman animal and human figures instead of larger
groups or communities. Still, the figures depicted do not resemble individual por-
trayals and are, rather, stylised as typical representatives of their species, gender
and cultures. Moreover, Savio’s works do not pursue instructive goals.

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 human–animal relations in sámi art and literature

Figure 9.4 John Savio. Between 1925 and 1938. Mann med reinokse (Almei hergin /
Man with Bull Reindeer). Hand-coloured woodcut on paper. 26.5 cm × 22.5 cm. Oslo:
National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design.

The tension-fraught woodcut Man with Bull Reindeer shows a scene which
has many variations in Savio’s oeuvre: a reindeer defending themselves against
a rope in their antlers, which has been thrown by a male human figure dressed
in traditional Sámi clothes. The two antagonists form a diagonal axis which
can indicate their pictorial roles as both opponents in harsh polarity and as
an ambiguous conflicting unity, tangibly connected by the rope between them.
It is not possible to identify which of them is dominating the fight. They are
surrounded by lively linear structures which help underline the overall expres-
sivity and create a restless pictorial space. In Savio’s woodcuts, human and
nonhuman animal actors never merge visually with the ‘natural’ environments
around them, but stand out by means of sharp dark–light contrasts. This
explicit focus on scenes of interaction and conflict which do not blur into the
surrounding landscape differs from that of other modernist representations of
similar themes, such as in the oil painting Sámi Working with Reindeer (1943)
by Danish artist Emilie Demant Hatt, who initially assisted Johan Turi in writ-
ing the book An Account of the Sámi and was keen on experiencing the semi-
nomadic lifestyle herself.

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 katharina alsen

Figure 9.5 John Savio. Undated. Pulkkjøring (Hærgevuodje or Heargevuoddji / Sleighride).

Woodcut on paper. 25.2 cm × 19.5 cm. Kirkenes:The Savio Museum.

The woodcut Sleighride transports an increased level of dynamic movement

and ambiguous physical violence into human–animal interaction. The reindeer
and the human figure are depicted from behind; the sleigh as such is barely
recognisable at first sight. Two jumping dogs accompany the duo, one of them
constituting the foreground of the image. The reindeer has large antlers which
reach high into the sky and shows spread legs in a peculiar position that would
make it anatomically impossible to run. The most interesting detail, however,
is the ambiguous visual reference between human and reindeer corporeality. A
pair of reindeer antlers is depicted on the back of the sleigh, and by means of
perspective, they even seem to be a part of the human clothing. As a result, the
human figure remains as an active aggressor, holding up a whip and exploiting
the physical strength of the nonhuman animal for his own purposes. On the
other hand, though, the ‘reindeer-ish’ physiognomy becomes part of the human
visual appearance through the antlers on the back. The overall image composi-
tion renders the reindeer visible as a superordinate actor in two ways. Although
being violently harnessed for the purpose of human mobility, the reindeer’s
physiognomy takes over the human visual appearance, and the reindeer figure
itself is located at the top of the image with large crown-like antlers.

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 human–animal relations in sámi art and literature

Cultural Self-Appropriation and Subversive Affirmation

The tradition of national romanticist landscape painting is considered a typi-
cally Nordic genre, if not the typical genre, embracing the peripheral status
of the North in contrast to Central European urban milieus. These landscape
works convey the impression of a close, emotionally charged relationship
between ‘nature’ and human and nonhuman animals as a visual strategy of
what is referred to as ‘place-making’ practices today (Cassel 2019). In terms of
the Sápmi region in the very North, the motifs used to be barren, yet sublime,
landscapes with reindeers as their dominant animal actors. Since Sápmi is, and
has always been, a cross-national region which is inhabited by both the Indige-
nous Sámi and members of the majority society, the question of authorship and
the privilege and power of interpretation become all the more relevant. In the
ideology of national romanticism which formed the mainstream canon of the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Sápmi has long been romanticised,
stereotyped and appropriated by non-Indigenous painters and writers, while
Indigenous positions were silenced.

Figure 9.6 John Savio. Between 1928 and 1934. Alene (Okto / Alone).
Woodcut on paper. 28 cm x 32,5 cm. Oslo:
National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design.

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 katharina alsen

The woodcut Alene, by John Savio, showing a solitary, proudly posing

reindeer on hill with a view across a spacious landscape, takes up (or, better,
imitates) central pictorial principles of the national romanticist paradigm, and
turns them into a Sámi perspective in its own right.12 I read this as a critical
strategy of cultural self-appropriation (Fricker 2007; Serrano Zamora 2017)
and subversive affirmation (Arns and Sasse 2006). Acts of subversive affirma-
tion operate with modes of structural invisibility (through imitation, simulation,
mimicry and camouflage) or over-identification, and make ‘use of the tactics of
resistance through apparent affirmation’ (Arns and Sasse 2006: 444). This is
especially useful in the context of repressive political situations. Such strategies
allow (presumably) subordinated social actors to take part in official discourses
while simultaneously gaining the agency to undermine them. Therein lies their
critical and emancipatory function. In all, ‘there is always a surplus which desta-
bilises affirmation and turns it into its opposite’ – or at least has the potential to
do so. This function is similar to the idea of cultural self-appropriation as a criti-
cal epistemic practice by dominated and hermeneutically marginalised groups
who aim to overcome the status of hermeneutical marginalisation and epistemic
injustice (Serrano Zamora 2017: 300). The reappropriation of interpretative
power over Indigenous cultural techniques and knowledges takes its starting
point here, in the reappropriation of stereotyped motifs which were harnessed
by non-Indigenous artists. In particular, the multifaceted Sámi portrayals of
reindeers who always seem to be situated in ambiguous interaction with human
figures, oscillating between resistance and surrender, gesture towards such an
ideal of (structural) transformation.
The works by Sámi artists examined in this chapter, Marakatt-Labba and
her modern(ist) predecessors, Turi, Skum and Savio, do not show explicit or
brutal criticism of repressive societal circumstances in their painterly modula-
tions of reindeer life. Instead they actively integrate established stereotypes into
their works, either by means of motif, medium and technique, or by the adapta-
tion of certain genre specifics of mainstream culture. While giving an insight into
significant traditions of Sámi lifestyle, the artworks can simultaneously be read
as examples of silent and subtle resistance.13

Animal Agency: Reindeers and/as Material Metaphors

The theoretical concept of ‘material metaphor’, which has been introduced to
the field of human–animal studies by literary scholars Aline Steinbrecher and
Roland Borgards (2016), is based on the assumption that nonhuman animals
have more than one active role in terms of human–animal relations and (inter-
species) cultural production. Nonhuman animals are living creatures and serve
as cultural signifiers who are charged with meaning. They are integrated into
processes of meaning production with specific, yet variable, forms of agency.
Cultural historian Mieke Roscher has discussed central perspectives on and of

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more-than-human agency in recent scholarship with the overall aim of avoiding

banal conclusions and repetitive, static projections. The mere idea that ‘agency
is the ability to have an effect’ will not do, since ‘everything affects everything
else in some way or another’ (Carter and Charles 2013: 328). Another com-
mon trap of banal labelling can be mistaking the attribution of ‘nonhuman
charisma’ (Lorimer 2007) and the resulting increased (human) attention as a
form of agency of selected animal species of interest. Thus, Roscher points
out that not ‘all agency is of the same quality’, which is a helpful conceptual
reminder, and calls for diversification of the semantically challenging ‘master
trope’ agency (2019: 167). A general differentiation between a ‘weak’ notion
of agency (Wirkungsmacht), following the ideas of Bruno Latour’s actor–
network theory (2005), and a ‘strong’ notion (Handlungsmacht) can be fur-
ther supplemented with critical understandings of relational, entangled and
embodied agency, as well as an increased awareness of the historicity of such
concepts (Roscher 2016: 57–61). Interestingly enough, it is especially acts of
resistance, performed by nonhuman animals against life forms that have been
imposed upon them by humans, and transgressions of human role expecta-
tions, which Roscher names as examples of influential acts of relational animal
agency (Roscher 2016: 49).
Bearing these critical considerations about (the limits of) the concept of
agency in mind, the perspective of nonhuman animals as material metaphors
offers a useful theoretical compromise for analysing nonhuman animals
in human-made cultural artefacts without losing track of the other role of
nonhuman animals in human–animal relations, which is the role as a living
creature with an impact on various levels. Material metaphors deny simple
logics of substitution in which nonhuman animals are considered only as
representatives of meaning implemented by humans. If that was the case, the
nonhuman animals depicted or written about could easily be substituted by
‘literal meanings’, which would follow a naive understanding of anthropo-
centric world-making. Instead, Steinbrecher and Borgards opt for a change
of perspective and emphasise the interactive and material aspects of nonhu-
man animals in art in three aspects. First, material metaphors originate from
the encounter and cohabitation of human and nonhuman animals. Second,
material metaphors can be read as traces of the respective underlying human–
animal relationships. Third, these traces will affect future animal relations
and, thus, they also have an impact on the on-going relationships they emerge
from (Steinbrecher and Borgards 2016: 165). The last aspect, which has the
strong potential of changing existing ‘realities’, demonstrates the importance
of relational interspecies meaning-making. Of course, the impact of an epis-
temological anthropocentrism and anthropogenic influence can never be
totally denied, since it is still human actors who interpret the cultural produc-
tions involving nonhuman animals. However, in the perspective of material

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 katharina alsen

metaphors, nonhuman animal actors take on a formative, world-changing

and world-making role. Steinbrecher and Borgards (2016: 157) suggest we
think of the living animal and the represented animal not as two separate
entities, but together – without indicating a hierarchy between human and
nonhuman animal impact.
If one considers the reindeers in the works by Marakatt-Labba and the
modern(ist) Sámi artists as material metaphors which reference both the living
nonhuman animals and their pictorial representation, the complexity of negoti-
ating resistance in terms of both human and nonhuman animal actors becomes
even more obvious. On the one hand, the reindeers reference the complexity of
(semi-)domesticated living animals, bear witness to lived relationships in which
human attempts at control do not succeed without complications, and show a
variety of acts of resistance which function in the logics of more-than-human
agency in a strong, formative sense. On the other hand, the symbolic level of the
nonhuman animal depictions becomes permeable for human experiences and a
commentary of Sámi resistance against attempted territorial and cultural sub-
ordination by societal majorities. In doing so, the representation of resistance is

Figure 9.7 John Savio. Between 1928 and 1938. Gutter med lasso (Gánddat
suohpaniin / Boys with Lasso). Woodcut on paper. 20.5 x 29 cm. Oslo: National
Museum of Art, Architecture and Design.

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 human–animal relations in sámi art and literature

ambiguous and can be found in depictions of vivid fights as well as in supposedly

tranquil, close-to-‘nature’ scenes which follow, as I have argued, the strategies
of cultural self-appropriation and subversive affirmation. None of the analytical
approaches I have presented in this chapter would work on its own; they only
work together, in interrelation.
The general ambiguity and the broad range of interpretation of reindeer
depictions in Sámi art finds its epitome in a woodcut by John Savio, which may
have a disturbing effect at first sight. The work Boys with Lasso shows three
male human figures who walk in a row, bending slightly forward while holding
reindeer antlers on to their foreheads. A fourth person stands in the front of
the scene, turning his back to the spectator and holding a rolled-up lasso in his
hands. His body position indicates that he is ready to throw it right away. This
image of the attempt at ‘becoming’ a reindeer offers a variety of interpretations.
Obviously, the human figures perform an imitation of reindeer corporeality
and behaviour. This could be read either as a simple leisure activity of children
about the species they have most contact with in daily life, or alternatively as an
act of holding reindeers up to ridicule by mocking processes of domestication,
or as a sign of deep respect and admiration for reindeer life as a result of a close
human–animal relationship.
The reindeer depictions in modern(ist) and contemporary Sámi art which I
have examined in this chapter can be read as images of both nonhuman animal
and human empowerment in challenging hierarchical environments. Informed
by Indigenous studies, post- and decolonial theory and human–animal studies,
the (re)presentations of nonhuman animals and humans in cohabitation, and
the related issues of (a)symmetries of power, have proven to be more complex
than they may seem from privileged (societal, academic or species) positions.
They countervoice dominant narratives of both cultural subordination and a
naive nature–culture divide, and illustrate how the perspective of Indigenous
and animal epistemologies are enriching contributions to mainstream readings
of modernist aesthetics.

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Notes
1. The clothing indicates traditional Sámi gákti costumes in blue and red colours, with
goikkehat shoes – usually made of reindeer skin – and the horn-shaped ládjogahpir
headgear which used to be worn by Sámi women in everyday life until the early
twentieth century (Guttorm 2018: 19, 22).
2. I place the term ‘nature’ in quotation marks due to the social constructedness of the
nature–culture divide. Among others, Timothy Morton provides an in-depth criti-
cal reading of dualist concepts of ‘nature’ and ‘the ecological imaginary’ (2007: 1).
3. The recent documentary film Historjá – Stygn for Sápmi (Stitches for Sápmi, 2022),
written and directed by Thomas Jackson, grapples with environmental issues in
Marakatt-Labba’s oeuvre in more detail.
4. Following new archaeological research, some have suggested we speak of all inhab-
itants of the Sápmi region as ‘immigrants’, which would include speakers both of

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 katharina alsen

Sámi or Baltic Finnic and of North Germanic languages, instead of considering the
Sámi ‘Indigenous’ (Kreuger 2018: 10).
5. ‘Charismatic megafauna’ of the Sápmi region, both extinct and extant, was also
the topic of the exhibition of the same name at the Arktikum museum and science
centre in Rovaniemi, Finland (16 March 2021–25 May 2022).
6. The collaborative process behind the bilingual publication (North Sámi and Danish)
is further described in Svonni (2009).
7. Some of Turiʾs late works, however, indicate changes of style and show experiments
with ‘Western’ pictorial conventions (Alsen and Landmann 2016: 51–7).
8. The primary ethnographic interest can also be explained by Turi’s biographical
background: before becoming an artist in advanced age, he worked as a hunter and
fisherman and was, like all of his family, active in reindeer herding.
9. In this text, I generally refer to the North Sámi spelling, which has the largest
amount of speakers (about 20,000). However, varying spellings can be found in the
different Sámi languages: for example, in Lule and Southern Sámi.
10. A comprehensive biography-oriented approach to the practices of John Savio,
Johan Turi and Nils Nilsson Skum can be found in Hautala-Hirvioja (2014).
11. The interaction between living reindeers and human spectators in Soma is further
discussed in Roters (2022: 89–119). The term ʿaesthetic actorʾ in animal aesthetics
has been introduced by Ullrich (2016: 203).
12. Moreover, the motif of the solitary reindeer plays with another dominant attribu-
tion of modernist Nordic art, which is melancholic Nordic individuum (and artist).
13. A radically different mode of criticism with the aid of reindeers as both motif and
material pursue the sculptures and installations by contemporary Sámi artist Máret
Ánne Sara (b. 1983), who works with the shock effect of accumulated reindeer
skulls. Her works were, amongst others, part of the renamed Sámi Pavilion (instead
of Nordic Pavilion) at the 59th Venice Biennale (23 April–22 November 2022).

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 Part IV

Intersections, Encounters

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 10

ANIMAL–HUMAN ENTANGLEMENTS IN
THE CANADIAN WILD ANIMAL STORIES OF
CHARLES G. D. ROBERTS

Lauren Cullen

I saw, deep in the eyes of the animals, the human soul look out upon me.
– Edward Carpenter, Towards Democracy (1905)

In a letter addressed to H. Gerald Wade in 1933 following a review of his real-

istic wild animal stories, Canadian author Charles G. D. Roberts lamented that
Rudyard Kipling’s Mowgli stories

are not by any means nature yarns in the same genre as mine, but rather
the order of the old fabliaux. My stories are a new departure in animal
stories, dealing with the psychology of animals, as I have pointed out
in several of my prefaces, and has been fully and ably expounded in the
(English) National Review for July 1931. (Roberts 1989: 455; emphasis
in original)

Roberts’s fascination with nonhuman animal (hereafter animal) psychology

was bound up with his aspiration to present truthful depictions of animals in
fiction and came on the heels of theories of evolution and comparative psy-
chology. The wild animal short story genre first emerged in the late nineteenth
century, which Adrian Hunter describes as a period in which a ‘three-way align-
ment between realism, the short story, and various forms of cultural radicalism
and avant-gardism came into being’, signalling the advent of a new modernist
moment (Hunter 2016: 206). A genre co-developed by two Canadian writers,

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Ernest Thompson Seton and Charles G. D. Roberts, the wild animal story has
long been touted as ‘distinctly Canadian’ for its style, focus on wild rather than
domestic animals, and form (Atwood 2012: 73). In the first instance, Roberts’s
use of animal–human encounters in the wild works as a formal strategy to
encode suspense and unpredictability within the fabric of the short story. ‘The
originality of the new form’, remarks W. J. Keith, ‘consisted in its shifting of
the main focus from the human to the animal world,’ and Roberts’s use of
heterodiegetic narration, as opposed to the autodiegetic narration employed
by Anna Sewell, Margaret Marshall Saunders and Virginia Woolf, marks an
experimental innovation that stands in contrast to the animal fable and (auto)
biography (Keith 1969: 88). In this chapter, I analyse how attention to the lived
experiences of animals in the wilderness raises important questions not only
about animal agency and the limits of humanism, but also about the entan-
gled nature of animal–human relations in settler society. As Caroline Hovanec
puts it, ‘in the Anthropocene, no “wilderness” entirely untouched by human
activities exists. It’s entanglements all the way down’ (Hovanec 2019: 93). This
chapter argues that Roberts’s wild animal stories work to deconstruct anthro-
pocentric hierarchies, with survival functioning as a means of blurring the
animal–human boundary in the Canadian wilderness. To that end, I provide
close readings of wild animal stories to reveal how Roberts challenges ideas
about animal victimhood and human supremacy to present them instead as
cognitively complex, agential characters.
As a writer whose reputation developed during the final decades of the
nineteenth century and the beginnings of the twentieth, it would seem that
Roberts found his career split between two periods at odds with one another: the
Victorian era and modernism. While attention has been given to Roberts’s mod-
ernist (and antimodernist) sensibilities, these analyses have mainly focused on
his poetry and not on his successful yet controversial wild animal short stories.1
By terming his stories ‘psychological romances constructed on the framework of
natural science’, Roberts’s attempt to know, understand and depict animal life
speaks to the modernist preoccupation which ‘drove Woolf and her contempo-
raries to the very limits of literary and scientific representation’ (Hovanec 2018: 3).
The wild animal short story genre illuminates the ‘interplay between anthro-
pocentric and biocentric storytelling traditions’ by acknowledging and refuting
anthropocentric distinctions made between civilisation and wilderness, instinct
and rationality, and (agential) character and (passive) object (Herman 2018: 4).
Animals, and animal characters, operate with more than just instinct, as shown,
for example, in Roberts’s ‘The King of the Mamozekel’ (1902), in which the titu-
lar moose shirks death through knowledge-building and experience. After a close
encounter where he witnesses the death of a fellow moose, the king concludes ‘he
now knew [men] to be dangerous, and also knew that their chief power lay in
the long dark tubes which spit fire and made fierce sounds’ (Roberts 1902: 332).

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 animal–human entanglements in charles g. d. roberts

Indeed, the critique of ‘the animal’ as a discursive category was a thread that
ran through Roberts’s works formally, thematically and characterologically.
As my analysis shows, the wild animal story functions as a transitional fiction
by embracing realist, naturalist and experimental formal elements in the short
story form to represent animal life. In his treatment of animal characters,
Roberts draws on both theories of evolution and the burgeoning comparative
psychology tradition, speaking to modernist concerns about animal subjectiv-
ity and the confluences of animal–human kinship. Importantly, Roberts also
reveals an awareness of the consequences of human hubris, colonialism and
settler expansion on animals. This chapter argues that, through its treatment of
the wild animal character in the short story form, the wild animal story genre
posits a bridge between forms and movements, time periods and cultural preoc-
cupations to reconsider, in turn, the parameters of modernism.

The Modern Canadian Animal

Reading for a Victorian-to-modernist shift, Roberts’s stories provide important
case studies that trouble the borderlands between these seemingly disparate
periods. Carrie Rohman asserts that ‘for those in modernist studies, the ani-
mal problem takes on a particularly charged valence since modernism comes
on the heels of Darwin’s catastrophic blow to human privilege vis-à-vis the
species question’ (Rohman 2008: 1). My discussion engages with and builds
on Rohman’s contention by illustrating how late nineteenth- into twentieth-
century writers responded to Darwin’s theories and questioned the complex-
ity and hierarchical nature of animal–human relationships. Roberts’s birth in
1860 coincided with developing theories of evolution that were being widely
discussed and engaged with by novelists, artists, poets and playwrights interna-
tionally, and were at the heart of the Nature Fakers debate.2 In 1903, American
naturalist John Burroughs penned an article in the Atlantic Monthly criticising
writers on animals, including Canadians Roberts and Thompson Seton, for
fabricating a ‘sham natural history’ through their literary representations of
animals who could communicate, learn and reason. This article ignited a fierce
literary debate over animal intelligence, sentience and behaviour that spanned
‘four years of magazine and newspaper articles, book prefaces, and a full edi-
torial in the New York Times’ (Lutts 2006: n.p.).3 What set Roberts and the
other ‘Nature Fakers’ apart from other writers on animals was their unflinch-
ing collective claim that their works represented truthful, realistic depictions of
animal behaviour, consciousness and emotion exemplified through dynamic,
central animal characters in North America. Thus, rather than extol the virtues
of humans against those of his nonhuman animal characters, Roberts connects
them with narratives built on survival.
These species entanglements were specific to Roberts’s experiences as a
white settler growing up on the edge of the wilderness in Canada. Roberts

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lived a rather solitary existence as a child, educated by his Reverend father, and
actively sought the companionship of animals, tame and wild, by the marsh-
lands of the Tantramar in rural New Brunswick, in eastern Canada. Moreover,
as ‘[t]he childhood of Charles G.D. Roberts coincided with the birth of the
Canadian nation’, the cultural and political ramifications of this reality colour
his works (Adams 1986: 9). Canada was a nascent nation with a powerful gird-
ing of British culture before and after its Confederation in 1867, and Canadians
belonged legitimately within the fold of nineteenth-century writers and were
part of the broader Anglophone dialogue. Roberts’s wild animal stories were
included in school readers in Canadian classrooms and published by Ameri-
can, Canadian and English publishers. Likewise, Roberts’s animal stories were
admired by German Nobel laureate Thomas Mann, and Roberts further cor-
responded with English and Irish writers Rudyard Kipling and Oscar Wilde, as
well as President Theodore Roosevelt and E. Pauline Johnson (Roberts 1989:
33, 496). Moreover, as Don Conway notes, T. S. Eliot ‘was a notable presence
for at least seven of the thirteen years of Roberts’s London sojourn’ (Conway
1984: 77). Roberts found immense international success with book publica-
tions, with a review in Country Life in 1907 touting the view that Roberts’s
Kindred of the Wild (1902), Watchers of the Trails (1904) and Red Fox (1905)
were ‘the most successful books’ of the modern animal story form (Country
Life 1907: clxvii).
Critics such as Thomas Dunlap, Terry Whalen and Margaret Atwood have
acknowledged Roberts’s contributions to Canadian literature, and literature
about animals more generally. In her ground-breaking book about the roots and
substance of Canadian literature past and present, Survival (2012), Atwood
dedicates an entire chapter to the presence of ‘animal victims’ as unique to
Canadian literature, a view likewise held by Marian Scholtmeijer, whose chap-
ter on ‘Animal Victims in the Wild’ contains an analysis of Roberts’s work
(Scholtmeijer 1993). Examining animals for their symbolic currency, Atwood
circumvents reading animals as subjects in and of themselves, choosing instead
to explore their role as vehicles for understanding the ‘national psyche’, since
her thesis considers the main preoccupations of Canadian prose and poetry as
survival and victimhood. She views Canada’s identification with nature and
fauna as a potential representation of national guilt, stating pointedly that
‘Canada after all was founded on the fur trade, and an animal cannot pain-
lessly be separated from its skin’ (Atwood 2012: 81). Yet Nicole Shukin’s
Animal Capital (2009), which provides a critique of the central role of animal
exploitation under capitalism, notes that in emphasising the symbolic nature
of animal life, cultural analyses neglect the corporality and lived experiences
of animal beings. In this way, the beaver exemplifies ‘Canada’s fetish insofar
as it configures the nation as a life form that is born rather than made’ (Shukin
2009: 3). For Shukin, the ‘rendering’ of animal life takes on a double meaning

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as representational, ‘making a copy’, and material/literal, ‘the industrial boil-

ing down and recycling of animal remains’ (Shukin 2009: 20). To this end,
Roberts’s ‘renderings’ of animal characters can draw attention to these politi-
cal–economic sensibilities, albeit in a more subtle way.
The development and prominence of animals as both symbols and characters
in the Canadian literary imagination is therefore tied to Canada’s cultural, politi-
cal, economic and environmental legacies. However, John Sandlos, in his survey
of Canadian literature about animals, points out that while much attention has
been drawn to the realistic wild animal story’s contribution to both the develop-
ment of the Canadian short story and animals in the Canadian literary canon,
critics have failed to acknowledge the extent to which these animal stories engage
with ‘the philosophical implications of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-cen-
tury natural science . . . to promote a sympathetic identification between the
reader and animal characters’ (Sandlos 2000: 81). This chapter posits that cen-
tral to these scientific conversations was an increasing awareness of the entangled
lives of humans and animals in Canada, with the backdrop of the back-to-nature
movement, and a transatlantic interest in environmental issues, conservation and
the treatment of animals both captive and wild, mediated by the authority that
Roberts presented.
Ideas surrounding animal–human continuity and animal psychology under-
gird the realistic animal story, and these frameworks are explicitly referenced
in the prefaces to Roberts’s collections, including Watchers of the Trails (1904),
in which Roberts clarifies:

the stories of which this volume is made up are avowedly fiction. They
are, at the same time, true, in that the material of which they are moulded
consists of facts, – facts as precise as painstaking observation and anx-
ious regard for truth can make them. (Roberts 1904: vii)

These wild animal stories are sketches whose subject matter and commentary
on animal–human relationships is distinctly modern. Roberts’s keen interest in
animal psychology complicates our usual sense of the form of short fiction, and
the anthropocentrism inherent in realist fiction. He poses a challenge to form
and genre by which animals feature as protagonists who are emotional and
rational, and whose stories represent the world through nonhuman perspec-
tives. Stories hinge on fitness and ability, as well as the implacability of luck
and chance in the wilderness. And although Terry Whalen contends ‘Roberts
never loses sight, as many critics have asserted, of the spiritual ascendency of the
human being’, although Roberts’s narratives often leave space for a more anti-
anthropocentric interpretation that evaluates the (unfairly advantaged) violent
methods of destruction at the disposal of humans, and the slow violence com-
mitted by acts of settlement (Whalen 1984: 139). In ‘The Tiger of the Sea’ from

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Neighbours Unknown (1911), for instance, Gardner, a yachtsman, is ‘seized

with a fool idea’ to hunt an orca for his trophy (Roberts 1911: 223). After miss-
ing his shot, he takes aim at and kills the orca’s calf, leaving his own life hang-
ing in the balance as the mother orca seeks retribution. While Roberts states
Gardner ‘was not wantonly cruel, only thoughtless’, he delivers a narrative that
underlines the cost of human hubris and selfishness, when the mother orca must
be killed by another man to guarantee Gardner’s survival (Roberts 1911: 26).
Consequently, while animals play the leading characters in these stories, the
realistic wild animal story genre does not obscure the role of the human; rather,
these multispecies narratives draw attention to the increasing number of ways
humans and animals interact with each other and their environments. Martina
Seifert writes that the wild animal story ‘follows the short-story convention of
isolating and dramatizing a single incident that contains within it a multitude
of implications’ (Seifert 2007: 49), and among these implications are those of
entanglement. The result is a form of multispecies narrative in which readers
are encouraged to look beyond distinctions between species. For posthumanist
Donna Haraway, ‘multispecies storytelling’ generates ‘stories in which multi-
species players, who are enmeshed in partial and flawed translations across
difference, redo ways of living and dying attuned to still possible finite flour-
ishing, still possible recuperation’ (Haraway 2016: 10). The locating of his
stories in the North American wilderness, where species encounters were often
violent struggles for territory, resources and life, means that animals crawl, fly,
gallop, swim and hop from the margins to occupy central roles in their stories.
Roberts was attentive to the ‘partial and flawed translations across difference’
that frustrated understandings of animal, and especially non-domesticated ani-
mal, life. In his stories, animals are not presumed to be human, and they do
not ‘speak’ in human language like other animal characters of the period, such
as Saunders’s Beautiful Joe.4 Roberts’s narratives explore the tension between
likeness and alterity by illustrating the rationality and motivations, in addition
to instinct, of his animal characters as they interact with their environments
and other ‘kindred of the wild’.
Although it is important to acknowledge that Roberts’s narratives often
reproduce and amplify anthropocentric conceptions of animal–human rela-
tionships, I nevertheless contend that Roberts’s detached position as narrator
and observer gives space for reader interpretation of this anthropocentrism.
That is not to say that the short stories carry no ethical or moral weight.
Rather, the realism of the wild animal story was meant to serve a higher
moral and sympathetic purpose. As Seton puts it: ‘[W]e and the beasts are
kin. Man has nothing that the animals have not at least a vestige of, and the
animals have nothing that man does not in some degree share’ (Seton 1898:
1). This contention of animal–human continuity based on both science and
religion demonstrates an awareness of an emerging modernist dialogue on

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mental and biological evolution in animals and also a growing animal rights
rhetoric. Roberts repeatedly invokes or relies on animal consciousness and
writes animal characters that are self-reflective and emotional, and make infer-
ences about their circumstances and predicaments. While a species-crossing
spoken language continues to be a barrier between seamless animal–human
communication, animals, and their textual representations in the animal story,
communicate in a variety of ways, including through signs, body language and
verbal cues that engage both textual characters and readers. With narratives
informed by science and attentive to developments in psychology, Roberts’s
animal characters provide an important lens to examine and re-examine these
wider cultural and literary ontologies surrounding animal psychology and
selfhood.

Roberts’s Animals
Roberts’s stories can be grouped into broad categories dependent on plot and
characterisation: the animal biography, the animal adventure story, the ‘anec-
dote of observation’ animal encounter stories and what I term ‘split-sympathy’
stories, such as the path-forging ‘Do Seek Their Meat from God’ (1892). Since
many of Roberts’s stories follow a familiar narrative structure, I draw most
of my close reading examples from Kindred of the Wild (1902). The animal
biography reflects an extended narrative, tracing the life of an animal from
birth until death, and, at times, functioning as a condensed Bildungsroman
in its attention to the psychological and emotional development of the animal
protagonist. These stories all employ heterodiegetic narration with variable
internal and external focalisation. More simply put, there is no first-person
point of view, no narrating ‘I’, but rather narration that focuses on character
action and behaviour. Stories such as ‘Strayed’ (1889) and ‘The Homesickness
of Kehonka’ (1902) feature animal characters who attempt to forge lives away
from human intervention, ‘stories told by persons to make sense of and pro-
vide a rationale or justification for their action’ (Herman 2020: 53). But for
Roberts’s characters, animal–human relationships are precarious, entangled
and often violent.
One of Roberts’s first successful wild animal stories, ‘Do Seek Their Meat
from God’ appeared in print in 1892. A short story focusing on the survival
of two families, panther and human, it was considered ‘too innovative’ when
Roberts first sought to publish it and was finally accepted by Harper’s Weekly
‘after considerable hesitation and for less than the usual writer’s fee’ (Seifert
2007: 44). The innovation that baffled and stalled the success of Roberts’s
publication was his detached and unsentimental depiction of wild animal life,
mediated through heterodiegetic narration, as opposed to the traditional auto-
diegetic narration in animal (auto)biographies, and the intertwining of animal
and human worlds. He sets up the premise of ‘Do Seek Their Meat from God’

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in a straightforward manner: Encroachment of settlers on the land had driven

away ‘deer and smaller game. Hence the sharp hunger of the panther parents,
and hence it came that on this night they hunted together’ (Roberts 1895: 4).
Their eventual target is a human child, a situation which instigates the human
and nonhuman animal conflict in the story and the death of the panther parents.
The consequence of this killing is described in ‘unflinchingly graphic’ terms
(Adams 1986: 19):

Not many weeks afterwards the settler was following the fresh trail of a
bear which had killed his sheep. The trail led him at last along the slope
of a deep ravine, from whose bottom came the brawl of a swollen and
obstructed stream. In the ravine he found a shallow cave, behind a great
white rock. The cave was plainly a wild beast’s lair, and he entered cir-
cumspectly. There were bones scattered about, and on some dry herbage
in the deepest corner of the den, he found the dead bodies, now rapidly
decaying, of two small panther cubs. (Roberts 1895: 16–17)

What is so jarring about the story is not only the importance (and violence)
of species relations in the wild, but also the blurring of animal–human lives in
language and representation. The death of the panther cubs is clearly likened
to the tragedy of two dead human children, given that they are described in
the first instance as ‘dead bodies’ and only later identified as ‘small panther
cubs’. The story’s resolution, in other words, is not one of human heroism
over animal conquest; instead, the pathos lies in understanding that human
encroachment and intervention often mean an unnecessarily violent end to
animal life.
Another explicit example of human intrusion comes with ‘The Homesick-
ness of Kehonka’. In this story, the capture and attempted domestication of a
wild animal is conveyed through the life-narrative of a young goose, who is
stolen from his family’s nest and raised by a backwoods farmer. Kehonka’s free-
dom is circumscribed when his wings are clipped; however, he never loses his
desire to return to the wild, and this ‘homesickness’ is reflected in his frequent
ruminations about migrating south and attempts to forge relationships with
the flock of geese near the goose pond. When spring arrives, Kehonka’s desire
to join this ‘alien flock’ becomes urgent, and he tries to fly, despite his clipped
wings (Roberts 1902: 129):

His first desperate effort carried him half a mile. Then he dropped to
earth, in a bed of withered salt-grass all awash with the full tide of Tan-
tramar. Resting amid the salt-grass, he tasted such exaltation of free-
dom that his heart forgot its soreness over the flock which had vanished.
(Roberts 1902: 131)

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Overcome by a newly formed fellowship with the wild goose group, Kehonka
forgets ‘his captivity and clipped wing’ (Roberts 1902: 132). Unable to keep
up with the flock, he begins a fragmented journey to find them, during which
his wings give out and he falls frequently along the Tantramar river. As with
most of Roberts’s narratives, animal death is immediate and violent. Earth-
bound, Kehonka is ambushed by a fox: ‘[T]he struggle lasted scarcely more
than two heart-beats’ and his limp body is carried swiftly back into the woods
(Roberts 1902: 140). As this story shows, Roberts’s representation of Kehonka
holds formal and political weight. As a psychologically complex protagonist,
Kehonka demands the same readerly attention and empathy that a human pro-
tagonist would garner, while his demise, due to human intervention, forces a
refashioning of the ethical optics surrounding hunting, environmental destruc-
tion and domestication.
Roberts’s animal characters are consequently fleshed out, fully formed and
central, often even more so than his human characters. Moreover, with the
short story form, animals come sharply into focus. Characters are not mar-
ginal, nor is their precarity reliant on being written out in favour of human
character action. Instead, this precarity is due to the inherent violence and
danger of the wilderness. Indeed, as Roberts writes, ‘death stalks joy forever
among the kindred of the wild’ (Roberts 1902: 36). Moreover, Roberts’s
wordplay in calling animals ‘wild folk’, ‘kindred’ and ‘persons’ also forges a
linguistic kinship, and specifically disrupts the uncertain boundary between
animals and humans. In not actively employing rights rhetoric throughout his
prose, Roberts sidesteps a Victorian didacticism in favour of a more modernist
representation of animal–human kinship based on confluences in behaviours
and concerns specific to psychology and the environment. This sets himself
apart from other writers of his time, such as Seton, London and even Woolf,
who often lean more towards overtly anthropomorphic depictions of talking
animals or animal narrators.
While Kehonka meets a tragic end, the titular eagle in the adventure story
‘The Lord of the Air’ (1902) manages a triumphant escape and return to free-
dom from both Indigenous and settler hands. Significantly, Roberts illuminates
different cultural relationships with animals. For the Indigenous character, the
eagle is initially ‘inoffensive’ and rather a source of inspiration: ‘He had often
watched, with feelings as near akin to jealousy as his arrogant heart could
entertain, the spearing of suckers and whitefish. And now the sight deter-
mined him to go fishing on his own account’ (Roberts 1902: 69). Though the
Indigenous character engages in trade because he ‘had freed himself from the
conservatism of his race’, the relinquishing of this reciprocal and appreciative
relationship with animals amounts to nothing.5 Consequently, eliding racial,
class and cultural differences, Roberts positions both the Indigenous trapper
and the American animal-trophy collector as threats to animal existence. Once

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trapped, the eagle sits in his cage, where the stifling nature of the enclosure is
palpable with his immobility:

Now when any one of his jailers approached and sought to win his
confidence, he would shrink within himself and harden his feathers with
wild inward aversion, but his eye of piercing gold would neither dim nor
waver, and a clear perception of the limits of his chain would prevent
any futile and ignoble struggle to escape. (Roberts 1902: 86–7)

Here, the eagle plays into a juxtaposing object–subject dynamic, as a live speci-
men whose importance exists for the American as symbolic domination of the
wilderness and for the Indigenous character as economic transaction, while also
markedly resisting this status by not giving in to their affections. He visibly
resists domestication, too, reflected by Roberts’s repetitive imagery of the eagle
drawing his energy inwards, collapsing his wings, shrinking but maintaining a
visual awareness of both his surroundings and his situation. When the American
arrives, excited to claim a live specimen of a species that ‘year after year had
baffled his woodcraft and eluded his rifle’, he brings with him a leather anklet
to be fitted so that the eagle may leave his cage (Roberts 1902: 87). While the
Indigenous ‘jailer’ had long accepted that ‘them’s the kind that don’t tame’, it
is the American’s ‘confidence in his knowledge of the wild folk’ that secures the
eagle’s freedom (Roberts 1902: 88). Seizing the opportunity to escape, ‘the king
bounded upward’ when the cage was opened (Roberts 1902: 90).
Roberts often repeats plot formulations in his adventure stories, such as
animal-to-animal combat, seen in ‘When Twilight Falls on the Stump Lots’,
and egocentric human hunting, as in ‘The Treason of Nature’, which raises two
central concerns: the conflicting roles of instinct and reason, and the role that
settlers play in the fabric of the wilderness that was being articulated at the
beginning of the twentieth century. For many of those living in the settlements,
survival forms the basis of their encounters with animals while others seek
out animal kin out of curiosity. This curiosity often manifests itself in perilous
encounters between children and animals. Many of Roberts’s stories feature a
character called ‘the Boy’, a potentially autobiographical figure: his father is a
pastor who teaches his son and gives him access to natural history books, and
he spends most of his time alone since he is not enrolled in the local school. As
Keith stresses, ‘in denying him a proper name, Roberts deliberately places [the
Boy] on the same footing as animals’ (Keith 1969: 97). The archetype, border-
ing on allegory, of the unnamed Boy thus works to distance the reader from
the human individual in salutary ways, in redressing the implicit imbalance of
narratives that depict animal–human relationships.
For the Boy, the multiple ways in which humans interact with animals and
the resulting conflicted feelings about responsibility towards those animals is

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played out in short stories, the most explicit being the first story of Kindred
of the Wild, ‘The Moonlight Trails’. In this story, the Boy is first described
as concerned with the welfare of animals, going so far as to state his love for
them and to be ‘fiercely intolerant’ of cruelty towards them (Roberts 1902:
40). Then, with a hired man named Andy, the Boy experiences ‘the wild spirit
of adventure, the hunting zest of elemental man’, as they set traps for rabbits
(Roberts 1902: 42). The Boy’s youth and excitement are juxtaposed with the
playful nature of the rabbits. While they are not seen by the Boy, their ‘fine
triplicate tracks’ in a ‘pattern of mirth’ reflect the ‘play of care-free children,
almost a kind of confused dance, a spontaneous expression of the joy of life’
(Roberts 1902: 34). But the rabbits are not care-free children, as Roberts clari-
fies, for they are nonhuman animals with their own form of communication
through signs: ‘No onlooker not of the clef-nose, long-ear clan could have told
in what the signal consisted, or what was its full significance’ (Roberts 1902:
36). There is no attempt to decipher or translate these signs as a recognition of
alterity that resists translation. His compassion blinkered by the thrill of the
hunt, the Boy’s revelatory return to his previous sympathies occurs only when
he sees ‘the cruel marks of the noose under [the rabbit’s] jaws and behind its
ears’ (Roberts 1902: 51). Horrified by the reality of hunting and trapping, the
Boy throws his animal ‘trophy’ into the snow and declares that neither he nor
Andy will snare any more rabbits.
We encounter the Boy once more in ‘The Boy and Hushwing’, where he is
determined to test his woodcraft against an owl’s, in order to trap and observe
him. The Boy’s fascination with Hushwing as a skilful hunter leads him to
track the owl to ‘give him a taste of what it feels like to be hunted’ (Roberts
1902: 160). However, in his desire to trap, but not kill, Hushwing, the Boy
reveals two key insights that complicate dominant structures of animal–human
relationships that place human as superior to animal. First, that ‘the Boy’ ‘felt
impelled to try his skill against’ Hushwing’s suggests that he is an intelligent
and worthy adversary and mentor. Second, the Boy understands his knowledge
of ‘woodcraft’ is linked to his understanding of animal behaviour, and he, in
turn, ‘becomes animal’ in order to observe them: he creeps ‘soundless as a
snake’, spies ‘as a fish-hawk’ and ‘[lies] still as a watching lynx’ (Roberts 1902:
160–1).6 He sets his trap, which involves a string that, when pulled, forced
‘broken twigs [to] scratch seductively on the stump, like the claws of a small
animal’, and waits patiently (Roberts 1902: 169). Slipping (albeit briefly) into
Hushwing’s thoughts, the narrator suggests that ‘Hushwing knew his fate was
wholly in the hands of this master being, whom no wild thing dared to hunt’
(Roberts 1902: 170). Here, Roberts’s variable focalisation, shifting from the
Boy’s to Hushwing’s thoughts, presents Hushwing with his own subjectivity
and interiority. In other words, the use of variable instead of fixed focalisation
opens up the narratological perspective to more-than-human characters.

