The animalizing imagination: totemism, textuality and ecocriticism

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The Animalizing Imagination Totemism, Textuality and Ecocriticism

Alan Bleakley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-19

The Animalizing Imagination

10.1057/9780230287259 - The Animalizing Imagination, Alan Bleakley

Also by Alan Bleakley FRUITS OF THE MOON TREE

HERMES IN THE KITCHEN DRAWER AND OTHER POEMS



EARTH’S EMBRACE

Totemism, Textuality and Ecocriticism Alan Bleakley




First published in Great Britain 2000 by

MACMILLAN PRESS LTD

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 0–333–77082–X First published in the United States of America 2000 by ST. MARTIN’S PRESS, INC., Scholarly and Reference Division, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 ISBN 0–312–22830–9 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bleakley, Alan. The animalizing imagination : totemism, textuality and ecocriticism / Alan Bleakley. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–312–22830–9 (cloth) 1. Animals—Symbolic aspects. 2. Animals—Religious aspects. 3. Animals—Psychological aspects. 4. Totemism. 5. Animal–human relationships. I. Title. GR705.B53 1999 398.24'5—dc21 99–38751 CIP © Alan Bleakley 2000 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1P 0LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. 10 09

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Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wiltshire



Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world

‘May my beasts guide me!’ Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-19

For Sue




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Acknowledgements

ix

Introduction

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1

The Burden of the Beasts Animal rites Animal slaughter or animal sacrifice? From sacrifice to slaughter Animal wrongs

1 1 11 12 19

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Aesthetic Animals A mythological history of animal exclusion The return of the repressed animal The return of the repressed human to an animal commonwealth Three kinds of animal presence (and many unaccounted absences) Intestinal fever Animal beauties

26 26 29

Suffering Animals Arks for the biological, cognitive and imaginary animals Animals and ethics The terrible familiar The shaman’s initiation in the shadow of the totem tree The world is a suffering place Four refusals of a florid and pathologized animalizing Fear of animals: the origin of religiosity? Animals, anxiety and dreams A poetics of imaginary violence: the animalizing imagination at work in the writing of Ted Hughes The gaze returned Freud’s familiars: excluded from the shadow of the totem tree

51 51 55 58 60 66 70 72 76

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Literary Beasts Zarathustra’s zoo Flaubert’s beasts

32 38 41 46

79 82 83 95 95 101

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Contents

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Contents

The bruising bestiary of Lautréamont An imagination of violence Gendering the ‘animal(e)’ Red dawn wolf: D.H. Lawrence’s zoological imagination

104 109 110 112

Animals and Information Totemism and animalizing: animals as signs Lévi-Strauss’s critique of ‘totemism’ The near future is already here Machine against animal: the Futurist manifesto Objections: information is sexy, machines are erotic and the human–machine relation offers constructive metaphors

128 128 135 142 145

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Postscript

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Bibliography

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Index

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I would like to thank Brian Bates for his support of my work; James Hillman, whose own work continues to provoke, enchant, and surprise; and Michael Whan and Dan Noel for important discussions of ideas connecting animals, post-modernism, and shamanism. Peter Redgrove introduced me many years ago to the poetic values emerging from the anima/animal. My colleague Mercedes Kemp, and my students, have given me valuable feedback that has helped me to reformulate my ideas. I have shared with my son Sam the formative experience of surfing with dolphins. Above all, my partner Sue, to whom this book is dedicated, continues to educate me through her own visual talents. Finally, thank you to the animals themselves, wherever and however they appear.

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Nobody asks what is the purpose of the lives of animals, unless peradventure they are designed to be of service to man. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents