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The Boy’s feeling of ‘mastery’ is short-lived, however, and reversed by Roberts

by the conclusion of the story. Much like the eagle, as a wild creature Hush-
wing resists the confines of captivity through his persistent defiance of human
authority. Even when he is released in the loft, Hushwing is visibly marked out
by his potential for violence: the Boy must be careful to avoid ‘the keen talons’
and the ‘hissing and snapping [from] his formidable beak’ when he approaches
the owl (Roberts 1902: 173–4). Moreover, in a spectacular moment of encoun-
ter, the Boy stares at Hushwing and Hushwing stares back, destabilising the
expected hierarchical power dynamic inherent in this master–captive relation-
ship: ‘The daunting mastery of the human gaze, which could prevail over the
gaze of the panther or the wolf, was lost upon the tameless spirit of Hushwing’
(Roberts 1902: 175). This challenge meets the Boy’s approval, made possible
by youthful inquisitiveness and curiosity rather than desire to bend the owl to
his will. Realising that he cannot make a pet out of Hushwing, the Boy instead
resolves to study his hunting in the loft for a fortnight, again employing his
knowledge of animal behaviour by sitting motionless in hiding. Hushwing’s
freedom is regained when a thief attempts to invade the loft to steal grain, and
Hushwing, with his cunning hearing, disturbs and attacks him with his claws
and wings. Here, Hushwing simultaneously assumes dominion of his space
and secures it through his depiction as a consistent threat to both human and
animal. In a stunning reversal of power, the thief mistakes Hushwing for a
‘hobgoblin’ – ‘Nothing was further from his imagination than that his assail-
ant should be a mere owl’ – and Hushwing flees (Roberts 1902: 175). In his
absence, Hushwing experiences a linguistic and hierarchical promotion as well,
rechristened ‘Master Hushwing’ by the Boy’s father (Roberts 1902: 177). This
scene marks a potential transgression of Cary Wolfe’s ‘discourse of species’, ‘a
constellation of signifiers to structure how we address others of whatever sort
(not just nonhuman animals) – and the living and breathing creatures who fall
outside the taxonomy of Homo sapiens’ (Wolfe 2003: xx). With this phrase,
Wolfe draws attention to sites in which human and animal similarity and dif-
ference, often a means of upholding human superiority, may be challenged.
In this conclusion, Hushwing is celebrated at once for his specifically ‘animal’
abilities, and he is rewarded with a human designation. His elevation can be
read as unsettling, and even inverting, the privileged status of the human. I
concede that Roberts’s use of the term ‘Master’, a semantic signifier reserved
exclusively for humans, exemplifies an allegiance to humanist epistemology;
however, I also see its use here, suggestive of a form of dominion over other
beings, including humans, as upending the animal–human relations at play in
the narrative.
This upending gesture is significant, as it redresses the accepted hierarchies
that maintain human supremacy, and is continued in Roberts’s attention to
animal gaze. In ‘The Haunter of the Pine Gloom’, it is the Boy who feels ‘afraid

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in his own woods’ because he realises he is being watched by a lynx (Roberts

1902: 199). As the hunter, the lynx reverses the position of human and animal.
However, this radical shift in agency does not necessarily affect the expected
outcome of the plot. The Boy, again, is eager to test his abilities against a wild
animal: ‘He had a pet theory that the human animal was more competent, as
a mere animal, than it gets the credit of being; and it was his particular pride
to outdo the wild creatures at their own games’ (Roberts 1902: 202). But these
skills take the form of the Boy mimicking their behaviours, and he prides him-
self above all on his keen eyesight. The Boy does, however, recognise his limita-
tions in this narrative. He reads a big black bear as the ‘undisputed Master of
the Woods’, and begins to carry a rifle when he realises that he is being watched
by the lynx (Roberts 1902: 105). Unable to accept this reversal of animal–
human hierarchy, the Boy takes it upon himself to become the steward of the
forest and stalks the lynx to death. Michel Poirier contends that in these scenes
where humans are in ‘great peril’, ‘the sympathies of the writer naturally go
out to him’, meaning that ‘the man almost invariably escapes unhurt’ (Poirier
1927: 403). However, while such an outcome proves true in many of Roberts’s
narratives, we should not assume that Roberts’s sympathies always lie with the
human. In ‘The Watchers of the Campfire’, Roberts articulates an ecocritical
attention to humanity’s destruction of the natural world through sprinklings
of the effects of human settlement on the area: ‘the ancient forest [has] fallen
under the axes of the lumbermen’ and the panther had been ‘declared’ by ‘some
hunters’ as ‘extinct’ (Roberts 1902: 255, 264).
The impartiality that Roberts displays towards the outcome of animal–
human or even animal–animal encounters signals his desire to tread the middle
ground. As many critics have pointed out, Roberts attempts to produce a realis-
tic, objective depiction of the nonhuman realm to ‘avoid . . . the melodramatic,
the visionary, and the sentimental’ (Roberts 1904: ix). Often, these scenes of
violence come at the price of animal life that ends brutally but does not triv-
ialise lived animal experience. Instead, animals prove worthy adversaries of
human characters in their intelligence and strength. Animal–human kinship is
strengthened by these similarities, and Roberts makes this apparent not only
through characters like the ‘semi-human’ bear of ‘Black Swamp’ (1911), but
also through form, the most striking examples of which are ‘Savoury Meats’,
‘Wild Motherhood’ and ‘Do Seek Their Meat from God’. In all three stories
human and animal interests are pitted against each other, with survival as the
common link between human and animal. Formally, Roberts employs what I
term ‘split-sympathy’ narratives in which reader identification shifts among
multiple, rich, intertwined plots. What gives depth to these stories and, indeed,
complicates a solely anthropocentric reading of the plot is that Roberts pro-
vides significant backstories for both human and nonhuman characters, and
positions all creatures within a family network.

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In ‘Wild Motherhood’, for instance, we see a triangulation between moose,

wolf and human families. The reader is first introduced to a family of moose
travelling through deep snow, in which they ‘can neither flee nor fight’, to take
the risk at finding food and shelter during the hard winter (Roberts 1902: 98).
A moose calf falls down a rock crevice, where he is stuck without any chance
of escape. His mother stays with him while the rest of the herd moves on. The
narrative then shifts, with a formal break indicating part two of the story, to
a family of wolves that inhabit a cave. Here, too, is struggle, as ‘there was
famine’ and, more troubling, the she-wolf has been wounded by a human steel
trap: ‘[s]he had gnawed off her own paw as the price of freedom. She could not
hunt’ and ‘[t]he wapiti deer had migrated to safer ranges’ (Roberts 1902: 101).
Since the wolf and his mate’s survival are dependent on the hunt, the he-wolf,
though aware of the threat of the human, nevertheless must venture outside of
the cave.
Another formal break welcomes the third and initially disparate narrative
about a family of settlers. The man, much like the male wolf, is depended
upon by his wife and child, both in ill-health. The solution to their plight is
fresh meat, casting the man as predator, akin to the wolf. This family does not
appear to live within the confines of the settlement or in proximity to other
families. Left in isolation ‘in a cabin of unutterable loneliness’, they appear as
reliant upon nature as the nonhuman animals (Roberts 1902: 107). Yet, the
reader is also privy to Roberts’s commentary on the ‘curious improvidence
of the backwoodsman [in cutting] down every tree in the neighbourhood of
the cabin’, which distinguishes his motives and actions from those of the wild
animals. Ironically, chopping down the forest deprives the man and his family
of warmth and shelter and exacerbates their illness. The man not only invades
nature but also upsets its balance and disturbs the forest. Furthermore, Roberts
does not paper over, or absolve the man of, this fact. From his hiding place,
the backwoodsman audibly disrupts the scene by ‘slapping the silences in the
face’ (Roberts 1902: 112). He shoots first the wolf and then the moose, who
collapses with her muzzle touched to her calf. Once outside of the dynamic of
survival with the conflict resolved, the man’s place in the fabric of the wilder-
ness becomes distorted. With a bizarre change of heart, the man saves the calf
and concludes the tale by sparing him for ‘the boy to play with and bring up’
(Roberts 1902: 113). Does this act offer further possibilities for interspecies
entanglements? Or does it simply re-enact the human–companion animal rela-
tionship made possible through domestication? While the man’s actions bring
about the story’s end, the narrative’s ambiguity complicates a conclusion cel-
ebrating human dominion, and instead demands a more thoughtful reflection
on animal–human encounter.
The critical dynamics at work in Roberts’s short stories contest accepted
hierarchies of intelligence, strength and emotion, and provide an alternative

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politics of animal–human relationships made possible by the creation of this

new genre. In its embrace of American naturalism, Victorian realism and the
modernist short story form, the wild animal story fashions a forceful discourse
of animal–human kinship within a North American geography. The result is a
transitional fiction that complicates, redresses and even, sometimes, subverts
the ‘human’ as separate and apart from the ‘wilderness’ folk. Roberts’s tight
plotlines and captivating animal characters contribute to a larger narrative
undercurrent that speaks to some of our most pressing predicaments regard-
ing environmental destruction, species displacement, extinction and climate
change. As my analysis has shown, scenes of violence are not brief encounter
but entanglement, causing a domino effect through communities, both human
and nonhuman. In its effect, survival is a captivating and unsettling narrative
premise in the Canadian wild animal short story that not only disrupts the
animal–human boundary, but also makes legible the crucial and continuous
confluences of environments, species and subjectivities in modernist literature
and culture.

Works Cited
Adams, John Coldwell. 1986. Sir Charles God Damn: The Life of Sir Charles G. D.
Roberts. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Atwood, Margaret. 2012. Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature. Toronto:
House of Anansi Press.
Conway, Don. 1984. ‘Roberts and Modernism: The Achievement of “The Squatter”’.
In The Sir Charles G. D. Roberts Symposium. Ed. Glenn Clever, 77–88. Halifax:
Nimbus.
Country Life. 1907. ‘Realism & Romance, Nature & Humour’. Country Life 22.570
(7 Dec.): clxvii.
Haraway, Donna. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chtulucene. Durham,
NC: Duke University Press.
Herman, David. 2018. Narratology Beyond the Human: Storytelling and Animal Life.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Herman, David. 2020. ‘Narratology Beyond the Human: Self-Narratives and Inter-
Species Identities’. In The Palgrave Handbook of Animals and Literature. Ed.
Susan McHugh, Robert McKay and John Miller, 51–64. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
Hovanec, Caroline. 2018. Animal Subjects: Literature, Zoology, and British Modernism.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hovanec, Caroline. 2019. ‘Darwin’s Earthworms in the Anthropocene’. Victorian
Review 45.1 (Spring): 81–96.
Hunter, Adrian. 2016. ‘The Rise of Short Fiction’. In Late Victorian into Modern. Ed.
Laura Marcus, Michèle Mendelssohn and Kirsten E. Shepherd-Barr, 204–17.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Irvine, Dean. 2010. ‘Modernisms in English Canada’. In The Oxford Handbook of
Modernisms. Ed. Peter Brooker, Andrzej Gąsiorek, Deborah Longworth and
Andrew Thacker. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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 lauren cullen

Keith, W. J. 1969. Charles G. D. Roberts. Toronto: Copp Clark.

Lutts, Ralph. 1990. The Nature Fakers: Wildlife, Science, and Sentiment. Charlottes-
ville: University of Virginia Press.
Lutts, Ralph. 2006. ‘Nature Fakers Controversy’. In The Encyclopedia of Religion and
Nature. Ed. Bron Taylor. London: Continuum.
Morton, Peter. 1984. The Vital Science: Biology and the Literary Imagination, 1860–1900.
London: Allen & Unwin.
Poirier, Michel. 1927. ‘The Animal Story in Canadian Literature’. Queen’s Quarterly
34 (April): 398–419.
Roberts, Charles G. D. 1895. Earth’s Enigmas: A Volume of Stories. Boston: Lamson,
Wolffe.
Roberts, Charles G. D. 1989. The Collected Letters of Charles G. D. Roberts. Ed. Laurel
Boone. Fredericton, New Brunswick: Goose Lane.
Roberts, Charles G. D. 1902. The Kindred of the Wild. London: Duckworth.
Roberts, Charles G. D. 1904. The Watchers of the Trails. Toronto: Copp, Clark.
Roberts, Charles G. D. 1911. Neighbours Unknown. New York: MacMillan.
Roberts, Charles G. D. 1974. ‘A Note on Modernism’. In Selected Poetry and Critical
Prose Charles G. D. Roberts. Ed. W. J. Keith, 296–301. Toronto: University of
Toronto Press.
Rohman, Carrie. 2008. Stalking the Subject: Modernism and the Animal. New York:
Columbia University Press.
Sandlos, John. 2000. ‘From Within Fur and Feathers: Animals in Canadian Literature’.
TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies 4: 73–91.
Scholtmeijer, Marian Louise. 1993. Animal Victims in Modern Fiction: From Sanctity to
Sacrifice. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Seifert, Martina. 2007. ‘Canadian Animal Stories: Charles G. D. Roberts, “Do Seek
Their Meat from God” (1892)’. In The Canadian Short Story: Interpretations. Ed.
Reingard Nischik, 41–52. Rochester, NY: Camden House.
Seton, Ernest Thompson. 1898. Wild Animals I Have Known. New York: Scribner.
Shepherd-Barr, Kirsten. 2015. Theatre and Evolution from Ibsen to Beckett. New York:
Columbia University Press.
Shukin, Nicole. 2009. Animal Capital: Rendering Life in Biopolitical Times. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.
Whalen, Terry. 1984. ‘Roberts and the Tradition of American Naturalism’. In The Sir
Charles G. D. Roberts Symposium. Ed. Glenn Clever, 127–42. Halifax: Nimbus.
Ware, Tracy. 2016. ‘Cosmopolitan Nationalism: Canadian Literature of the Confedera-
tion Period, 1867–1914.’ In The Oxford Handbook of Canadian Literature. Ed.
Cynthia Sugars. Oxford:Oxford University Press.
Wolfe, Cary. 2003. Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal. Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press.

Notes
1. For Roberts on modernism, see Roberts, ‘A Note on Modernism’ (1974: 296–301).
For criticism on modernism and Roberts’s poetry, see Don Conway, ‘Roberts and
Modernism: The Achievement of “The Squatter”’ (1984); and Dean Irvine, ‘Mod-
ernisms in English Canada’ (2010).

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 animal–human entanglements in charles g. d. roberts

2. For more on the overlapping discourses of evolution and the arts, see Kirsten
Shepherd-Barr, Theatre and Evolution from Ibsen to Beckett (2015); and Peter
Morton, The Vital Science: Biology and the Literary Imagination, 1860–1900 (1984).
3. For more about this subject see Ralph H. Lutts, The Nature Fakers: Wildlife, Science,
and Sentiment (1990).
4. Terry Whalen’s ‘Roberts and the Tradition of American Naturalism’ (1984) pro-
vides a compelling comparison of Roberts’s and American Jack London’s corpus.
For Whalen, Roberts writes in ‘the wider tradition of mimetic’ while ‘London
writes in closer kinship with the anthropomorphic mode of Kipling’ (130–1).
5. In considering Roberts’s role in the ‘cosmopolitan nationalism’ of early Canadian
literature Tracy Ware highlights that his ‘several poems on Aboriginal mythology,
whatever their shortcomings, demonstrate that he was not exclusively Eurocentric,
and the Senecas and the Sarcees made him an honorary chief’ (Ware 2016: 297).
6. Also noted by Keith (1969: 99).

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 11

ENCOUNTERING FEMALE HUMAN ANIMAL

BECOMINGS IN LEONORA CARRINGTON’S
SURREALIST HYBRID TALES

Karen Eckersley

Surrealist Leonora Carrington’s proclamation that she was born a ‘female

human animal’ (Carrington 1998a: 372) situates her as an artist and author
who identified as a hybrid, bringing her into conversation with a posthuman
and feminist politics. In her essay ‘What is a Woman?’ (1970), Carrington
intimates that her human–animal positioning is not mere aesthetic choice but
rather an ontological state, a political manoeuvre that disrupts humanism’s
normative models of the Vitruvian white man. It signposts a call to action
aimed at women in order to forge an alliance with the natural world against
what she perceives as patriarchal ‘Masters’ (Carrington 1998a: 375).
Carrington’s remedy for an imminent apocalypse induced by a tyrannical
male anthropos demands adopting a multiplicity of perspectives and ontologies
for her proposed hybrid and ‘humanoid female’ (Carrington 1998a: 373):

The idea that ‘Our Masters’ are Right and must be loved, honoured and
obeyed is, I think, one of the most destructive lies that have been instilled
into the female psyche. It has become most horribly obvious what these
Masters have done to our planet and her organic life. If women remain
passive I think there is very little hope for the survival of life on this
Earth. (Carrington 1998a: 375)

Carrington’s call to action provokes both a politics of transgression and a

rebellion in her attack upon the ‘destructive lies’ of ‘Our Masters’. Moreover,

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she catalyses a dynamic that requires alliance and sympoiesis, where she sug-
gests that women and ‘organic life’ are kin that must come together to ensure
‘the survival of life’. As I argue in this chapter, the politics exhibited in ‘What is
a Woman?’ aptly introduce the hybrid human–animal themes of Carrington’s
short stories – laying the ground for characters who embody such trans-
gressions and alliances in a manner that anticipates a posthuman approach.
Crucially, I posit that Carrington employs the human–animal hybrid figure as a
feminist catalyst for change: one which transgresses and subverts the ‘passive’
position that she critiques in a manner that demonstrates a strategy in con-
fronting ecological crisis, whilst at the same time forging a feminist politics that
contributes to contemporary environmental debates. In this way, Carrington
also challenges the male surrealists’ penchant for visions of female passivity, by
harnessing the figure of the hybrid in order to redesign and articulate an active
female position. To this end, I investigate how Carrington’s modernist hybrids
anticipate feminist Rosi Braidotti’s posthuman subjects, exhibiting modes of
‘becoming-animal’ and multiple ecologies of belonging and navigating a path
beyond an androcentric humanism. Carrington’s short stories ‘As They Rode
Along the Edge’ (1937–40) and ‘Jemima and the Wolf’ (2017)1 are thus pre-
cise anticipations of the ‘geostories’ (Haraway 2016: 49) that Donna Haraway
proposes as a route out of the narratives repeatedly dictated by ‘Species Man’.
Carrington’s tales stage a revolt via their cast of disparate, hybrid bodies and
etch an interspecies cartography that gives voice to contemporary feminist and
ecological thinking.
In their account from A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia
(1980), Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari explain their concept of ‘becoming
animal’ as a process of intensive and affective encounters between humans and
nonhumans. This process involves casting off majoritarian modes of thought
(including humanist principles) and instead moving towards what they describe
as ‘minoritarian’ positions in order to embrace a potential unfettered by human-
ist dichotomies. Crucially, it marks a process or movement towards, rather than
arriving at a fixed destination point: a praxis emphatically evident in Carrington’s
nomadic human-animal speakers. The ‘becoming animal’ is always in flux in a
manner that mirrors the surrealist hybrid’s ontological ambiguity, thus forging a
creative space for the feminist identity, as Deleuze and Guattari explain further
in Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (1975):

To become animal is to participate in movement, to stake out the path of

escape in all its positivity, to cross a threshold, to reach a continuum of
intensities that are valuable only in themselves, to find a world of pure
intensities where all forms come undone, as do all the significations,
signifiers, and signifieds, to the benefit of an unformed matter of deterri-
torialized flux, of nonsignifying signs. (Deleuze and Guattari 1986, 13).

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 karen eckersley

Posthuman thinker Rosi Braidotti adopts a feminist reading of Deleuze

and Guattari’s theory of ‘becoming animal’ in a bid to offer alternatives to
humanism. Braidotti insists that the ‘becoming animal’ has the potential to
‘scramble the master-code of phallocentrism’, thereby ‘loosening its power over
the body’ (Braidotti 2002: 124). Her development of Deleuze and Guattari’s
frameworks opens up original feminist readings of the hybrid figure in Car-
rington’s surrealist work. Braidotti seizes the concept of a becoming politics,
viewing it as an opportunity for so-called ‘minoritarian’ others in its potential
slippage in between ontologies. Notions of human and animal are ruptured
and replaced with a sliding continuum of movement which dislodges Cartesian
essentialist principles where ‘all forms come undone’, as Deleuze and Guattari
explain. In this way, the fixed, stable subjectivity envisaged and consolidated by
humanism is unsettled in a manner that also accurately describes Carrington’s
hybrid figure, who is similarly in flux, fully adhering to neither humanity nor
animality, and instead depicted as crossing ‘a threshold’. As Braidotti adds,
these becoming modes show how we ‘live in permanent processes of transi-
tion, hybridization and nomadization and these in-between states and stages
defy the established modes of theoretical representation’ (Braidotti 2002: 2). In
this chapter I investigate how Braidotti’s reading of this malleable, ‘becoming
animal’ mode illuminates Carrington’s hybrid figures who occupy, and operate
within, indeterminate territories which circumnavigate humanist cartographies.
The ‘becoming animal’ female hybrid figures in Carrington’s tales also mark
their estrangement from the male white body as the measure of all things: a prac-
tice that Braidotti identifies as a tool in Enlightenment humanism’s habit of sub-
ordinating all those who fall outside of its parameters. In The Posthuman (2013),
Braidotti suggests that it is Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man who has become
the ultimate and most pervasive symbol of androcentric humanism. In this ‘ideal
of bodily perfection’, Braidotti posits that humanism has found its ‘universal
model’: a European white man, ‘self-regulating’ and imbued with the ‘intrinsi-
cally moral powers of human reason’ (Braidotti 2013: 13). I suggest that this
figure has shaken off its animal heritage in order to assume its superiority over all
other species. Carrington’s hybrids embrace their inherent wildness by eschewing
man’s codes of controlled civility and restraint, and so reclaim an animal ancestry
whilst gesturing towards a posthuman future. In this way, her work chimes with
Braidotti’s postulation that ‘feminism is not a humanism’ (Braidotti 2017: 21)
where female figures turn to their animality in order to disrupt the male symbolic
order but also to conjure a more balanced and posthuman landscape to replace
it. Braidotti suggests that the antidote to Man falsely claiming to be the measure
of all things is to enact a ‘colossal hybridization of the species’ where ‘What
comes to the fore instead is a human–nonhuman continuum’ (Braidotti 2017:
26). I investigate the extent to which Carrington’s female, hybrid figures recur-
rently embody and conspicuously enact this continuum.

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 leonora carrington’s surrealist hybrid tales

Carrington’s own biocentric perspective in ‘What is a Woman?’ provides

an appropriate cue to begin a posthuman analysis of her short stories. She is
dismissive of René Descartes, casting his ‘I think, therefore I am’ as ‘[s]ome
kind of pretension’, and replaces it instead with a metamorphic ontology in
the form of a female body that is ‘changing every second’ (Carrington 1998a:
373). Carrington’s perception of an imminent manmade disaster and her call to
women to facilitate change and recovery anticipates Donna Haraway’s feminist
politics, which argues for the eschewal of ‘Species Man’s’ dominance over all
life. Like Carrington, Haraway suggests that we ‘refuse’ ‘Species Man’s’ reign,
which she describes in similarly condemnatory terms in her book Staying with
the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (2016):

The story of Species Man as the agent of the Anthropocene is an almost

laughable rerun of the great phallic humanizing and modernizing
Adventure, where man, made in the image of a vanished god, takes
on superpowers in his secular-sacred ascent, only to end in tragic detu-
mescence, once again. Autopoietic, self-making man came down once
again, this time in a tragic system failure, turning biodiverse ecosystems
into flipped-out deserts. (Haraway 2016: 47)

Haraway correlates the annihilation of the natural world with the singular ego
of Cartesian man (and his representative humanism), who subordinates and
denigrates all who fall outside of his epistemological category in a manner that
mirrors Carrington’s concerns in ‘What is a Woman?’ Not only are there paral-
lels between both writers’ calls to refuse such a tyrannical system, but they are
similarly aligned in the creative, posthumanist approach they propose in order
to circumnavigate it. Rather than slipping into a reductive trap that rants against
the humanist framework, thus reinforcing its binaries, Haraway proposes new
frameworks which resonate with the method and subject matter Carrington had
given voice to several decades earlier. Haraway abandons Anthropocene-bound,
utilitarian individualism in favour of forging a more inclusive landscape that
knits species together, a praxis that could also accurately describe Carrington’s
interconnected creaturely approach in her writing and visual art: ‘That History
must give way to geostories, to Gaia stories, to symchthonic stories; terrans
do webbed, braided, and tentacular living and dying in sympoietic multispe-
cies string figures; they do not do History’ (Haraway 2016: 49). Haraway’s
call for tales of ‘sympoietic multispecies’ uncannily resembles the principles
that underpin Carrington’s writing and art where her audience is brought into
close proximity and alliance with not only other animal species, but crucially
their own animal genealogy. Such a radical reconfiguration of traditional tales
that forge anticipatory ‘geostories’ often manifests in Carrington’s writing as a
recourse to fairy-tale domains, where she invokes imaginary realms that hark

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 karen eckersley

back to childhood. It is these frameworks that, I suggest, enable original read-

ings of Carrington’s work in this chapter. Her hybrid configurations, conjur-
ing transformative landscapes that reimagine a humanity entangled within the
natural world, serve to re-index and rewire humanist principles. In this way, I
investigate how Carrington’s band of beastly modernist hybrids fosters a femi-
nist move towards ecological recovery in order to reconfigure a phallocentric
Anthropocene.
Born in Lancashire to an upper middle-class family, Carrington rebelled
early on, scribbling on the walls of the Crookhey Hall mansion where she grew
up, and getting expelled from several schools where one cast her ‘ineducable’
(Aberth 2010: 15). She sought solace with animals, frequently etching non-
human realms in her early visual oeuvre and story writing. Her Self-Portrait
(Inn of the Dawn Horse) (1937–8), for example, was painted around the same
time that she wrote many of her short stories and features both a hyena alter
ego, whose pose mirrors her own, and a horse glimpsed galloping away through
an open window. After a brief spell at the Ozenfant Academy of Fine Arts in
London, Carrington went to Paris, where she was welcomed into André Breton’s
surrealist circle, achieving critical acclaim with exhibits of her own. Her rela-
tionship with fellow surrealist Max Ernst, who was twenty-six years her senior,
helped to catapult her into the minds and imaginations of the surrealist move-
ment. At the same time, it threatened to compromise her own artistic integ-
rity because her youth and beauty positioned her as a potential muse to the
male artist’s gaze. As Anna Watz notes in Surrealist Women’s Writing: A Critical
Exploration (2020), whilst the surrealists were interested in the collective proj-
ect of unsettling subjectivity, the ‘troubling of identity sought by Breton and
Ernst [. . .] was often conceived as simulating a “feminine” subject position’:
one that they correlated with a passivity and hysteria that Carrington’s work
and politics sought to contradict. Watz adds that whereas ‘Breton and Ernst
envision psychic, and by extension social, revolution resulting from their trou-
bling of identity, several of Carrington’s stories contain a critical reflection on
the gendered and political blind spots of such a project’ (Watz 2020: 46, 43).
I posit that Carrington challenged the male surrealists’ ‘blind spots’ and their
predilection for visions of female passivity, symbolised in the femme-enfant, by
forging an active and agentive human–animal hybrid.
Carrington’s short story ‘As They Rode Along the Edge’ is one of a series
of tales she wrote between 1937 and 1939. It has been published most recently
as one of a collection in The Complete Stories of Leonora Carrington (2017)
by Dorothy Project. This surreal tale opens with the provocatively named pro-
tagonist Virginia Fur riding a so-called wheel through her forest homeland with
a menagerie of cats, immediately establishing her as one among a human–animal
assemblage. The liminality of her existence is established in the opening pages
when we discover that, despite exhibiting traces of a human ontology, she lives ‘in

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a village long abandoned by human beings’ (Carrington 2017: 40). Significantly,

Virginia’s house has holes all over that she has deliberately ‘pierced for the fig
tree that grew in the kitchen’ (Carrington 2017: 40). In this way, Virginia thrives
within a setting which is appropriately metamorphic and porous: a realm that is
palpably in flux in a manner that aptly introduces the protagonist’s own shape-
shifting physicality and character. Carrington presents Virginia as an emphatic
hybrid force who slides across the human–animal continuum, one that Braidotti
posits as key to adopting posthuman positioning. as this extract from the opening
page of the story demonstrates:

This was something to see: fifty black cats, and as many yellow ones,
and then her, and one couldn’t really be altogether sure that she was a
human being. Her smell alone threw doubt on it – a mixture of spices
and game, the stables, fur and grasses [. . .] Her name was Virginia Fur,
she had a mane of hair yards long and enormous hands with dirty nails;
yet the citizens of the mountain respected her and she too always showed
a deference for their customs. (Carrington 2017: 39).

Virginia’s ‘dirty nails’ situate her as an earthly being: a character who is at one
with the soil and embraces the uncleanliness that Carrington suggests all reli-
gion ascribes to women in ‘The Cabbage is a Rose’ (1975). In this later essay,
she critiques the religious thinking that ‘declare[s] women to be feeble-minded,
unclean, generally inferior creatures to males’ (Carrington 1998b: 377). Aside
from her nails and her bestial name, Virginia’s ‘mane of hair’ also aligns her with
equine characteristics, whilst her ‘enormous hands’ suggest that she transgresses
anthropocentric proportion and scale.
As Janet Lyon explains in her chapter ‘Carrington’s Sensorium’, ‘there is no
right or wrong body in Carrington’ (Lyon 2017: 169: emphasis in original), and
her rupturing of anthropocentric scale and perspective constructs new modes that
question the hierarchical supremacy that the human species anoints itself with:

In the Carringtonian milieu, this dissolution of scale is part of a larger

fundamental condition: in this milieu, no life is slotted for sanctity or
degradation in advance. No living thing deserves, a priori, to live or die
more than any other living thing. [. . .] No body or manifestation of life
has more value than another. (Lyon 2017: 169)

Lyon here highlights how Carrington’s narrative landscape is one that corre-
sponds with Haraway’s ‘geostories’: tales which operate outside of the humanist
orbit, exploding the rational boundaries of Cartesian thinking to etch instead
an open-ended, human–-animal continuum that functions on an often vast and
incomprehensible scale. The fact that Virginia’s initial appearance is blurred in

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 karen eckersley

among ‘fifty cats’ speaks to the non-hierarchical and posthuman ontology that
Lyon underlines in her analysis, where those who do presume to ‘live or die
more than any other’ are held to account in an often violent and transgressive
manner. Carrington draws attention to a conspicuous animality in this extract
in the description of Virginia’s potent smell, which is a key signifier of her
ambiguous ontology. Despite her apparently anomalous and hybridised pres-
ence, she is, however, presented as a reciprocal agent in this landscape, one who
is respected and, at the same time, exhibits a ‘deference’ to others, speaking to
this space as a balanced and therefore posthuman milieu.
In many ways, ‘As They Rode Along the Edge’ is enacted as a quest, where
Virginia, accompanied by an extraordinary menagerie of animals, eventually
seeks revenge for the murder of her boar lover at the hands of Saint Alexander –
a figure who, in presuming that his religiosity accords him superiority, is destined
for an unpleasant end. Situated in the wilds of the woods within the mountains,
it is the setting of a multitude of animal species and hybrid life who exist in a rich
ecosystem that exhibits sympoietic balance, as the dynamic between Virginia and
the landscape’s residents suggests. This vibrant assemblage of life that anticipates
Haraway’s calls for ‘tentacular’ tales is threatened by the appearance of Saint
Alexander. Saint Alexander’s ambitions for Virginia Fur to ‘enter the Church’, so
that he can ‘win her soul’ (Carrington 2017: 41), play out Carrington’s critique
of the way in which religious male masters seek to ‘enfeeble’ and control women.
He wishes to sacrifice her, promising that she will be rewarded with a ‘beautiful
spot’ in his graveyard, ‘right next to the statue of the Holy Virgin’ (Carrington
2017: 41). With no intention of conforming to Saint Alexander’s religious
regime, Virginia instead becomes a thief, filling her bag ‘with holy plates’ in a
comic interlude (Carrington 2017: 44), and eventually escaping with one hun-
dred cats behind her in a transgressive manoeuvre. Her journey across the forest
is one that takes place in the company of its beasts: creatures who appear to be
drawn to Virginia’s own animality. Further galvanised by their co-mingling, this
assemblage of animal and hybrid life replaces the singular symbolism of Saint
Alexander and his cold church with a more collective, animal politics:

The wheel crossed the woods at a hissing speed. Bats and moths were
imprisoned in Virginia’s hair; she gestured to the beasts with her strange
hands that the hunt was over; she opened her mouth and a blind night-
ingale flew in: she swallowed it and sang in the nightingale’s voice: ‘Little
Jesus is dead, and we’ve had a fine dinner.’ (Carrington 2017: 44)

Saint Alexander’s piety is dismissed as Virginia and her assemblage of beasts tri-
umph, enjoying the fact that his attempts to sacrifice her to religion are thwarted.
Rather, her own animality and her kinship with other creatures are cast as an
active and emancipating force that speaks to the strategy of becoming-animal.

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Here, Virginia is empowered by her nomadic and hybrid force, emblematised by

the cyclical vision of a wheel that eschews humanism’s hierarchical frameworks,
and emphasising her tentacular entanglements with the creatures of the woods.
Her immersion within this twilight, liminal sphere that criss-crosses between
human and nonhuman space is emphasised by the way in which bats and moths
become caught in her hair. Moths are particularly significant. As conspicuously
metamorphic creatures, they aptly complement Virginia’s own on-going, shape-
shifting ontology. Swallowing a nightingale appears to symbolise how Virginia
is given voice by connecting with animals. This contrasts with the eternal silence
that Saint Alexander has planned for her in death in his graveyard. The fact
that it is Virginia who sings as a result of swallowing the nightingale suggests
Carrington’s own feminist politics, as this is a bird species where only the male
gives song. Transferring his voice to Virginia gives further agency to her female-
animal hybrid figure, thereby speaking to the active gender politics that Carrington
calls for women to adopt.
It is significant that the episode where Saint Alexander espouses his religious
rhetoric and attempts to convert Virginia is juxtaposed with a scene of seduc-
tion. Following her escape from the church, Carrington introduces Virginia’s
ostentatious lover, Igname. Igname is a boar, whose name suggests an audacious
embrace with disgrace and dishonour in its etymological relations with igno-
miny. Importantly, his attraction to Virginia is apparently stirred by her hybrid
animality. Rather than lie sacrificed and dead in Saint Alexander’s graveyard next
to the ‘Holy Virgin’, the ironically named Virginia would rather lie in bed with
Igname, a feeling that he shares: ‘He admired most her fruity smell and her long
hair, always full of nocturnal animals. He decided she was very beautiful and
probably a virgin. Igname rolled in the mud luxuriously, thinking of Virginia’s
charms’ (Carrington 2017: 45).
The significance of smell is highlighted again in this short story and is a key
defining characteristic of Carrington’s protagonists, who engage all of their ani-
mal senses rather than relying solely upon sight. Virginia’s ‘fruity smell’ acts as
an aphrodisiac to Igname, whilst Saint Alexander’s human odour, by contrast,
is described as ‘sickening’ (Carrington 2017: 40). Similarly, Virginia’s attraction
to Igname is underpinned by his position as one among a creaturely multiverse,
where the young nightjar attached to his head and his wig of squirrel’s tails only
adds to his beauty. Carrington subverts the famed surrealist male gaze into a
female one here, playfully detailing how Igname teasingly hides ‘his russet but-
tocks, as he did not want to show all his beauty at one go’ (Carrington 2017:
46). In this way, human figures – particularly religiously inclined ones – are
relegated to the periphery in the tale, while those who display their animality
are central to its concerns. Saint Alexander wants to ‘win’ Virginia and take her
like a trophy. Igname is instead generous in his affection for her, explaining that
his ‘body is exploding with love’ (Carrington 2017: 47). Carrington presents

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their bestial sexuality as an affirmative life force, thereby transgressing religious

humanist codes that insist upon denial, ritual sacrifice and empty symbolism.
Saint Alexander’s cold and inert churchyard, stone statues and ‘Flowers of
Mortification’ (Carrington 2017: 42) are contrasted with the excesses and vivac-
ity of creatural life stirred by the spectacle of Virginia and Igname’s courtship.
The stillness of Saint Alexander’s church is replaced with the intense colour and
sexual dynamic pulsing between the lovers in a scene which highlights Virginia’s
wild animality, as well as the transgressive politics of her hybridity:

She spat into the stewpot and put her lips into the boiling liquid and swal-
lowed a big mouthful. With a savage cry she brought her head back out
of the pot; she jumped round Igname, tearing her hair out by the roots;
Igname stood up, and together they danced a dance of ecstasy. The cats
caterwauled and stuck their claws into one another’s necks, and then
threw themselves in a mass onto Igname and Virginia, who disappeared
under a mountain of cats. Where they made love. (Carrington 2017: 47)

This scene is a swirling vortex that complements the nomadic mode of becom-
ing animal where the creatures, and the landscape itself, appear to be in flux.
The courtship episode is imbued with movement, energised by the animal
dynamics at play between Virginia and Igname but also the caterwauling cats
who play a part in the ceremony of the couple’s love-making. Virginia’s hybrid-
ity is cast in this scene as a subversive force. Her spitting into the stewpot and
tearing out her hair speak to a primal and animal instinct that resonates with
Carrington’s own rebellion against the so-called civilising forces of Man and
religion that she takes to task in her essays. Virginia’s grotesque and violent
animal manifestation – further emphasised in its jarring juxtaposition with
the implied purity of her name – also counters the male surrealists’ penchant
for the femme-enfant: a role that Carrington herself refused to be subsumed
into, thus rupturing the male scopophilic gaze. Carrington’s hybrid protagonist
experiences a further wild metamorphosis after she ingests the ‘boiling liquid’
(Carrington 2017: 47) from her stewpot, suggestive of a culinary alchemy that
triggers further uninhibited behaviour. Now firmly distanced from the inert
space of Saint Alexander’s church, Virginia is both an energised and, impor-
tantly, an energising force whose wild vivacity spills over immanently, casting a
spell upon those around her. This transformation is not coerced in the manner
that Alexander’s church rhetoric would effect. Rather, this wilder metamorpho-
sis is enabled through Virginia’s own free will and desire to act in a way that
Carrington calls for in ‘What is a Woman?’
The tale’s denouement is catalysed by Igname’s death: he is slain and sacri-
ficed for his meat by human hunters at Saint Alexander’s behest. For this act,
Virginia and an animal assemblage of extraordinary scale seek revenge and

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set about interrupting the religious party’s convent meal, where they intend to
feast on Igname’s flesh. Carrington’s prescient posthumanist ethics are demon-
strated in Virginia’s assertion that what humans call hunting is, in fact, murder.
She descends upon the religious meal, accompanied by a copious, wild menag-
erie of co-species, allies who are motivated by the same sense of injustice and
the need for redress against male masters:

The door crashed open and all the beasts of the forest entered crying,
‘Kill him, kill him.’ In the turmoil that followed one could barely make
out a human form sitting on a wheel that turned with incredible speed,
who shouted with the others: ‘Kill him!’ (Carrington 2017: 56)

The collective revenge that the animals and Virginia seek is symbolic of the
creatures’ confrontation with the domineering speciesism of humanist prac-
tice exhibited in Saint Alexander’s religious moralising and in his carnophal-
logocentric meal.2 In the tale Carrington challenges the centrality of human
characters and replaces them with a non-speciesist framework: the sympoietic
landscape celebrated by Haraway which recognises animals as our kin. The
fact that Virginia can hardly be made out as a ‘human form’ suggests that not
only has she fully embraced her animal ontology, but also that she is, most
importantly, very much one among an assemblage of life, not poised over oth-
ers upon an anthropocentric throne. She is the embodiment of the becoming-
animal and posthuman identity as Braidotti imagines it, a ‘transversal entity,
fully immersed in and immanent to a network of relations’ (Braidotti 2013:
193). In this manner, Carrington etches an animal milieu overriding humanist
perspectives and forging malleable scales that rupture the human’s presumed
centrality. Virginia’s dismissal of Saint Alexander demonstrates this refusal
of hierarchy. Instead, Carrington conjures unstable, shifting and metamor-
phic realms that do not prioritise one body or species over another, as Lyon
notes. This manoeuvre is suggestive of a feminist politics in that it eschews
what Braidotti dismisses as the habit of casting ‘Man’ as the gold standard by
which we define ourselves. As she explains in Anthropocene Feminism (2017):
‘Neither “Man” as the universal humanistic measure of all things nor Anthro-
pos as the emblem of an exceptional species can claim the central position . . .
this shift marks a sort of “anthropological exodus” from the dominant configu-
rations of the human’ (Braidotti 2017: 26).
An ‘anthropological exodus’ is precisely what Carrington facilitates in the
final pages of ‘As They Rode Along the Edge’ in the characters’ quest for
revenge and move towards an animal kinship, synonymous with Braidotti’s
call for a ‘hybridization of species’. In the example of the hybrid figure of
Virginia Fur we witness how a posthuman, vitalist feminism is enabled in the
vision of her position upon a ‘human–nonhuman continuum’ which refuses

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 karen eckersley

to valorise humanism as the exception. What emerges in the continuum and

hybrid visions and practices of Carrington’s story is the movement of always
becoming and fostering entanglements across subject and species lines. As
Braidotti further explains in a praxis that could describe Carrington’s char-
acters, ‘“Becoming” [. . .] is about affinities and the capacity both to sustain
and generate inter-connectedness’ (Braidotti 2002: 8). In Carrington’s vision
of the surrealist hybrid figure, such open-ended praxis is fully harnessed and
enabled, fostering feminist politics that escape humanism’s reductive, fixed
parameters in both their transgressive powers and in their evocation of an
alliance and sympoietic balance. In this way, her hybrid ontology is one that
conjures a portal out of what Haraway critiques as the repeated tales of
‘Species Man’.
Such active becomings are further manifest in the case of Carrington’s
‘Jemima and the Wolf’: a story only recently published for the first time, situ-
ated as the final tale in the complete collection with ‘As They Rode Along the
Edge’. Whilst Virginia is introduced at the beginning of that narrative as an
already hybrid figure in the wild amalgam of the forest, Jemima appears at first
as a singular and human girl, as yet uninitiated into the becoming-animal mode
and held hostage in a family home she despises. Carrington does, however,
hint at the metamorphoses to come, establishing the teenage girl as a trans-
gressive misfit, reminiscent of Carrington’s own rebellious childhood when she
was expelled from several educational institutions. Jemima’s governess is called
upon to make ‘a normal girl’ of her. This involves taming her wildness and
bringing her into line with the civilised behaviour expected of a young lady
born into an upper-class life. Jemima’s mother, a woman who conforms to such
codes, is disappointed with her daughter and upset to hear that the doll she
gave her has not become a treasured toy but has instead had her head broken
‘against a rock’ (Carrington 2017: 193). Her mother’s ambitions for Jemima
consist of making her ‘become a very beautiful woman’ but she sees her ‘ridic-
ulous’ behaviour as a serious foil to her plans, casting her thirteen-year-old
daughter as ‘that she-devil’ (Carrington 2017: 195). Demonstrating parallels
with Virginia spitting into the stewpot, Jemima similarly ‘spat on the beautiful
carpet’ (Carrington 2017: 195) when the governess confronts her about her
behaviour, exhibiting a transgressive wildness that foreshadows the mode of
becoming-animal she eventually adopts.
In the same way as Virginia Fur’s sexuality is portrayed as an animal force,
so too is Jemima’s animated by her attraction to a mysterious figure who exhib-
its a hybridity that eludes epistemological categories. Following the altercation
with her mother and governess, Jemima seeks refuge outdoors, hiding herself
‘in the branches of a great tree’ as she laughs at her family’s futile attempts to
tame her. Whilst lurking in her tree, she catches sight of her father with a man
whose appearance both captivates and confounds her:

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It seemed to her that this man had the head of a wolf. Intrigued, she
bent forward to see better. ‘It’s the changing shadows that produce the
impression,’ she said to herself. ‘But I’m sure he’s got the head of a wolf.
He’s devilishly beautiful, damn it, more beautiful than other men.’ [. . .]
With his untidy grey hair and thin face, he really did look more like an
animal than a man; close up, his yellow eyes had a hunted look. His
clothes were very correct. (Carrington 2017: 196)

This mysterious figure is later identified as Ambrose Barbary – a contradictory

conundrum of a name that suits his apparent hybridity. Ambrose attracts Jemima
via his palpable animality, which immediately intoxicates her in the way that
Virginia is similarly drawn to the boar Igname. This key feature is one that makes
him ‘more beautiful than other men’. His claim to ‘know a lot about the habits
of animals’ only serves to heighten the teenager’s sexual curiosity. Indeed, Jemima
ponders how the ‘human language is strange on his lips’ (Carrington 2017: 197),
as if his nonhuman otherness is what arouses her the most. Jemima’s transgres-
sive character, highlighted by her mother, who casts her as a ‘she-devil’, is also
foreshadowed in Ambrose, whose own devilish beauty speaks to an immediate
resonance between these two figures. As the two men return to the house, Jemima
climbs down from her tree and goes towards the shed that only she and her ani-
mal companions use. The building, like Virginia’s house with its fig tree growing
through the middle, contains a hole through which Jemima enters. Like the feast
where Virginia and her animal community convene around a stewpot, Jemima’s
own animal menagerie appear together to eat, albeit on a smaller scale. Cats jump
in at the window and a large female bat appears with her seven suckling babies. As
Jemima mingles with this animal community, her own inherent wildness becomes
increasingly apparent, moving beyond the more obviously rebellious spitting
towards exhibiting a seemingly creaturely ontology herself as she proclaims that
the ‘flies taste good today’ (Carrington 2017: 198). Whilst Carrington appears to
relish the alterity of this creatural scene, she also invokes an intimacy and famil-
iarity between Jemima and her animal companions. The baby bats suckling their
mother underline how, as posthuman thinker and physicist Karen Barad explains,
‘“Human” bodies are not inherently different from animal ones’ (Barad 2007:
152). Later, hearing her governess calling, Jemima emerges from the shed and, like
Virginia, finds creatures become caught in her hair, eating ‘lots of little insects’ and
‘spitting out their scaly feet’ (Carrington 2017: 199). This source of sustenance is
cast as preferable to the more conventional drink and snacks which await her in
her room, where she ‘poured the milk into a flowerpot, and ignored the biscuits’
(Carrington 2017: 200). In this way, Carrington intimates Jemima’s sense of kin-
ship with this animal community, where she exhibits a tangible entanglement with
this nonhuman realm in a manner further highlighted by her refusal of the human
custom of ‘milk’ and ‘biscuits’.

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When Jemima finally meets Ambrose Barbary formally in the family home,
Carrington introduces him as both the object of her teenage desires but also a
conduit into the animal world, to which she already feels a sense of kinship. In
her chapter ‘The Gender of Sound’ (1992), Anne Carson suggests that women
and wolves share an affinity in their more proximate ties to the wild and the
earth in a manner that resonates with Carrington’s portrayal of the uncanny
connection between Jemima and Ambrose:

The wolf is a conventional symbol of marginality in Greek poetry. The

wolf is an outlaw. He lives beyond the boundary of usefully cultivated
and inhabited space marked off as the polis, in that blank no man’s land
called to apeiron (‘the unbounded’). Women, in the ancient view, share
this territory spiritually and metaphorically in virtue of a ‘natural’ female
affinity for all that is lawless, formless and in need of the civilizing hand
of man. (Carson 1992: 119–42)

Both Jemima and Ambrose occupy a liminal and unmappable space on the
margins of the human and beyond ‘usefully cultivated and inhabited space’;
they are equally ‘unbounded’ and lupine in the way that Carson identifies.
Similarly, Carla Freccero discusses the connection between humans and wolves,
explaining that the wolf–human hybrid in particular demonstrates a ‘history of
interdependence’ (Freccero 2017: M102). Jemima’s and Ambrose’s entangle-
ment speaks to the fact that, whilst they project a human appearance, there
are visible traces of an inherent animality within them which appears to surge
more palpably when they are in one another’s company. This animal kinship
in their united becoming-animal is indicative of an emancipatory passage out
of the civilised and thus inhibited human world within which Jemima feels
imprisoned. Their union appears to catalyse their animality and predisposition
for metamorphosis, as the following climactic episodes suggest.
Ambrose presents Jemima with a gift and proposes that they meet early
in the gardens before breakfast. Jemima eagerly unwraps the present and is
delighted to find inside the head of a rooster ‘five times larger than any other’;
she appraises it as ‘beautiful’ (Carrington 2017: 202). She kisses it three times,
thereby revising conventional definitions of beauty beyond those conceived by
her mother. Pressing the rooster’s head to her heart, she falls asleep but is seized
by a series of nightmares. Jemima dreams of the wolf as a metamorphic form,
possessing ‘sometimes the body of all animals mixed with his own’ (Carrington
2017: 202), speaking to the shapeshifting and hybrid themes of the narrative.
At 4am, she is drawn to the window and sees a shadow in the garden, recognis-
ing it, ‘though it changed into a plant, bird, animal, man’ (Carrington 2017:
202). Jemima enters the garden with a sense of uneasy anticipation whilst fol-
lowing this shadow, knowing that she is pursuing the wolf and yet unable to

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‘distinguish the precise form of his body’. Ambrose is in flux, anticipating the
becoming-animal posited by Braidotti as a route out of humanist frameworks,
occupying an in-between state that triggers Jemima’s own metamorphosis in
their immanent relations. Such an in-between is emphasised in the recurrent
liminal motifs that are invoked in Carrington’s short story: Jemima’s status as
a teenager, neither child nor adult; Ambrose’s shifting appearance as a human–
animal that cannot be definitively categorised; the twilight hour when the moon
hangs still, yet the daylight will soon be upon them; and the garden realm itself,
which is both an outside space and one that is curated and manipulated by
man – not fully wild and yet not entirely containable either. The two characters
come together, with Jemima touching his face with her fingertips. With her
touch she ‘had the feeling his face was changing colour’ (Carrington 2017: 203)
and the sun casts a yellow light before he disappears with such suddenness that
she describes their last scene together as experiencing ‘whiplash’ (Carrington
2017: 204). In this intimate scene it is as if Jemima has become an agentive
force herself, where it is her touch that triggers a visible shift in the wolf’s
appearance. Indeed, Carrington forges the couple as exhibiting a sympoietic
connection where Ambrose’s slippage towards the status of a plant similarly
seems to trigger a significant and reciprocal metamorphosis in Jemima:

But her feet had changed. She bent down to see better and to satisfy her-
self that a metamorphosis had really occurred. Fine, soft fur had grown
between her toes, a fur that stopped on the instep where she found little
hairs barely visible to the naked eye. With a gaping mouth she looked at
her two feet and murmured. ‘I’m of the same blood. Will I be as beauti-
ful as he? [. . .] What wonderful changes will I see in just a few days?’
(Carrington 2017: 204)

Jemima’s ‘acute loneliness’ and sense of despair are transformed by the

becoming-animal metamorphosis she witnesses in herself, thrilled not only by
the shapeshift she observes so far, but also by the changes to come. Such a trans-
formation brings Jemima into closer proximity with the wolf as she notes that
their entanglement is complete, they are now ‘of the same blood’ (Carrington
2017: 204). Through this connection, Jemima is further positioned as a posthu-
man figure: one immanent to a network of others, in flux and becoming rather
than the stable, individualist ego of humanism. Here she presents an ‘affec-
tive, interactive entity endowed with intelligent flesh and an embodied mind’
(Braidotti 2017: 39). Her increasingly hybrid form speaks to what Braidotti
labels the posthuman nomadic body which is ‘open-ended, inter-relational and
trans-species’, exploding the ‘boundaries of humanism at skin level’ (Braidotti
2002: 124). Jemima’s transgressions thus far in the short story, which defy the
tales of ‘Species Man’, also move towards a symbol of alliance and entanglement,

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 karen eckersley

where Jemima’s and the wolf’s co-mingling ontologies resonate in affirmative

posthuman becomings. It is a mode that is positively estranged from the for-
tress of human civilisation that her family home represents.
I suggest that Jemima has now experienced an awakening to the world
beyond ‘Species Man’, as Haraway critiques it, embracing a metamorphic ontol-
ogy in order to begin to craft her own narrative destiny that seeks a reunion
with her animal heritage. Feeling at one with the wolf, Jemima expresses an
increasing sense of alienation from her family home and seeks to reunite with
Ambrose, beginning a solo quest to find him. She abandons the patriarchal rule
of home and its humanist conventions, climbing a tree to look into the distance,
spying a landscape that shares parallels with the world in which Virginia Fur
resides. It is one of ‘miles of forest and a gigantic castle’, bringing the narrative
into a fairy-tale sphere, albeit an increasingly dark and at times gothic one. In
this way, there is a sense that Carrington is intimating her story’s connections
with Red Riding Hood in Jemima’s journey into the woods. However, in this
version, it is the young female figure who seeks out the wolf rather than the
animal predating upon her, as we witness in the traditional tale. Entering this
wild and earthly milieu brings Carrington’s Jemima character into conversa-
tion with Virginia Fur as a fellow creature who registers upon a spectrum of
human–nonhuman hybridity. Jemima is not the vulnerable femme-enfant but
rather a wild and creaturely force herself who controls her own destiny. This
fairy-tale multiverse recalls Lyon’s discussion of Carrington’s capacity to invoke
landscapes which are out of humanist scale and perspective. Jemima stumbles
upon a figure whom she presumes is a young child and whose gender is unclear.
However, he is quick to point out that he is twenty years old and so older than
her. This strange boy, described as ‘pale, fragile’ (Carrington 2017: 207) as if a
ghost, is Ambrose’s son, called Mimoo. He details his father in the terms that
Jemima is familiar with as a multitude of creatures: ‘A fox, a wolf, a cat, an
eagle, a stag, a horse, a rooster’ (Carrington 2017: 209). Jemima demands that
he take her to his father’s castle so as to continue her metamorphosis on her
trajectory of becoming-animal.
Jemima’s surprise discovery that Ambrose Barbary and his family are, in
fact, all ghosts, who walk the line between the living and the dead, closes the
tale in an emphatically hybrid and posthuman zone. Worn out with fatigue
from her journey through an increasingly frozen landscape, Jemima finally lies
down on an enormous stone, reading the words written into it with ‘deep gothic
letters, Here lies Ambrose Barbary and his wife Lucind. Wolf, dear Master,
do not walk too often in the footsteps of the living’ (Carrington 2017: 212;
emphasis in original). On this final page, Carrington’s tale enacts a full exit
from the stories of ‘Species Man’, forging a geostory that melds temporality,
space and ontologies in recurrently hybridised manoeuvres. Ambrose figur-
ing as a human–wolf, dead but still walking ‘in the footsteps of the living’,

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places him upon an on-going, becoming trajectory: a figure who criss-crosses

between thresholds, even in death. Jemima’s increasing connection with this
figure galvanises her own becoming-animal figuration, staged as a protest that
answers Carrington’s call to action in her ‘What is a Woman?’ essay whilst also
committing to a mode of connection and entanglement that forges a human–
animal continuum in the manner we also witness in ‘As they Rode Along the
Edge’. In this way, both Jemima and Virginia are characters who anticipate the
tentacular figures Haraway proposes, forging a portal away from the frame-
works of ‘Species Man’ and his pervasive ‘History’, where the male masters
that Carrington critiques pose a threat to the planet and her organic life. In
the hybrid figures from Carrington’s stories here, we witness both a rebellion
and a transgression against a humanist symbolic order that imposes patriar-
chal rule, and a creative posthuman cartography that navigates a path away
from such rule. As such, Carrington’s brand of beastly modernism leads us
into a posthuman landscape that gives voice to a feminist politics and a more
balanced ecological approach. It reminds us, most importantly, that animals
are ourselves and our kin. In Carrington’s animal hybrid figures we learn how
becoming is about our capacity both to ‘sustain and generate interconnected-
ness’ (Braidotti 2002: 8). As Carrington so presciently warns, this is a vital
strategy in countering a neglectful, androcentric anthropos that threatens the
existence of all species.

Works Cited
Aberth, Susan L. 2010. Leonora Carrington Surrealism, Alchemy and Art. Farnham:
Lund Humphries.
Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Braidotti, Rosi. 2002. Metamorphoses Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming.
Cambridge: Polity Press.
Braidotti, Rosi. 2013. The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Braidotti, Rosi. 2017. ‘Four Theses on Posthuman Feminism’. In Anthropocene Feminism.
Ed. Richard Grusin, 21–48. London: University of Minnesota Press.
Carrington, Leonora. 1998a. ‘What is a Woman?’ In Surrealist Women: An International
Anthology. Ed. Penelope Rosemont, 372–5. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Carrington, Leonora. 1998b. ‘The Cabbage is a Rose’. In Surrealist Women: An Interna-
tional Anthology. Ed. Penelope Rosemont, 375–7. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Carrington, Leonora. 2017. The Complete Stories of Leonora Carrington. St Louis:
Dorothy Project.
Carson, Anne. 1992. ‘The Gender of Sound’. In Glass, Irony and God. New York: New
Directions, 119–42.
Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. 1986. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Trans.
Dana Polan. London: University of Minnesota Press.
Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. 2004. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizo-
phrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. London: Continuum.

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 karen eckersley

Derrida, Jacques. 1991. ‘“Eating Well”, or the Calculation of the Subject’. In Who
Comes After the Subject. Ed. Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor and Jean-Luc Nancy
(eds), 96–119. New York: Routledge.
Freccero, Carla. 2017. ‘Wolf, or Homo Homini Lupus’. In Arts of Living on a Damaged
Planet. Ed. Anna Tsing, Heather Swanson, Elaine Gan and Nils Bubandt,
M91–M103. London: University of Minnesota Press.
Haraway, Donna J. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene.
Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press.
Lyon, Janet. 2017. ‘Carrington’s Sensorium’. In Leonora Carrington and the International
Avant-garde. Ed. Jonathan P. Eburne and Catriona McAra, 163–76. Manchester:
Manchester University Press.
Watz, Anna. 2020. Surrealist Women’s Writing: A Critical Exploration. Manchester:
Manchester University Press.
Wolfe, Cary. 2003. Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and
Posthumanist Theory. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.

Notes
1. ‘Jemima and the Wolf’ was published for the first time, together with ‘The Sand
Camel’ and ‘Mr. Gregory’s Fly’, in Leonora Carrington, The Complete Stories of
Leonora Carrington (2017).
2. See Jacques Derrida, ‘“Eating Well”, or the Calculation of the Subject’ (1991).
Derrida explains the term ‘carnophallogocentrism’ as one which highlights the way
in which subjectivity is most specifically the privilege of meat-eating men, implying
‘carnivorous virility’ and species supremacy (1991: 113). In Animal Rites, Cary
Wolfe explains that eating animals facilitates a ‘transcendence of the human . . . by
killing off and disavowal of the animal’ (2003: 66).

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 12

MODERN INTERSECTIONS: READING ANITA

SCOTT COLEMAN’S ANIMALS

Elizabeth Curry

In May 1926, when Opportunity magazine announced the winners of its sec-
ond annual writing contest, the Casper Holstein Awards, it was no small affair.
Celebrating a range of authorial forms, from poetry to investigative journalism,
the contest culminated in a dinner party at New York’s Fifth Avenue Restaurant
attended by 400 writers, political actors and socialites – many of them well-
known figures of the Harlem Renaissance, including Jean Toomer, Alain Locke,
Paul Robeson and Carl Van Vechten (‘The Awards Dinner’ 1926: 186). These
awards not only bestowed recognition and cash prizes upon the celebrated, but
most essentially made available a sizeable public platform for promising Black
writers from around the country. From this dais, the name of one such writer
then beginning to emerge as a literary voice from beyond the New York locus
was announced: Anita Scott Coleman. Awarded second place for her personal
experience sketch ‘The Dark Horse’, Coleman’s introduction was broadcast
prominently through this prize.
A poet who also wrote fiction and essays, Coleman’s work appeared fre-
quently in African American periodicals between 1925 and 1938, but her cen-
tral occupation concerned family life on the ranch (Davis and Mitchell 2008:
24). In a short biography published in tandem with the Holstein awards, self-
described ‘ex-schoolteacher’ Coleman sums up her position as that of a married
woman ‘engaged in raising children and chickens’ on a ranch in New Mexico
(Coleman 1926: 188). This brief self-portrait not only distinguishes Coleman
through geography and occupation, but it also emphasises an important theme

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that crops up often in her writing: a keen awareness of the side-by-side lives
of humans and nonhuman animals. The unpretentious and humorous discur-
sive parallel Coleman draws between children and chickens, who both require
raising, corresponds to similar associations and linguistic dyads that appear
throughout her work, which take for granted notions of interspecies linkages.
For Coleman, who did indeed raise five children and untold chickens before
moving to Los Angeles in mid-life, her positionality as a Black woman at home
on a ranch in New Mexico would seem to foreground a perspective that sur-
faces often in her poetry and prose. Her work disarticulates antiblack racism
and dehumanisation while it simultaneously resists the instrumentalisation of
nonhuman figures as necessarily reproachable in the process.
In this chapter, I observe how Coleman’s work within the Harlem Renais-
sance modernist milieu explores nonhuman animality not outside the prism of
America’s racial imaginary, but in a way that reconceptualises many of its ani-
malising compulsions. Given how race, and Blackness specifically, directly fig-
ure in the animalising ontologies that many modernist texts explore, a critical
focus on how racialisation and animalisation intersect with modernist themes
and aesthetics reveals much about both constructions, as Coleman’s poetry and
prose demonstrate. Engaging critical work in Black studies and postcolonial
studies that consider animal representation, I read Coleman’s work as but one
example of (heretofore overlooked) modernist experimentation concerned with
the parallel rupture of race and animality as co-constituting colonial categories
of devaluation. Within modernism’s bestiary, where often the human becomes
strange and the nonhuman becomes familiar, Coleman imagines something dif-
ferent: scenes of interspecies mingling where lines of division blur and merge
to redraw formations that disrupt the work of whiteness as a force of dehu-
manisation. Instead, dyadic pairings align interspecies linkages through both
affective and positional bonds that highlight how such alliances resist white
hegemonic subordination. Binary oppositions are reinscribed through Cole-
man’s work to be parallelisms between humans and animals that reveal race
and animality to be co-constructs of what Aimé Césaire calls the ‘howling sav-
agery’ of the ‘Western humanist’ (Césaire 1950: 37). Approaching a writer long
overlooked, this chapter surveys Coleman as an important figure to consider as
we rework the beastly modern with the aim of challenging systems of racialisa-
tion and animalisation.
Though unfortunately ‘The Dark Horse’ is now lost – either to history or
to an as-yet-uncatalogued archive – its mention survives alongside a number of
Coleman’s published essays, short stories and poems presented in the recently
assembled collection Western Echoes of the Harlem Renaissance (2008).1 Within
this collection, themes and discursive parallelisms arise between humans and non-
human animals that challenge notions of their figurations as somehow removed
from the American racial imaginary. Coleman’s poetry and prose borrow from

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animalising stereotypes around Black bestiality and then soften or reverse those
tropes so that animality comes to figure as something at odds with the beastly.
The most prominent example of this reversal appears in her story ‘Three Dogs
and a Rabbit’, which, a year prior to the Holstein awards, had earned Coleman
a writing prize from The Crisis in 1925. A frame narrative, the story formally
mirrors the disorienting layers of ‘civility’ that ostensibly separate human and
nonhuman as recognisable relations. Additionally, her poem ‘Idle Wonder’,
published in Opportunity in 1938, creates not so much a reversal as a thinking
through animality when its speaker speculates about feline consciousness, then to
meditate further on Black labour and conditions of servile captivity. Both pieces
offer possibilities to read closely the work of an artist who, though celebrated at
the time, was also marginalised by social forces that limited a wider circulation
of Black voices within modernism. These works also suggest new possibilities
for reading race alongside questions of the animal (and reading animals while
always considering racial constructions) as a way to think around white norma-
tivity and discourses of dehumanisation. Interestingly, these works also point to
an early twentieth-century concern among Black writers with representations
of animals that differ markedly from white modernist depictions. For instance,
while works by white writers noted for their radical takes on animality (such
as Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood or Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis) explore
and acknowledge the beastly animalism inherent in being human, writers like
Coleman (and, notably, Zora Neale Hurston and Jean Toomer as well) portray
animals not as atavistic or primitive, but redemptive in their dignity and fullness.
In opposition to modernist texts that render the animal (and the human animal)
as monstrously other, Coleman’s prose and poetry demonstrate how racialisation
and compulsive animalisation fundamentally distort their subjects. Instead, her
work puts forward a notion of the human animal that is not so distinctly above
or different from the rest of the living world. This chapter represents an effort to
expand understandings of how Coleman – among other writers of the Harlem
Renaissance – were long since asserting animal figurations that refigure what it
means to be human.

Prose Work
Through figurations of bodily entanglements, ‘Three Dogs and a Rabbit’ illus-
trates how race and animality are always ensnared in a Eurocentric American
culture that seeks to devour nonwhite bodies. One of her best-known works, the
short story was an entry Coleman submitted to an annual fiction contest held by
The Crisis, for which she won third prize.2 In the tale, past and present – memory
and reality – merge across the species barrier to conjure a challenge to what
Claire Jean Kim identifies as ‘the centuries-old racial trope [of] Black bestiality’
(Kim 2015: 6). Instead, it offers a way of reading that Sharon Holland proposes
as one that avoids ‘defining the human against the animal other’, whereby both

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discursively exist in binary tension; rather, the story achieves ‘a potentiality for
togetherness’ that does not seek the lack in one to establish the greatness of the
other (Holland 2016: 168). ‘Three Dogs’ tells the tale of a woman standing trial,
offering testimonial defence for her part in harbouring a Black man as he fled
three policemen. She confesses to this act and justifies it through a narrative that
relies on the animal as a figure of sentimentality. She explains to the attendant
jury that in the fleeing man, ‘only a little terror-mad rabbit’ was visible, the very
same rabbit, in fact, that she had rescued at great personal peril decades earlier
from three hound dogs and her white enslaver (93). In this story, the connection
between human and animal manifests as one of parallel vulnerability subject
to forces of white brutality bent on domination. The narrative engages animal
figures as a means of enacting resistance through empathy (rather than fear or
malice) in its audience, and thereby inverts the dominating ends that animalisa-
tion often pursues. As a scholar of Coleman’s work, Laura Barrett notes that the
story explores ‘the intersection of personal and national, individual and race,
oral and written traditions’ (Barrett 2013: 59). A piece that stands decidedly
within the modernist context and also outside the narrowness of the modernism
canon, ‘Three Dogs’ is but one example of a text that explores how race and
animality collide to interrupt the deployment of violence as usual through com-
mingling figurations.
The story operates through a frame narrative with an unidentified narra-
tor quoting at length a lively man named Timothy Phipps, who advised the
narrator to ‘write, write, write’ the oral tale that Phipps recounts (85). This
piece of short fiction that ‘consciously examines layers of storytelling’ engages
a series of narrative voices that unintentionally illustrate how added layers of
discourse ultimately distort their subjects (Barrett 2013: 61). Chronicling three
narrative voices (the narrator, Phipps and Mrs Ritton as she stands trial), the
story successively draws the reader closer to a central figure incapable of speak-
ing: a frightened rabbit. Each voice presents a set of perspectives that differ in
interpretive capacity, and which remain readily identifiable by the shorthand
of their punctuation. Near the beginning of the story, Phipps explains that ‘the
only plot in this rigamarole [. . .] is running, hard to catch’ before he goes on
to elaborate emphatically his gendered theories around beauty and its rarity
among women (85). Fortunately for Phipps, who ‘clings like a leech to the
belief that beautiful temples are invariably beautiful within’, the small, attrac-
tive Mrs Ritton (the central human figure around which the story revolves)
provides a tidy sense of validity to his subjective claim. He interprets the story
he tells to be one that affirms ‘the power of her beauty’ (92). Phipps would
seem to engage what Achille Mbembe refers to as a ‘racist conscience’, whereby
‘appearance is taken as the true reality of things’ (Mbembe 2017: 112). But
Mrs Ritton’s story as the central kernel disrupts Phipps’s interpretive voice,
since she speaks as well. Her voice (as related by Phipps and documented by the

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narrator) is the third perspective the story follows as she testifies from a court-
room witness stand, presenting her own defence against four charges, which
include hampering police in their duty and harbouring ‘a criminal’ (87). Mrs
Ritton’s verbal testimony ultimately tells a very different story, one that is not
about gendered beauty, but about the verve of ‘nonhuman vitality’ in confron-
tation with brutal human violence (Bennett 2010: 14).
From the witness stand, Mrs Ritton tells two stories that take the reader
to the core of liveliness that the story ultimately pursues in its alignment with
nonhuman animality. She relates a pair of nearly identical actions, performed
decades apart, as central to both stories; both stemmed from the ‘only two
impulses’ Mrs Ritton ever answered, having not ‘been born so unfettered’ as the
white courtroom she addresses (89). In the first story, she explains, in a line that
breaks off, ‘I was ten years old, when my master –’ thereby testifying to having
survived as a child under American chattel slavery (90). In her testimony, she
describes how, during that time, she journeyed overland with the Ritton family
from their holding in the South to a new homestead out west. Long days on the
trail, she explains, left them eventually exhausted and starving. Then, one night,
they stop to camp in what the girl observes to be a ‘lovely spot . . . a luxuri-
ous resting place for weary bodies’ (90). To assuage the party’s hunger, ‘three
hounds – faithful brutes that had trailed beside [them] all the weary miles’, are
sent to chase down dinner (91). The dogs quickly succeed in scaring up a rab-
bit, who runs, bounds, turns, swirls and finally plunges, ‘terror-mad’, into the
girl’s lap – a frantic ‘flight-blind’ attempt to escape that she observes with almost
unmediated identification (91). This concentrated observation of the rabbit’s
plight compels her to cover ‘the tiny trembling creature’ in her hands as she
fends off the springing dogs; she then manages ‘to conceal [her] captive in the
large old-fashioned pocket’ of her skirt where it rests, presumably motionless
(91). Arriving a moment later, ‘Master’, hungry and ireful, asks which way the
rabbit went (91). Mrs Ritton explains to the court:

When I replied ‘Don’t know,’ he became quite angry and beat me.
Gentlemen, the scars of that long ago flogging I shall carry to my grave.
Our food was nearly gone and it was I, the slave-girl, who knew the lack
most sorely. But I did not give the rabbit over to my master. (91)

The power of this scene – both for the reader and for the story’s courtroom
audience to whom the testimony is addressed – is in the bareness of the modes
of defence it describes. Using her body alone, the girl withstands the violence
of a brutal assault, terror and hunger to enact resistance to animal suffering
and death. In shielding the rabbit, the girl does more than protect the small
creature from death and devouring; she rejects and endures in her own bare
and unarmed flesh the basest justifications for which men kill animals: hunger

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(which is here extreme), fear, violent will, rapacious entitlement and assumed
dominance over nature and all that exists in it. She asserts her body between
these ideological and physical forces on an impulse, a connection with the crea-
turely, in recognition of the small animal’s determination to live in the face of a
howling chase. In a body deemed available to violence – as violable – by both
her white captors and the law, the girl enacts an improbable inverse: she cre-
ates a space of inviolability for the smaller creature, preserving the unspeaking
animal at the centre of the story.
As Mrs Ritton continues her testimony, she explains that the horrific scene
of violence she endured was witnessed by the white man’s son – the future
Colonel Ritton – who then ‘changed from that day’ toward the girl he had always
teased (92). She tells the assembled ‘Gentlemen’ in the courtroom that he –
her husband – taught her ‘to forget the scars of serfdom’ and to find ‘the joys
of freedom’ from the social positionality assured by her status as Mrs Ritton
(92). Her account pauses here when Phipps interrupts her narrative and tes-
timony to praise the ‘little old white-haired woman standing alone’ in ‘her
loveliness’, captivating the room with ‘the power of her beauty’ (92). With
this interjection, Phipps and the narrator tie together the construction of Mrs
Ritton’s personhood in the eyes of the courtroom by entangling her beauty,
her passing whiteness, and her demonstration of courage and compassion for
the hunted rabbit. Her protection of the animal and her display of courage
and moral commitment had transformed her access to respected personhood,
which was further ‘guaranteed’ through her marriage to the military officer,
Colonel Ritton. As this particular notion of what it means to be a respect-
able person is so enmeshed in the American military state, the narrator does
not further identify her beyond her married surname. As Alexander Weheliye
explains, ‘full access to legal personhood has been a systematic absence’ for
people of colour (Weheliye 2014: 11). In ‘Three Dogs’, race, gender and ani-
mality are tied together to construct certain versions of what it means to be
human in the eyes of the law and white heteropatriarchal culture that abides
by ‘the colonial model of comparing humans to animals’ within a society
where subjugation and domination structure mainstream discourses of ani-
mality (Mbembe 2017: 21).
But Coleman is not through with the construction of personhood as sep-
arate, above or outside of the nonhuman sphere. Though human–nonhuman
boundary lines remain distinct in Mrs Ritton’s first remembrance, in the story’s
final scene these boundaries blur into something momentous. Concluding her
testimony to address the charges at hand, Mrs Ritton recalls the day she glanced
out the window to witness a man running down the street. Fleeing three white
policemen on foot, the man compelled Mrs Ritton to ‘look closer’ to observe
‘that he was black’ (93). From the witness stand she relates: ‘[t]hen a queer thing
happened’ as the memory of that ‘hilly slope’ from years ago surrounded her,

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and suddenly the man ‘who was running so wildly’ appeared to be ‘only a little
terror-mad rabbit’ (93). The sequence of this memory spills from her recognition
of the man’s Blackness – a mode of identification Mrs Ritton had thrust aside – to
a visceral terror that guides her association back to the rabbit. This association
becomes more than memory or resemblance, however, as Mrs Ritton explains
that the forms of man and rabbit exceeded distinction, and as she looked on,
‘they merged and both were one’ (93). Both man and rabbit running for their
lives take on the form of a transgressive creature, at once distinct and combined,
simultaneously appearing as vital beings legible to white American society as
exploitable and killable. Species separation breaks down to make material the
connection that both experience as living beings, who are also bounded by a
logic outside of themselves, one that renders them subject to violent debasement
by Euroamerican brutality. On an impulse, as he darts into her house, Mrs Rit-
ton shelters Phipps – who is here revealed to be the ‘hard to catch’ man – and
like the rabbit, she never gives him over (85). In both scenarios, concealment is
critical; hiding their forms is an act that Mrs Ritton impulsively recognises as the
only mode of defence against the violence of white hysteria, a practice she had
adopted for her own being by passing in order to live freely.
The work of Mrs Ritton’s narrative is in its production of symmetry between
man and rabbit that discursively merges their figures to draw a phenomenologi-
cal connection between the two. This connection is important in the context of
the story’s courtroom because it critically illustrates how white sympathy seeks
sentimentalised animals as it also creates bestialised humans. As Bénédicte
Boisseron observes, within the US court system, so-called justice is contingent
on ‘a racially invested denial of personhood’ (Boisseron 2018: 9). ‘Three Dogs’
demonstrates very clearly how the conceptual gymnastics required to receive
legal justice while Black in America hinges on pushing the proper buttons of
sentimentality to activate white sympathy so that it recognises persons and
their rights. Paradoxically, those buttons light up for charismatic, docile, small
and frightened animals, even while such creatures are also subject to various
exploitative and inhumane actions by that same culture. Animality here does
not function as a means of ‘othering’ in the service of subjugating; rather, its
intention is to humanise both the small animal and Phipps, and to link them
through experiences of vulnerability to harm and unjust entrapment. In the
context of Euroamerican histories of bestialising Black men, animalisation in
this story partially inverts that logic, not only by ascribing rabbit-like quali-
ties to the man (he is fleeing, frightened and outnumbered by beings ferocious
and merciless), but by blurring the lines of distinction between the two. That
‘both were one’ gestures toward the body as the site of connection, not only
through shared vulnerability but through the commonality of embodied being
– of being as always within bodily form. Outside of deliberative logic or even
the pursuit of justice, it is an affective impulse that overtakes Mrs Ritton in

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each of her lifesaving encounters. The story’s power derives from its core asso-
ciations between affective connections; it draws the reader’s attention to what
Jane Bennett calls ‘the common materiality of all that is’ (Bennett 2010: 122). A
connection through affect – a sense of what it means to share the very thing of
being – spurs Mrs Ritton’s impulses and consequent protective actions to shield
the hunted, who otherwise lack any chance of escape, and thus to stand physi-
cally in the way of predation that hunts with hungry entitlement. What is more,
the story re-authors what it means to be human as well. It illustrates what Dana
Luciano and Mel Y. Chen point to in the humaneness of the human, which
is ‘to feel for others [. . .] and to respond to [their] suffering’ (2015: 190).
Mrs Ritton reacts not only through identification, but as an immediate response
to the desperate plight of another being.
Despite the story’s title and the connection it draws between the three
policemen and the three dogs who first chased down the rabbit, it is worth not-
ing that Mrs Ritton’s testimony does not explicitly align these figures. Rather,
she declares that the policemen, though three in number and chasing down ‘the
rabbit’, instead share ‘the visage of [her] master’ (93). Importantly, with this
refusal to impugn the dogs as agents of white violence (a colonialist tactic that
Boisseron extensively explores), the narrative affirms another connection, this
time to animal actors who are assigned roles by dominating forces of white
control. Coleman’s story prefigures Joshua Bennett’s twenty-first-century call
‘ultimately to abolish the forms of antiblack thought that have maintained the
fissure between human and animal’, as it refuses to affirm this fissure with an
easy analogy (Bennett 2020: 4). Instead, the story ‘animalises’ the police such
that they take on the inhuman form of the white enslaver. Aimé Césaire, in
Discourse on Colonialism (1950), writes that the coloniser ‘gets into the habit
of seeing the other man as an animal, accustoms himself to treating him like
an animal, and tends objectively to transform himself into an animal’ (Césaire
1950: 41). In Coleman’s short story this psychological process is rendered liter-
ally and inversely: Mrs Ritton’s so-called ‘Master’ treats her as ‘an animal’ and
seemingly becomes one by doing so. In the final scene, it is the ‘master’s’ face,
not the hounds’, that subsumes those of the police. That is, the men pursuing
violent domination resemble only themselves, and thus call into question the
very construction of the term ‘animal’ and its perverse usages. Coleman’s story
asserts that nonhuman animals themselves have no part in this framework
around which a power structure has been assembled but are collateral damage
in the carnage of colonial human self-destruction.
Ultimately, ‘Three Dogs and a Rabbit’ inverts animality as a concept – as
a designator of abuseability – and through a merging of forms and figures,
it emphasises the shared circumstances of bodily vulnerability and necessary
flight. Inversions here proliferate to offer productive vantage points from which
to apprehend better the previously concealed. In this story, Black bestiality is

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inverted such that white domination and ‘law enforcement’ appear beastly;
the logic of violence is inverted such that it is combatted not through revenge
but through nonviolence and safeguarding. The figure of the rabbit, nested
inside layers of narrative scaffolding, emits a pulsing vibrancy – a harmless
and fearful relatability not only across species boundaries, but across juridical
barriers that buttress the white courtroom as well. Coleman’s story exemplifies
how exclusion from full acceptance within the American legal rubric of per-
sonhood enables Phipps and Mrs Ritton to escape ways of seeing that are con-
ditioned by Eurocentric fantasies of domination and supremacy, though both
must still navigate this terrain as a means of survival by traversing territories of
animal sentimentality first. In her verbal testimony before a white courtroom,
Mrs Ritton does not appeal for recognition of her humanity vis-à-vis an onto-
logic equation with the white master or the policemen, but rather turns away
from ‘the human’ and toward the rabbit as a redemptive counterfigure to the
unhinged ferocity of ‘Man’ (Wynter 2003: 260). ‘Three Dogs and a Rabbit’
illustrates how a steely protection of life in the face of white brutality depends
on an impulse in which care eclipses fear. It illustrates the connection between
vulnerable lives – both of them treated as prey by predatory creatures – and the
propulsion to safeguard life because it lives.