From Palaeolithic cave paintings to post-modern cyber-pets, animals appear in guises other than ‘natural’, or biological, beasts. While this spectrum of animal presences is not limited to the immediacy of literal, flesh-and-blood presentation, it may feed off the death of the literal, or spring like ghosts or spirits from the abandoned carcases. For animals also stalk our dreams, slither into our fantasies, haunt our mentalities, and frame our metaphors. We might dream of a snake biting us; use the animal as a linguistic trope, or figure of speech, such as a snaking queue; or thrill at the hyper-real snakes represented on our television screens from locations we will never visit. Such animals are photographed in vivid close-up, beyond the capacity of the human eye. Shots of the animal in the wild are spliced with ‘studio’ shots of ‘stand-in’ animals in zoos, so that the viewer has a seamless experience, believing all the footage to be ‘wild’, where the televisual animal actually becomes a simulacrum. We wonder at these beastly presences as we are anaesthetized to their worldly value, for we cannot smell, taste or touch their images. And their sounds are also simulations. They are recreated for TV-audience consumption, yet they remain extraordinarily ‘other’. Animals traditionally animate our language: ‘Trojans and Greeks leaped wolfishly at each others’ throats, stabbing and hewing’ (Iliad, Bk IV); ‘Boar images shone/ over cheek protectors/ adorned with gold,/ radiant and fire-hardened-spirit guardianship/ the war minded boar held for the resolute warriors’ (Beowulf ). The boar acts as totemic image and guardian for the warrior, and is re-created in both helmet and poem so that the reader encounters the boar, who has loosened himself from forest and from muscle, now roaming the pulped wood of the page and muscling in on the heart and mind of the reader. The late Ted Hughes (1967b, p. 15) describes ‘capturing animals’ (‘live’ animals such as mice), and ‘capturing’ animals in poems (describing and recreating animals), as ‘different stages of the same fever’. In ‘The Thought-Fox’, the act of writing the poem is described in terms of a fox ‘Brilliantly, xi



Introduction

Introduction

concentratedly,/ Coming about its own business’, that is the business of self-presentation. The ‘sudden sharp hot stink of fox’ described by Hughes as the presence of the imaginal fox carrying with it the unmistakable trace of the biological animal, is also unfolded as the printing of the page: the animal as poem and the poem as animal. Writing ‘is hunting’ while ‘the poem is a new species of creature’, suggests Hughes (ibid., p. 17). Again, while boar and fox may refer back to the biological animals, in these textual examples, like animals in a dream, they have no body or stench to press us, but rather haunt us as ghosts, spirits, familiars. Their aesthetic is re-created – from the actual stink of the fox to its literary representation, its imagined presence, where it also embodies an idea, and cascades a string of associations in the reader’s mind as an animated and animating presence. Moreover, the wordanimal – bearing the trace of the animal of the field – also intends us, generously, powerfully, again offering an extraordinary otherness. In these literary examples, textuality itself is animated, as animality inhabits the writing, and a participatory animality is invited from the reader, as emotional response. Where, in a contemporary text, a novella that spoofs a Renaissance medical discourse on the ‘discovery’ of the clitoris as a site of sexual pleasure, Federico Andahazi (1998, p. 73) describes the training of sixteenth-century Italian novice whores, he resorts to animal-animated textuality: ‘They bathed them in she-wolf’s milk, because water was forbidden since the time of the great plagues and because . . . she-wolf’s milk favored growth and prevented decrepitude. They rubbed their skin with mare’s saliva to prevent the flesh from growing soft and, once a week, they would lay their pupils down to sleep in the barnyard, next to the pigs, to teach them to bear the most repulsive stench and the least pleasant company’. The fecund presence of these imaginary animals and their fluids haunts us as strongly as the smell of dung in the zoo, the after-taste of boiled mussels, the thrill generated by the fleeting shadow on the ground of a bird passing overhead, or the distant barking of a dog fox at dead of night. Without such a variety of psychological and conceptual animal presences, language, imagination and culture would be as impoverished as a landscape stripped of dipping birds and industrious insects. This book takes all such appearances of the animal seriously, while not literally. It differentiates between ‘animals’ appearing in three realms or orders of experience: as the biological (literal); the psychological (imaginal); and the conceptual (semiotic, symbolic, textual). As it articulates animal presences in these three realms, it does not privilege any particular presence. It does, however, focus upon the animal as a