Poetic Figures
Figurative representations that push beyond affective connection between
human and animal continue in Coleman’s poetry, exploring as it does the
figure of the nonhuman as capable of the same psychic longings and frustra-
tions that haunt human subjects confined to the domestic realm. Offering
a catalogue of queries into the nature of being, of consciousness and of
social subjugation, many of Coleman’s poetic works demonstrate a preoc-
cupation with nonhuman subjects, presaging the more recent ‘nonhuman
turn’ embraced by a growing list of scholars (Luciano and Chen 2015: 189).
Such critical investigations into the global historical construction of race as
dependent on conceptions of animality importantly look primarily to the
animal and the nonhuman as sites not of rejection, but of interest, enquiry
and possibility. In Being Property Once Myself: Blackness and the End of
Man (2020), Joshua Bennett surveys the ‘ongoing entanglement of blackness
and animality’ to watch how ‘black authors cultivated a poetics of persis-
tence and interspecies empathy’ (5). This turn toward the animal, and, by
extension, a turn away from interest or inclusion in white American notions
of the human, appears irrepressibly over time in the poetic works of Anita
Scott Coleman, surfacing in poems such as ‘She Was Not Wise’, ‘The Dust of
the Streets’ (1929) and ‘Respective Flight’ (1948).
Most notably, the route from nonhuman to human is explicitly encoun-
tered in Coleman’s poem ‘Idle Wonder’, published in Opportunity in 1938.3

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The short verse poem draws a comparison between human and house cat as it
muses on animal consciousness and the assumptions of those who rationalise
oppression and possession. Through this parallel encounter, the poem fore-
grounds empathetic curiosity about companion species as a means of under-
standing human social relationships. The poem’s speaker begins by pondering
her cat, assuming it leads a life of satisfaction, but then questions that assump-
tion by drawing a comparison between the cat and the subjugated position of
a Black acquaintance. The poem appeared originally in Opportunity in 1938
as follows:

Idle Wonder
My cat is so sleek and contented;
    She is a real house-cat
She has not seen any other cat
since she came to live with me.

I wonder does she think,

I wonder does she dream
I wonder does she ever imagine
Herself out, among cats
I wonder is she like poor Agnes

Agnes lives with the white folks

And they think she is contented
And actually delighted with being
    their house-maid. (Coleman 1948: 202)

Beginning from a space of idle observation, as its title asserts, the speaker’s
domestic assurance informs the musings around her cat’s smooth figure and
presumed satisfaction. An impression of repose is suggested by the cat’s ‘con-
tented’ air. As the sentence runs on, it even suggests that her contentment corre-
lates with a lack of contact with other cats, such that she can repose unbothered
by their company. Despite or because of the cat’s isolation from other felines,
she is decreed authentic in her domesticated position; observed to be relaxed
and fit, she seemingly wants for little in the way of comforts or companionship,
and so lives as ‘a real house-cat’ is meant to live.
It is remarkable how little scholarly theory around race and animals, or
within animal studies itself, looks specifically at cats. This is despite the fact
that Jacques Derrida’s (2008) musings about his own cat’s consciousness
opened the scholarly floodgates for a serious consideration of animal being
among Western humanists. As books like Kim’s and Boisseron’s reveal, dogs
and often farm animals are creatures in whom animal studies remains heavily
invested. This is exemplified by Donna Haraway’s When Species Meet (2007),

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which gives scant attention to cats and only then to a small family of feral
cats as ‘interpellated into the modern biopolitical state’, whom she hopes to
safeguard for both their ‘subject status’ and as agents of rodent control (2007:
277). Indeed, America has a vexed relationship with cats, especially among
their devoted advocates who have yet to reach collective consensus around
how ‘feral’ they should be encouraged to be. Thus, Coleman’s use of the signi-
fier ‘house-cat’ is itself a radical position in some ways that marks the speaker
herself as a proponent of the domestic. She naturalises this subject position
and asserts it to be the position in which real personhood resides, for both
human and feline.
But the speaker goes on in the next stanza to question further whether these
assumptions of fulfilment and definition are misconstrued, pondering her cat’s
interiority and likening her to ‘poor Agnes’. Through the imagined subjectivity
of the cat and her potential personhood – she might, after all, think, dream and
imagine – she brings to the speaker’s attention Agnes, a Black acquaintance
who works as a live-in maid for white people. Her employers, in their position
of assumed powerful benevolence, believe her to be happy. Though they hold
her in socio-economic captivity, they assume she is ‘delighted’ to inhabit that
realm. The hyphenated connection the speaker draws between ‘house-maid’
and ‘house-cat’ not only links the two subjects by their house-boundedness,
but it also emphasises the domesticating work that the enclosures of home
do in ostensibly offering comfortable lives to those within, despite how they
occupy that space. Revealing how subjugation operates through the exercise of
privilege on the part of the subjugator, the poem illustrates how the privilege
to draw assumptions about the happiness of others (whether human or animal)
who must reside inside a home they did not choose belongs to people who
believe they possess the power to confer favours through the superiority of
their position. Those who benefit, from labour or from companionship, infer
their own paternalistic benevolence and enact a bourgeois complicity in the
structures of domination that gird such an arrangement. The poem suggests
that the workings of white supremacy and white innocence may creep into
human–animal relationships unnoticed when assumptions about others’ expe-
riences glorify those who presume control.
‘Idle Wonder’ goes even further than drawing attention to the privileged
assumptions of those in domestic control, in that it also depicts a troubled
connection between the isolation of the cat and that of Agnes. If the speaker
views the cat as authentic and pleased in its isolation from other cats, it
implies that Agnes’s employers attribute part of her delight to living away
from Black people, exclusively in a space of whiteness. But the poem pro-
vides immediate evidence to the contrary; Agnes has spoken of her thoughts,
dreams and imaginings of escape from the confines of domestic labour and
economic internment.

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The dissonance between her white employers’ false beliefs and the truth of
Agnes’s desires are what compel the speaker to question her own assumptions.
The speaker’s wondering about animal interiority and speculating about the
falsity of her own conjectures takes its route through the animal to the per-
son, just as Coleman’s story ‘Three Dogs and a Rabbit’ does, and thus enacts
Joshua Bennett’s poetic means of ‘getting out of animality by going through
it’ (2020: 2, emphasis in original). Through the cat, an appreciation for its
interiority emerges in concert with lamentation for Agnes’s position. Still, it is
worth noting that although the poem projects a form of interspecies empathy
in which the cat’s experience is taken seriously and is imaginatively encoun-
tered, it does not directly reflect human empathy here. Instead, the speaker’s
empathy for Agnes takes a more indirect and sardonic tone, going through the
white folks to comment on how erroneous their assumptions are. The poem
performs a talking around what Agnes truly thinks to indicate more precisely
how discontented and trapped she is. The speaker’s musing about Agnes’s
interior state would be inadequate, the poem suggests, because she already
knows the answers to these questions, and the unhappiness of her position
exceeds the parallelism by which the verse is constructed. To go beyond this
dyadic formation would be to weigh down both halves of the poem with a
more complete articulation of what Zakiyyah Jackson calls the ‘abjectly ani-
malized’, or the ‘burden of “the animal”’ wherein the appropriation of lives
by Euroamericans structures the spaces – interior and exterior – in which both
figures dwell (Jackson 2020: 12).
In recognising modernism as distinctively inquisitive about nonhuman ani-
mals and the human connection to other beings, attending to works that lay
bare the work of racialising constructions is critical if we are to understand
better how ‘the animal’ came to be, and can be recovered and ultimately set
free. Coleman’s poetry and prose present formulations of human–nonhuman
pairs (house-cat : house-maid, rabbit : man, children : chickens) that reject
the hierarchical assumptions inherent in the modern construction of the
Euroamerican human, or ‘homo modernus’ as Denise da Silva terms the inven-
tion of such a being, and opposes this construction with adamant interspecies
likenesses (Da Silva 2007: 4). Through her literary contributions, Coleman
proposes a realm of parallel existences in which each pair occupies a space
of being that, while subject to the forces of white judgement and control,
nonetheless refuse to submit to the ideo-logic of those demands. By pushing
against the indexed gradations of value that white hegemonic ideology assigns,
Coleman’s discursive parallels reject the bases of Euroamerican presumptions
around racialisation and animalisation, namely that some lives are inherently
more valuable than others, that some humans are more animal that others,
that some humans are not animals and that animalising comparisons need be
derogatory. Instead, her work foregrounds a poetics of the posthuman figure,

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 reading anita scott coleman’s animals

one that embraces discursive correlations between humanity and animality to

create pairings of similarity rather than opposition. In this way, she reinscribes
the other as an other.

Works Cited
Barrett, Laura. 2013. ‘“Mark my words”: Speech, Writing, and Identity in Three Harlem
Renaissance Stories’. Journal of Modern Literature 37.1: 58–76.
Bennett, Jane. 2010. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press.
Bennett, Joshua. 2020. Being Property Once Myself: Blackness and the End of Man.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Boisseron, Bénédicte. 2018. Afro-Dog: Blackness and the Animal Question. New York:
Columbia University Press.
Césaire, Aimé. 2000 [1950]. Discourse on Colonialism. New York: Monthly Review.
Coleman, Anita Scott. 1926. ‘Our Prize Winners and What They Say of Themselves’.
Opportunity 189: 188–9.
Coleman, Anita Scott. 1948. ‘Idle Wonder’. In Reason for Singing. Prairie City, IL:
Decker Press.
Coleman, Anita Scott. 2008a. Western Echoes of the Harlem Renaissance: The Life and
Writings of Anita Scott Coleman. Ed. Cynthia J. Davis and Verner D. Mitchell.
Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.
Coleman, Anita Scott. 2008b. Unfinished Masterpiece: The Harlem Renaissance Fiction
of Anita Scott Coleman. Ed. Laurie Champion and Bruce A. Glasrud. Lubbock:
Texas Tech University Press.
Da Silva, Denise. 2007. Toward a Global Idea of Race. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
Davis, Cynthia J. and Verner D. Mitchell, eds. 2008. Western Echoes of the Harlem
Renaissance: The Life and Writings of Anita Scott Coleman. Norman: University
of Oklahoma Press.
Derrida, Jacques. 2008 [1997]. The Animal That Therefore I Am. New York: Fordham
University Press.
Haraway, Donna. 2007. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Holland, Sharon. 2016. ‘Hum/Animal All Together’. PMLA 131.1: 167–9.
Jackson, Zakiyyah Iman. 2020. Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack
World. New York: NYU Press.
Kim, Claire Jean. 2015. Dangerous Crossings: Race, Species, and Nature in a Multicultural
Age. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Luciano, Dana and Mel Y. Chen. 2015. ‘Has the Queer Ever Been Human? Introduction’.
GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 21.2-3: 183–207.
Mbembe, Achille. 2017. Critique of Black Reason. Trans. Laurent Dubois. Durham,
NC: Duke University Press.
‘The Awards Dinner’. 1926. Opportunity 126: 186.
Weheliye, Alexander G. 2014. ‘Introduction’ and ‘Blackness: The Human’. In Habeas
Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the
Human, 1–32. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

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 elizabeth curry

Wynter, Sylvia. 2003. ‘Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom:

Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation – An Argument’. CR:
The New Centennial Review 3.3: 257–337.

Notes
1. Another Coleman volume was also published that same year: Unfinished Master-
piece: The Harlem Renaissance Fiction of Anita Scott Coleman.
2. It was judged in second place by H. G. Wells, who served on the contest judg-
ing panel along with Sinclair Lewis, Charles Chesnutt and Mary White Ovington
(Davis and Mitchell 2008: 23).
3. The only full collection of Coleman’s work published during her lifetime was a
compilation of poetry titled Reason for Singing (1948); ‘Idle Wonder’ appears in
that collection.

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 Part V

Extinction, War,
Proliferation

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 13

1940s AVIAN NOIR

Laura Blomvall

The Menace of Birds

In a long tradition of Western war literature stretching back to Ancient Greece,
birds have appeared in military imagery, from the war cries of Trojan soldiers
in The Iliad pouring out ‘like the clamour of cranes’ (Homer 2014: 129), to
Aristophanes’ allusions to the Peloponnesian War in his comic fantasy play,
The Birds. Embodying the fears and fantasies of twentieth-century aerial war-
fare, in literary representations of the Second World War this surreal imagery
resurfaces in a figurative conflation of birds and aircraft. This chapter examines
what I term ‘avian noir’ in the 1940s: war poetry that goes beyond the trope of
flight and the aeroplane’s engineered resemblance to a bird with outstretched
wings, by exploring the destructive dominance of the aerially positioned beast
– bird or machine. From Elizabeth Bishop to Sylvia Townsend-Warner, poets
represented the threat of bomber planes by employing rapid and unexpected
juxtapositions inherited from modernism, surrealism and the visual language
of cinema, but materially underpinned in the 1940s by the lived experience
of total war. Especially in female and queer lyric poetry, imagery confusing
birds and planes represented distant violence capable of infiltrating women’s
intimate spaces. Avian noir, as explored in this chapter, thus touches on wider
questions over the relationship between the material otherness of birds and the
other, othered voices of noir in wartime modernism.
This 1940s avian noir formed part of a global mid-century moment exploring
aerial warfare through the visual language of birds, in a performative reflection

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on the role of the poetic image within the modern war lyric. The speaker in
Anna Akhmatova’s ‘The Wind of War’ (‘Veter Voiny’, 1941), poetically docu-
menting aerial warfare during the siege of Leningrad, depicts bomber planes as
‘birds of death’ (Haughton 2004: 7). Bertolt Brecht’s poem ‘This Summer’s Sky’
(‘Der Himmel dieses Sommers’, 1953) describes bomber planes that appear in
the horizon ‘like young starlings, their beaks wide open for food’ (Haughton
2004: 36). In London, H.D. writes in ‘R.A.F.’ (1941) of ‘the flying shadow /
of high wings // moving / over the grass’ (Keery 2020: 34). The speaker in
Stephen Spender’s poem ‘To Poets and Airmen’ calls a bomber plane an
‘all-night screeching metal bird’ (Spender 1942: 101) and, in Edith Sitwell’s
‘Lullaby’ (1940), the plane takes the form of a ‘steel bird’ with ‘steel wings’
(Sitwell 1940: 13). Whether a flying shadow, a bringer of death, a creature of
metal or steel, or young birds hungry to be fed, from Leningrad to London
avian species provide a visual language in poetry for evoking the fantasies and
fears of bombers capable of inflicting mass civilian casualties. Terrifying and
dream-like characteristics oversaturate the most central resemblance between
birds and planes – the act of occupying space in the sky – as the speakers of
these poems use images of avian menace to gesture towards atrocities that are
fundamentally human. If, in Homer, war cries carry through the air like birds,
in twentieth-century warfare the presence of military technology in the sky
means birds can figuratively represent the aerial distance of violence. However,
in the twentieth century the sounds of war extend to an embodied conflation of
birds and instruments of warfare within the technological language of moder-
nity that blurs boundaries between nonhuman nature and machines.
A number of cultural shifts underpinned the use of avian imagery in 1940s
modernism. From one perspective, these images could be seen as constituting
a distinct subgenre of the frequently cited pastoral turn of the Second World
War. Reflecting on his translation of Virgil’s Georgics, published to critical and
commercial success in 1940, Cecil Day-Lewis wondered how ‘it takes a seis-
mic event such as a war’ to reveal a rural patriotism in ‘most of us rootless
moderns’ (‘On Translating Poetry’ [1970], qtd in Stanford 2004: 177). In her
analysis of Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts (1941), Marina MacKay observes
how the ‘context of war exacerbates the conservative function of the imag-
ined countryside’, and how, during the war, ‘idealised rural England once again
became the literary mainstay of nostalgic longings for community and conti-
nuity’ (MacKay 2010: 24–5). Leo Mellor’s study of literary representations of
metropolitan bombsites, focused on urban rather than rural representations of
war, analyses the importance of ‘[t]he creation of implausibly lush zones in the
midst of London’, ‘one of the most unexpected transformations that resulted
from incendiary and high-explosive bomb attacks’ (Mellor 2011: 166). The
presence of nonhuman nature was therefore not just essential to pastoral and

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georgic poetry and countryside fiction; it now also formed a part of the urban
settings in the wartime imagination.
However, this pastoral turn also frequently implied a critically under-
explored animal turn during the war. In her notes to Between the Acts, Woolf
recounts this return of nature in the wartime city specifically in reference to
nonhuman animals: ‘They have gone back to the 18th century. Nature prevails.
I suppose badgers & foxes wd. come back if this went on, & owls & nightin-
gales . . . Odd if this should be the end of town life’ (Lee 1997: 718). To Woolf,
wartime London has ecologically returned to a past century, as she wonders
whether ‘the end of town life’ will come after nonhuman animals return to
the city. Aerial warfare transformed the organised anonymous crowds of the
modernist city, revealing the coexistence of nature and buildings, human and
nonhuman animals, bricks and foliage, surreal in their dream-like and unex-
pected connections. In an apocalyptic narrative of regression, the presence of
nonhuman animals is symptomatic of an urban dystopia that spells the end of
modernism and modernity.
These nonhuman animals include birds, such as the ‘owls & nightingales’
Woolf imagines taking over London. Elizabeth Berridge’s poem ‘Bombed
Church’ (1946) reveals some of the distinguishing characteristics of birds
within this animal turn of wartime modernism. In the poem’s urban church,
it is creatures with wings that overtake the fragmented ecclesiastical space: ‘a
black owl chant[s] the lesson’ and ‘[b]ats descend and flap’ in the place of the
verger (Reilly 1984: 20). The bird especially captures the vertical vulnerabili-
ties of rapidly transformed architectural structures, as it descends from the sky
through opened roofs and walls to occupy buildings. Meanwhile, in the coun-
tryside of Between the Acts (1941), aeroplanes assume the appearance of birds
as they interrupt the rhythms of rural life with their noisy engines in the sky,
when twelve planes appear overhead ‘in perfect formation like a flight of wild
duck’, interrupting Miss La Trobe’s pageant (Woolf 2000: 119). The surreal
city is matched by the surreal sky with its confusing juxtapositions of engines
and birdsong, technology and nature, metal and feathers. This wartime avian
turn thus represents a crucial context for utilising the aesthetics of modernism
to interrogate the possibilities of its end.
Critics have frequently cited the significance of surrealism in wartime cul-
ture. Mellor, for one, notes both ‘the organicist turn in the use of surrealist
methods in British poetry and art’ (Mellor 2011: 91–2), and ‘how surreal-
ism provided the conditions of possibility for various aesthetic strategies to
engage with wartime London’ (Mellor 2011: 93). However, the figure of the
bird opens a particular interest in the kinetic and figurative logic of dreams
in surrealism. Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945) – a psychological thriller about
the growing intimacy between a psychotherapist (Ingrid Bergman) and a

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man suffering from dissociative amnesia (Gregory Peck) – includes a dream

sequence designed by Salvador Dalí. The sequence climaxes with the shadow
of a bird chasing Peck’s character:

[DR. ANTHONY EDWARDES / JOHN BALLANTYNE]: Suddenly I

was running. Then I heard something beating over my head. It was a
great pair of wings. The wings chased me, and they almost caught up
with me, as I came down the hill. (Hitchcock 1945: 1:29:17 to 1:29:26)

From the top left corner of the screen, the shadow of the wings expands until it
overtakes the running character and the frame dissolves back to Gregory Peck’s
face, recounting the dream to Ingrid Bergman. The dark avian shape thus cap-
tures the moment of dissolve between recalled dream and the waking present,
where the dream and the dreamer momentarily overlap. The speed of the avian
shadow evokes both the speed of the dream (its metamorphosing images, the
suspense of the final avian chase) and the speed of cinematic transitions. In
surrealist art, birds make frequent appearances, from Max Ernst’s human–bird
hybrids to René Magritte’s avian windows in the sky. Indeed, in a 1927 essay,
Dalí, while comparing the possibilities of photography to poetry, used an avian
image to draw these parallels between the two media:

The [camera’s] mechanism, perfect and exact, proves, by its economical

structure, the joy of its poetical functioning [. . .] out of the pure crystal-
line objectivity of the glass there emerges a spiritual bird of thirty-six
greys and forty new manners of inspiration. (Finkelstein 1998: 45–6)

The image of a bird captures the poetic possibilities of the camera implicit in
its ‘economical structure’ and the ‘crystalline objectivity’ of its lens. Eighteen
years later, at the end of yet another world war, the winged shadow chasing the
dreamer in Spellbound captures the possibility of birds to convey the speed of
the visual metamorphoses of surrealist cinema, while evoking wartime anxiet-
ies over flying shapes in the sky.
Indeed, these avian noir poems converse with the visual speed of cinema
with increasing directness. These poems’ visual language of birds engages in a
technical and aesthetic dialogue with the film’s ability to cut from one image
to another in order to activate the imagination of the audience. In the new
‘cinematographic poems’ of the early twentieth century, the film-maker Jean
Epstein, for example, identified similarities between modern poetry and cinema,
noting how ‘[t]he film like contemporary literature accelerates unstable meta-
morphoses’ (quoted in Marcus 2007: 2). In ‘Tapestry of Great Fear’ (‘Tapisserie
de la grande peur’), written in August 1940 in response to scenes at Dunkirk,
the French surrealist poet Louis Aragon puts this cinematographic lyricism into

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practice. To capture the ‘modern terror’ of war in a pastoral landscape, the

poem ‘accelerates unstable metamorphoses’ from ‘flying fish’ to a growing list
of hybrid, bird-like creatures:

And hydra-headed birds like Lerna’s hydra

What are they writing, white on blue, in the sky?
Skimmers of earth, steel birds that stitch the air
To the stone houses, strident comet-birds . . . (Haughton 2004: 14)

[Qu’écrit-il blanc sur bleu dans le ciel celui-ci

Hydre-oiseau qui fait songer à l’hydre de Lerne
Écumeur de la terre oiseau-pierre qui coud
L’air aux maisons oiseau strident oiseau-comète . . .]

In Aragon’s poem, the ‘steel birds’ of modern warfare undergo various figura-
tive transformations, from ‘hydra-headed birds’ to ‘comet-birds’. In the original
French, the repetition of the word ‘oiseau’ in three compounds – ‘hydre-oiseau’,
‘oiseau-pierre’ and ‘oiseau-comète’ – further foregrounds the accelerating trans-
formations of the birds’ hybrid forms. In the context of the Second World War,
the rapidity of his avian metamorphoses also conveys the amorphous, movable
and momentary threat of aerial warfare. Within his poem on Dunkirk’s ‘mod-
ern terror’, the birds evoke the speed of planes and the changeable dangers in
the sky.
The speed of metaphor and cinematic visual editing is therefore particularly apt
to describe these dangerous aerial movements. As Susan Stewart writes, ‘the work
of metaphor is to draw on the material qualities of the phenomenon to reshape
and reform it, to hypothesize about what had formerly been fixed’ (Stewart 2011:
74). In 1940s poetry, the rapid metamorphoses of the formerly fixed birds to
evoke fear over the true nature of winged shapes in the sky are both plane-like
and cinematic in the speed of their visual alternations. The aesthetics of speed and
‘unstable metamorphoses’ underpin the operation of metaphor. These aesthetics
were therefore central to the visual mechanisms of war poetry, which developed
the twentieth-century dialogue with film in the 1940s. Birds, with their dynamic
movement across the sky, open possibilities for exploiting the visual instability of
figurative language and cinematic cuts in the war lyric.
In 1940s war poems, the rapid transformations of avian imagery are thus
indebted both to the speed of planes and the accelerating visual metamorphoses
familiar from the page and the screen. In his wartime poem ‘The Edge of Day’
(1951), Laurie Lee employs images of incendiary and high explosive bombs
to describe birds at dawn as ‘[t]he starlike birds catch fire’ and ‘[t]he birdlike
stars droop down and die’ (Keery 2020: 193). The poem’s speaker also uses
astral imagery reminiscent of Aragon’s ‘comet-birds’: in Lee’s poem, ‘blackbirds

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 laura blomvall

scream with comet tails’ and ‘starlings, aimed like meteors, / Bounce from the
garden wall’ (Keery 2020: 193). However, the main part of the poem’s accelerat-
ing avian transformations draws on images of electricity and fire:

The thrush’s tinder throat strikes up,

The sparrow chips hot sparks
From flinty tongue, and all the sky
Showers with electric larks. (Keery 2020: 193)

The Blitz and the cinema share, with different intentions and ends,
dramatic lighting effects in their artificial and intense illumination of dark
spaces. Indeed, the cinematic visual language of the Blitz is evident in films
like Humphrey Jennings’s 1943 Fires Were Started, depicting firemen working
in nocturnal burning London. Lee, like Jennings, had first-hand experience
of both film production and the Blitz. Lee lived with Day-Lewis and the
novelist Rosamond Lehmann in London during the air raids and worked
in the Ministry of Information making wartime documentaries for the GPO
Film Unit and the Crown Film Unit. Lee’s experience of 1940s film-making
and of living through the Blitz are the two salient contemporaneous contexts
that underpin the light and fire effects of his rapidly changing avian imagery,
from the ‘electric larks’ to the ‘thrush’s tinder throat’.
The sexually suggestive chiaroscuro effects of the ‘great O of the sun’ forming
in the horizon ‘with smoky, smut-red lips’ to break the ‘mouldering atoms of the
dark’ (Keery 2020: 193) in the poem are evocative of the new style of American
film noir with its femmes fatales and dramatic light effects overtaking cinemas on
both sides of the Atlantic in the 1940s.1 Known for its theatrical play with dark
and shadow both as an aesthetic and as a wider theme, the term film noir was
first coined by French critic Nino Frank when this new style of cinema reached
Paris in 1946: a term which, as William Luhr notes, ‘translates as “black film”
and refers to the darkness of the themes as well as the visuals of the film’ (Luhr
2012: 20). The poetry of the 1940s shared the social and cultural contexts of the
emerging film noir. In fact, critics often diagnose the essence of noir outside of
film. James Naremore, for example, argues that noir sensibility ‘was expressed
through many things besides cinema’, and a more representative artist of noir’s
origins would not be a film-maker, but ‘the somewhat Rimbaud-like personality
Boris Vian’, a surrealist author and jazz musician (Naremore 2008: 11).
While the term film noir is notoriously enigmatic,2 it is a productive cultural
and critical category for untangling the aesthetic implications of 1940s domi-
nant cinematic style on the visual language of the poetry in the same period
– poetry which arose from the same wartime mood of ethical and existential
questioning. Frank first introduced the term film noir to explain how crime films
had left the traditional formula of detective films behind in order to explore the

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reality of the 1940s, where ‘atrocities, which there has never been a good rea-
son to conceal, do exist’ (‘à certaines atrocités qui existent effectivement et qu’il
n’a jamais servi à rien d’occulter’) (Frank 1946; my translation). From the first
use of the term, considering the darkness of human violence was more essential
to distinguishing film noir than its detectives and investigative storylines. By
exploring avian noir in lyric poetry, I want to sharpen and expand the idea of
noir not only by examining its presence in lyric poetry, but also by investigating
how avian noir includes rural environments, female speakers and queer voices
in an aesthetic that critics have almost entirely delineated as urban and male. In
1940s rural writing, the avian, with the speed of its flight and elevated position
in the sky, enables the evocation of rapid visual transformations and vertical
dynamics of domination and vulnerability. Moreover, the image of the bird
becomes a key poetic vehicle for accessing other elements of otherness – female,
queer, rural – through its entanglement with noir themes of secret sexualities,
mutability of dreams and nihilistic violence.

Distant and Intimate Violence

In the first critical account of film noir, Raymond Borde and Étienne Chaumeton
identified in 1955 this new cinematic style by its ‘oneiric, strange, erotic, ambiva-
lent, and cruel’ elements (Borde and Chaumeton 2002: 2). In her poem ‘Death of
Miss Green’s Cottage’ (1944), Sylvia Townsend Warner activates some of these
noir elements by juxtaposing a rural scene of female intimacy with the distant
violence of war. In the poem, a bomb has landed on a cottage where the speaker
had been ‘in love’ (Warner 2008: 295). Its bird-like roof, ‘[s]loped like the tail-
feathers of a sitting dove’, takes flight after the explosion: ‘[w]ith a fluster it spread
its wings of grey stone, / And went its piecemeal way into the dark’ (Warner 2008:
294). The dove with ‘wings of grey stone’ visualises the architectural damage of
a rural cottage from aerial bombardment. The speaker thus reaches for an avian
image to convey how the violence of modern war destroys the affective history of
an intimately shared domestic space. Indeed, the coexistence of the ‘erotic’ and the
‘cruel’ in the continuities between intimate spaces and distant violence were part
of the lived experience on the British Home Front, including the entanglement of
the wartime homes of Townsend Warner and her partner, Valentine Ackland, in
the conflict. In 1940, an incendiary bomb fell through the roof of their home in
Frome Vauchurch. In 1942, their house was selected as a machine-gun post
in the event of a German landing on the Dorset coast. This intersection of the inti-
mate domestic space with wartime organised violence underpins the ‘oneiric’ and
‘strange’ image of the stones of their home taking flight like a dove in the after-
math of bombing. The poem’s avian noir thus enables a lyric discourse exploring
how the violence of war compromises intimate spaces that protect romantic rela-
tionships between women. Like the fade-out of a cinematic scene, the avian home
disappears ‘piecemeal into the dark’.

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Townsend Warner had, in fact, used the image of a plane to mourn the
loss of female intimacy before the Second World War. In 1930 (the same year
Ackland and Townsend Warner moved to live in Miss Green’s Cottage), Townsend
Warner’s close female friend, the author Bea Howe, was getting married. Visiting
Howe to say goodbye to ‘her nymph’, Townsend Warner saw Howe’s wedding-
dress ‘spread in her bedroom – an enormous rectangular ghost – like an aero-
plane, shrouded in tissue-paper and dust-sheets’ (Harman 2015: 93). Writing
about the replacement of intimate female friendship with heterosexual marriage,
Townsend Warner conflates the spectral absence of a living, breathing body inside
the dress with an ‘aeroplane’. In 1930, planes evoked memories of the Zeppelin
planes of the First World War. In 1944, in ‘Death of Miss Green’s Cottage’, the
loss of past female intimacy still reverberated within her portrayal of a bomber
plane. The poem’s speaker reaches for surreal aesthetics in her metaphorical jux-
tapositions, this time of grey stones and dove’s tail-feathers, just like Townsend
Warner had earlier – strangely but strikingly – connected the shape of a dress on
a bed with the shape of a plane in the sky.
On the other side of the Atlantic, Elizabeth Bishop’s poem ‘Roosters’ (1946)
represents another avian evocation of aerial warfare that infiltrates women’s
intimate space, its noir even more dream-like because of its dark bedroom set-
ting. Written after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941,
the speaker of the poem is at home in the early hours of the morning, using
the pronoun ‘we’ in an intimate register that fits with the intimacy of its dusk
setting. Sounds of roosters invade this interior space, as the poem turns into a
layered avian allegory of aerial warfare:

At four o’clock
in the gun-metal blue dark
we hear the first crow of the first cock

just below
the gun-metal blue window
and immediately there is an echo

off in the distance,

then one from the backyard fence,
then one, with horrible insistence,

grates like a wet match from the broccoli patch,

flares, and all over town begins to catch. (Bishop 2011: 36)

In setting the scene, the violence of war colours both the transparent openings of
the home and the early morning sky associated with the privacy of sleep, as the
speaker describes the morning darkness, as well as the window, as ‘gun-metal

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blue’. As the avian description expands, the speaker in Bishop’s poem uses
metaphors of the metallic materials of bomber planes and their incendiary
impact to evoke the birds’ plumage, describing the birds’ ‘flame-feather’ and
‘metallic feathers’ that ‘oxidize’ ‘on the grey ash-heap’. The dream-like imag-
ery maps on to the night-time of the poem as Bishop metaphorically obscures
the distinctions between planes and birds. In the avian noir of its intimate
setting and violent, invasive imagery of birds, ‘Roosters’ also bears similarities
to Frances Cornford’s poem ‘Daybreak’ (1954), where the speaker describes
the cock crow as a ‘long metallic cry of dung and dew’ interrupting the speaker,
who lies ‘warm in bed’ in the ‘graying light’ (Keery 2020: 38). Both Bishop
and Cornford use the word ‘metallic’ to confuse the sound and appearance of
roosters with the materials familiar from planes, interfering with the intimate
boundaries of the bedroom.
For Borde and Chaumenton, as Naremore summarises in his introduction,
the ‘erotic treatment of violence’ is essential to the new style of film noir (Borde
and Chaumenton 2002: xix). Wartime poems by Townsend Warner, Bishop
and Cornford, with their suggestive bedroom settings of the aubade and ele-
gies for sexual and emotional histories of women, are deeply concerned with
sexuality and violence in their avian noir. However, instead of representing
female seducers or female victims familiar from film noir, the female voices of
these poems are invested in using avian imagery in unique ways to explore the
porousness of the bedroom’s boundaries in the context of new and violent tech-
nologies of warfare. In ‘Roosters’, where the ‘virile’ birds ‘terrorize’ their hens
and ‘by twos . . . fight each other’ in ‘mid-air’, lyricism itself is complicit and
corrupted by its ability to perform and evoke the erotic and violent as the sub-
conscious forces of war (Bishop 2011: 36, 38). The poem’s irregular rhymes,
sometimes appearing in twos with a third half-rhyme, at other times produc-
ing three perfect rhymes, breaking the satisfaction of an even pairing with a
third, clamorous element, seem lyrically to parallel the ‘horrible insistence’ of
the sounds of the cock crows and their ‘echo . . . off in the distance’ (Bishop
2011: 36). Mutlu Konuk Blasing reads these rhyming triplets as ‘gaudy’, like
the roosters, insist[ing] on being heard’ (Blasing 1995: 90). The wider implica-
tions of Bishop’s use of avian imagery and soundscapes relate to how birds in
particular become complicit in the aggression and sexual undertones of the
scene, as the poem lyrically performs the invasion of the intimacy of the bed-
room, implicit in the poem’s aubade setting, with the ‘fighting blood’ of the
birds heard outside (Bishop 2011: 38).
Indeed, in 1940s avian noir poetry, the poetic image of the bird is intertex-
tually entangled with its associations with music and the soundscapes of lyric
poetry. Comparing Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ (1819) to Bishop’s ‘Roosters’
shows how wartime lyric poetry both mobilises and distorts these allusions. In
Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, as in the opening of ‘Roosters’, the focus is on

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 laura blomvall

hearing the bird, instead of seeing it; as Susan Stewart notes, ‘Keats skillfully
emphasizes that he cannot see [. . .] The night wandering of the sleepless melan-
cholic is carefully worked through the meandering sound through the darkness’
(Stewart 2002: 282–3; emphasis in original). Bishop’s nocturnal avian sound-
scapes meanwhile ‘terrorize’: the Romantic song of Keats’s nightingale, with its
‘full-throated ease’, turns into the ‘uncontrolled, traditional cries’ floating ‘deep
from the raw throats’ of the morning roosters:

Deep from the protruding chests

in green-gold medals dressed,
planned to command and terrorize the rest,

the many wives

who lead hens’ lives
of being courted and despised;

deep from the raw throats

a senseless order floats
all over town. A rooster gloats

over our beds . . .. (Bishop 2011: 36–7)

Instead of the Keatsian temptation of ‘easeful death’, the birdsong in Bishop’s

poem erupts as military orders leading to the mass casualties of modern war-
fare: leaving no home untouched, the sound of the roosters spreads through the
air ‘all over town’, ‘over our churches’ and ‘over our beds’. Continuing the vio-
lence of avian noir in the shape of another winged symbol of poetic inspiration,
Pegasus, Lynette Roberts’s poem ‘Crossed and Uncrossed’ (1944) also fuses its
avian imagery with memories of the Blitz. In the poem, written after a visit to
the bombed East End of London in June 1942, the firemen cling ‘to buildings
like swallows / flat and exhausted under the storm’, while ‘Pegasus melted and
fell / Meteor of shining light on to a stone court / and only wing grave’ (Roberts
2005: 20). Flat and exhausted, melting and falling, the winged creatures in the
poem infuse the avian imagery of the bombs’ impact with a fragility and vul-
nerability distinct from the open aggression of Bishop’s birds. However, ending
with the ‘wing grave’, Roberts’s poem ties its winged symbol of poetic inspira-
tion to similarly deadly outcomes. Across different poets’ wartime writing, the
avian becomes a vehicle for exploring the violent impact of aerial violence.
In 1940s avian noir, this complicity of lyric language is evident in the defa-
miliarisation of the bird as a symbol for the expressive powers of poetry. In
the early 1940s verse of W. H. Auden, as in that of Bishop, poetic imagery
transforms birds into mechanically engineered harbingers of death from air,
mobilising the symbolic associations of the bird to draw uncomfortably close

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connections between lyric poetry and violence. Written between 1940 and
1942, Auden’s lyrics to Benjamin Britten’s choral piece ‘Hymn to St Cecilia’
(1942) evoke the symbol of the bird to represent the patron saint of music:
the lyrics compare her to ‘a black swan’, who, ‘as death came forth’, ‘[p]oured
forth her song in perfect calm’ (Auden 2007: 278). However, the Second World
War is another audible subtext in Auden’s lyrics, visualising the death-bringing
swan as a mechanical plane in the air. St Cecilia’s swan-like music ‘thundered
out on the Roman air’: it is ‘her great engine’ in death (Auden 2007: 278).
‘Hymn to St Cecilia’ was the final collaboration between Britten and Auden;
unlike Auden, Britten felt compelled to return to England during the war and
finished his composition on the voyage home across the Atlantic in April 1942,
as the aerial bombing of civilians in Britain was escalating. Auden’s lyrics for
the composition reflect on the place of music during wartime and, by extension,
the place of lyric poetry, which has its roots in music.
From Bishop to Roberts and Auden, 1940s verse thus employs avian noir
as a figurative language to evoke aerial warfare and to suggest the complicity
of lyric poetry with the darker forces that motivate war, as well as some of its
more terrifying effects. In this sense, the aesthetic foregrounding of dark themes
in avian noir is comparable to the way the word ‘“noir” in film noir referred as
much to its visual textures as to its themes’, as Luhr argues:

[Film noir’s] use of chiaroscuro lighting and ominous darkness gave

viewers the sense that they were watching more than a ‘realistic’ depic-
tion of story events; they were watching those events unfold in a highly
mediated visual environment evocative of the dark forces eruptive in the
films. (Luhr 2012: 204).

While lyrics by Bishop, Roberts, Townsend Warner or Auden will not include
the superficially familiar tropes of film noir, like the character of a hard-boiled
detective or a fatefully seductive femme fatale, the threat of death from air
that inspired these poems unfolds ‘in a highly mediated’ linguistic environment
characteristic of lyric poetry, further foregrounded through the figurative con-
fusion of birds and planes that draws attention to the transformative capabili-
ties of poetic imagery. These lyric environments are also ‘evocative of the dark
forces eruptive’ in war poetry: the avian noir of Bishop’s poem – its use of the
image of the bird to evoke sexuality and aggression, a dream-like atmosphere
and a sense of moral ambiguity where the sun that rises could either be an
‘enemy, or friend’ (Bishop 2011: 40) – is part of the texture of the poem and its
mechanisms for achieving its effects.
What is more important than a cross-over of tropes from film noir into the
avian noir of 1940s poetry is the implication of lyric aesthetics in the fears and
fantasies of aerial destruction these poems express. Moreover, although poets

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used bird imagery widely to describe bomber planes in the 1940s, what is spe-
cific about queer women’s writing of avian noir, as in ‘Death of Miss Green’s
Cottage’ or ‘Roosters’, is the gendered dichotomy of sexuality and violence
– the contrast between female intimacy and male military aggression – and
the layered social, moral and personal threat that war’s violent exposure of
the domestic space to the outside world represented. If noir films like Double
Indemnity (1944) or The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946) include femme
fatale characters with sexual desires and murderous intentions the domestic
confines of their marriage are unable to contain, within avian noir it is the
state-sanctioned violence of hommes fatales that threaten the protective walls
of women’s homes and their bedrooms. While entangled with noir themes of
sexuality and violence, as well as its dark, heightened aesthetics, the avian thus
manages to access elements of otherness – female, rural, queer – in noir poetry
that are mostly absent from accounts of noir cinema.
However, this gendered dichotomy between intimate interiors and the
external violence of aerial assault is ambivalent and complex; women’s domes-
tic space can be equally threatening and shadowy. Townsend Warner and
Ackland had already experienced aerial warfare serving in the Red Cross during
the Spanish Civil War. But back home in 1938, before Britain’s declaration of
war against Germany, Townsend Warner described the fears that could attend
their frequently pained partnership in the lead-up to the Second World War:
‘In Madrid, I never felt a flutter of fear; and yet, sitting in our own kind house,
under the shadow of your black moods I become an abject coward’ (Bingham
2021: 127–8). Living under a sky with planes dropping bombs did not inspire
as much fear as sitting ‘under the shadow of your black moods’; the distinc-
tion between the threat of intimate pain and distant violence is as disturbingly
unstable as the distinction between animal and mechanical shapes in avian noir
imagery. Meanwhile, if the ‘kind house’ of women could be a frightening envi-
ronment, the American soldiers arriving in the rural Home Front in Maiden
Newton – where men had been absent for so long – appear to Townsend Warner
‘intensely fragile’: ‘In this accumulation of metal, soldiers seemed intensely
fragile, objets du luxe. One stared at the craftmanship of their eyelashes and
fingernails, their eyelids like flower-petals’ (Harman 2015 [1989]: 200). In con-
trast to the ‘accumulation of metal’, the bodies of men are intricate and delicate
– vulnerable to breaking, rather than agents of violence. The flower image also
appears in Muriel Rukeyser’s poem ‘One Soldier’, which opens her 1944 col-
lection Beast in View and refers to and addresses Otto Boch, a German athlete
who died in the Spanish Civil War; in the poem, ‘the moral flesh’ of the man
inspires ‘poems’ that ‘flower from the bone’ (Rukeyser 2005: 207). The flesh of
soldiers, like the bodies of birds, is organic, both standing out from and blur-
ring into the violence of mechanical warfare, obscuring the distinction between
the human and the nonhuman. The avian and floral imagery in these poems

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 1940s AVIAN NOIR

allows a more complex interplay of death and danger: the fatale is not simply
masculine or feminine, internal or external, human or nonhuman. but a perme-
able element – a variable x.
However, the rapid movement of birds in the sky enables a cinematic and
animated evocation of these permeable locations of violence. Employing an
avian allegory to explore the ambivalent and unstable boundaries between
internal and external violence, Rukeyser’s poem ‘Mortal Girl’, also from Beast
in View (1944), retells the myth of Zeus’s rape of Leda in the shape of a swan.
Throughout the poem, the speaker eroticises the god’s destructive descent
from the air, confusing sex and violence in its avian imagery. Alluding to aerial
warfare, which Rukeyser (like Townsend Warner and Ackland) had witnessed
during the Spanish Civil War, the swan descends from the sky as a ‘flame’ and
‘unthinkable light’, but also as ‘a shower of gold’. The moment of assault is
also a moment of consummation, as the body of the female speaker assumes
the fire from the sky: ‘When you took me as a flame, I turned to flame . . .
Within me your city burning’ (Rukeyser 2005: 211–12). The following poem
in the collection, ‘Child in the Great Wood’, builds on many of the themes and
images from ‘Mortal Girl’, but with a changed tone around its avian imagery.
Instead of the swan and its flame, both violent and erotic, external and internal,
‘the mechanical birds’ in the next poem appear with ‘[w]ing, claw and sharp-
ened eye’ (Rukeyser 2005: 213), confusing the natural and the engineered. The
poem’s mood is one of midnight ‘anxiety’, its wartime setting ‘not unlike the
dream’ (Rukeyser 2005: 212). Rukeyser’s wartime poems in Beast in View, like
those by other women poets, display a sinister combination of aggression and
sexuality, vulnerability and violence, intimacy and warfare, with shifting moral
combinations and dream-like atmospheres in the night-time settings charac-
teristic of film noir. At the same time, the poems’ speakers destabilise the gen-
dered nature of wartime violence by representing female interiors as dangerous,
threatening and shadowy. Aerial attacks from the sky may be less frightening
than the ‘black moods’ of a woman lover, or the flames of war internalised
as a ‘city burning inside’ the speaker’s own body: the total destruction of a
city conceived inside the womb which resulted from the original bird-shaped,
male assault. Thus, 1940s avian noir is a means of exploring the continuities
and discontinuities between female intimacy and the violence of war, between
sexuality and aggression, while activating women’s and queer voices otherwise
decentred in urban noir films.

Coda: The Hostile Imagination

Rukeyser’s wartime lectures on lyric poetry, collected together in her 1949
The Life of Poetry, reveal more about her understanding of the relationship
between poetry, war and the visual language of cinema in the 1940s. Alluding
to the malign psychological forces of war, Rukeyser argued that poetry may

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 laura blomvall

be seen ‘as an image of the kind of fullness that can best meet the evening, the
hostile imagination – which restricts, denies, and proclaims death – and the
inner clouds which mask our fears’ (1996: 21). As in film noir, with its flirta-
tion with the darker undercurrents of the human mind, Rukeyser explains the
role of poetry in the 1940s by reflecting on its relationship to darker psycho-
logical forces: a new lyric poetry emerges from an encounter with a sinister,
death-proclaiming imagination, ‘inner clouds’ and ‘fears’. These overlapping
thematic and aesthetic interests in film noir and Rukeyser’s lyric theory are
not a coincidence; she specifically exemplifies the centrality of the image to
lyric poetry in cinematic terms. In the same 1940s lecture series, she identifies
similarities between Hitchcock’s films and lyric poetry by focusing on scenes
of violence familiar from the Second World War: the explosion of a bomb and
an aeroplane crash. In Foreign Correspondent (1940), Hitchcock conveys the
crashing of a plane, according to Rukeyser, ‘in the speed and economy of image
that is to be found in concentrated poems’ (Rukeyser 1996: 144). Meanwhile,
describing the bomb explosion in Hitchcock’s Sabotage (1936), Rukeyser is
interested in distortions of everyday stable structures that ‘shudder and seem
to lean’; she considers how the cinematic and poetic image can convey explo-
sion as a distortion, which ‘is maximum derangement from the human being’s
point of view’ and ‘a warping of reality that becomes more unbearable as you
see it more clearly’ (Rukeyser 1996: 143–4). For Rukeyser, violent film scenes
familiar from the Second World War exemplify the speed and the perceptual
distortions of the modern poetic image.
To explain the role of imagery in poetry in the 1940s, Rukeyser thus draws
on moments of cinematic suspense that recall the violence of aerial warfare,
while also evoking the surrealism and deceptions of film noir, underpinned by
an interest in aberrant psychology, with its ‘warping of reality’ and perceptual
‘derangement’. In 1936, Elizabeth Bowen also anticipated some of these cross-
media influences between films, short stories and lyric poetry. Bowen described
the ‘affinities’ between the new forms of the short story and cinema ‘accelerat-
ing together’ in ‘the disoriented romanticism of the age’ (Bowen 1950: 38). To
shape this discourse on the two new media – or ‘young art[s]’, as Bowen calls
them – she explains their formal similarities through the aesthetics of poetry:
‘[p]oetic tautness and clarity’ are ‘essential’ for both (Bowen 1950: 38). A poeti-
cised aesthetic was also part of the film noir as a genre. Borde and Chaumenton,
for example, considered Orson Welles’s Othello (1952) a film noir not just for its
‘criminal psychology of the most modern kind’, but also for its ‘visual poetry’,
both of which culminate in the murder of Desdemona (Borde and Chaumenton
2002: 81) (indeed, to describe the noir essence of her death scene, Borde and
Chaumenton quote the French symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé). The con-
temporary film scholar Winston Wheeler Dixon also identifies noir through its
lyrical visual aesthetics, where noir functions ‘as a literal and figurative zone

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 1940s AVIAN NOIR

of darkness’ (Dixon 2009: 3). The affinities between lyric poetry and film noir
therefore do not lie only in their interest in distant and intimate violence and
the continuities between sexuality and aggression. Their cross-influences also
emerge in a distinct engagement with a style of imagery that draws on the visual
language of both poetry and cinema.
However, while using the metaphorical element of darkness to provide
a capacious interpretation of noir, which ‘persists in many forms, within
many genres’ (Dixon 2009: 2), Dixon establishes clear limits for what the
setting of noir can be, arguing that ‘the inescapable terrain of noir is the city’
(Dixon 2009: 3). By contrast, 1940s avian noir shows how noir aesthetics
and themes are present in rural settings; indeed, they become an essential
lyric environment for exploiting a confusion of categories between planes and
birds. As the poems use metaphor to blur the noise of engines and the cries
of birds, these poems explore the contrast and continuity between aggres-
sion and eroticism in their representations of war, with wider implications
for the understanding of the power and place of metaphor and other visual
mechanisms of poetry in the 1940s late modernist lyric. The avian poems of
the Second World War thus also open up questions about the limitations and
possibilities of noir and the types of voices and settings they may include.
Birds, the natural inhabitants of the sky, embody the oneiric and strange ele-
ments of noir in these poems, assuming qualities of bombs and planes, and
unlocking affinities between lyric poetry and film in ‘the disoriented roman-
ticism of the age’ (Bowen 1950: 38). 1940s avian noir does not betray an
interest in ‘literal and figurative zone[s] of darkness’ (Dixon 2009: 3); indeed,
in Rukeyser’s wartime lyric theory, poetry is matched against the ‘evening’,
the ‘hostile imagination’ and its dark psychological undercurrents. The avian
noir of women war poets, from Townsend Warner and Bishop to Roberts and
Rukeyser, in Rukeyser’s terms, ‘meet’ the ‘inner clouds which mask our fears’
and the ‘hostile imagination’ by restating ambivalent moments of intimacy
and vulnerability to distant aerial aggression in rural noir settings. The poets
are thus capable of mobilising bird images ‘of the kind of fullness’ that can
both delve into and ‘meet’ the fears and fantasies of the wartime imagination,
both exploit and expand the visual mechanisms of lyric poetry to reflect on
the place and power of the poetic at times of war.
Works Cited
Auden, W. H. 2007. Collected Poems. Ed. Edward Mendelson. London: Faber and Faber.
Bingham, Frances. 2021. Valentine Ackland: A Transgressive Life. Bath: Handheld Press.
Bishop, Elizabeth. 2011. Poems. London: Chatto & Windus.
Blasing, Mutlu Konuk. 1995. Politics and Form in Postmodern Poetry: O’Hara, Bishop,
Ashbery, and Merrill. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Borde, Raymond and Étienne Chaumeton. 2002. A Panorama of American Film Noir
1941–1953. Trans. Paul Hammond. San Francisco: City Lights Books.

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 laura blomvall

Bowen, Elizabeth. 1950 [1936]. ‘The Faber Book of Modern Short Stories’. In Collected
Impressions. Ed. Elizabeth Bowen, 38–46. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Dimendberg, Edward. 2004. Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Dixon, Winston Wheeler. 2009. Film Noir and the Cinema of Paranoia. Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press.
Finkelstein, Haim, ed. and trans. 1998. The Collected Writings of Salvador Dalí. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press.
Frank, Nino. 1946. ‘Un nouveau genre policier: l’aventure criminelle’. L’Ecran français,
61 (28 August).
Harman, Claire. 2015 [1989]. Sylvia Townsend Warner: A Biography. London and
New York: Penguin Random House.
Haughton, Hugh, ed. 2004. Second World War Poems. London: Faber & Faber.
Hitchcock, Alfred, dir. 1945. Spellbound. New York: Selznick International Pictures.
Homer. 2014. Iliad, Volume 1. Trans A. T. Murray. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press.
Keaney, Michael F. 2011. British Film Noir Guide. Jefferson, NC, and London: McFarland.
Keery, James, ed. 2020. Apocalypse: An Anthology. Manchester: Carcanet.
Leach, Jim. 2014. ‘British Noir’. In International Noir. Ed. Homer B. Pettey, 14–35.
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Lee, Hermione. 1997. Virginia Woolf. London: Vintage.
Luhr, William. 2012. Film Noir. Chichester: Blackwell-Wiley.
MacKay, Marina. 2010. Modernism and World War II. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press.
Marcus, Laura. 2007. The Tenth Muse: Writing about Cinema in the Modernist Period.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Mellor, Leo. 2011. Reading the Ruins: Modernism, Bombsites and British Culture.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Miller, Laurence. 1991–2. ‘Evidence for a British “Film Noir” Cycle’. Film Criticism
16.1–2: 42–51.
Naremore, James. 2008 [1998]. More Than Night: Film Noir in Its Contexts. Berkeley,
Los Angeles and London: University of California Press.
Reilly, Catherine, ed. 1984. Chaos of the Night: Women’s Poetry and Verse of the Second
World War. London: Virago.
Roberts, Lynette. 2005. Collected Poems. Ed. Patrick McGuinness. Manchester: Carcanet.
Rukeyser, Muriel. 1996 [1949]. The Life of Poetry. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan Univer-
sity Press.
Rukeyser, Muriel. 2005. The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser. Ed. Janet E. Kaufman
and Anne F. Herzog. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.
Sitwell, Edith. 1940. ‘Lullaby’. The Times Literary Supplement, 1989 (16 March): 13.
Spender, Stephen. 1942. Ruins and Visions: Poems, 1934–1942. New York: Random
House.
Stanford, Peter. 2004. C Day Lewis: A Life. New York and London: Continuum.
Stewart, Susan. 2002. Poetry and the Fate of the Senses. Chicago and London: University
of Chicago Press.

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Stewart, Susan. 2011. Poet’s Freedom: A Notebook on Making. Chicago: Chicago

University Press.
Townsend Warner, Sylvia. 2008. New Collected Poems. Ed. Claire Harman. Manchester:
Carcanet.
Woolf, Virginia. 2000 [1941]. Between the Acts. London: Vintage.

Notes
1. For accounts of the development of British film noir, see Laurence Miller (1991–2),
‘Evidence for a British “Film Noir” Cycle’; Michael F. Keaney (2011), British Film
Noir Guide, pp.1–6; and Jim Leach (2014), ‘British Noir’, pp.14–35.
2. See, for example, Raymond Borde and Étienne Chaumeton (2002), A Panorama of
American Film Noir 1941–1953, p. 2; Edward Dimendberg (2004), Film Noir and
the Spaces of Modernity, p. 11; or Naremore (2008 [1998]: 9).

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 14

UNHOMING THE PIGEON:

AHMED ALI’S TWILIGHT IN DELHI

Caroline Hovanec

Perhaps no animal cuts a more modern figure than the pigeon. The consum-
mate city dweller, at home amid concrete and metal, able to navigate by neigh-
bourhood landmarks, the pigeon might be seen as a flâneur of the skies or a
cosmopolitan of the gutters. While the encroachments of human development
have been a death warrant for many other wild animals, the pigeon thrives in
proximity to people. It is also, however, a victim of its own success. Around
the middle of the twentieth century, people began to see feral pigeons as tres-
passers, vagrants and squatters in urban spaces. Critics called them ‘rats with
wings’, city officials placed bans on pigeon feeding and pest controllers used
spikes, nets and poisons to deter them. They became, to quote the sociologist
Colin Jerolmack, ‘a “homeless” species’ (2008: 89). If, as Edward Said says,
‘We have become accustomed to thinking of the modern period itself as spiritu-
ally orphaned and alienated, the age of anxiety and estrangement’ (1984: n.p.),
the pigeon is modern in that sense too.
Like their feral cousins, domestic pigeons have also faced a decline in stat-
ure in recent decades. Once, they were the messengers of kings and generals,
the pride of pigeon racers and the trophies of fanciers (Allen 2009: 102–3,
110–15). They lived in elaborate dovecotes in the medieval and early mod-
ern periods, when keeping them was a special privilege of the nobility. Then
they lived in rooftop coops in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, from
which their working-class guardians entered them in homing races or flew them
simply for the beauty of it (Soth 2020; Allen 2009: 122–4). Today, the few

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 pigeons and ahmed ali’s twilight in delhi

remaining enthusiasts say that these human–pigeon cultures are on the verge of
extinction. Once-popular pigeon clubs have dwindled to just a few members or
disappeared entirely, and the rooftops that used to hold coops are now largely
empty. The remaining old guard lament that ‘Where once thousands of pigeon
wings filled the air . . . now silent skies reign’ (Jerolmack 2013: 89). Pigeon-
keeping communities are not yet entirely dead, but they are now suffused with
nostalgia and melancholy.
The fate of pigeons is a complicated one. They have been remarkably suc-
cessful in adapting to environments built by and for humans, but they are
also remarkably vulnerable, both to a modern spatial regime whose exclu-
sions and enclosures make them homeless, and to a modern temporal regime
whose ravages upon tradition make them endangered. Because they speak
to both the promise and the inhospitality of urban modernity, pigeon ico-
nography is widespread in modernist literature, art and film. They appear in
poems by Marianne Moore, Gertrude Stein and Mina Loy, and in novels by
Henry Green (Pong 2019); Picasso often painted them and named his daugh-
ter Paloma, Spanish for ‘dove’ (Bottinelli 2004); they are recorded in Joseph
Cornell’s experimental films The Aviary (1954) and Nymphlight (1957), and
in Elia Kazan’s Hollywood film On the Waterfront (1954). Pigeons are also
a crucial motif in Ahmed Ali’s 1940 novel Twilight in Delhi, the subject of
this chapter.
Twilight in Delhi is a family saga that narrates the decline and fall of the
Nihal clan, and of Delhi’s Muslim culture more generally, under British occu-
pation. Written in English and published by Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s
Hogarth Press, the novel blends the modernist aesthetics of ruin (readers will
hear echoes of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) and the ‘Time Passes’ sec-
tion of Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927)) with an Urdu poetics of loss. It is a
work about colonialism, the experience of alienation in one’s own home and
the threat of cultural extinction. It is also a city novel peopled by pigeons. Its
protagonist, the patriarch Mir Nihal, raises domestic pigeons and takes great
pride in their flying. Ali also portrays Delhi’s cracks and margins as tenanted
by wild pigeons, other stray animals and beggars who have nowhere else to
go. Twilight in Delhi’s pigeon imagery channels memories of a lost precolo-
nial past, lamentation for the waning fortunes of Delhi’s Muslim gentry and
a fine thread of hope for survival through the British occupation into a new,
changed future.
In this chapter, I want to trace two figures through Twilight in Delhi, using
them to draw together Ali’s moment with our own, and Ali’s anticolonial con-
cerns with the environmentalist concerns of today. The first figure is ‘extinction’,
a term which, in the novel’s historical context, describes colonialism’s destruction
of traditions and communities, and which has become a keyword for environ-
mentalism today, where it refers to the death of species. The second figure is

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 caroline hovanec

‘unhoming’, a word I use to evoke the material displacements imposed by colo-

nial modernity, as well as the psychic alienation that Freud called the unhomely
(Unheimlich) (2003 [1919]: 124). These forces of unhoming, unleashed by impe-
rial powers, distinctly shaped twentieth-century modernity, but they are no less
powerful in our current century, as climate change displaces thousands and mass
extinction makes the earth unrecognisable.
Pigeons are guides for both of these figures: as they have been made out of
place or obsolete in the increasing rationalisation of urban modernity, they have
become symbols of homelessness and endangered ways of life in the literary
imagination. Yet just as real pigeons have proven harder to eradicate than many
city officials bargained for, so the symbolic pigeon is a Janus-faced bird. One is
the face of intense vulnerability, the other of stubborn survival.

Extinction
The word ‘extinction’ comes from the verb ‘to extinguish’, meaning to put out,
as in a fire. It has long been a synonym for death, envisioned as the extinguish-
ing of life. Its use ‘with reference to a race, family, species, etc.’ to describe
‘a coming to an end or dying out’ appears to have come later (‘Extinction,
n.’ 2021: n.p.). The idea of family lineages going extinct predates the idea of
biological species extinction; the latter was not widely accepted as even a pos-
sibility until the discoveries of Georges Cuvier at the turn of the nineteenth
century (Kolbert 2014: 23–5). The term’s history leads to two observations.
‘Extinction’ once described an active process – someone putting something
out – but that volitional thrust has largely vanished in favour of uses which
imply a natural or passive dying out. And to speak of ‘cultural extinction’ is no
more metaphorical than to speak of ‘biological extinction’. In fact, both may
be regarded as metaphors based on the extinguishing of a light.
In the current age of the sixth mass extinction, recovering the connotation of
agency in ‘extinction’ is important. ‘Anthropogenic extinction’ is the usual term
for this purpose, and it is not wrong so far as it goes. But, following the work
of scholars including Kathryn Yusoff (2018), Andreas Malm and Alf Hornborg
(2014), and Joanna Zylinska (2018), I take the subject which extinguishes to be
not ‘man’ or ‘the human’ as a species, but specific groups of white imperialists
and capitalists who orchestrate and benefit from the exploitation of the planet
and its inhabitants. There is, of course, a certain level on which ‘man’ as species
does bear responsibility for the extinction of other species; Pleistocene hunters
probably wiped out some species of megafauna long before the modern age. Yet
the systematic destruction of the forests and wetlands, acidification of the seas and
heating of the atmosphere beyond a point compatible with survival is, as these
scholars and others have shown, a project of imperial capitalism. And that project
has considered Indigenous peoples, colonised peoples and the global poor just as
disposable as the nonhuman animals whose habitats have been sacrificed to it.

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Understanding the sixth mass extinction as one face of imperial capitalism

also casts the object which is being extinguished in a different light. It is not
enough to think only of species or populations being lost; rather, it is ways
of life. As Thom van Dooren argues, extinction is not a singular event which
happens when the last member of a species dies. It is ‘a slow unraveling’ of
‘complex ways of life that have been co-produced and delicately interwoven
through patterns of sequential and synchronous multispecies relationship’
(van Dooren 2014: 58). Van Dooren uses the term ‘flight ways’ to describe
the ‘unique, evolved, and evolving way[s] of life whose passing disrupts real
lived relations’ (van Dooren 2014: 58). Deborah Bird Rose shows that these
ways of life draw humans into their orbit too; her book Wild Dog Dreaming
(2011) studies an Aboriginal Australian community with a long history of
kinship with dingoes. Both the humans and their dogs have been threatened
with extermination by white settlers, and Rose’s research makes it clear that
what is at stake in the dingo’s possible extinction is the destruction of an entire
Aboriginal cosmos. Cases such as these support the idea that ‘extinction is an
inherently and inextricably biocultural phenomenon’ (Rose et al. 2017: 5).
For Ahmed Ali and his cohort of Indian anticolonial writers, extinction
would have been understood predominantly as a cultural threat facing peoples
under colonial occupation. The ‘anglicisation’ of culture which would ‘convert
Indians to brown Englishmen’ by destroying their languages, religious institu-
tions and cultural practices was an explicit policy of British colonial rule (Ali
1994 [1940]: xiii). Resistance to this policy was pathologised; after the 1857
anticolonial rebellion in Delhi and subsequent British retaliation, the British
began to speak of the ‘Backward Muslim’, a figure intransigently attached to
the religion and traditions of his or her ancestors (Padamsee 2011: 32). The
idea that Indian Muslims were trapped in the past, unable to adapt to modern
times, and therefore bound for cultural extinction, was a common trope in the
colonial period (Padamsee 2011: 32). Urdu literature of the post-1857 period
(though significantly more complicated in its relationship to time and history)
also developed a poetics of ‘memorialisation’ and ‘loss’ (Padamsee 2011: 33).
And anticolonial activists, including the future Prime Minister Jawaharlal
Nehru, made references to the temporal dislocation and gradual extinction
of Indo-Muslim culture during the 1930s (Padamsee 2011: 27–9). Ali echoed
these extinction tropes when he wrote, in the 1993 introduction to Twilight in
Delhi, ‘my purpose was to depict a phase of our national life and the decay of
a whole culture, a particular mode of thought and living, now dead and gone
already right before our eyes’ (Ali 1994: xix). The characters and the narrator
in the novel frequently lament the diminished state of their city’s culture, con-
trasting it with the past glories of the Mughal Empire.
However, Alex Padamsee argues that there is more than meets the eye to
this rhetoric of cultural extinction. He shows that Ali and other nationalist

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writers used the trope of Muslim moribundity not simply in a descriptive or

predictive way, nor even in a nostalgic way. Rather, Ali figured extinction as a
‘means of passage’, and mourning as a way of ‘opening up’ to a ‘postnational
South Asian future’ (Padamsee 2011: 29, 30). Padamsee reads Ali’s poetics of
extinction as fashioning forms for rebirth, rather than just mimetically repre-
senting a longing for the past. It is a reading that helps to make sense of the
metaphor of rebirth Ali used to conclude his 1993 introduction to the novel:
‘Life, like the phoenix, must collect the spices for its nest and set fire to it, and
arise resurrected out of the flames’ (Ali 1994: xx).
Twilight in Delhi’s pigeons are part of the rhetoric of Muslim cultural deca-
dence within the novel, yet they also contribute to the new subjectivities which
Padamsee sees as emerging from the novel’s mourning. The novel’s protago-
nist, Mir Nihal, is an avid pigeon-keeper, and his birds serve an important
social function: they make him feel accomplished and important among other
men of his class. He competes with his neighbours in ‘the pigeon game’, the
object of which is to get your flock to collect and bring home more of your
opponents’ birds. In one such scene, Mir Nihal succeeds in capturing some of
his neighbour’s dappled pigeons, and then he ‘smile[s] to himself, a smile of
satisfaction and victory’ (Ali 1994: 16). This moment, which occurs early in
the novel, shows Mir Nihal at the top of his game, taking pride in his flock’s
performance. Later, when he goes to buy some more pigeons, he participates
again in a community of fliers who tell stories and debate over bird breeds as
a way to socialise with each other and to jostle for status. Flying his pigeons
gives Mir Nihal a sense of dignity and social embeddedness, and his hobby
marks him as ‘a typical feudal gentleman’ who tries to keep the old traditions
alive (Ali 1994: 28). In the sixteenth-century court of the Emperor Akbar, the
‘breeding and training’ of pigeons was regarded as an ‘art form’ and, until the
fall of the Mughal Empire in 1857, pigeon-keeping was a ‘prestigious pastime
of the gentry in Delhi’ (Frembgen and Rollier 2014: 55).
The literary critic Judith Brown echoes this notion of pigeon-keeping as
an art, comparing it to the ghazal, qawwali and other poetic forms within
the novel. Mir Nihal’s pigeons, she writes, ‘function as a living reminder of a
Mughal pastime and passion raised to the heights of art, at once animal and art
form’ (Brown 2018: 840). Ali’s painterly description of the birds supports her
claim: ‘They were ever so many, black ones and white ones, red ones and blue
ones, dappled and grey, beautiful wings stretched out in flight’ (Ali 1994: 15).
There is more to this description than its stylised language, though. Its syntax
is a curious echo of two other points in the novel – first when Ali is describing
beggars, and again when he is describing kites:

They were ever so many, young ones and old ones, fair ones and dark ones,
beggars with white flowing beards and beggars with shaved chins . . . there

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 pigeons and ahmed ali’s twilight in delhi

were beggars in tattered rags and beggars in long robes reaching down to
their knees. There were beggars in patched clothes and beggars in white
ones. (Ali 1994: 14)

The sky was full of kites, black kites and white kites, purple kites and
blue. They were green and lemon-coloured, red and peacock blue and
yellow, jade and vermilion . . . (Ali 1994: 22)

Why this repetition? For some readers, it might seem like a moment of (quite
literal) local colour, in keeping with the novel’s function as ‘a guide to Delhi
for Englishmen’ (Askari 1998/9 [1949]: 245). Alternatively, we might follow
Padamsee in seeing these moments as drawing on, and ultimately emptying out,
the Urdu poetic genre of the sharh-ashob, in which ‘linguistic wordplay’ is of
higher priority than ‘literal referents’ (Padamsee 2011: 39). My own reading of
this triptych falls somewhere in between the ethnographic and deconstructive
interpretations. The repetitions draw a connection between three cultural prac-
tices that, the novel suggests, defined the old Delhi – pigeon-keeping, kite-flying
and generosity to beggars. Yet while these descriptions still, in my view, have
some referential function, Padamsee is not wrong to see a Derridean absence
within them as well (2011: 40–1). Their syntax creates a sense of plenitude
and variety – so many colours, so many kinds! – yet the images also carry an
undercurrent of poverty. The beggars in their tatters come first, and their lack
haunts the subsequent two descriptions of pigeons and kites. Even the moment
of apparent fullness is also already a moment of emptying out.
Mir Nihal’s flock is riven with this sense of loss, and the birds’ fate mirrors
the fate of Delhi and of the family in its waning days. From their very first
appearance in the first chapter of the novel, the pigeons are vulnerable. The
novel’s initial action occurs in the Nihal home, late at night. The family hears
‘a sudden fluttering of wings’ from the pigeon house, and when Mir Nihal goes
to investigate, he finds a snake in the loft and grabs it and kills it (Ali 1994:
9). Only one bird is killed – a loss that Mir Nihal grieves, but not nearly as
disastrous as it might have been. But the early signs of corruption are already
present. The snake is already in the home. It does not seem much of a stretch to
read this serpentine invader as a symbol for the British occupiers, who, at the
novel’s outset, are already in India. Indeed, the chapter juxtaposes the discov-
ery of the snake with a moment in which Mir Nihal scolds his son for wearing
English boots – the implication being that decadent forms of Anglicisation have
already infiltrated his own house.
Throughout the rest of the novel, the pigeons continue to be menaced, first
by a heat wave, then by a cat and finally by the First World War, which drives
up the price of grain and makes pigeon-keeping prohibitively expensive for
many residents. Ali writes of this last event, ‘And one of the most outstanding

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 caroline hovanec

characteristics of Delhi was threatened with extinction and death. But still
there were enough people who flew the pigeons and kicked up their usual
tapage’ (Ali 1994: 155). One day, Mir Nihal hears that his mistress is sick; he
rushes out of his house to visit her, only to arrive, too late, at her deathbed,
and accidentally leaves the door of his pigeon loft open. When he returns home
the next morning, he finds that a cat has decimated his birds. All at once, in his
sorrow, he decides to retire from work and quit pigeon-keeping. Mir Nihal’s
depression here is both personal and cultural. To give up his pigeons is to give
up on a tradition that was a source of pride and one of his few remaining
connections to the past.
Note, though, the strange contradiction in the sentences quoted above.
Pigeon-keeping is almost dead, and yet, ‘still there were enough people who
flew the pigeons and kicked up their usual tapage’. This formulation – the cul-
ture is dying, yet some tradition or person still lives – pervades the novel and
is, I would argue, its signature expression. Judith Brown claims that Twilight in
Delhi’s dominant aesthetic is that of the afterlife, ‘a realm of persistence and in
persistence, survival, even as that survival depends upon a prior death’ (Brown
2018: 826). The people, traditions, art forms and animals of the novel have,
she argues, a strange power of survival which is marked by their ‘failure to die
even when death has made its claim’ (Brown 2018: 826). Brown suggests that
these hesitant images of persistence are a way for the novel to point to, even if it
cannot yet describe, what happens ‘after the apocalypse of empire is complete’
(Brown 2018: 826).
The last pigeon of the novel, a grey bird glimpsed on its final page, flies at
twilight, ‘[plying] its lonely way across the unending vastness of the sky’ (Ali
1994: 200). Twilight would seem, on the surface, to be an image of extinction –
the extinguishing of the sun’s light, the end of the day, the end of a culture. Yet
Ulka Anjaria offers a very different interpretation of the meaning of twilights
in Ali’s oeuvre. Bringing Ali’s 1931 play The Land of Twilight into conversa-
tion with Twilight in Delhi, Anjaria uncovers a ‘powerful resignification of the
concept of twilight’ in his work, where it becomes not a symbol of death but
rather ‘the topos for a utopic, future land’ (Anjaria 2011: 202). For Ali, she
suggests, the dusk is a surrealistic image but also a political one, signalling a
kind of liberation. One suspects it might also be Ali’s rejoinder to the old impe-
rial slogan. The sun does indeed set on the British Empire, and when it does, it
will be left to the survivors to build something new.