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vehicle for human imagination, mapping a species of imagining called ‘animalizing’. This form of imagination is argued to be at the heart of a traditional totemic world-view, that has also been revived and reimagined as central to the contemporary ecology movement, with its interest in animal welfare and animal rights. Jacques Lacan (1979) describes three orders of experience corresponding to our three kinds of animal presence: the real, the imaginary and the symbolic. For a structuralist such as Lacan, the order of the real, that is the ‘natural’ world, is never known directly to humans but is mediated, through language and culture. This mediation is either through imagery (the pre-verbal order of the imaginary), or through language (the verbal order of the symbolic). The world is taken as constructed, or can only be known through representation (the legacy of Kantian idealism). In this view, because of psychological or linguistic representation, self-presentation of animal life is never known directly. The danger of this is that the world of the real becomes detached rather than mediated; unhinged, forcing us to focus in an introspective manner, and we forget that we are embedded in a world that intends us, just as we intend it. One can read Lacan as suggesting that the symbolic order in any case offers a defensive structure against the real that is both primary and potentially destructive: ‘the (order of) the real (is). . . . ready to submerge in its outbursts what the “reality principle” constructs within it’ (Lacan, in Bowie, 1991, p. 95). The real is then beyond the ‘reality principle’, or the symbolic fictions of ‘social realism’ and ‘naturalism’, as a sur-reality or sur-realism. What if we were to reverse the focus of introspection, asking not how do humans constitute a world, but rather, what does the sur-real or extraordinary world make of us? Particularly, in what sense might the world of animals construct us in its image, or educate our attention(s) to its presence(s)? Instead of detachment from the order of the real, we might then ask how the human symbolic and imaginary orders may be grounded in the (worldly) biological. Gaston Bachelard (1986), who first theorized, and phenomenologically mapped, an ‘animalizing’ imagination, takes this approach. Bachelard characterizes such an imagination as a way in which humans articulate their existence through the medium of animal life, as a sur-reality. Language and textuality have been seen as the high-tide mark of humanity’s stretch away from animal origins, and distancing from the smells and bodily textures of animal life that are recreated through the languages of commercialized fashion, as material effects. Through the capacity for memory, reflection, speculation and future planning, the



Introduction

Introduction

human offers a unique chapter in evolution. Such characteristics, as they are coded in verbal and non-verbal language, can also be read as the human animal’s primary mode of display, or efflorescence, including ritual and fashion. Such display suggests that ‘animality’ is first and foremost an aesthetic event. Human evolution can be seen not as a lifting out of animal life, an act of reflective distancing and meaningmaking, but as a plunging back, deeper, into the body of the world itself in an act of appreciation. To turn back to the world in an act of what the philosopher Santayana calls ‘animal faith’, as a deep noticing or witnessing, rather than to delve further into ourselves in narcissistic self-interest, is to become more ‘animal’. We live in a culture dogged by anthropocentrism or person-centredness. Indeed, ‘Animal’ can be seen to represent an Other through which the human condition is defined, in terms of the exclusion of the animal Other as ‘bestial’, maintaining our anthropocentric identities. Typical of this anthropocentrism is the notion that we should preserve what is left of the world’s rainforests not primarily for the sake of the flora and fauna of these habitats in their own right, but for what they may offer humans as potential medicines. The language of anthropocentrism excludes and displaces the animal. ‘Bestiality’ becomes a term of abuse, animals reduced to the horizons created by humans, adapted to the human condition. This displacement of the animal to the margins of life also, however, dulls the aesthetic tradition, first recorded as philosophical dialogue in the Western imagination by Plato, who describes love and beauty in terms of animal similes and metaphors, and animal display. For Plato, the soul – and our experiences of love and beauty determined by the soul – cannot be apprehended without reference to birds, who offer the primary model for the soaring freedom of imagination: ‘in its original state the soul was feathered all over’, muses Plato, while love and beauty are ways through which ‘the soul’s plumage is fostered’. An obvious place to look for relief from this rooted and stubborn anthropocentrism would seem to be the animal rights movement. Yet here, where we might expect to find an authentic voice for the animal, we discover a deep-seated secularism. The animal rights movement avoids the issue of animal rites, of the sacred nature of human–animal relations, and of the sacred presence of the animal in its own right/rite. Beyond the anthropocentric interests of liberal humanism and the secular bias of the animal rights movement, this book calls for other forms of appreciation of animal presence and articulation of human– animal relations. For example, a consideration of how animals appear as biological beings that focuses upon the affectivity of animal–human