Unhoming
Domestic pigeons like Mir Nihal’s are bred for their homing ability, a remarkable
capacity for navigation that uses sun position, olfactory stimuli and landmark
recognition to allow pigeons to steer their way home. Homing is also a rich and
evocative aesthetic symbol, and it is the central figure, and title, of writer and

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 pigeons and ahmed ali’s twilight in delhi

pigeon-keeper Jon Day’s (2019) recent memoir. The chapters of Homing meditate
on how people and pigeons make homes of their dwelling places, and Day revis-
its the contradictory forms that homeland politics took in the twentieth century,
from the fascists’ blood-and-soil ideology to Simone Weil’s defence of rooted-
ness. Day is also interested in modern and contemporary forces of unhoming,
including exile, gentrification and housing scarcity. Cycling along the River Lea
for a pigeon release, he witnesses houseboats, encampments and graffiti reading
‘Give us Homes!’ – all signs of ‘London’s housing crisis’, a movement of evictions,
pricing out and redevelopment that has made the city a speculator’s dream while
pushing its poor to the margins (Day 2019: 174).
In his exploration of unhoming as the hidden underbelly of dwelling, Day
turns to Freud. Freud was, he points out, quite literally exiled from his homeland
at the end of his life, as he moved to Britain in flight from the Nazis. Freud was
also eternally interested in psychic alienation; as Day puts it, ‘One of his most
radical ideas was to acknowledge that people could become unhomed within
themselves: that they could be unmoored from the familiarity of their own minds
without ever going anywhere’ (Day 2019: 20). The aesthetic expression of this,
for Freud, was the Unheimlich, or unhomely, more commonly translated as the
uncanny. Freud describes the unhomely as ‘that species of the frightening that
goes back to what was once well known and had long been familiar’ (Freud
2003: 124). For Freud, the homely and the unhomely (Heimlich and Unheim-
lich) converge in meaning until they are no longer distinguishable: the home, the
domestic and the familial are the sources of unhomely experience.
One of Freud’s key examples of unhomely phenomena is ‘repetition of the
same thing’ (Freud 2003: 143). He writes that under certain circumstances,
repetition creates a sense of ‘helplessness we experience in certain dream states’
(Freud 2003: 144). In a passage that has become famous, Freud describes
walking around an unfamiliar town in Italy, finding himself in a red-light dis-
trict, hurrying away and getting lost, only to find himself returning to that
same district over and over again. This inadvertent return disturbs him with
its uncanniness. Freud proposes that the unhomely quality of such repetitions
can be traced back to the unconscious ‘compulsion to repeat’ (Freud 2003:
145; emphasis in original). We can see this compulsion not just in Twilight in
Delhi’s characters, but in the narrative itself, which, like a melancholic patient,
rehashes its losses over and over. The novel is structured on a ‘principle of
repetition, or a series of repetitions that amounts to a narrative aesthetic’ (Pad-
amsee 2011: 38), and Freud’s work sheds light on how these repetitions evoke
a sense of unhomeliness.
The unhomely is also an environmental atmosphere to which ecocritical
theorists have recently turned to describe the experience of dwelling on an earth
irrevocably changed by global warming and mass extinction. Amitav Ghosh
identifies this critical trend and ties the uncanniness of climate change – the

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 caroline hovanec

bizarre weather events, the pervasive sense of dread – to humans’ remem-

brance of the nonhuman presences with which we share the world. He writes
that the observable changes in the earth ‘are not merely strange in the sense
of being unknown or alien; their uncanniness lies precisely in the fact that in
these encounters we recognize something we had turned away from [in the
Enlightenment]: that is to say, the presence and proximity of nonhuman inter-
locutors’ (Ghosh 2016: 30). Jennifer Fay, meanwhile, writes that under global
warming, the changed earth

raises to a new level of disorientation what the uncanny for Freud sum-
mons forth: the feeling that home, homeliness, and all that is familiar
have been transformed into their dreadful opposites, that the home has
been replaced with an artificial substitute that resembles it. (Fay 2018: 3)

Twilight in Delhi’s urban and domestic spaces are deeply unhomely, reflect-
ing Mir Nihal’s experience of dwelling under British colonialism. It is not that
he has been geographically exiled (although Indian Muslims were temporarily
removed from Delhi following the 1857 rebellions) – he remains in the city
and in the old family compound for the entirety of the novel. Rather, the city
around him has changed until it is barely recognisable. As Padamsee points
out, Ali was writing in a moment in which Indo-Muslims felt their position in
India was increasingly liminal and unstable; if a sense of existential homeless-
ness suffuses the novel, ‘Homelessness, in this context, might well be the point’
(Padamsee 2011: 36). The novel’s unhomeliness speaks both to its 1930s politi-
cal context and to the twenty-first-century context from which I read it today.
Its eerie depictions of Delhi during a heat wave and in the aftermath of the First
World War and the 1918 influenza pandemic resonate particularly strongly for
readers today, who have witnessed the world made uncanny by colonialism,
climate change and Covid-19.
Consider, first, the novel’s description of the summer of 1911. The city is
preparing for King George V’s coronation (‘a new and foreign king’; Ali 1994:
65), while it is also experiencing an extreme heat wave that kills and sickens
people, plants and animals, including the aforementioned pigeons. Ali’s prose
connects this heat wave not only to the 1911 imperial ceremony, but also back
to 1857, the year of the rebellion that was eventually crushed by the British
colonial army:

It was the terrible summer of nineteen hundred and eleven. No one had
experienced such heat for many years. Begam Jamal complained that she
had never known such heat in all her life. Begam Nihal said she had never
experienced such a summer ever since 1857, the year of the ‘Mutiny’.
The temperature rose higher and higher until it reached one hundred

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 pigeons and ahmed ali’s twilight in delhi

fifteen in the shade. From seven in the morning the loo began to moan,
blowing drearily through the hopeless streets. The leaves of the henna
tree became sered and wan, and the branches of the date palm became
coated with sand. The dust blew through the unending noon; and men
went out with their heads well-covered and protected. The pigeons flew
for a while and opened their beaks for heat. The crows cawed and the
kites cried and their voices sounded so dull.
...
Fires broke out every now and then. At such times the sky was made
red with the flames that shot up from the burning earth. Men died of
sunstroke; and even birds were not immune from the destructive influ-
ence of the sun, and many pigeons died. (Ali 1994: 65)

This passage, though firmly located in history, reads as uncanny in its pre-
science today, as India faces more and more extreme heat, drought and other
(un)natural disasters due to climate change. It also introduces several images
of what Ghosh calls ‘nonhuman interlocutors’ – the wailing wind, the dried-
up date palm, the lamenting birds – which Ali will repeat at later moments in
the novel, evoking uncanniness through repetition as well as through inhuman
presences.
Twilight in Delhi’s surreal city is a place in which nature itself has become
unnatural. In the passage quoted above, this making-unhomely is connected
metonymically to colonial despoliation, through the references to the 1857
mutiny and the 1911 coronation. When Ali repeats these images later in the
book, the connection to imperialism is figured more forcefully as a causal one.
In 1918, the year of world war and global pandemic, unnatural disasters hit
Delhi once again, turning it into a ‘city of the dead’ (Ali 1994: 171). Once
again, Ali writes of a ‘terrible’ summer:

The summer of 1918 was more terrible than the summers of the previ-
ous years. The sky was of a coppery hue throughout the day, and at
night the stars were hidden behind the sand which rained down from
the sky, and the loo did not stop. It howled more fiercely than before as
the City Walls had been demolished and the wind could now blow free
from the mountainous wastes outside the city. It howled through the
empty streets and in the narrow by-lanes and bazars. The dogs moaned
and wept at night as if afraid of death, and the cats, whose numbers had
surprisingly decreased, were quiet and subdued. (Ali 1994: 169)

Many of the uncanny images of the 1911 passage recur here – the wind and
sand, the moaning animals, the wrong-coloured sky, the atmosphere of death.
This time, the city environment has been made unhomely not just by ‘nature’,

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 caroline hovanec

but by the British forces which destroyed the walls in the period after 1857,
leaving the streets unprotected. Like the 1911 passage, this one presages the
sort of unseasonal disasters that regularly happen today, this time with a stron-
ger sense of causality. Climate change, too, is an environmental unhoming
driven by imperial capitalism.
This unhomely atmosphere becomes more and more oppressive as the novel
progresses, and it reaches an apex in the last scene. These final paragraphs
return, for the last time, to the images of dust, a hostile sky and crying animals.
They clearly show a conjunction of deathliness, exile and unnatural nature that
crushes Mir Nihal within his own house:

Mir Nihal lay on his bed more dead than alive, too broken to think even
of the past. The sky was overcast with a cloud of dust, and one grey
pigeon, strayed from its flock, plied its lonely way across the unending
vastness of the sky. The oven which had been built in the morning to boil
the water for the dead was full of ashes and dust. On the bare top of the
date palm sat a kite and shrilly cried for a while and flew away, leaving
the trunk, ugly and dark, standing all alone against the sky.
His days were done and beauty had vanished from the earth. [. . .]
Yet he was still alive to mope like an owl, and count his days, at the
mercy of Time and Fate.
He lay on the bed in a state of coma, too feelingless to sit up or think.
The sun went down and hid his face. The rooks cawed and flew away.
The sparrows found their nest. And night came striding fast, bringing
silence in its train, and covered up the empires of the world in its blanket
of darkness and gloom . . . . (Ali 1994: 200)

Mir Nihal is consumed by the loneliness of being exiled in his own home, in his
own city, even in his own mind. Yet he, like the birds which return here – the
pigeon, the rooks, the kite – is somehow ‘still alive’. They are all marked for
death, but the life has not quite been extinguished from them; they hold on by
a thread to the inhospitable world. As Brown says, Mir Nihal is ‘kin to that
lonely pigeon – vulnerable, doomed, yet persistent – against the vast reach of
the sky’ (Brown 2018: 842).
What exactly is ending here? Night blots out ‘the empires of the world’, not
just the extinct Mughal Empire but, one must suppose, the British Empire as well.
In 1940, in the ferment of Indian nationalism, this must have been a politically
charged statement, yet the question of what comes after imperial occupation was
not yet resolved. There is a sad irony to the author’s personal history here. Seven
years after Twilight in Delhi’s publication, India became independent, but at a
terrible cost to Ali. After Partition, which divided British India into a majority-
Hindu India and a majority-Muslim Pakistan, he was exiled from the former,

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 pigeons and ahmed ali’s twilight in delhi

‘and for no other reason than because I was Muslim’ (Ali 1994: xviii). He spent
the rest of his life based in Pakistan, where Twilight in Delhi was banned (Ali
1994: xix). In his 1993 introduction to the novel (penned just weeks before his
death), Ali compared his own banishment to that of his grandparents, who were
driven out of Delhi in 1857 when the British commandeered the city. ‘Yet while
their exile was temporary,’ he wrote, ‘mine was permanent, and the loss not only
of home and whatever I possessed, but also my birthright, when I had no hatred
of any caste or creed in my heart’ (Ali 1994: xviii).
Ali’s biography places him among the millions of people displaced from
their homes in the mid-twentieth century. It is an important reminder that
unhoming is not only a psychic or metaphorical experience, but a literal and
political one. As Said wrote, ‘to think of the exile informing [modernist] lit-
erature as beneficially humanistic is to banalize its mutilations, the losses it
inflicts on those who suffer them, the muteness with which it responds to any
attempt to recognize it as “good for us”’ (1984: n.p.). The material dimen-
sions of unhoming are especially crucial to recognise now that we are, in the
twenty-first century, on the brink of another massive wave of unhoming, this
time due to climate change. Sea level rise alone may displace as many as 50
million Indians who live on islands and along coasts (Ghosh 2016: 89), not to
speak of the millions of potential climate refugees distributed throughout the
rest of the world. It is not only humans whose homes are being destroyed, but
also wild animals, at least those species that have managed to survive the past
several centuries of habitat destruction wrought by mining, deforestation and
plantation agriculture. The challenge for the environmental justice movement
is how to imagine, and then materialise, something better than bare survival for
those who are among these numbers of the vulnerable.

Politics, Ecology, Literary Modes

When Ali brought the manuscript of Twilight in Delhi to Britain in 1939, he ran
into difficulties. He had managed to line up a publisher – the Hogarth Press –
but the printers refused to print the novel because they were concerned about its
potentially subversive (that is, anticolonial) content. Ali found support in E. M.
Forster, who used his Bloomsbury connections to persuade Harold Nicholson,
the official censor (and husband of Vita Sackville-West), to approve the book,
and it finally came out in 1940 (Brown 2018: 829). The novel that was almost
too radical for the British printers, however, was not radical enough for Ali’s
colleagues in India. In the 1930s, Ali had belonged to the All-India Progressive
Writers Association (AIPWA), a group of young writers involved with leftist
and anticolonial causes. The preferred literary mode of the AIPWA was social
realism (Anjaria 2011: 186–9). Its members rejected art-for-art’s-sake forms of
aestheticism in favour of activist, socially engaged writing, which they believed
would help in the project of Indian independence (Brown 2018: 828). When

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 caroline hovanec

Twilight in Delhi came out, many of these writers were disappointed by its
apparent nostalgia for the Mughal past, regarding it as ‘not befitting a commit-
ted Marxist’ (Anjaria 2011: 189). Ali defended himself from these charges of
political quietism, saying, ‘They called it a reactionary thing, nostalgia of the
past, a glorification of feudalism, forgetting that, as a writer, I had my technique,
that I had evolved my own symbols, my own methodology’ (qtd in Brown 2018:
829–30).
This critical debate over the novel’s politics is caught up with questions of
reading and of literary modes. Should it be read as a work of realism, mimeti-
cally describing a particular class located in a particular historical moment? Or
is it better understood as a symbolist text (as Ali suggests in the quote above),
a theatrical performance (as Anjaria argues), or a meta-literary translation and
reframing of Urdu poetic forms (as Padamsee and Brown read it)? To whom
does Twilight in Delhi’s nostalgia belong – the characters, the narrator or the
author? And is nostalgia necessarily reactionary?
My intent here is less to resolve these questions than to note their remark-
able similarity to the questions driving debate within ecological writing and
ecocriticism today. Specifically, there is the problem of how to conceptualise
and write about the sixth extinction and the destruction of wild animals’ habi-
tats. Some critics defend the public mourning of lost species and lost ecologies,
as a way of insisting on the value of nonhuman life (Heise 2016: 32–5) or as a
rhetorical act which uses the pathos of loss to bring together a political collec-
tive (Taylor 2019: 58–9). Others argue that a turn to the emotions of sadness
and anxiety amounts to a passive form of resignation or an individualised
retreat from politics. Anna Kornbluh, for instance, warns against mistaking
‘the sylvan beatification of extinction rites’ for political action, arguing that
‘the dispersive poetics of attunement to the material world, romancing pre-
carity, and dissolving binaries entice us to lie down’ when, in fact, we need
to ‘stand up’ (2020: 771, 775). Rithika Ramamurthy (2021), meanwhile,
critiques the inward turn of recent climate anxiety novels. She proposes that
the ‘polyvocal’ perspective of big, collective climate change novels (Kim Stanley
Robinson’s 2020 Ministry for the Future being her key example) is more befit-
ting of the ecological politics we need.
There can be little doubt that the sixth extinction, global warming and
climate displacement are problems of power, not of individual feelings, and
many others have written persuasively of the need to attack these problems
at their root, which is a system of imperial capitalism that extracts profits
from nature and people while leaving them vulnerable to an increasingly
unstable planetary climate. A more difficult question to answer is what these
insights mean for literature and literary criticism. It might be that Ali’s critics
were right, that Twilight in Delhi gives too much space to a dying aristocracy
and not enough space to an emerging revolutionary movement, that it is too

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 pigeons and ahmed ali’s twilight in delhi

in love with nostalgia and grief and languorous beauty to be of any use for
leftist politics. It might be that social realism, big casts of characters and uto-
pian imaginaries, not romantic elegy or modernist interiority, are the literary
properties best suited to Ali’s political moment and to our own.
Yet Twilight in Delhi has at least one lesson that is vital for ecological, anti-
colonial and anticapitalist politics today. That is, the end is not the end, and ‘too
late’ is the only place left to begin. If two degrees of warming is catastrophic,
four degrees is far worse and six worse still. If a thousand species lost is a trag-
edy, perhaps another thousand extinctions can still be averted. If 20 million
people lose their homes to climate disaster, that is no reason to become resigned
to the displacement of 200 million. ‘And life went on . . .’, Ali tells us again and
again (Ali 1994: 31, 147, 159). That last ‘grey pigeon’ that ‘plied its lonely way
across the unending vastness of the sky’ might well be the Angel of History, the
winds of progress ‘caught in his wings’, watching as the on-going catastrophe
‘keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet’ (Benjamin 1968 [1940]:
257). History just keeps happening; the sun keeps rising every morning and, as
Ali shows, being marked for death is no escape. The only choice left, once you
accept that life goes on, is to keep fighting for more life.

Works Cited
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Anjaria, Ulka. 2011. ‘Staging Realism and the Ambivalence of Nationalism in the Colonial
Novel’. NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 44.2 (Summer): 186–207.
Askari, Mohamed Hasan. 1998/9 [1949]. ‘A Novel by Ahmed Ali’. Trans. Carlo Coppola.
Journal of South Asian Literature 33/4.1–2: 243–54.
Benjamin, Walter. 1968 [1940]. ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’. In Illuminations:
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Day, Jon. 2019. Homing: On Pigeons, Dwellings and Why We Return. London: John
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Frembgen, Jurgen Wasim and Paul Rollier. 2014. Wrestlers, Pigeon Fanciers, and Kite
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Freud, Sigmund. 2003 [1919]. The Uncanny. Trans. David McLintock. New York:
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Ghosh, Amitav. 2016. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable.
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Heise, Ursula K. 2016. Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered

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and Philip Steer, 42–62. New York: Fordham University Press.
van Dooren, Thom. 2014. Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction. New
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Yusoff, Kathryn. 2018. A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None. Minneapolis: Univer-
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Zylinska, Joanna. 2018. The End of Man: A Feminist Counterapocalypse. Minneapolis:
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 15

THE MODERNIST JELLYFISH

Rachel Murray

In December 1999, the Filipino island of Luzon, home to 40 million people, was
suddenly plunged into darkness. As the hours passed, many began to suspect
that a military coup was under way against the then President, Joseph Estrada,
whose sharp decline in popularity during his first year in office had resulted in
a tense and uncertain political atmosphere. Others blamed the blackout on an
early outbreak of the millennium bug, an anticipated computer system flaw
that caused widespread global panic in the final months of 1999. In actual fact,
the power cut was caused by another bug in the system – namely, an influx of
creatures dubbed the cockroaches of the sea (Stone 2011). With rumours of
sabotage swirling, the government issued a statement explaining that a swarm
of jellyfish had been sucked into the cooling system of a major power station
north of Manila, causing the island’s entire electricity grid to shut down. Seven
hours and fifty truckloads of jellyfish later, power was finally restored.
This act of industrial vandalism will be familiar to anyone acquainted with
reports of the so-called jellyfish apocalypse, or ‘jellygeddon’. In recent years,
jellyfish have frequently been cast as the ‘durable and opportunistic inheri-
tors’ (Giggs 2018: n.p.) of marine ecosystems that are suffering from the effects
of overfishing, eutrophication, acidification, habitat modification and species
translocation (Richardson et al. 2009; Gershwin 2013). Vast blooms of jellyfish
– such as those that immobilised the nuclear aircraft carrier the USS Ronald
Reagan in 2006 – have been interpreted by some scientists as a sign of impend-
ing ecological collapse, prompting visions of future seas teeming with gelatinous

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life forms and very little else. As Rebecca Giggs notes, images of a sea gummed
up with the bodies of jellyfish (‘transformed into something like an aspic ter-
rine’) appear to signal a return to ‘the ocean of pre-history’ – a reversion of life
to the ‘primordial soup’ (Giggs 2018: n.p.).
We might read these jellyfish blooms as a form of atavistic symptom, the
resurfacing of the slimy evolutionary past that modern society had sought to
expunge from itself, but which returns once more to clog up its inner workings.
We might even be tempted to celebrate these cnidarian invaders as a force capa-
ble of arresting the industrial systems that have manufactured the present envi-
ronmental crisis. Yet this narrative is complicated by the fact that these blooms
are a by-product, as well as a beneficiary, of these very same systems: ‘jelly-
fish and human industrialization’, writes Eva Hayward, work ‘hand in tentacle
to alter and destroy ocean ecosystems’ (Hayward 2012: 180). The problem,
in other words, is that their environmental destructiveness is inextricably tied
up with ours; there can be no clean separation between us and them. There is
even a suggestion that ‘“we” – or, at least the excrement of twenty-first century
civilization – are becoming jellyfish’ (Johnson 2016: 65).
The uncertain status of jellyfish blooms as ‘tangled objects’ (Latour 2004:
24), which trouble the distinction between human and nonhuman, subject and
object, nature and culture, has posed a particular challenge for blue humanities
scholarship. Surveying recent work in this area, Brandon Jones notes that the
jellyfish appears to have generated an ‘antagonistic split [. . .] between argu-
ments for the posthumanist ethics its radically inhuman body and perceptual
apparatus afford, and arguments against its destructive agency in league with
human industry, pollution, and extraction’ (Jones 2019: 485).1 In this chapter, I
argue that the concept of trauma may offer a way out of this impasse, enabling
us to think of jellyfish in ways that are neither wholly negative nor positive,
but which instead foregrounds their capacity to disrupt our categories of sense-
making in ways that are at once destructive and potentially useful. Trauma,
as the literary scholar Roger Luckhurst notes, violently opens up passageways
‘between systems that were once discrete’, making ‘unforeseen connections that
distress or confound’ (Luckhurst 2008: 3). Dominic LaCapra has also written
of trauma’s ability to ‘disarticulate relations’, deconstructing binary opposi-
tions and confusing self and other (LaCapra 2001: 21), while fellow trauma
theorist Cathy Caruth has spoken of its ‘peculiar temporality’, the sense ‘that
the past it foists upon one is not one’s own’ (Caruth 1996: 171).
Modernist literature, it has often been noted, is particularly well suited
to representing the effects of trauma: its epistemic ruptures, its techniques of
fragmentation, its recursive rhythms and unruly temporality (Armstrong 2005:
92–5; Henke 2010). Modernist writing also exhibits a response to jellyfish that
bears many of the hallmarks of trauma. In the interwar prose of Wyndham
Lewis and H.D., images of jellyfish are suggestive of an encounter with the

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 the modernist jellyfish

world that ruptures the boundaries of the human subject, unsettling the distinc-
tion between self and other, inside and outside, human and nonhuman. This
chapter proposes that such encounters, while distressing, open up passageways
between systems that were thought to be discrete, establishing points of contact
between human subjects and seemingly distant or ‘alien’ forms of life (Alaimo
2013: 154).
The first part of this chapter focuses on the novelist and critic Tom McCarthy’s
essay collection Typewriters, Bombs, Jellyfish (2017), which uncovers surprising
threads of connection between modernist aesthetics, trauma and the figure of the
jellyfish. The second part examines the work of Wyndham Lewis, arguing that
jellyfish in his writing appear representative of an ‘authentic shock’ (Lewis 1937:
85), which, in puncturing the subject’s psychic defences, also serves to galvanise
their aesthetic procedures, resulting in significant moments of textual rupture.
The final part of the chapter examines H.D.’s interwar prose, contending that
jellyfish are bound up in her thinking about the enabling possibilities of trauma,
which, in breaking the mind apart, also brings it into contact with parts of the
world – as well as aspects of the self – that would otherwise remain out of reach.

McCarthy, Jellyfish and the ‘Traumatic Real’

Tom McCarthy’s modernist proclivities have been well documented, includ-
ing by the author himself. In a 2010 interview, he argued that ‘the task for
the contemporary novelist is to deal with the legacy of modernism’, adding:
‘I’m not trying to be modernist, but to navigate the wreckage of that project’
(McCarthy qtd in Purdon 2010: n.p.). McCarthy’s novels repeatedly circle
back to the central themes and preoccupations of high modernism, including
the impact of new media technologies on subject formation, the imbrication of
humans and machines, the importance of recovered memory, and the material-
ity of language. Examining the influence of modernist aesthetics on his writ-
ing, Justus Nieland has even gone as far as describing McCarthy’s response
to modernism as a form of traumatic re-enactment, arguing that his work
‘linger[s] in the remains of [modernism’s] most fecund catastrophes, which are
also those of the twentieth century itself’ (Nieland 2012: 570).
McCarthy’s critical writing is also marked by a tendency to linger in the
wreckage of modernism. Written between 2002 and 2016, his essay collection
Typewriters, Bombs, Jellyfish covers a range of modernist authors and themes,
from Joycean scatology to dodgem jockeys as modern-day ‘Angels of History’
(McCarthy 2017: 207). The essays tend to proceed ‘associatively, digressing,
jolting, looping’ (61): ‘Semi Connected Thoughts’, for instance, moves at break-
neck speed from Japanese conceptual art to fly-fishing to exploding windowsills,
while ‘Nothing Will Have Taken Place’ takes us from Stéphane Mallarmé to
Don DeLillo to the virtuosic footwork of Zinedine Zidane. Reading the collec-
tion in its entirety, however, it is possible to identify a recurring preoccupation

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 rachel murray

with the relationship between trauma and aesthetic innovation. This is particu-
larly evident in an essay entitled ‘Get Real, or What Jellyfish Have to Teach Us
About Literature’. Drawing on Jacques Lacan’s account of ‘the Real’ as that
which is ‘unassimilable by any system of representation’ and which ‘always
returns to the same place’ (Lacan qtd in McCarthy 2017: 69), McCarthy defines
the ‘real’ in literature as an event which ‘happens, or forever threatens to do so,
not as a result of the artist “getting it right” or overcoming inauthenticity’, but
rather through a sudden mishap or accident, a ‘radical and disastrous eruption
within the always-and-irremediably inauthentic’ (69; emphasis in original). To
illustrate this idea, McCarthy borrows a beastly analogy from the French sur-
realist writer Michel Leiris, who compares the writer to a toreador:

Imagine a bullfight without the bull: it would comprise a set of aesthetic

manoeuvres, pretty twills and pirouettes and so forth – but there’d be no
danger. The bull, crucially, brings this to the party; and for Leiris, that’s
the real: the tip of the bull’s horn. [. . .] If a matador is gored, the bull-
fight, its entire spectacle, suddenly shudders to an appalled halt; what
the bull’s horn brings to the party is not just danger but also the very
thing that would catastrophically interrupt the party, plunging craft into
chaos. (1984: 68–9; emphasis in original)

Here, the force of the ‘real’ is located in a violent encounter with a nonhuman
creature – an encounter that may be orchestrated by the bullfighter-cum-writer,
but which remains, to a large extent, out of their control. The threat posed to
art by the ‘real’ is presented as a form of traumatic interruption or break in
proceedings, a sudden intercession that ‘would involve the violent rupture of
the very form and procedure of the artwork itself’ (68). Yet crucially, this threat
of collapse is also what galvanises the artwork, prompting a set of thrilling aes-
thetic manoeuvres as the writer dallies dangerously with the point – the sharp
tip – ‘at which the writing’s entire project crumples and implodes’ (70).
Leiris’s bullfight analogy draws on his experiences of attending corridas
during the 1930s and 1940s, where he was captivated by the way that the
matador ‘reveals the whole quality of his style just when he is most threat-
ened’ (Leiris 1984: 155). For McCarthy, however, the ‘real’ is exemplified by
a more recent form of creaturely interruption. Recalling a 2013 article in the
New York Review of Books that reported that jellyfish ‘were taking over the
planet’ (1), McCarthy suggests that these ‘giant agglomerations’ (1) of medusae
threaten the emergence of something akin to the ‘real’ insofar as they resemble
a kind of traumatic material that remains unassimilable within any system:
‘there’s a critical mass of goo in circulation; and it’s coming back, lodging,
sticking’ (2). McCarthy’s reading may help to explain why the phenomenon of
jellyfish blooms appears so anxiety-inducing. To recall Lacan on the ‘Real’, the

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 the modernist jellyfish

sight of these gooey masses seems to terrorise us with the prospect of returning
‘to the same place’, or rather a place of evolutionary and ontological sameness,
in which there is no longer any distinction between self and other, or between
primordial origins and apocalyptic endings.
Significantly, though, McCarthy goes on to suggest that jellyfish, as well
as representing something akin to the ‘traumatic real’, may also provide a
‘decisive model’ (74) for how this ‘real’ might be registered by the literary text.
This idea is suggested to him by an image from Sigmund Freud’s Beyond the
Pleasure Principle (1920), which contains one of the most influential early the-
ories of trauma. In it, Freud envisages the mental apparatus, in its most basic
form, as ‘an undifferentiated vesicle of living substance that is susceptible to
stimulation’ (Freud 1961a: 20). In order to protect itself from the ‘enormous
energies at work in the external world’, Freud writes, the mind has been forced
to evolve a ‘protective shield against stimuli’ (21). Trauma constitutes a breach
in this protective shield that floods the mind with large amounts of stimulus,
preventing it from ‘mastering [. . .] them, so that they can be disposed of’ (24).
McCarthy is struck by Freud’s description of this mental apparatus as, at its
core, ‘an organ for receiving stimuli’ (20), observing how his account of the
psyche draws on ‘earliest marine life, germ-plasms and protozoa’ (McCarthy
2017: 73). At one point in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud describes how
‘the unconscious stretches out feelers [. . .] towards the external world and
hastily withdraws them as soon as they have sampled the excitations coming
from it’ (Freud 1961a: 22). Responding to this tentacular image, McCarthy
argues that the mental apparatus appears ‘jellyfish-like’, equipped as it is with
‘feelers’ that stretch out into the surrounding world (73).
Identifying the recurrence of this image in another of Freud’s essays, written
five years later, McCarthy goes on to note:

What’s most astonishing for me, about these medusozoan images, is

the fact that Freud houses them in a longer meditation on a reusable
notepad . . . [on which] inscriptions may be both kept and erased. This
is his decisive model for consciousness and, ultimately, for life. (74)

McCarthy is referring to Freud’s account of the mental apparatus as a form of

‘mystic writing pad’ or slab of dark resin (the unconscious) covered with a sheet
of wax paper and celluloid (the perceptual system) on which messages can be
written (Freud 1961b: 230–1). Though the writing on these surface layers can
easily be erased, most notably by trauma, Freud suggests that ‘the permanent
trace of what was written is retained upon the wax slab and is legible in suit-
able lights’ (Freud 1961b: 230). What McCarthy finds remarkable about this
analogy is the suggestion that the formation of consciousness and the act of
writing originate in a primal experience of trauma which remains unavailable to

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 rachel murray

the conscious mind, yet which the subject is compelled to return to and repeat.
‘We are all writing machines,’ McCarthy concludes, ‘jellyfish included. In fact,
jellyfish especially’ (74).
In order to illustrate this notion, McCarthy turns to a passage from Alex-
ander Trocchi’s late modernist novel, Cain’s Book (1960), which combines
images of plasmic receptiveness, trauma, and the act of writing. In a ‘strangely
Proustian sequence of perception’ (74), the narrator watches a man urinating
in an alley and suddenly feels ‘like a piece of sensitive photographic paper,
waiting passively to feel the shock of impression’, a ‘mute hunk of appetitional
plasm . . . run through by a series of external stimuli’ (Trocchi qtd in McCarthy
2017: 74–5). This urinary stream-of-consciousness is suggestive of a modernist
experience of trauma (‘the shock of impression’, ‘run through by stimuli’) that
returns the mind to its original, primordial function as an organ for receiving
stimuli. It is also suggestive of an experience of trauma that is realised – or
‘hypostatized’ (75) – through the act of writing, with McCarthy proposing
that the artwork is capable of bearing the traces of what the conscious mind
cannot, acting as an ‘organ for receiving stimuli’ (Freud 1961a: 20). Crucially,
however, this act of inscription is one that renders the human subject ‘passive’,
reducing the artist to a mere receiver of impressions – a ‘mute hunk of appeti-
tional plasm’ (Trocchi qtd in McCarthy 2017: 74–5). Though he does not press
the point, McCarthy’s reading aligns modernist experimentation with a state
of relinquished mastery, in which the mind, run through by stimuli, finds itself
jolted back to a state of primal receptiveness, which is also the scene of writing.
For McCarthy, then, the jellyfish represents the force of ‘the real’, under-
stood as a traumatic impact from without, as well as a form of writing that
is capable of registering and giving shape to its deleterious effects. McCarthy
identifies a similar tendency at work in the writing of the American avant-garde
novelist Kathy Acker, whose writing – like H.D.’s and Lewis’s – is ‘awash’ (255)
with jellyfish. McCarthy proposes that her cnidarian figures are associated with
the recursive force of trauma that breaks in, nightmarishly, to the subject’s con-
sciousness in the form of an actual nightmare of ‘huge jellyfish glop’ (Acker qtd
in McCarthy 2017: 256) chasing her down the street. At the same time, Acker’s
bodies are also ‘like jellyfish quivering as pulse signals reach them through a
viscous sea’, channelling and acting as ‘hubs or mainstays in a world of viscer-
ally connected continuity’ (257; emphasis in original). Her jellyfish, he notes,
‘both anchor this world and serve as its disjecta’ (257; emphasis in original).
McCarthy’s reading provides a crucial insight into the dual function of the jel-
lyfish in modernist writing. In the work of Lewis and H.D., images of jellyfish
are representative of a trauma from without, be it the volatile energies of the
masses in Lewis’s ‘The War-Crowds’ (1937), who resemble a ‘jellyfish’ in the
eyes of his protagonist (Lewis 1937: 89), or the ‘jelly-fish like’ spectacle of
‘modernity’ (H.D. 1968: 174) that obstructs the subject’s thought processes in

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H.D.’s Palimpsest (written 1926, published 1968). At the same time, jellyfish
also signify a mode of consciousness, as well as a mode of writing, that is capa-
ble of registering the impact of these traumatic incursions on its quivering sur-
face, transforming trauma’s deleterious effects into a form of creative energy.
To examine the gelatinous imagery of Lewis and that of H.D. alongside one
another may appear somewhat perverse. After all, the jellyfish in Lewis is gen-
erally understood by critics to be a derided figure of aesthetic over-refinement,
feminine fluidity and a chaotic melting of the self into others, representing all
that is antithetical to the ‘dry, hard’ classicism (Hulme 2003: 75) of the men of
1914. The writing of H.D., by contrast, is thought to celebrate ‘precisely those
“jellyfish attributes” that Lewis attacks’; her gelatinous imagery aspires towards
an extension rather than a reinforcement of the self through art, reaching out
tentacularly towards networked ‘forms of sensation distributed between persons
rather than owned’ (Armstrong 2005: 94; Crown 1995: 229–31). Re-examining
their work in relation to McCarthy’s account of the ‘traumatic real’, however,
it becomes possible to identify important similarities, as well as key differences,
between their medusozoan figures, which threaten the breakdown of the self at
the same time as they promise to extend it in new directions.

Beyond jelly[f]ish diffuseness: Wyndham Lewis

Towards the end of Lewis’s novel Tarr (1918), the titular protagonist finds
himself suddenly ‘overwhelmed’ by powerful feelings of lust for the Russian–
German aristocrat Anastasya Vasek. Fearing the loss of autonomy that might
come with submitting to his desire (he has already spent much of the novel
unsuccessfully attempting to wrest himself free from another romantic attach-
ment), Tarr attempts to rationalise his feelings:

He was a man. = A woman was a lower form of life. Everything was

female to begin with. A jellyish diffuseness spread itself and gaped on
the beds and in the bas-fonds of everything. Above a certain level of
life sex disappeared, just as in highly organised sensualism sex van-
ishes. And, on the other hand, everything beneath that line was female.
= Bard, Simpson, Mackenzie, Townsend, Annandale – he enumerated
acquaintances below the absolute line and who displayed a lack of
energy, permanently mesmeric state, and almost purely emotional reac-
tions. He knew that everything on the superior side of that line was not
purged of jellyish attributes; also that Anastasya’s flaccid and funda-
mental charms were formidable, although the line had been crossed by
her.2 (Lewis 1996: 313–14)

The misogyny in this passage is palpable: there is little room for ambiguity in
statements such as ‘A woman was a lower form of life,’ which seem designed to

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 rachel murray

provoke ‘almost purely emotional reactions’ in the reader. (‘On a first reading of
Tarr,’ notes Min Wild with commendable restraint, ‘occasionally one gasps a lit-
tle’; 2004: 25.) But what is often overlooked about these lines, and what might
become clearer upon subsequent readings, is the way that Anastasya’s ‘jellyish’
presence quickly confounds Tarr’s ‘absolute line’, collapsing the binary distinc-
tions that he has sought to erect (with obvious phallic implications) between
himself and his soon-to-be lover. ‘He knew’, the narrator concedes, ‘that every-
thing on the superior side of that line was not purged of jellyish attributes’ (314;
emphasis added). The repetition of ‘everything’ over the course of this passage
suggests that no one, including Tarr, is safe from this sensual spread; amid the
ooze, categories meld and blur as the ‘jellyish’ other becomes indistinguishable
from the ‘jellyish’ self.
Tarr’s psychic disintegration is compounded by the form of the text, which
highlights the growing ‘diffuseness’ of his thought processes in the face of his
‘mentally outsize[d]’ (Lewis 2010: 278) adversary. Definitive statements – ‘He
was a man’ – give way to run-on sentences formed of increasingly unstable
clauses that qualify and contradict themselves (‘on the other hand’, ‘although’).
The description of Anastasya’s charms first as ‘flaccid’, then conversely ‘funda-
mental’ and finally ‘formidable’ gives the impression of someone leafing des-
perately through a thesaurus in search of the right adjective. Tarr’s efforts to
categorise and thus impose a degree of control over his amorphous rival appear
destined to fail, leaving him with a sense of ‘personal defeat’ (314). The end of
narrative – which leaves Tarr flip-flopping back and forth between Anastasya
and his previous lover, Bertha, unable to escape the clutches of either – might be
read as the ultimate triumph of these ‘jellyish attributes’ over Tarr’s aesthetics
of the ‘armoured hide’ (299).
I want to suggest that this sense of being thwarted by a jellyish adversary
is something that Lewis’s writing at some level invites, though it is hardly wel-
comed by his male subjects. Time and time again, Lewis’s protagonists hit up
against a gelatinous entity that serves to breach their psychic defences, throw-
ing the author’s ‘externalist’ (Lewis 1964: 121) vision of self and art into dis-
array.3 At the same time, however, Lewis’s writing appears to be galvanised
by this force of disruption, repeatedly returning to that which threatens to
implode the rigid systems of thought that he has sought to put in place. This is
particularly apparent in a story entitled ‘The War-Crowds’, which appeared in
his memoir Blasting and Bombardiering (1937). In the story, Lewis hands over
the controls of the narrative to a fictional avatar named Cantleman, who, after
hearing news of the outbreak of the First World War, travels down to London
to witness the fervour of the wartime masses surging in waves of ‘excited vio-
lence’ (Lewis 1937: 94) through the city streets. Cantleman decides to under-
take a series of ‘crowd-experiments’ (84), immersing himself within this sea
of bodies before withdrawing to a nearby café to make notes on what he has

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experienced. In an image that recalls Freud’s analogy of the mystic writing pad,
Cantleman presents himself as a kind of medium, or ‘planchette’ (85), who is
able to receive messages from the crowd: ‘he was inviting [them] to inscribe
their ideas on the tabula rasa he offered them’ (86).
Cantleman’s desire to ‘express the meaning of this crowd’ (83) suggests that
his agenda is ultimately one of mastery. Indeed, an earlier version of this text,
which appeared in the second issue of Lewis’s short-lived periodical Blast, was
entitled ‘The Crowd Master’ (Lewis 1915). Like the Baudelairean figure of the
dandy, who seeks to immerse himself in the urban masses before rushing off
to record the impressions that assail him, Cantleman aspires to a kind of ‘cold
detachment’ (Baudelaire 2010: 10) as he embarks on his crowd experiments,
exhibiting an unshakeable determination to remain unmoved. Yet something
happens that is not part of his plan. After sinking ‘like a diver’ into the depths
of the crowd, Cantleman receives an unexpected jolt:

Suddenly he experienced a distinct and he believed authentic shock. It

could only come from the crowd! Evidently he had penetrated its mind –
the cerebration of this jelly-fish! Hence the sting! He had received his first
novel sensation. What was it exactly – could he define it? (85; emphasis
in original)

The passage suggests an inversion of the power dynamics that Cantleman has
sought to establish in relation to this amorphous mass of bodies: though he is
eager to convince himself that he is the one doing the penetrating, really it is
he who is on the receiving end of the crowd. Rather than emerging victorious
from this conquest, Cantleman is left with the nagging sense that he has ‘lost
ground, even’, finding himself unable ‘to obtain a valuable note’ from the mass
of ‘confusing’ (85) messages that are pressing in upon him. As is often the case
in Lewis’s writing, Cantleman’s internal conflict is presented in gendered terms
as a struggle to assert one’s masculinity against the threat of feminine fluidity.
At one point he likens the crowd to suffragettes, before wondering: ‘Are the
crowds then female? . . . Is this opposition correct?’ (82). As the modernist
scholar Tom Holland points out, it becomes increasingly clear over the course
of the text that it is not simply a mastery of the male over the female, but rather
‘a weird cnidarian androgyny holds sway’ (Holland 2007: 160).
Lewis’s jellyfish imagery, then, seems designed to thwart the oppositional
structures that his male subjects have put in place to obtain a degree of mastery
over their surroundings. The presence of these gelatinous figures also hints at
an experience of trauma, in which the overwhelming of the individual’s psychic
defences by the ‘enormous energies’ at work in the outer world results in a
confusion of subject and object, self and other, inside and outside. Significantly,
though, Lewis’s writing indicates that this sense of shock also serves to galvanise

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his protagonist’s thought processes, resulting in an unsettling but potentially

generative state of confusion. Following his ‘jellyish’ encounter with Anasta-
sya, the narrator of Tarr remarks: ‘an entirely different world was revealed,
that demanded completely new arguments’ (Lewis 1996: 315). Similarly, after
receiving his ‘first novel sensation’ from the jellyfish crowds, Cantleman rushes
to a local bar to record his impressions in his notebook. His initial excitement
is, admittedly, short-lived. After jotting down a series of disjointed thoughts,
the narrator remarks flatly: ‘He read [them] through. He was disappointed. He
returned to the crowd’ (Lewis 1937: 86). Cantleman repeats this process several
times without success, with his notes resembling a mass of incoherent ideas,
snatches of quotation and polyglot fragments. Yet while Cantleman may not
be able to recognise the significance of these disconnected fragments, as readers
we can begin to piece together a narrative about an ailing heroic figure, Lord
Nelson, whose former glories fade from his mind as he lies face down in the
mud: ‘The wild ass stamps o’er his head’ (88). What resembles an incoherent
mass of words to Cantleman (‘it had no meaning’; 84) may provide a source
of insight into the puncturing of his controlling narrative, as well as the heroic
fictions that preside over the conflict.
The fragments (or ‘disjecta’, to recall McCarthy) that Cantleman produces
following his encounter with the ‘cerebration of this jelly-fish’ (85) suggest a
characteristically modernist recognition of the potential of trauma to release
the world from known categories. It is also indicative of an experience of shock
that threatens to collapse the self, as well as the artwork, as an autonomous
entity. Here and elsewhere in Lewis, the jellyfish appears to signify an encounter
with the ‘traumatic real’ that results in moments of productive textual rupture,
in which readers are afforded a glimpse of that which cannot be accommo-
dated into the subject’s oppositional systems, and which threatens instead to
overwhelm them.

Jellyfish Consciousness: H.D.