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relations and the value of the immediate aesthetic presence of animal life (as display), while resisting reduction to functional or utilitarian descriptions and explanations of that animal life, which is the dominant sociobiological and evolutionary psychological view. Also, a consideration of how the animal appears to a human consciousness that itself is considered to be co-extensive with an animated world or anima mundi (‘world soul’), and is not conceived as an interiorized subjectivity or isolated consciousness. This approach would recognize how the human imagination invents, constitutes, or creates through animal forms (as an animalizing imagination). Again, animalizing is described as a form of imagination grounded in the biological. While the animalizing imagination is rooted in literal animal presence, it both re-presents such presence, and originates its own plural species of animal presence, as a pre-presentational apprehension. The animalizing imagination may be thought of as animal archetype at work in an extended personal and cultural/historical psyche. Bachelard’s interesting contention is that the animalizing imagination both precedes, and acts to deform, our ‘natural’ perceptions of animal life. In this, the ‘reality’ of animal presence is turned into both an ‘irreality’ and a ‘surreality’, where the extraordinary is discovered in the ordinary through the vehicle of the animalizing imagination. Animalizing is a pre-verbal condition of imagination that shapes verbal discourse and prepares us for perception of literal animals. For Bachelard, animalizing is then a transcendent category. However, it is the very category that is paradoxically grounded in the non-discursive biological order of the real, and is afforded by the natural environment of animal life. It is the category of ‘the extraordinary’, embodying the staggering biodiversity of life. Where we shift our focus from the ‘natural’ animal to representations of animals in text or discourse, such representations could also be subject to the kinds of metaphors we apply to the self-presentation of biological animals, metaphors that are familiar from the Ecology movement. These include concerns such as conservation: human intervention in the balance of survival and extinction. What if we applied, for example, the notion of conservation to species of animal in the psychological and conceptual realms? Is there an ecological crisis of imagination, of imagination of animal forms, and of semiotic animals? Do these animals have rights and do we have responsibilities towards them? Most importantly, in what sense might these animal presences be honoured? This is, as discussed above, more a question of animal rites.



Introduction

Introduction

Where we invoke a sacred presence of animals through textuality and ecological concerns (the critical study of which may be termed ‘ecocriticism’), we are moving into the area of the wider religious sense of the presence of animals to humans, traditionally called ‘totemism’, where biological, psychological and conceptual animals come to overlap, or fuse. Totemism is often linked with a typical religious functionary of small-scale, primal, cultures – the shaman. The rites and observances of animal-centred and animal-directed spirituality have been a consistent aspect of the human condition, and have attracted a complex of social practices loosely termed ‘shamanism’. The shaman may be thought of as the human that is most readily ‘animalized’, or has been educated into an animalizing imagination by the zoological. The shaman’s worldview offers continuity between what we would separate out as literal and psychological animals, some of which will become familiars, and guiding presences. The tradition of shamanism can be seen to have been re-invented in post-modern times as a central feature in a new cultural phenomenon – ecological politics. The critical study of such politics has been termed both ‘ecological psychology’ and ‘ecocriticism’, the latter seeing the wider ecology movement as a phenomenon to be studied within the discipline of cultural studies. Here, ‘animal’, especially within both the animal rights and animal welfare movements, has become a central emblem, or signifier, for an ecological awareness. Such totemic and textual animal rites then supplement the more familiar animal rights of the wider ecological movement. This movement has now become sophisticated enough to be critically reflexive about its own concerns – its value positions, ideas and practices. In fact, the ‘ecological movement’ is a misnomer. There is a variety of ecologically interested movements, sometimes with competing interests. For example, the animal rights movement is more politically radical and philosophically aware than the animal welfare movement, which has a different agenda. There is then a plural ‘ecocriticism’ that is characterized by various ecology movements turning back upon themselves in examination of their own agendas. Further, these movements offer critical practices that are themselves motivated by ecological concerns. Such practices are often focused upon critique of mainstream discursive practices that are implicitly or explicitly ‘non-ecological’. ‘Ecocriticism’ is then used here with a double meaning: first, critical practices that are ecologically aware, and second, where such practices reflexively examine their own discourses, or are prompted into such examination through critical attention from disciplines such as cultural studies, critical sociology,



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and cultural or discursive psychology. Hence the subtitle to this book: Totemism, Textuality and Ecocriticism. In summary, this book does not then focus primarily upon the natural or biological animal, although it will keep on returning to the ground of the zoological, but considers a range of other animal significations (or ‘animal presences’) in their unnatural ‘habitats’: ‘text’, ‘language’, ‘discourse’, ‘mind’ and ‘psyche’. Such animal presences may best be apprehended aesthetically, through an animalizing imagination, and may be the basis to our religiosity. These animal appearances are imagined against the cultural grain, or dominant discourses, of anthropocentrism and literalism (which would maintain the privileged ‘reality’ of the biological or ‘natural’ animal), and humanistic secularism. We begin with a review of a critical debate addressing the question ‘what is an animal?’, published in two editions of the periodical Spring: a Journal of Archetype and Culture, the primary organ for post-Jungian archetypal psychology, during 1993/94. This debate involved a spirited but courteous exchange between two friends and colleagues with differing views – Wolfgang Giegerich and James Hillman – currently the two most respected and inspiring writers and thinkers in that field. And this exchange clarified two quite different broad intellectual streams at work within the field of archetypal psychology, the theoretical field that largely informs the discourse presented by this book. The topic of the debate is the implication for ‘soul-making’ – or the life of cultural imagination – of animal sacrifice. As a background and prelude to this debate, we first consider a case-study offering an intertwining of humans and cattle, meat and soul-murder, to ask whether a valid distinction may be drawn between animal sacrifice and animal slaughter. Our entry into the world of an animalizing imagination is through the actual slaughter of millions of cattle during 1996–99, as a result of the British BSE crisis.



Introduction




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Animal rites Throughout the summer and autumn of 1996, Britain was in the grip of an animal-centred crisis. Often reaching a fairly hysterical pitch and radically polarizing both public opinion and specialist scientific views, the economic result of this crisis was a three-year-long ban on sales of British beef within the rest of the European community, and a worldwide slump in exports of British beef (leading to an estimated loss of £500 million a year in export revenue). This was not simply a literal economic disaster, but a crisis of national pride, for beef is a core emblem of the ‘English’ variant of British identity. Tragically, this crisis led to the slaughter of around four million cattle, with the possibility that another four million may still be culled (Britain’s standing cattle population is usually around 12 million). The cost of the crisis to the taxpayer is estimated at £4.6 billion, constituting the most costly peacetime catastrophe ever faced by the British people. £80 million alone went to slaughterhouses, as grant aid to cope with the sudden, chronic influx of doomed animals. The 1998 inquiry into the Tory Government’s (mis)handling of the crisis is estimated to have cost the taxpayer a further £10 million, and has revealed an alarming number of politically motivated policy misjudgements. Meat retailers lost around £26 million as a result of the crisis. Some farmers, butchers, and meat-processing businesses went bankrupt, while total losses to livestock hauliers are estimated at £33 million, with many firms going bust. Beef sales in Britain dropped from 901 000 tons in 1995 to 740 000 tons in 1996. These are the raw economic facts and figures, but at the core of this crisis are the deaths of (at the time of writing) 30 young people from a terrible neurological wasting disease. 1