In H.D.’s interwar writing, images of jellyfish are also bound up with an expe-
rience of trauma. In her novella Kora and Ka (1934), the shell-shocked busi-
nessman John Helforth describes a sensation of having a ‘monster’ in his brain
known as Ka, ‘who is a jellyfish, who is a microbe, who is (a specialist all but
told me) a disease’ (H.D. 1996: 29). While experiencing a mental breakdown,
the protagonist of H.D.’s novel Her (written 1927, published 1984) likens the
splitting of her psyche to the image of jellyfish giving birth by ‘breaking apart,
separating themselves from themselves’ (H.D. 1984: 118). These two examples
are suggestive of the ways in which trauma in H.D.’s writing tends to resemble
a destructive force from without – a form an invasive entity or ‘disease’ – as
well as a more generative phenomenon that serves to expand and multiply the

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self in unforeseen ways. For H.D., the jellyfish seems to offer a way of bringing
together these two aspects of trauma – the destructive and the generative – without
resolving the split between them.
This is particularly evident in ‘Murex: War and Postwar London (circa
A.D. 1916–1926)’, which forms the middle section of H.D.’s novel Palimpsest
(1926). The narrative focuses on the resurfacing of American poet Raymonde
Ransome’s traumatic recollections of the First World War following her return
to London almost a decade later. Early on in the text, Raymonde receives a
surprise visit from an old acquaintance, known as Ermy, whose unannounced
arrival results in an ‘unexpected breach in her armour’ (H.D. 1968: 122) as her
suppressed memories of the conflict come flooding back. The distant beat of
soldiers marching towards the troop trains at Waterloo begins to echo through
her mind (‘Feet – feet – feet’; 175) as Raymonde recalls:

face upon face, impression upon impression, and all of modernity (as she
viewed it) was as the jellied and sickly substance of a collection of old
colourless photographic negatives through which gleamed the reality . . .
Antiquity showed through the semi-transparence of shallow modernity
like blue flame through the texture of some jelly-fish-like deep-sea crea-
ture. Modernity was unfamiliar and semi-transparent and it obscured
antiquity while it let a little show through, falsified by the nervous move-
ment of its transparent surface. (179)

There are echoes here of Cantleman’s encounter with the ‘cerebration of this
jelly fish’ in ‘The War-Crowds’, with the mass of faces generating a multitude
of impressions that threaten to overwhelm the onlooker. This ‘jellied and sickly
substance’ also resembles a form of ‘disjecta’ (McCarthy 2017: 257), with H.D.
likening this psychic phenomenon to a material substance that returns to jam
up the workings of Raymonde’s consciousness, obscuring and falsifying her
reality. At the same time, H.D. hints that this obstruction – or viscous ‘over-
layer’ – may also be what permits access to a deeper reality: the ‘texture’ of
this ‘jellyfish-like creature’ serves to ‘let a little show through’. What initially
appears to be a barrier becomes the medium ‘through which gleamed the real-
ity’ (179; emphasis added). Consequently, while the jellyfish body may function
as a creative obstruction, hindering Raymonde’s efforts to gain access to the
‘defined and clarid’ (122) medium of verse, it also enables a fuller apprehen-
sion of her wartime experiences by allowing glimmers of something akin to the
‘real’ to show through.
The figure of the jellyfish, then, helps H.D. to imagine a form of conscious-
ness, as well as a mode of writing, that is capable of registering, and giving
shape to, trauma’s belated effects. This idea is explored at length in Notes on

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 rachel murray

Thought and Vision (written 1919, published 1982), an experimental essay

which H.D. wrote shortly after experiencing a series of traumatic wartime
events, including the birth of her stillborn child during an air raid, as well as
the deaths of her father and brother. The text was inspired by a hallucinatory
episode that H.D. underwent while visiting the Scilly Isles with her partner
Bryher in the summer of 1919. During this episode, her mind took on ‘an
almost physical character’, resembling ‘a jellyfish, placed over and about the
brain . . . fluid yet with definite body’:

I should say – to continue this jelly-fish metaphor – that long feelers

reached down and through the body, that these stood in the same rela-
tion to the nervous system as the over-mind to the brain or intellect.
There is, then, a set of super-feelings. These feelings extend out and
about us; as the long, floating tentacles of the jelly-fish reach out and
about him. They are not different material, extraneous, as the physical
arms and legs are extraneous to the gray matter of the directing brain.
The super-feelers are part of the super-mind, as the jelly-fish feelers are
the jelly-fish itself, elongated in fine threads. (H.D. 1982: 18–19)

The striking similarity between H.D.’s jellyfish metaphor and Freud’s medusoid
image of the psyche is all the more surprising given that H.D. wrote this text
prior to the publication of Beyond the Pleasure Principle in 1920. For both
writers, the idea of the jellyfish seems to have offered a way of describing and
giving shape to the effects of trauma in the immediate aftermath of the First
World War. In contrast to Freud’s, however, H.D.’s jellyfish analogy suggests
a more enabling understanding of trauma, which, in breaching the subject’s
psychic defences, establishes new connections between mind and body, self and
world, human and nonhuman.
In the above passage, H.D. is describing a form of aesthetic experience in
which no form of sensory information is deemed ‘extraneous’ to any other,
with mental and physical experience standing ‘in the same relation’ to one
another. Significantly, however, this state of expanded consciousness is one
that remains largely confined to the realm of possibility. ‘If we had the right
sort of brains,’ she writes, ‘we would receive a definite message from that fig-
ure, like dots and lines [. . .] received and translated into definite thought by
another telegraphic centre’ (26). The conditional nature of this statement – ‘if
we had’ – combined with the modal auxiliary ‘would’ is consistent with the
speculative tone of her essay more generally. Here, as in ‘The War-Crowds’, the
jellyfish appears to represent a message which may be ‘received’ but not ‘trans-
lated’ into something ‘definite’, holding out the promise of meaning even as it
defies writerly attempts to grasp its significance. For both H.D. and Lewis, the
jellyfish provides a means of registering the deleterious effects of trauma at the

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 the modernist jellyfish

same time as it exposes the limitations of the human mind as an apparatus for
receiving and translating its pulse signals into legible signs.
In contrast to Lewis, however, H.D.’s writing appears much more invested
in the notion that by embracing the destructive effects of trauma, rather than
attempting to remain shielded from them, it may be possible to gain access to a
deeper layer of consciousness, as well as a heightened connectedness to the sur-
rounding world. In a story set shortly after the First World War, the protagonist
likens her mind to ‘platinum sheet-metal over jelly-fish’, adding: ‘The inside
could get out that way, only when the top was broken’ (H.D. 2011: 39). This
is a far cry from Tarr’s efforts to conceal ‘the naked pulsing and moving of the
soft inside of life’ behind ‘the armoured hide’ (Lewis 1996: 299). Here and else-
where in H.D.’s writing, the jellyfish appears central to the notion that while
trauma may expose the mind to harm, it also puts the subject in touch with
parts of the self, as well as parts of the world, that would otherwise remain
out of reach. Insofar as it threatens to disarticulate the self, it also promises to
reconfigure it anew.
By paying close attention to the jellyfish, it becomes possible to develop a
new awareness of the value of trauma for modernist writers, which, in breach-
ing the modern subject’s psychic defences, also serves to pierce the boundary
separating inside from outside, self from other, human from nonhuman. The
medusoid imagery of H.D. and Lewis may also enable us to recognise the
significance of traumatic experience more generally: from Lewis’s ‘jellyish
diffuseness’ to H.D.’s ‘super-feelers’, these texts hint at trauma’s capacity
productively to undermine ideas of human separation and exceptionalism,
presenting significant moments of slippage between human subjects and
medusoid entities. With this in mind, the writing examined by this chapter
may help us to think differently about our present environmental crisis, in
which jellyfish have come to stand once more as a disturbing manifestation of
the psychic and physical trauma wrought by capitalist modernity. By gather-
ing together these gelatinous examples from H.D and Lewis, as well as from
McCarthy and Freud, it becomes possible to envisage a response to jellyfish
blooms that moves beyond narratives of invasion or apocalyptic endings, and
which recognises the potential of these life forms to jolt, or sting, us into a
new awareness of ourselves in relation to others. If, as Johnson suggests, the
fear is that ‘“we” – or, at least the excrement of twenty-first century civiliza-
tion – are becoming jellyfish’, then the disruptive power of these blooms may
also be ours to draw on.

Works Cited
Alaimo, Stacy. 2013. ‘Jellyfish Science, Jellyfish Aesthetics: Posthuman Reconfigurations of
the Sensible’. In Thinking With Water. Ed. Cecilia Chen, Janine McLeod and Astrida
Neimanis, 139–64. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press.

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Armstrong, Tim. 2005. Modernism: A Cultural History. Cambridge and Malden, MA:
Polity Press.
Baudelaire, Charles. 2010. The Painter of Modern Life. Trans. P. E. Charvet. London:
Penguin.
Berwald, Juli. 2017. Spineless: The Science of Jellyfish and the Art of Growing a Backbone.
New York: Riverhead Books.
Caruth, Cathy. 1996. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History. Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press.
Crown, Kathleen. 1995. ‘H.D.’s Jellyfish Manifesto and the Visible Body of Modernism’.
Sagetrieb 14.1–2: 217–41.
Farrier, David. 2019. ‘Swerve: The Poetics of Kin-Making’. In Anthropocene Poetics:
Deep Time, Sacrifice Zones and Extinction, 89–124. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
Freud, Sigmund. 1961a. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Trans. James Strachey. New
York and London: W. W. Norton.
Freud, Sigmund. 1961b. ‘A Note upon the “Mystic Writing Pad”’. In The Ego and the
Id and Other Works. Trans. James Strachey, 227–32. London: Hogarth Press.
Gershwin, Lisa-Ann. 2013. Stung! On Jellyfish Blooms and the Future of the Ocean.
Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Giggs, Rebecca. 2018. ‘Imagining the Jellyfish Apocalypse’. The Atlantic (January/Feb-
ruary). Available at: <https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/01/
listening-to-jellyfish/546542/> (last accessed 15 July 2022).
Hayward, Eva. 2012. ‘Sensational Jellyfish: Aquarium Affects and the Matter of
Immersion’. differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 23.3: 161–96.
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H.D. 1968. Palimpsest. Carbondale and Edwardsville. Southern Illinois University Press.
H.D. 1982. Notes on Thought and Vision and The Wise Sappho. San Francisco: City
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H.D. 1984. Her. London: Virago.
H.D. 1996. Kora and Ka. New York: New Directions.
H.D. 2011. ‘Pontikonisi (Mouse Island)’. In Narthex and Other Stories, 29–40. Toronto:
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Henke, Suzette. 2010. ‘Modernism and Trauma’. In The Cambridge Companion
to Modernist Women Writers. Ed. Maren Tova Linett, 160–71. Cambridge:
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Holland, Tom. 2007. Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and the Crowd. Doctoral Thesis,
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Hulme, T. E. 2003. ‘Romanticism and Classicism’. In T. E. Hulme: Selected Writings.
Ed. Patrick McGuinness, 68–83. New York: Routledge.
Johnson, Elizabeth. 2016. ‘Governing Jellyfish: Eco-Security and Planetary “Life” in the
Anthropocene’. In Animals, Biopolitics, Law: Lively Legalities. Ed. Irus Braverman,
59–78. Abingdon and New York: Routledge.
Jones, Brandon. 2019. ‘Bloom/Split/Dissolve: Jellyfish, H.D., and Multispecies Justice
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Kime Scott, Bonnie. 1989. ‘Jellyfish and Treacle: Lewis, Joyce, Gender and Modernism’.
In Coping with Joyce: Essays from the Copenhagen Symposium. Ed. Morris Beja
and Shari Benstock, 168–79. Columbus: Ohio State University Press.
LaCapra, Dominic. 2001. Writing History, Writing Trauma. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
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Leiris, Michel. 1984. Manhood: A Journey from Childhood into the Fierce Order of Virility.
Trans. Richard Howard. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.
Lewis, Wyndham. 1915. ‘The Crowd-Master’. Blast 2 (July): 94–102.
Lewis, Wyndham. 1930. Satire and Fiction. London: Arthur Press.
Lewis, Wyndham. 1937. Blasting and Bombardiering. London: Eyre & Spottiswoode.
Lewis, Wyndham. 1964. Men Without Art. New York: Russell & Russell.
Lewis, Wyndham. 1996. Tarr: The 1918 Version. Ed. Paul O’Keeffe. Santa Rosa, CA:
Black Sparrow Press.
Lewis, Wyndham. 2010. Tarr. Ed. Scott Klein. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Luckhurst, Roger. 2008. The Trauma Question. Abingdon: Routledge.
McCarthy, Tom. 2017. Typewriters, Bombs, Jellyfish: Essays. New York: New York
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Monroe, Melissa. 2020. Medusa Beach. New York: New York Review of Books.
Nieland, Justus. 2012. ‘Dirty Media: Tom McCarthy and the Afterlife of Modern-
ism’. MFS: Modern Fiction Studies 58.3 (Fall): 569–99. Available at: <https://doi.
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Purdon, James. 2010. ‘To Ignore the Avant-Garde is Akin to Ignoring Darwin’. The
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aug/01/tom-mccarthy-c-james-purdon> (last accessed 15 July 2022).
Richardson, Anthony J., Andrew Bakun, Graeme C. Hays and Mark J. Gibbons. 2009.
‘The Jellyfish Joyride: Causes, Consequences and Management Responses to a
More Gelatinous Future’. Trends in Ecology and Evolution 24.6: 312–22. Avail-
able at: <https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tree.2009.01.010> (last accessed 15 July 2022).
Stone, Richard. 2011. ‘Massive Outbreak of Jellyfish Could Spell Trouble for Fisheries’.
Yale Environment 360 (13 January). Available at: <https://e360.yale.edu/features/
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Wild, Min. 2004. ‘The Elation of Objects: Adorno and Wyndham Lewis’s Tarr’. Wyndham
Lewis Annual 11: 18–31.

Notes
1. For recent critical examinations of jellyfish blooms see Alaimo (2013); Berwald
(2017); Farrier (2019); Gershwin (2013); Giggs (2018); Hayward (2012); Johnson
(2016); Jones (2019); and Richardson et al. (2009).
2. As Melissa Monroe points out in her recent poem-essay Medusa Beach, ‘many
recent scholars’ have mistakenly replaced the word ‘jellyish’, which appears twice
in this passage, with the word ‘jellyfish’ (Monroe 2020: 165). This ‘simple tran-
scription error’, which appeared in Bonnie Kime Scott’s essay ‘Jellyfish and Treacle’

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 rachel murray

(1989), has since been widely reproduced by critics ‘in a process that one might call
“textual selection”’ (165).
3. Responding to what he saw as an undue emphasis on interiority in the work of
writers such as James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence, Lewis called for
an externalist approach to art, which sought to pay ‘more attention’ to ‘the outside
of people’, their ‘shells, or pelts’, the ‘language of their bodily movements’ (Lewis
1930: 46).

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 AFTERWORD:
THE ANIMAL IN THE MIRROR

Kari Weil

Mirror Recognition/Anthropocentric Vision

Towards the beginning of her memoir, ‘A Sketch of the Past’, Virginia Woolf
gives an account of ‘the incident of the looking-glass’, when she attempts to
understand why, at a young age, she already seemed ashamed of her own face
and would look in a mirror only if alone. She recalls the memory of a dream –
or perhaps of a real-life incident, she is not really sure – in which ‘I was looking
in a glass when a horrible face – the face of an animal – suddenly showed over
my shoulder’ (Woolf 1985: 69). And she adds, ‘I have always remembered that
other face in the glass, whether it was a dream or a fact, and that it frightened
me’ (69).
Who or what is this animal in the mirror? We can assume it is a beast in
that ‘debased’ sense referenced by Djuna Barnes, given the fear it provokes,
but who, where? Is Woolf seeing herself or another as beast? Perhaps what is
frightening is the indeterminate slippage between what/who I see in the mirror
and what/who I am, a slippage that, as so many essays in this volume point
to, pushed modernist writers to look through the taxonomies and the ‘logics
of optical and literary realism’ (see Fagan in this volume, p. 110) in order to
uncover the forces and sensations of an animal/human or human/animal hid-
den, if also disavowed, within. In this regard we might be reminded of Kafka’s
protagonist, Red Peter, the ape turned human who admits in his lecture to the
academy that he had to ‘whip’ the animal outside of himself to be accepted

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as such (Kafka 1993: 203). But every night as he returns from his work, that
beastly, if humane, nature returns to allow him to find sympathy with his
untrained, female ape-companion. Such sympathy is linked to the creaturely at
the core of ‘beastly modernisms’, a function of the vulnerability shared between
human and nonhuman animal and especially by those excluded from, othered
or abused by the anthropological machine.
In Kafka’s fiction, Red Peter is able to put the anthropological machine to
work in his favour in order to free himself from his animal cage and be included
in the community of humans, however debased that community appears. In
Woolf’s autobiographical account, on the contrary, Giorgio Agamben’s ‘onto-
logical hiatus’ is not a risk that is freely assumed, but rather, as we come to
understand, a threat imposed by the memory of a shameful and traumatic past
she did not choose and cannot erase. To write of this beastly image, however,
might also be a means to allow for that past to be, in Derek Ryan’s terms
outlined in Chapter 1 of this volume, ‘repurposed’ or ‘reimagined’ (see p. 25).
Such is also Rachel Murray’s insightful argument, in the final chapter of this
volume, about ‘the enabling possibilities of trauma’, which brings the mind and
body into contact with aspects of the self and the world ‘which would other-
wise remain out of reach’ (see Murray, p. 265). The animal in the mirror might
then be like those hybrid figures that, for Leonora Carrington, according to
Karen Eckersley in Chapter 11, ‘function as a feminist catalyst for change’ (see
p. 199), or at least for creative innovation. This, moreover, can offer another
way to understand the ‘bio’ that Carrie Rohman perceptively situates at the ori-
gin of aesthetic creativity in her chapter on bioaesthetics. The ‘bio’ here is not
the blossoming of the erotic, but rather the blossoming of creative resistance
to the abuse experienced as a passive, erotic object. In other words, as we will
see below, creaturely vulnerability gives rise to an authorial urge as a means of
aesthetic healing through a reimagined beastly entanglement and/or opening to
the more than human world.
At a first level, the animal in the mirror might be associated with what Peter
Adkins, in Chapter 5, refers to as a ‘beastly masculinity’, here seen in the face
of Virginia’s half-brother, Gerald Duckworth. Woolf writes of this mirror scene
just after describing an incident when, in the same hall near the looking glass,
Gerald picked her up and placed her on a ledge, where he began to explore and
touch her ‘private parts’ (Woolf 1985: 69). This moment, she then understands,
is the origin of her shame – ‘I must have been ashamed or afraid of my own
body’ (68) – leading us to question whether that horrible, animal face might also
be her own, a past image that has persisted into the present, whether through
her dreams or in her memory. The point is not to insist that animals also feel
shame – the emotion whose expression Darwin identified as most human –
although I could offer that Woolf’s dog protagonist, Flush, felt some ‘version’
of shame after biting Robert Barrett Browning.1 I want, rather, to consider the

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 afterword

animal face here as Woolf’s insistence on an unspecified but persistent animal-

ity at the foundation of life and of the self, whether we recognise it or not; that
animality is the felt foundation of our physical and emotional vulnerability to
others, one we share with other animals. It is, moreover, this animal being that
comes closest to figuring the person ‘to whom things happen’, and who, Woolf
claims, is so often left out of memoirs (Woolf 1985: 69). If that is so, it may be
because we so rarely see this person in a mirror, or if we do, we do not recognise
the face as our own.
One might wonder, then, why the so-called mirror recognition test has
become so important for proving that some species of nonhuman animals have
self-awareness. It was fifty years ago that Gordon Gallup first showed a mirror
to four chimpanzees, each alone in a cage (Gallup 1970). The chimps immedi-
ately reacted to the mirror image with fear or threatening sounds as if it were
another, strange creature. But little by little they appeared to understand that
the image was a reflection, one they could use to clean food from their teeth or
examine their behinds and genitals. In order to prove their understanding of the
mirror image, Gallup had the chimps anaesthetised and marked with red dye
on their eyebrows or ears. When they awoke, the chimps noticed something
amiss in the mirror as they then touched their fingers to the red spots upon their
face (Preston 2018). The test has since been used on a wide range of species,
from primates to chickens and elephants, and most recently on dolphins and
some fish, but only a few species have passed the test. Unsurprisingly, those are
the species who are regarded as highly intelligent and with an intellect closest
to that of humans. But what does the test really prove? Who or what is the self
that we see in a mirror?
Already around the age of six months, at a time when, according to Jacques
Lacan, monkeys have ‘mastered’ the image and found it ‘empty’, human
children will begin to play with their image in a mirror (Lacan 1977: 1). This
‘specular image’, as Lacan calls it, appears to compensate for, or at least mask,
the ‘motor incapacity and nursling dependence’ of the child, offering in its place
the image of a mobile and independent subject. The image, in other words, is
a fiction, one whose assumption inaugurates the fundamental misrecognitions
(méconnaissances) that ‘constitute the ego, the illusion of autonomy to which it
entrusts itself’ (Lacan 1977: 6). If the image is a fiction, should we be so quick
to think less of those animals who abandon the image? We might turn again
to Flush, ‘the philosopher’, as Jane Goldman also quotes in the second chap-
ter of this volume, ‘meditating the difference between appearance and reality’
(see p. 41). Held by his mistress before a mirror, Flush rejects the ‘misrecog-
nitions’ of the mirror stage and instead asks what exactly it is he sees in the
mirror. ‘Was not the little brown dog himself? But what is oneself? Is it the thing
people see or is it the thing one is?’ (Woolf 2009: 32). According to Alexandra
Horowitz, a canine cognition specialist, dogs are notorious for not recognising

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themselves in mirrors, but that is because their sense of self as of others comes
largely through smell (Horowitz 2017). And smell, as Woolf emphasises, is
a sense of which we humans have taken little notice. As she puts it in Flush:
A Biography, ‘The greatest poets in the world have smelt nothing but roses on
the one hand and dung on the other. The infinite gradations that lie between are
unrecorded’ (Woolf 2009: 86).
In its prioritising of the visual, the mirror test reaffirms an anthropocentric
hierarchy of the senses, since vision has been our primary means of recognition, not
to mention the sense most associated with rationality and intellect. Most humans
have difficulty entering into the Umwelten or phenomenological worlds of others
who navigate their surroundings in different ways and through other senses.2 We
may, moreover, have been skewing the representations of our own human Umwelt
through a long literary tradition that has privileged the visual and dismissed the
fine gradations of such senses as smell, taste and touch. Woolf and other modern-
ists, I would argue, sought to change this and to give a new importance, if not
presence, to these other senses and to what is not visually confirmed. We need only
think of Proust and the taste of the madeleine (Proust 2003). Returning to Lacan,
we see also that the mirror registers what I can do – how I can move my leg or
arm, play with a piece of clothing or change my facial expression. But it does not
necessarily register what has been done to me and so give insight into the person
‘to whom things happen’ (Woolf 1985: 69). Can it in any way reveal the memories
that are otherwise released by the taste of the dipped madeleine?

Visual Image or Felt Sensation: Oneself and the Cotton Wool

In her short story ‘The Lady in the Looking Glass’ (1972), Woolf emphasises
the dangers and distortions of mirrors that can give only false impressions
of life as it erases the movements of time and the environment. Her narrator
contrasts the myriad of nocturnal creatures seen ‘pirouetting across the floor’,
along with a flurry of changing light, colour and emotions with the absolute
stillness seen within the reflection of (another) hallway looking glass.

And there were obscure flushes and darkenings too, as if a cuttlefish had
suddenly suffused the air with purple; and the room had its passions
and rages and envies and sorrows coming over it and clouding it, like a
human being. Nothing stayed the same for two seconds together.
But, outside, the looking-glass reflected the hall table, the sunflowers,
the garden path so accurately and so fixedly that they seemed held there
in their reality unescapably. It was a strange contrast – all changing here,
all stillness there. (Woolf 1972: 88)

A naturalist, Woolf suggests, would find little to explore in a mirror which is

better used as a primary instrument for ladies and girls to confirm that their

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appearance conforms to the demands of convention. More importantly, as she

writes in A Room of One’s Own (1929), the convention is a patriarchal one,
such that women themselves ‘have served all these centuries as looking glasses
possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at
twice its natural size’ (Woolf 1929: 37). The same might be said of ‘the ani-
mal’, a word that has been used to reflect and guarantee human superiority by
opposition. ‘The animal’, explains Jacques Derrida, ‘is a word that men have
given themselves the right to give’ (Derrida 2008: 23). It is a word men use to
separate themselves from other living beings and to identify them as objects for
our own use and consumption (Derrida 2008: 23). This is why the modernist
writer must find ways of uncovering the truth of an animal or the lady other
than holding up the mirror in the fashion of realists. Rather, ‘one must prize her
open with the first tool that came to hand – the imagination’ (Woolf 1972: 91).
That is not to say that our sense of self can ever be independent from the
ways we see ourselves seen by another. For the purposes of autobiography and
in a possible response to Lacan, Derrida thus asks ‘cannot this cat also be . . .
my primary mirror?’ and ponders what it might mean to see oneself in the face
of an animal (Derrida 2008: 51). Could it be a way of catching a glimpse, on
one level, of the animal ‘I follow’ (je suis) in the evolutionary, Darwinian sense,
whose articulations have allowed humans to hold on to our place at the top or
the end of history? More importantly, and in a manner that might dismantle
both gender and species hierarchies, could looking at myself in the eyes of an
animal provoke me to see the animal I am (je suis)? It is interesting that, for
both Derrida and Woolf, this animal in the mirror elicits an immediate sense
of shame, as if the animal reflection has stripped each of the clothes and fictive
bodily armour that glass mirrors allow us to assume, along with an autono-
mous or separate sense of self. As Derrida puts it, ‘It is as if I were ashamed,
therefore, naked in front of this cat, but also ashamed for being ashamed . . .
A reflected shame’ (Derrida 2008: 11). Derrida goes on to elaborate upon this
shame as a feeling of nudity, a term he also questions since animals are said
to be naked even as they have no consciousness of it. Rather than argue that
animals do have this capacity, Derrida subverts the active/passive dichotomy
that is implicated in the hierarchical human/animal binary and redefines nudity
as ‘that passivity, the involuntary exhibition of the self’ (Derrida 2008: 11). A
form of passive and imposed exposure, nudity is related to a ‘passion of the
animal’ and, as such, opposed to a ‘power or capability’, a ‘being-able’. What
Derrida experiences in nudity, then, is a response in the form of a passivity that
‘testifies to a sufferance, a passion, a “not-being-able”’ (Derrida 2008: 27), one
moreover that is shared between human and animal.
It is this sense of exposure, this vulnerability to an other that is both evoked
and shared by the animal face in the looking glass, whether seen or dreamt by
the young Virginia Woolf, and which helps explain her fear of mirrors more

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generally. At one level we have her vulnerability to her memory, not as what
she can recall, but as what she is subjected to and cannot forget. In words that
might bring to mind Proust’s involuntary memory, Woolf insists that ‘the things
one does not remember are as important, perhaps more important’ (Woolf
1985: 69) than the moments one does remember. Indeed, they are fundamen-
tally connected to each other because ‘the separate moments were however
embedded in many more moments of non-being, [. . .] embedded in a kind of
non-descript cotton-wool’ (Woolf 1985: 70).
In her notion of the cotton wool, Woolf elaborates upon her philosophy
of life and of art in a way that might shed light on modernism more generally.
On the one hand there is the idea, influenced by Freud among others, that this
cotton wool has something to do not only with the persistence of memory in
the unconscious, but with the persistence of the past in the material world: ‘[i]s
it not possible, I often wonder, that the things we have felt with great intensity
have an existence independent of our minds; are in fact still in existence’ (Woolf
1985: 67). Her philosophy of art and life is thus prescient for contemporary eco-
logical thinking, for she expresses the fundamental connectedness of artists and
all humans to the more-than-human world in which they too are embedded.3

From this I reach what I might call a philosophy; at any rate it is a con-
stant idea of mine; that behind the cotton wool is a pattern; that we – I
mean all human beings – are connected with this; that the whole world
is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art. (Woolf 1985: 72)

Readers of Woolf will find this ‘cotton wool’ akin to what, in her essay on
‘Modern Fiction’ ([1919] 1984), she refers to as a ‘semi-transparent envelope’
that surrounds the living but is also of it:

life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from

the beginning of consciousness to the end. Is it not the task of the novelist
to convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumcised spirit, whatever
aberration or complexity it may display, with as little mixture of the alien
and external as possible? (Woolf 1984: 160)

Lying somewhere between the material and spiritual, between what can be
touched and what can be seen even as it enfolds one within the other, this
envelope is very much like what Maurice Merleau-Ponty calls the ‘flesh’ of the
world, and which is not ‘a thing, but a possibility and a latency’ – indeed, a
‘kinship’ between seer and seen, for we can only touch and see that of which
we are a part (Merleau-Ponty 2004: 3). It is especially the folding of the see-
ing and touching body within what is visible and tangible that Merleau-Ponty
explores in his chapter on ‘The Intertwining – the Chiasm’, which has particular

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relevance for the animal in Woolf’s mirror. Provoked by the memory of the
sensation of touch, that vision is the image of her own ‘animality’, the word
Merleau-Ponty uses to refer to ‘the logos of the sensible world: an incorporated
meaning’ (Merleau-Ponty 2003: 166). Woolf writes:

His hand explored my private parts too. I remember resenting, disliking

it – what is the word for so dumb and mixed a feeling? It must have been
strong, since I still recall it. This seems to show that a feeling about cer-
tain parts of the body; how they must not be touched; how it is wrong to
allow them to be touched; must be instinctive. (Woolf 1985: 69)

While Woolf elaborates here on this notion of instinct as a persistence of what

‘thousands of ancestresses in the past’ (69) had acquired, we understand that
even if it escapes words, this feeling is not opposed to intellect or thought, but
rather in continuity with it. In a letter to Vita Sackville-West on March 1926
she writes:

A sight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes
words to fit it; and in writing (such is my present belief) one has to recap-
ture this, and set this working (which has nothing apparently to do with
words) and then, as it breaks and tumbles in the mind, it makes words
to fit it. (Woolf 1975–80, III: 247)

Woolf here sets out even more dynamically that forcefield of communication
that Merleau-Ponty describes within and between bodies: ‘secreting a sense,
projecting this sense about material surroundings and communicating it’
(Merleau-Ponty 2012: 203).
Already, in a diary entry of 1922, Woolf admits that ‘when I write I’m
merely a sensibility’ (cited in Howard 2007: 51), and in ‘A Sketch of the Past’
she insists on the centrality of this sensibility to her life and her work, explain-
ing how the most painful and shocking sensations, those which most expose
and remind her of her vulnerable animality and her woundedness, are also
those which excite and move her to capture them in words, and in so doing, to
turn her passivity into creative agency:

And so I go on to suppose that the shock-receiving capacity is what

makes me a writer. I hazard the explanation that a shock is at once in
my case followed by the desire to explain it. I feel that I have had a blow;
but it is not, as I thought as a child, simply a blow from an enemy hidden
behind the cotton wool of daily life; it is or will become a revelation of
some order; it is a token of some real thing behind appearances; and I
make it real by putting it into words. (Woolf 1985: 72)

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Of course, words may themselves lose their hard reality and merge into sen-
sation. Writing of an experience when, lying in the grass and reading a poem
she understood for the first time, she writes ‘I had a feeling of transparency in
words when they cease to be words and become so intensified that one seems
to experience them’. And at that point, like a dog, ‘the pen gets on the scent’
(Woolf 1985: 93).
The point, then, Woolf intimates in a manner that is similar to what Peter
Adkins finds in Djuna Barnes in Chapter 5, is not to abject the animal in the
mirror, no matter how horrible its face might be and how much we want to
disown it. Writing on ‘Animal Abjects’, Kelly Oliver notes that Julia Kristeva,
like Derrida, finds an animal lurking behind the very origin of humanity, ‘a
darker more frightening beast, our dependence on which we disavow and
abject’ (Oliver 2009: 282). Abjection is the very process of that disavowal and,
for much of Western culture, the beast has figured the abject other of civilisa-
tion – a fact Kafka’s Red Peter knew only too well. Elsewhere I have writ-
ten of certain protagonists of Edgar Allan Poe and Thomas Mann, who are
themselves regarded as abject because of their own identification with other
animals – whether cats or dogs – and who destroy themselves and/or their
animal kin in an effort to conform to the upright image of the fully human
(Weil 2012). Woolf offers another path, if an avowedly difficult one, as she
hints at in her memoir and explores more fully in her novel The Waves (1931).
Rather than focus on our relations with pets or other individualised animals,
the novel explores our own animality and, consequently, our relations to that
sometimes ‘frightening’ beast who is also an aspect of ourselves – whether or
not we choose to see it in the mirror.

Beastly Waves and Ways

In A Room of One’s Own (1929), written just three years before The Waves,
Woolf discussed differences between men and women’s writing and admitted
to a certain delight in reading a man whose prose ‘indicated such freedom of
mind, such liberty of person, such confidence in himself’. His writing gave the
sense of ‘one who had never been thwarted or opposed’ (Woolf 1929: 98).
But then, she finds she grows tired of this hardened ego which, like the letter
‘I’, hid what might lie in the landscape behind it, whether woman or tree: ‘the
worst of it is that in the shadow of the letter “I” all is shapeless as mist’, if
indeed anything can grow at all (Woolf 1929: 98). Woolf admits her desire to
renounce or seek beyond this self-contained ‘I’ and so to explore, if not give
shape to, the world of which both self and the writing must be a part. The
Waves is just such a novel about the fluid and transparent interconnected-
ness of humans with each other and of humans with the ‘more than human
world’, as David Abram calls it (Abram 2017). ‘We melt into each other with

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phrases,’ says Bernard, the most writerly of the six characters of the novel
whose lives are intertwined, even as each lives life with a style of their own, a
particular attunement to light or sound or touch (Woolf 1931: 16). Readers
are alerted to the texture of the melting matter in which they are immersed
in the very opening pages, where sea and sky, initially indistinguishable, are
slowly divided into woollen wrinkles by the light of the rising sun, even as
these ‘fibres’, subject to the movements of time and light, are also ‘fused
into one candescence’ and turned into a ‘million atoms of soft blue’ (Woolf
1931: 7). At the end of the novel, Bernard admits, ‘We grew; we changed;
for, of course, we are animals. We are not always aware by any means; we
breathe, eat, sleep automatically. We exist not only separately but in undif-
ferentiated blobs of matter’ (Woolf 1931: 246). Bernard embraces animality
as both cause and effect of our existence within the fluid and fleshy envelope
of the world.
Accepting our transparency, however, and living with the constant sensa-
tion of one’s own fluid and flimsy boundaries, is not always easy and can be
threatening, as we witness in the character of Rhoda. It is Rhoda, moreover,
who brings us back to the animal in the mirror, or a version of it. When she
sees her face ‘in the looking-glass behind Susan’s shoulder’, she ducks to hide
it because ‘I have no face . . . Other people have faces . . . their world is the
real world. The things they lift are heavy. They say Yes they say No; whereas I
shift and change and am seen through in a second’ (Woolf 1985: 43). Having
a face, according to Emmanuel Levinas, is the proper signifier of being human
and, significantly, what initiates an ethical relation between humans (Levinas
1998: 114). Thus, for Rhoda to be without a face is, as Vicki Tromanhauser
claims, ‘to fall outside the sanctuary of ethical regard and to join the ranks
of the abject, the flesh, the edible’ (Tromanhauser 2014: 86). Building on the
work of Shari Benstock (1988), Stephen Howard has written of Rhoda as
caught within the semiotic or prelinguistic self, such that her difficulties stem
from her ‘lack of Lacan’s imago’ or mirror image (Howard 2007: 50). With
no visual assurance of a self, Rhoda looks for physical boundaries, something
she can touch, to feel the limits of her physical extension. Trying several times
to cross a puddle, she says, ‘Unless I can stretch and touch something hard,
I shall be blown down the eternal corridors forever. What then can I touch?
What brick, what stone? and so draw myself across the enormous gulf into my
body safely?’ (Woolf 1931: 159). Rhoda desires or needs precisely what she
also fears, for there is, as Merleau-Ponty explains, no touching without being
touched. She risks the very ‘shock of sensation’ that she so tries to avoid: ‘I
am afraid of the shock of sensation that leaps upon me, because I cannot deal
with it as you do – I cannot make one moment merge in the next. To me they
are all violent, all separate’ (Woolf 1931: 130).4

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Rhoda is unable to turn the ‘shock of sensation’ into words, and so make it
both productive and protective, as Woolf claims to do in her own writing, by
making it unable to hurt her. Bernard is the one who turns things into ‘phrases
and phrases’ with which to ‘interpose something hard between myself and the
stare of housemaids, the stare of clocks, staring faces, indifferent faces’ (Woolf
1931: 30). Yet it seems that the effectiveness of phrases also breaks down for
him as he increasingly senses not only the vulnerability of the faces around him,
but also their power to inflict pain. ‘It is strange that we who are capable of so
much suffering, should inflict so much suffering. Strange that the face of a per-
son whom I scarcely know . . . should have power to inflict this insult’ (Woolf
1931: 293). The realisation, moreover, follows from that of the ‘corruption’ in
which he too is implicated, a corruption linked to what Caroline Hovanec, in
Chapter 14 of this volume, describes as the ‘inhospitality of urban modernity’
(see p. 249). ‘Disorder, sordidity and corruption surround us. We have been
taking into our mouths the bodies of dead birds. It is with these greasy crumbs,
slobbered over napkins, and little corpses that we have to build’ (Woolf 1931:
292). Indeed, at the end of the novel Bernard drops his book to the floor for
the charwoman to sweep up, admitting ‘I have done with phrases.’ ‘What is the
phrase for the moon? And the phrase for love? By what name are we to call
death [. . .] I need a howl; a cry’ (Woolf 1931: 295).
Phrases are insufficient for expressing the animal we are; words cannot heal
the wounds, even as they may work to explain them. Unlike the howl or the
cry, words and phrases are always incommensurate with the animal body, tem-
porally separated from what they seek to explain, much as the mirror image
is visually separate from the seeing body. In each case, we might say, the ‘I’ is
always, if ever so slightly, out of touch with the body, with the flesh, even as it
is animated by it. And this may also be because, as Judith Butler explains, the
I can never fully know the touch or the look of the other who affects us and so
animates us into being. Reflecting on the role of ‘touch’ in Merleau-Ponty and
Nicholas Malebranche, she writes:

But if feeling becomes mine on the condition of an autobiographical

report in language, and if feeling follows from a touch that is not mine,
then I am, as it were, grounded in, animated by a touch that I can know
only on the condition that I cover over that primary impression as I give
an account of myself. (Butler 2015: 43)

Touch is like the waves that swell within and without us and which, as
Bernard concludes, we must ride like the ‘proud horse’ (Woolf 1931: 297). We
may ride and spur them forward or, like Rhoda, try to pull back so as not to
face the shock of sensation. For if that touch is felt as harmful and abusive, it
threatens not only my sense of self, but also the very wave and rhythm and flesh

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of the world that must sustain it, rendering all hideous and horrible. A howl or
a cry may thus be the only adequate expression of wounded animality, or of an
animal face in the mirror.
As the varied chapters in this volume illustrate, riding the waves and explor-
ing by experiencing the untamed and often overpowering sensations of the
wounded, excluded and abject animal is a risk that so many modernist authors
took on, a risk that gives rise to the intense vibrancy of their writing. In their
attention to a seemingly ineffable, if fleshy vulnerability, moreover, these writ-
ers opened new pathways for acknowledging, and possibly healing, the fragile
interconnectedness of mind and body, self and other, past and present, and
especially, of the human and more-than-human world.
Writing about modernist art, Steve Baker claims that ‘there was no mod-
ern or modernist animal because pictures had to be about the act of picturing
before they were anything else’ (Baker 2000: 20). If we take The Waves as an
example of modernist literature, we might similarly say that it is about the
act of expression, about the language of sensation before it is about anything
else. But that act is also about animals, and even more so, it is of them, it
is of and about the animals we are and with whom we engage; it is of and
about the animality that feels and sees and smells and hears and desires, and
without which there would be no expression, even as it may have no singu-
lar face or image that we recognise as animal. It aims to capture what lies
beneath the metaphors and similes, ‘beneath the like and like and like . . .
beneath the semblance of the thing’ (Woolf 1931: 163), and so beneath the
mirror image.