The Burden of the Beasts


Between 1982 and 1983 some traditional vegetable matter cattle feed began to be supplemented by a ‘super feed’ that promised better milk yield. This supplement came to spawn a nightmare. In November 1986, some cattle were diagnosed as having contracted bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), a disease causing irreversible damage to the central nervous system of the animal. The symptoms of the illness include loss of muscular control, with characteristic spasmodic movements, leading to its description of ‘mad cow’ disease. By 1993, more than 1000 cases of the disease were being confirmed each week in Britain, providing over 99 per cent of BSE cases reported world-wide (by 1998, this was reduced to only 100 cases a week). Originally thought to have a two to seven years incubation period, a period then revised to 10 to 15 years, the disease is now thought to have an incubation period of as much as 30 to 40 years. This unusual dietary supplement, now confirmed as the probable cause of the BSE epidemic, turned out to consist of offal. It included bone meal and the central nervous systems of sheep and cattle, and faecal material from slaughtered cattle (ironically, to the eco-minded, called ‘green’ offal). The prime suspect in this ‘super feed’ turned out to be offal and bone meal from sheep infected with scrapie, an endemic brain disease. Because scrapie had infected sheep for over 200 years, and humans have been eating lamb and mutton throughout that time, it was assumed that since scrapie did not pass the infection barrier between sheep and humans, it would also not pass from sheep to cattle. The use of this dietary booster was banned in 1988, by which time up to 700 000 naturally herbivorous cattle had been fed (unnaturally) on this animal protein supplement, including the feeding of beef products back to fellow cattle, effectively turning them from vegetarians into meat eaters, and then into cannibals. Some estimates saw this as a conservative figure, suggesting that one million or more cattle had eaten the feed and thus been infected. Prior to the 1988 ban on feeding meat and bone meal derived from sheep and cows to cattle, minced brain and spinal cord had found their way into cheap hamburgers, sausage rolls and pies. This material included BSE-infected tissue. After learning that eating such infected beef products could lead to the risk of developing a human variety of BSE, in 1996, the government of the day ordered a cull of over a million cattle. At this time the government had received advice from scientists in the field, who were so concerned about the dangers of eating infected beef that recommendations had actually been made to cull the entire stock of dairy and beef herds in Britain, as the only guarantee of averting a possible public health crisis. In fact,



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such a warning came on the back of a decision already taken by the petfood industry to exclude spinal cord and other tissue in beef products for pets: cats had already been diagnosed with feline spongiform encephalopathy. The despair over this cattle epidemic was at first limited to the farming community, which was faced with losing large numbers of its herds. In 1996, however, it was confirmed that a small but significant number of human deaths (14 at that time) that had occurred from a new variant of the rare Creutzfeld–Jakob disease (CJD) – a human equivalent of BSE – could be directly attributed to eating beef from cattle which had contracted BSE. Like BSE in cattle, CJD led to a condition where the brain, in effect, turned sponge-like. The first case of CJD, reported in 1987, was a variety affecting older people only. What was startling about the new variant CJD was that it affected young people. The first victim, in 1995, was a nineteen-year-old. By late 1998, 30 people had died from ‘new variant’ CJD (nv-CJD), and a victims’ support group had been established. ‘Mad cow disease’ suddenly became a demonic phrase, transferred now to the possibility of any regular beef eater during the critical period of the mid- to late-1980s having been at risk of infection, leading to the suffering of a tragic human wasting disease. As a progressive degeneration of the central nervous system, the symptoms of CJD begin in mood changes and forgetfulness; they then deteriorate to more florid psychiatric disturbances constituting a loss of rational functions – in other words, there is a stereotypical slippage into the irrationalism of ‘animality’. The current dominant theory is that new variant CJD is caused by a pathogenic ‘rogue’ protein of very high resistance and tolerance, called a ‘prion’, which may be a modified form of a normal cell surface. Resonant with the early days of the AIDS crisis, experts have no idea what the eventual mortality from CJD will be. Even the leading expert in the field suggested that ‘we cannot yet say whether it will lead to 20 or 100,000 deaths a year’ (Observer, 6/10/96), and a television programme reporting the twenty-first death from new variant CJD in late 1997 included expert prediction of a future epidemic of anything between ‘many thousands and tens of thousands’. Such estimates differ widely – a report from November 1996 prepared by the CJD Surveillance Unit in Edinburgh suggests that the epidemic may be limited, although they estimate that as many as 446 000 BSE-infected cattle entered the food chain, culminating in the dangerous ingestion of cheap hamburgers and ‘mechanically recovered’ meat made through stripping the spines and heads of cattle. Mainly lower income groups, who are more dependent upon consumption of cheaper protein, would