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More-than-Human-World. New York: Vintage.
Baker, Steve. 2000. The Postmodern Animal. London: Reaktion Books.
Benstock, Shari. 1988. ‘Authorizing the Autobiographical’. In The Private Self: Theory
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Despret, Vincianne. 2014. Que diraient les animaux si on leur posait de bonnes questions?
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Horowitz, Alexandra. 2017. ‘Smelling Themselves: Dogs Investigate Their Own Odors
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Howard, Stephen. 2007. ‘The Lady in the Looking Glass: Reflections on the Self in Virginia
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Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 2003. Nature: Course Notes from the Collège de France.
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Proust, Marcel. 2003. Swan’s Way. Trans. Lydia Davis. New York: Viking Press.
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Tromanhauser, Vicki. 2014. ‘Eating Animals and Becoming Meat in Virginia Woolf’s
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Notes
1. Vincianne Despret suggests that nonhuman animals may experience versions of
human emotions, implying that they may not be exactly equivalent but are similar
enough to expand the meaning of the term. See Despret (2014: 231–42).
2. On Umwelten see von Uexküll 2010.
3. For more on this see, for instance, the work of Louise Westling (1999) and Derek
Ryan (2013).
4. Rhoda’s sense of self – or lack thereof – might also be said to exist between
Bergson’s iteration of a ‘self with well-defined states’ and ‘a self in which succeed-
ing each other means melting into one another and forming an organic whole’. See
Bergson (2008: 128).

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 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Peter Adkins is an Early Career Teaching and Research Fellow at the University
of Edinburgh. He is the author of The Modernist Anthropocene: Nonhuman
Life and Planetary Change in James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Djuna Barnes
(2022) and co-editor of Virginia Woolf, Europe and Peace: Aesthetics and
Theory (2020). He has also co-edited a special issue of Comparative Critical
Studies on Rosi Braidotti and Virginia Woolf (2022) and an issue of 19: Inter-
disciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century on ‘Victorian Ecology’.

Katharina Alsen is a Research Associate at Hamburg University of Music and

Theatre. She has been a doctoral fellow at the international research training
group InterArt and a Global Humanities Junior Fellow at the research network
Principles of Cultural Dynamics, both at Freie Universität Berlin, and held visiting
scholarships in Copenhagen, Stockholm and Hong Kong. Her research interests
concern intimacy in theatre and performance art, postcolonialism in the Nordics
and cultural animal studies with a special focus on insects and parasitism. She is
the co-author of the book Nordic Painting: The Rise of Modernity (2016).

Laura Blomvall is a Research Associate at the University of York and Product

Specialist at Adam Matthew Digital. Her work on different aspects of twentieth-
century lyric poetry, from Blitz poetics to the work of Ted Hughes, has previously
been published by Cambridge University Press, Palgrave Macmillan and Journal of
Modern Literature. In 2019, she was the research lead in the Digital Humanities

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 notes on contributors

project ‘Bombing Britain: An Air Raid Map’, a collaboration between Routledge,

Taylor & Francis, the National Archives and the University of York, which was
covered widely in the press.

Lauren Cullen completed her PhD in English at the University of Oxford,

where she was also a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council
(SSHRC) Doctoral Fellow. Her thesis traces the relationship between literary
culture, animal characters and nineteenth-century animal welfare discourse.
She specialises in nineteenth-century British literature and animal studies,
with further research interests across literature and science, Canadian fiction,
and ecocriticism.

Elizabeth Curry completed a PhD in English at the University of Oregon, con-

centrating on multiethnic modernisms and representations of animals as not
so radically other. Her chapter in this volume developed as part of her disser-
tation project, Refiguring the Animal: Race, Posthumanism, and Modernism.
She is Associate Faculty at Cascadia College and Adjunct Faculty at Portland
State University.

Karen Eckersley is the recipient of a funded PhD studentship at Nottingham

Trent University and is conducting a project that investigates the intersections
between feminism and posthumanist theory in women’s surrealist praxis. Her
research focuses, in particular, on the ways in which women surrealist artists and
writers anticipate and confront environmental debates of today. Her research has
been published in peer-reviewed journals including Gothic Nature, the Journal
for Intermedial Crossings and Transpositiones.

Paul Fagan is an IRC Postdoctoral Fellow at Maynooth University. The

research for, and composition of, his contribution to this collection was under-
taken during his position as a Senior Scientist at Salzburg University. He is a
co-founder of the International Flann O’Brien Society and a founding gen-
eral editor of the open access journals The Parish Review: Journal of Flann
O’Brien Studies and Production Archives (Open Library of Humanities).
Paul is the co-editor of Irish Modernisms: Gaps, Conjectures, Possibilities
and Stage Irish: Performance, Identity, Cultural Circulation, as well as four
well-received edited collections on Flann O’Brien. He is currently finalising
a monograph on Irish literary hoaxes and developing research projects on
‘Representations of Nonhuman Skin in Modernist Writing’ and ‘Celibacy in
Irish Women’s Writing, 1860s–1950s’.

Jane Goldman is Reader in English at the University of Glasgow and a General

Editor of the Cambridge University Press edition of the works of Virginia

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 notes on contributors

Woolf. Her books include The Feminist Aesthetics of Virginia Woolf (1998),
The Cambridge Introduction to Virginia Woolf (2006), With You in the
Hebrides: Virginia Woolf and Scotland (2013) and Modernism, 1910–1945:
Image to Apocalypse (2004). A co-editor of Flush: A Biography, forthcoming
for Cambridge (2022), she is currently writing a book, Virginia Woolf and the
Signifying Dog. She is also a poet. Her first collection, SEKXPHRASTIKS, was
published by Dostoevsky Wannabe in 2021.

Alex Goody is Professor of Twentieth-Century Literature and Culture at

Oxford Brookes University. She is the author of Gender, Leisure Technology
and Modernist Poetry: Machine Amusements (2019), Technology, Literature
and Culture (2011) and Modernist Articulations: A Cultural Study of Djuna
Barnes, Mina Loy and Gertrude Stein (2007), and co-editor of The Edinburgh
Companion to Modernism and Technology (2022), Reading Westworld (2019)
and American Modernism: Cultural Transactions (2009).

Caroline Hovanec is Associate Teaching Professor in English and Writing at the

University of Tampa and the author of Animal Subjects: Literature, Zoology,
and British Modernism (Cambridge University Press, 2018). With Rachel
Murray, she is the editor of ‘Reading Modernism in the Sixth Extinction’, a
special issue of Modernism/Modernity PrintPlus. Her current research focuses
on vermin in literature.

Gabriela Jarzębowska is an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Artes Liberales,

University of Warsaw. She was a Fulbright Fellow at the Wesleyan University, the
Seedbox network at the Linköping University grantee and a short-time visiting
scholar at the University of California (Santa Cruz). Her interdisciplinary work,
bridging the gap between cultural studies, history and sociology, is focused on
critical animal studies and environmental humanities. Her main research interests
include rhetoric of environmental conflicts, representations of animals in popular
discourse and entanglements between environment, socialism and modernity. She
has published in Journal for Critical Animal Studies and Society & Animals.

Saskia McCracken completed her PhD on Virginia Woolf’s Darwinian animal

tropes at the University of Glasgow. Her research has been published in Virginia
Woolf, Europe, and Peace: Aesthetics and Theory (2020), Matraga: Modernist
Prose in Contemporaneity (UERJ 2020), The Modern Short Story and Magazine
Culture: 1880–1950 (2021), Modernism/Modernity: Reading Modernism in
the Sixth Extinction (2022) and Crossing Borders: Transnational Modernism
Beyond the Human (2022). Her forthcoming research will be published in Flush:
A Biography (Cambridge University Press), Animal Satire (Palgrave Macmillan)
and Virginia Woolf and the Anthropocene (Edinburgh University Press).

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 notes on contributors

Rachel Murray is a Lecturer in English at the University of Northumbria who

specialises in modernist literature, science and animal studies. She has published
articles on a range of authors and topics, including James Joyce and apiculture
and Samuel Beckett’s worms – the latter of which won the 2016 BSLS Early
Career Essay Prize. Her book The Modernist Exoskeleton: Insects, War, Liter-
ary Form was published by Edinburgh University Press in 2020.

Beerendra Pandey, Professor of English and Dean at the School of Language

and Literature, KIIT-Deemed University (Bhubaneswar), has a Fulbright PhD
from the State University of New York at Stony Brook. His research and teach-
ing focus on Partition Studies, Trauma Studies, Human Rights Literature, hum-
Animal Studies, Cultural Studies, Affect Theory, and the Poetics and Politics
of Irony. His current research interest includes a comprehensive study of the
metaphysics at work in the folk art of Mithila Painting, practised in the Mithila
region straddling the Bihar State of India and Madhesh Province of Nepal. He
can be reached at birunepali@gmail.com

Carrie Rohman is Professor of English at Lafayette College. She has pub-

lished widely in animal studies, modernism, posthumanism and perfor-
mance in such journals as Deleuze Studies, Modernism/modernity, American
Literature, Modern Fiction Studies and Hypatia, and in a number of edited
volumes. She is author of Stalking the Subject: Modernism and the Animal
(2009) and Choreographies of the Living: Bioaesthetics in Literature, Art,
and Performance (2018), and co-editor with Kristin Czarnecki of Virginia
Woolf and the Natural World (2011). Rohman is on the editorial board of
the Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature series and serves as Associate
Editor for Contemporary Women’s Writing.

Derek Ryan is Senior Lecturer in Modernist Literature at the University

of Kent and author of Animal Theory: A Critical Introduction (2015) and
Virginia Woolf and the Materiality of Theory: Sex, Animal, Life (2013). He has
co-edited several volumes encompassing historical and theoretical research on
modernism and animal studies, including Reading Literary Animals: Medieval
to Modern (2020), Cross-Channel Modernisms (2020) and The Handbook to
the Bloomsbury Group (2018). Currently, he is completing two projects relat-
ing to ‘beastly modernism’: a co-edited scholarly edition of Flush: A Biography
for the Cambridge Edition of Virginia Woolf, and a new monograph titled
Bloomsbury, Beasts and British Modernism.

Kari Weil is University Professor of Letters, College of the Environment and

Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Wesleyan University. She is the author
of Precarious Partners: Horses and their Humans in Nineteenth-Century France

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 notes on contributors

(2020), Thinking Animals: Why Animal Studies Now (2012), Androgyny and
the Denial of Difference (1992), and numerous essays dealing with animal stud-
ies, gender and feminist theory. Her current research explores the legacies of
animal magnetism in nineteenth- and twentieth-century theories of affective
influence, tactility and traumatic healing.

Juanjuan Wu is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Foreign

Languages and Literatures at Tsinghua University, Beijing, China. She earned
her MA in English Literature from Fudan University, China, in 2016 and her
PhD from the University of Melbourne, Australia, in 2021. Her main fields
of interest include twentieth-century Anglophone modernism and China,
women’s travel writing, animal studies, and the history of emotions and
literature. Her research has been published in peer-reviewed journals including
Women’s Studies, an Interdisciplinary Journal, Studies in Travel Writing and
Women’s Writing.

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 Index

1851 Great Exhibition (Hyde Park), 109 All-India Progressive Writers Association
(AIPWA), 259
abject, 64, 96, 97, 111, 114, 120, 286, American Museum of Natural History
287, 289 (New York), 115
Acker, Kathy, 268 American Red Cross Museum
Adair, William, 116–17 (Washington, D.C.), 116
aeroplane, 230, 233, 235, 238, 239, Anand, Mulk Raj, 143, 144, 148–9, 156
241, 242, 244, 245 ‘The Parrot of the Cage’, 148–9
affect, 10, 56–7, 60–2, 64, 222 animacy, 5
Africa, 59, 115–16; see also South Africa animal agency, 77, 83, 162, 172, 173, 182
Agamben, Giorgio, 3, 10, 129, 146, 280 animal authority, 75–7, 81
agency, 3, 16, 56–7, 60–1, 66, 69, 77, animal authorship, 76
83, 84, 96, 129, 143, 148, 154, animal, commodification of, 47, 114
156, 160, 162, 163, 165, 172–3, animal consciousness, 37, 187, 225
174 182, 193, 205, 250, 264, 285 animal cruelty, 8
Akhmatova, Anna, ‘The Wind of War’, animal and domestication see
232 domestication
Akeley Hall of African Mammals, 115–17 animal epistemologies, 175
Akeley, Carl, 115–17, 118 animal protection, 219–21, 223
Alaimo, Stacy, 10, 265 animal psychology, 16, 185, 187
Ali, Ahmed, 8, 13, 16, 249–54, 255, animal slaughter, 98, 99
256–61 animal suffering see animal cruelty
Twilight in Delhi, 249–61 animal sentience see animal consciousness
Ahmed, Sara, 64–5, 70 animal welfare, 7, 129, 121

297

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 index

Anthropocene, 182, 201, 202 Barthes, Roland, 76, 85–6, 112

anthropocentrism, 11, 26, 165, 185, 186 Bartlett, Abraham Dee, 112
ontological anthropocentrism, 165 bat, 27, 204, 205, 209
epistemological anthropocentrism, bear, 188, 193
165, 172 bestiary, 6–7, 216
anthropological machine, 3, 146, 280 Beastly Modernisms conference, ix, 10
anthropomorphism, 26, 27, 28, 57–8, Beckett, Samuel, 2, 3, 9, 113
63, 66, 69, 81, 130, 131 beetle dress, 110
anthropos, 11, 198, 213 becoming-animal, 11, 107, 119, 199,
anthroposophy, 2 204, 208, 210–13
ape, 279 becoming-with, 11, 12
Aragon, Louis, 234–35 Benjamin, Walter, 261
Atlantic Monthly, 183 Bennett, Jane, 10, 18, 58, 69, 70, 88, 90,
Atwood, Margaret, Survival, 184 219, 222, 223, 224, 226, 227
Auden, W. H., ‘Hymn to St. Cecelia’, Bennett, Joshua, 222, 223
240 Bergson, Henri, 11, 291n
Audubon, John James, The Birds of Berridge, Elizabeth, ‘Bombed Church’,
America, 108 233
Australia, 8, 59, 151 bioaesthetics, 75, 280
autobiography, 24, 30 56–7, 59, 62, 68, biofiction, 25, 35
69, 94, 283 bird
avant-garde, 166, 181, 268 auk (great), 112
Ayscough, Florence, 15, 56–62, 66–71 The Birds of America see Audubon,
John James
Barad, Karen, 10, 209 bird hats, 110
Barnes, Djuna, 1–5, 91–106, 217, 279, A Century of Birds from the Himalaya
286 Mountains see Gould, John
Ann Portugeuise, 105 chicken, 215, 216, 226, 21
The Antiphon, 105, 92–100 The Death and Burial of Cock Robin
Biography of Julie van Bartmann, see Potter, Walter
91–9 dodo, 112
Creatures in an Alphabet, 6 dove, 237, 238, 248, 249, 261
Ladies Almanack, 6 eagle, 101, 133, 189, 190, 192, 212
‘A Portrait of a Man Who Is, At flamingo, 111
present, One of the More Significant goose, 188, 189
Figures in Literature’, 1 humming-bird, 86
Nightwood, 4, 96, 217 macaw, 79, 80
‘The Rabbit’, 105 moa, 112
Ryder, 15, 91–103 nightingale, 204, 205, 233, 239, 240
Barnum, P. T., 112, 115 owl, 191, 192, 233
Barrett, Laura, 218 peacock, 118, 253
Barrett Browning, Elizabeth, 23, 25, 26, pigeon, 8, 13, 16–17, 94, 248–62 ;
29, 36, 38–55, 56 pigeon-feather screens, 110
‘Flush, or Faunus’, 23, 49–50, 52 raven, 111
‘To Flush, My Dog’, 23 swan, 118, 241, 243

298

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 index

Bishop, Elizabeth, 16, 231, 240, 241, 245 Carrington, Leonora, 3, 8, 16, 198–214,
‘Roosters’ 238–40 280
Black labour, 217, 224 ‘As They Rode Along the Edge’, 199,
domestic servitude, 225 202, 204, 207, 208, 213
subjugation, 220, 223, 225 ‘The Cabbage in a Rose’, 203, 213
Black modernism, 216, 217 ‘Jemima and the Wolf’, 16, 199, 208,
Blackness 214
race and animality, 217 Self-Portrait (Inn of the Dawn Horse),
and animalisation, 222 202
and bodily vulnerability, 220, 223 ‘What is a Woman?’, 198, 199, 201,
and speculative interiority, 225–6 206, 213
Bloomsbury, 14, 15, 23–37, 113, 259 Carroll, Lewis, Alice’s Adventures in
blue humanities, 264 Wonderland, 111
boar, 204, 205, 209 Cassell’s Household Guide, 110
bodies, 64–6, 108–11, 114, 115, 118–20, cat
127, 131, 160, 199, 209, 242, 264, and authenticity, 225
268, 270, 288 ‘Bob’, 114
Boni and Liveright, 91 cat-paw letter-opener, 114, 122
Boisseron, Bénédicte, 12, 221, 222, 225 domestic cat, 225
Borges, Jorge Luis, 6 feral cat, 225, 253, 254
Bowen, Elizabeth, 244 house-cat, 12, 224–6, 283
Braidotti, Rosi, 11, 199, 200, 203, 207, kitten, 110
208, 211, 213 Catullus, 38, 48, 49, 53, 55
Brecht, Bertold, ‘This Summer Sky’, 232 Césaire, Aimé, 216, 222
bred, 28, 41, 254 Chen, Mel Y., 5, 13, 222, 223
breed, breeding, 23, 28, 41, 42, 53, 59, chimpanzee, 281, 289
62, 66, 67, 98, 102, 252 China, 14, 15, 58–9, 61–71
Breton, André, 202 Chineseness, 62–3
British Empire, 8, 19, 110, 254, 258 cinema, 115, 231–47, 261
Browning, Robert, 23, 49, 55, 280 class, 8, 24, 40, 56, 59, 63, 68, 69, 108,
bull, 97, 117, 118, 151, 152, 266 110, 115, 118, 158, 189, 202, 208,
bullfighting, 117, 266 248, 252, 260
Burton, Antoinette and Renisa Mawani, climate change, 10, 17, 161, 195, 250
Animalia: An Anti-Imperial Bestiary 255, 256, 258, 261, 260
for Our Times, 7, 8, 18 clothing, 105, 120, 170, 177, 282
Butler, Judith, 188 Coetzee, J. M., 27, 34, 89
Coleman Anita Scott, 215–28
Canada, 56–7, 68, 183–5, 195, 196 ‘The Dark Horse,’ 215, 216
canine, 11, 15, 24, 28, 34, 35, 38–53, ‘The Dust of the Streets’, 224
56–71, 105, 145–55, 281 ‘Idle Wonder,’ 16, 217, 224–7
capitalism, 3, 17, 18, 30, 88, 127, 184, ‘Respective Flight’, 224
199, 213, 250, 251, 258, 260, 261, ‘She Was Not Wise’, 224
275 ‘Three Dogs and a Rabbit’, 217–23, 226
captivity, 29, 189, 192, 217, 225 Western Echoes of the Harlem
carnivalesque, 111 Renaissance, 216, 227

299

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 index

colonialism, 8, 13, 19, 63, 70, 108, 114, Derrida, Jacques, 12, 15, 18, 38, 39, 44,
118, 120, 158, 161, 164, 176, 183, 47, 49, 53, 76, 95, 100, 103, 104,
222, 227, 249, 256 152, 155, 157, 214, 225, 227, 283,
companion species, 2, 11, 12, 14, 15, 286, 289
23, 24, 28–30, 32, 33, 38–52, The Animal That Therefore I Am, 12
59–61, 65, 69, 77, 78, 114, 116, animot, 12, 76
145–9, 155, 184, 192–4, 209, 224, Descartes, René, 62, 201
225, 280 de Ville, Jacques, 100, 103
comparative psychology, 24, 181, 183 Dickens, Charles, 107, Our Mutual
Confucius, 66–7 Friend, 111, 121
Cornell, Joseph, 249 dingo, 251
Cornford, Frances, ‘Daybreak’, 239 diorama, 107, 115–22
cosmopolitanism, 66, 248 disability studies, 14
creatural, 5, 19, 75, 76, 78, 79, 83, 85, doe, 1, 2
88, 89, 104, 148, 149, 206, 209 dog, 56–63, 65–9
Crisis, The, 217 Australian Shepherd, 52
critical animal studies (CAS), 13 Bismarck, 77, 78, 80–8
critical race studies see critical race Blenheim, 41
theory Buster, 60, 68
critical race theory, 12, 13, 164 Cayenne, 11, 52
critical whiteness studies, 164 cocker, 23, 25, 39, 40, 41, 56
critters, 5, 9 Flush, 15, 23–37, 38–55, 56–71, 280–2
crocodile, 119 Hans, 42
cruelty, 8, 18, 28, 69, 83, 102, 191 James Buchanan, 57, 59, 60, 61,
63–6, 68, 69
Dalí, Salvador, 234, 246 King Charles, 41
Dante, 106 Looloo, 77, 78, 80, 88
Darwin, Charles, 9, 19, 35, 58, 104, Lo-sze, 59, 66, 67
183, 195, 277, 280 Pekinese, 77
Darwinian evolution, 7, 9, 94, 95, 98, ‘Sergeant Stubby’, 116
283 Seleuchi [saluki] hound, 118
Da Silva, Denise, 226, 227 Spaniel, 3, 23–37, 38–55, 70
Dalziel, Hugh, 23, 41, 53 Yo Fei, 56–60, 66–9
Day, Jon, Homing, 255 domestication, 161, 163, 168, 188
Day-Lewis, Cecil, 232 domesticity, 224–6
Decka, Maneesha, 8, 12, 18 Donne, John, 92
decolonial theory, 164, 175 Dovey, Ceridwen, 15, 23–37, 70
Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari, 78, dragon, 85, 88
79 Dufresne, Louis, 108, 115
becoming animal see becoming-animal
Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, ecology, 9, 13, 18, 20, 34, 70, 76, 88,
199 89, 90, 103, 126–7, 130, 132, 139,
A Thousand Plateaus, 11, 199 141, 176, 177, 199, 202, 213, 227,
Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 11 233, 259–63, 277, 284
Delhi, 249, 251–4, 256–62 ecosystem, 129, 201, 204

300

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 index

marine, 263, 264 forgery, 112

eggs, 112 Foucualt, Michel, 15, 18, 76, 77, 86, 88
elephant, 116, 281 biopolitics, 10
Eliot, T. S., 92, 102, 103–5, 184 The Order of Things, 6, 7, 18
The Waste Land, 144, 157, 249 fox, 2, 119, 184, 189, 212, 233
embroidery, 15, 110, 160 Freud, Sigmund, 83, 105, 268, 271,
emotion, 31, 58, 61, 64–6, 70, 71, 100, 274–6, 284
134, 260, 282, 291, 296 Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 267
environmental concerns, 10, 125, 126, Unheimlich, 250, 255–6, 261
129, 138, 139, 140, 177, 185, 199, frog, 45, 110, 111
249, 255, 259
environmental destruction, 17, 161, 189, Gallup, Gordon, 281
195, 264, 275 Gaunt, Mary, 57, 58, 59–66, 69
Epstein, Jean, 234 A Broken Journey, 56, 59–61, 62,
Ernst, Max, 202, 234 63–4, 65
ethics, 12, 13, 19, 35, 37, 69, 89, 92, A Woman in China, 62, 64, 65
107, 128, 130, 147, 152–4, 158, genealogy, 96, 97, 201
176, 207, 264 gender, 3, 8, 10, 13, 14, 24, 56–7, 84,
eugenics, 24, 35, 40, 115 95, 96, 108, 110, 115–18, 168,
evolution, theories of see Darwninian 202, 205, 210, 212, 218–20, 242,
evolution 243, 271, 283
extinction, 7, 10, 11, 14, 16, 17, 112, geostories, 199, 201, 203
113, 195, 249–55, 260–2, 276, 294 Ghosh, Amitav, 255, 256, 257, 259, 261
giraffe, 119
Faber and Faber, 92, 104 global warming see climate change
familial relations, 92, 93, 101, 106, 255 Gould, John, A Century of Birds from
fascism, fascist, 24, 30, 31, 35, 138, 255 the Himalaya Mountains, 108
feathers, 8, 41, 109, 110, 190, 196, 233,
237, 238, 239 H. D., 17, 264–5, 268, 275, 276
feminism, 4, 8, 11, 12, 58, 59, 61, 77, Her, 272
198, 199, 200, 201, 202, 205, 207, Kora and Ka, 272
208, 213, 280 Notes on Thought and Vision, 274
Field Museum of Natural History Palimpsest, 269, 273
(Chicago), 115, 116 ‘R.A.F.’, 132, 232
film noir, 236, 237, 239, 241, 243–7 Haldane, J. B. S., 9, 54
First World War, 59, 62, 238, 253, 256, Haraway, Donna, 5, 10, 14, 42, 66, 69,
270, 273, 274, 275 110, 112, 115, 116, 186, 199, 203,
fish, 29, 79, 112, 290 204, 207, 208, 212, 218
fish-scale embroidery, 110 The Companion Species Manifesto, 11,
flaying, 110, 120 52
fly (insect), 111, 214 ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’, 11
fly (verb), 82, 85, 186, 188, 232, 234, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin
249, 252, 261 in the Chthulucene, 201
forest, 193, 194, 202, 204, 207, 208, When Species Meet, 11
212, 250, 259; see also woods Harlem Renaissance, 215

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 index

Harper’s Weekly, 187 Influenza pandemic (1918), 256

Hatt, Emilie Demant, 166, 169 insect, 9 108, 130, 209
hedgehog, 111 intersectionality, 13
Hegel, 39, 54 interspecies, 12, 42, 50, 51, 52, 126,
Hemingway, Ernest, 10, 107, 120 161, 173, 199, 216, 223, 226
The Sun Also Rises, 116–17 interspecies empathy, 219, 223, 226
Hemingway Sanford, Marcelline, 116
Hitler, Adolf, 31 Jackson, Zakiyyah, 226
hoax, 115, 120 jellyfish, 14, 17, 263–78
Bloomsbury Dreadnought hoax, 113 ‘jellygeddon’, 263
Feejee mermaid hoax, 112 Joyce, James, 1–4, 9, 113, 265
Ossian hoax, 113 ‘The Dead’, 2
Spectrist hoax, 113 Finnegan’s Wake, 4
Hobbes, Thomas, 100 Ulysses, 1, 2
Hogarth Press, 36, 45, 54, 249, 259, Jungle, The (Piccadilly shop), 110
276
Holland, Sharon, 217, 218 Kafka, Franz, 9, 26, 104, 217, 279–80,
Höller, Carsten, Soma, 168 286, 290
horse, 43, 69, 202, 212, 215, 216, 288 The Metamorphosis, 217
horse-hoof inkwell, 110 Keats, John, ‘Ode to a Nightingale,’ 239,
Hughes, Langston, 3 240
humanism, 3, 10, 108, 112, 114, 120, Kim, Claire Jean, 217, 225
144–9, 156, 182, 198–201, 205, Kipling, Rudyard, 62, 70, 181, 184, 197
208, 211 kitsch, 109, 120
Hurston, Zora Neale, 3, 217
Huxley, Julian, 9 Lacan, Jacques, 44, 53, 266, 281, 282,
hybrid, 2, 16, 51, 113, 198–213, 234, 283, 287, 290
235, 280 Laika, 32
hygiene, 108, 115, 129–32, 136–40 Latour, Bruno, 173, 264
Lawrence, D. H., 3, 9, 15, 37, 75–89,
India, 8, 14, 143–58, 248–62 104, 278
Italy, 41, 56, 57, 255 Lee, Laurie, ‘The Edge of Day’, 235
imperialism, 8, 14, 57–8, 114, 257 Leiris, Michel, 266
In Brightest Africa, 116 Levinas, Emmanuel, 287
indexicality, 109, 112 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 105
Indigenous people, 161, 164, 165, 177, Lewis, Wyndham, 9, 17, 264, 265, 269
250 Blast!, 271
Indigenous resistance, 165 Tarr, 269, 270, 272
Indigenous studies, 164, 165 ‘The War-Crowds’, 268, 270, 273,
and ‘critical care’, 164 274
and cross-disciplinary scholarship, lion, 101
163–5 literacy, 42, 51, 83, 84
and decentralisation, 165–6 literary realism, 109, 110, 111, 279
and heterogeneity, 6, 161, 165 Locke, Alain, 215
industrialisation, 68, 108, 138, 160 lobster, 3

302

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 index

London, 23, 29, 30, 32, 56, 59, 77, 184, moose, 182, 194
189, 197, 232, 233, 236, 240, 270, moth, 204, 205
273 Muir, Edwin, 105
Lowell, Amy, 58 Munch, Edvard, 168
Luciano, Dana and Mel Y. Chen, 222,
223 Nagel, Thomas, 27
Luzon (Phillippines), 263 na Gopaleen, Myles (Flann O’Brien), 107,
119, 120
McCarthy, Tom, 265–9, 272, 273, 275 ‘Two in One’, 119
Typewriters, Bombs, Jellyfish, 265 naming practice, 63, 67
traumatic real, 265, 267, 269, 272 Narayanan, Yamini, 13, 143, 145
Macpherson, James, 113 Naturalism, 120, 195, 197
manhood see masculinity Nature Fakers debate, 183
marten, 110 Nazi, 30, 32, 132–42
Manto, Saadat Hasan, 143–58 new materialism, 90, 164
Marakatt-Labba, Britta, 15, 160–2, 166, New Mexico, 215, 216
172, 174 New York, 94, 97, 140, 215, 266
Historjá, 160, 161, 177 New York Times, 183
marmoset, 14, 15, 23–37 New Zealand, 8, 112
masculinity, 10, 84, 94, 100, 116–18, Nietzsche, Friedrich, 11
271, 280 Nordic countries, 161, 163, 164, 168,
Mauritius, 112 171, 178
Mbembe, Achille, 218, 220 and colonial entanglements, 164
meat, 29, 44, 103, 105, 187, 193, 194, Norris, Margot, 4, 92
196, 206, 214, 290 nostalgia, 115, 117, 118, 249, 260–1
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 284–8 Nunez, Sigrid, 15, 23–37
mermaid, 112, 120
metamodernist, metamodernism 14, 25, O’Brien, Flann see na Gopaleen, Myles
33, 34–6 Opportunity, 215, 217, 224
metamorphosis, 16, 118, 206, 210, 211, optical realism, 279, 109, 110, 111, 279
212 orca, 186
metaphor, 2, 3, 78, 100, 101, 125, 132, Orwell, George, 25, 32
136–40, 161, 164, 172, 173, 174,
210, 235, 238, 239, 245, 250, 252, Pakistan, 8, 145, 147, 149, 150, 152,
259, 274, 289 153, 258–9
material metaphor, 164, 172–4 Pall Mall Gazette, 112, 113
military technology, 232 panther, 187–93
mirror image, 26, 40, 41, 70, 99, Paris, 1, 93, 106, 116, 236
279–91 Partition, 143–58, 258
Mitford, Mary Russell, 23, 38, 39, 42, pastoral, 105, 161, 232, 233, 235
47, 52 patriarchy, 13
Mitz, 15, 23–37 Peking, 59, 65, 68
mobility, 59, 69, 161, 170, 190 personhood
monkey, 29, 35, 112, 281 constructions of, 220–1
Moore, Marianne, 17, 249 human rights, 222

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pet see companion species ‘The Homesickness of Kehonka’, 187–9

Picasso, Pablo, 249, 261 ‘The Haunter of the Pine Gloom’, 192
Plautus, 23–37 Kindred of the Wild, 196
Ploucquet, Hermann, 109, 110 ‘The King of the Mamozekel’, 182
poetry, lyric, 38, 231–45 ‘The Moonlight Trails’, 191
Poland, 15, 125–42 ‘Savoury Meats’, 193
pollution, 264 ‘Strayed’, 187
polygamy, 94 ‘The Tiger of the Sea’, 185
postcolonial, 12, 162, 164, 216 ‘The Treason of Nature’, 190
posthuman figures, 227 ‘The Watchers of the Campfire’, 193
posthumanism, 9, 10, 11, 186, 201, 207, Watchers of the Trails, 196
264 ‘When Twilight Falls in the Stump
Potter, Walter, The Death and Burial of Lot’, 190
Cock Robin, 110, 111, 129 ‘Wild Motherhood’, 193, 194
primal, 3, 50, 51, 52, 206, 267, 268 Roberts, Lynette, ‘Crossed and
Proust, Marcel, 268, 282, 284 Uncrossed’, 240
Psycho, 120 Robeson, Paul, 215
Rohman, Carrie, Stalking the Subject,
queer, 4, 5, 13, 14, 83, 84, 118, 221, 231, 4, 9
237, 242, 243 Ronald Reagan (USS aircraft carrier),
263
rabbit, 26, 76, 77–88, 110, 119, 191, Roosevelt, Teddy (U.S. president), 116,
218–23, 226 184
race, 3, 8, 12, 13, 57–8, 57–71, 87, 108, Rose, Deborah Bird, Wild Dog
115, 164, 189, 216–28, 250 Dreaming, 251
racism, 57, 58, 62, 64, 114, 216 Royal Museum of Stuttgart, 109–10
scientific racism, 114 Royal Society for the Protection of
racial oppression, 12 Animals (RSPCA), 7
racial imaginary, 216 Royal Society for the 33 Protection of
Rakesh, Mohan, 8, 15, 143–58 Birds (RSPB), 7
rat, 14, 15, 125–42 Rukeyser, Muriel, 16, 242–5
realism, 109, 110–20, 134, 162, 181, ‘Child in the Great Wood’, 243
186, 195, 259, 260, 261 The Life of Poetry, 243
reindeer, 8, 14, 15, 159–78 ‘Mortal Girl’, 243
antlers, 159–61, 169, 170, 175 ‘One Soldier’, 242
herding, 161, 178 Russell, Bertrand, 9
relics, 112
religion, 28, 54, 67, 144, 186, 203, 204, Sackville-West, Vita, 36, 40, 46, 54, 259,
206, 251 285
Reynolds, Michael S., 116 Said, Edward, 248
Roberts, Charles G. D., 16, 181–97 Sámi, 159–78
‘Black Swamp’, 193 art, 8, 160, 162, 163, 164, 166, 168,
‘The Boy and Hushwing’, 191 169, 172, 174, 175
‘Do Seek their Meat from God’, 187, and assimilation policies, 161, 163,
193 168

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cosmology, 153, 166 slavery, 12, 24, 63, 64, 219–21

cultural self-appropriation, 162, 171, snake, 3, 80, 150, 191, 253
172, 175 soldier, 118, 145–8, 231, 242, 273
culture, 162, 165 South Africa, 8, 24
lifestyle, 160, 161, 162, 168, 172 Spanish Civil War, 242, 243
and non-human animals see speciesism, 10, 13, 57, 58, 114, 207
nonhuman Spellbound, 233
regional fauna, 162 Spender, Stephen, ‘To Poets and Airmen’,
and reindeer see reindeer 232
settlement areas, 163 Spengler, Birgitte and Babette Tischleder,
shamanism, 166 An Eclectic Bestiary, 7
traditions, 15, 172 spider, 119
Sámi Dáiddajoavku (Sámi Artist Group), Spillers, Hortense, 12
160 squirrel, 110, 205
Sápmi region, 171, 177, 178 Strachey, Lytton, 46
Savio, John, 162, 163, 168 stuffed animals see taxidermy
Alene, 171, 172 Steiner, Rudolf, 2
Gutter med lasso, 175 subjectivity, 9, 24, 56–8, 61, 66, 69, 80,
Man with Bull Reindeer, 169 83, 92, 183, 156, 183, 191, 200,
Sleighride, 170 202, 214, 225
Scandinavia, 162, 163 suffragette movement, 117, 271
science, 7, 9, 14, 28, 44, 51, 57, 108, surrealism, 231, 233, 234
109, 115, 120, 127, 140, 178, 182, Sylvanian Families, 110
185, 186, 187, 196–7, 257
scientific realism, 108 taxidermy, 107–22
Scott, Bonnie Kime, 2, 92, 106, 277 anthropomorphic taxidermy, 107,
Second World War, 16, 32, 127, 139, 109–11, 115
231, 232, 235, 238, 241, 242, 244, commercial taxidermy, 108, 110, 111,
245 119
semiotics, 110 diorama, 117
Sewell, Anna, 32, 69, 70, 182 human taxidermy, 114
sexuality, 13, 14, 94, 95, 96, 98, 105, museal taxidermy, 107, 109, 110, 112,
206, 208, 239, 241, 242, 243, 245 115, 116
Shanghai, 56, 58, 68 naturalist taxidermy, 109, 116, 117
Shetland pony, 119 Victorian taxidermy, 107–11, 120
short story, 16, 25, 113, 119, 144, trophy taxidermy, 109, 110 117, 118
181–95, 202, 205, 211, 217, 222, testimony, 152, 219–23
244, 282 Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The, 120
Shukin, Nicole, Animal Capital, 184–5 Toomer, Jean, 215, 217
Skum, Nils Nilsson, 162, 163, 168, 172 tortoise, 14, 15, 23–37, 89
Same sita (Sámi Village), 168 transcendentalism, 94, 95
Singer, Peter, Animal Liberation, 13 travel, 56–60, 69
Sitwell, Edith, ‘Lullaby’, 232 trauma, 65, 98, 99, 102, 127, 143, 144,
skin, 108, 109, 114, 115, 120, 177, 184, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 156, 264,
211 265–9, 271, 272–5

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Trocchi, Alexander, Cain’s Book, Wells, H. G., 116, 228n

268 ‘The Triumphs of a Taxidermist’,
trophy hunting see hunting 112–14, 119, 120
trope, 56, 60, 69, 117, 118, 122, 150, Weil, Kari, Thinking About Animals, 9
217, 231, 251, 252 whiteness, 62, 16, 216, 226
Turi, Johan, 162, 163, 166–8 white violence see violence and white
Muittalus samid birra, 166, 168 brutality
‘Reindeer Corral in Autumn’, 166, wilderness, 182, 183, 185, 186, 189,
167 190, 194
wildness, 7, 200, 208, 209
Uexküll, Jakob von, 11 wolf, 45, 192, 194, 209, 210, 211–12
Umwelten, 11, 282 Wolfe, Cary, 9, 10, 20, 83, 89, 90, 157,
unhoming, 8, 13, 16, 17, 248–59 192, 196, 214
woods, 189, 193, 194, 204, 205, 212
Van Vechten, Carl, 215 see also forest
vegetarianism, 105n Woolf, Leonard, 15, 24, 28–32, 36, 54,
Victorian, 15, 23, 24, 25, 52, 56, 57, 249
61, 107–11, 120, 122, 182, 183, Woolf, Virginia
189, 195 Between the Acts, 232, 233
violence, 5, 10, 24, 28, 29, 38, 83, 88, Flush: A Biography, 18, 23–37, 38–55,
102, 109, 114, 118, 119, 143, 144, 56–7, 71, 282, 290, 294, 295
150, 151, 156, 159, 161, 168, 170, Jacob’s Room, 47
185, 188, 192, 193, 195, 218–23, ‘The Lady in the Looking Glass’, 282
231, 232, 237–45, 270 ‘Modern Fiction’, 284, 290
chattel slavery, 12, 24, 63, 64, Mrs Dalloway, 55
219–21 Orlando: A Biography, 25, 40, 45, 54,
assault, 99, 117, 219–21, 242, 55, 117, 118
243 ‘Oxford Street Tide’, 30, 36
military state, 220 A Room of One’s Own, 33, 54, 283,
and white brutality, 218, 222, 223 286, 290
police, 30, 148, 158, 218, 219, ‘A Sketch of the Past’, 279, 285, 290
221–3 To the Lighthouse, 46, 55, 249
predation, 223 The Waves, 45, 47, 286, 289, 290
vital materialism, 10, 11, 58, 87 The Years, 55
Wynter, Sylvia, 12, 223
Ward, Henry Augustus, 115
Ward, James Rowland, 110 Yeats, W. B., 92
Ward, John, 108
Wardian furniture, 110, 111, 114, 115, zoo, 29
118, 119 zoomorphism, 111, 130
Warner, Sylvia Townsend, 231, 237–8 zoopoetics, 76, 88, 89
‘Death of Miss Green’s Cottage’, 237, Zoological Gallery (Oxford Street), 43,
238 109
Weheliye, Alexander, 12, 220 Zoological Society of London, 42, 108

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