have eaten such meat at peak infection, during 1988 and 1989. The report suggested that the peak of the epidemic would probably occur in the early part of the next century, although this has now been revised to a later period through a recognition of longer incubation periods than those originally thought. The conclusion of the Surveillance Unit was that the greater the consumption of such cheap beef, the greater the risk of infection, although there was still the possibility of infection from a single rogue contaminated piece of beef or beef product from this period of peak infection. It was noted repeatedly in the press that the twenty-fifth nv-CJD victim, who died in 1998, had been a vegetarian for thirteen years prior to death. Infections, passing from cattle to humans, would thus have their origins in beef contaminated during the brief period of legality of the supplemented cattle feed that contained animal protein. Work in 1997 on mice infected with either new variant CJD or BSE showed a strikingly similar pattern of brain damage and time of death between the two groups, demonstrating that CJD and BSE are isomorphic. The suggestion was made that cattle fed on animal protein may have suffered from a weakened immune system leading to their susceptibility to BSE. The food chain thus suffered from an unfortunate human intervention. ‘Why did we start feeding animals to animals?’ queried one newspaper headline; more specifically, why did we feed animal protein to herbivores? In addition, an article in the leading scientific journal Nature proposed that the British government had withheld information from a research team at the University of Oxford looking into the relationship between BSE and CJD because this information would have revealed the actual number of diseased cattle that had not shown symptoms of BSE but nevertheless constituted a potential risk, since these cattle had also eaten the contaminated feed. A debate ensued as to how many cattle overall were likely to be contaminated and therefore not fit for human consumption. Was the risk of contamination limited to the cattle fed on the supplemented diet, or could the disease be passed on to their calves? How many generations would be affected? Most importantly, which parts of the animal offered risk of contamination? At first, the British government, on the advice of experts, claimed that only beef products containing any part of the central nervous system carried a health risk for humans, while the flesh posed no risk. Later, the risk widened to include all beef offal, and then, in a U-turn, again on the advice of experts, the government suggested that meat cuts from animals over the age of 30 months might pose a health risk. This U-turn eventually cost the government (or taxpayers and the European Union)



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£4.6 billion in the management of cattle slaughter and compensation to farmers – more than twice the government’s annual science research and development budget. While expert opinion polarized on the technical questions – primarily the causes of BSE and nv-CJD infections – politicians and farmers panicked as one European country after another began a wholesale ban, first on the import and sale of British beef products such as tallow, and then on the meat itself, including cattle from herds that could not be infected with BSE because they had not been exposed to the animalprotein-supplemented cattle feed in question. The ‘contamination’ spread to untainted Scottish beef (previously regarded as the best of European cuts) simply by association with English beef. The contamination spread locally also, when, as a result of the crisis, it became public knowledge that scores of seemingly innocuous products on the supermarket shelves, including varieties of biscuits and sweets, contained beef products. The public wave of mistrust peaked with the appearance of full-page advertisements in the national press taken out by McDonald’s and Burger King, and then the Wimpy chain, claiming that they would not be using British beef in their hamburgers. Beef sales slumped resulting in significant redundancy – from butchers’ shops and slaughterhouses to specialist restaurants. Many farmers faced financial ruin. In 1997, the government made it illegal to sell beef on the bone (such as T-bone steaks). Just prior to the ban, supermarkets clearing their shelves offered beef on the bone at give-away prices and were inundated with customers. Soon after the 1996 admission of links between BSE and nv-CJD – which initiated what the European (18–24/12/97) was to call ‘Europe’s new food hysteria’ – announcements were made that it could also be dangerous to eat sheep and goat, particularly the brain and possibly other offal. Scrapie – the sheep equivalent of BSE – was a well known infectious condition of sheep, but, as mentioned above, was thought not to pass the sheep–human species barrier. Now, it seemed, there was a possibility of infection. Large numbers of pickled and frozen sheep’s eyeballs, kept in the laboratories of University and College science departments for teaching and experimental purposes, had now to be disposed of as clinical waste since they might offer a risk to human health through scrapie infection, possibly leading to BSE in humans. A directive went out from the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food under the plain but bizarre title ‘Heads of Sheep and Goats Order 1996’. In a typical governmental sleight-of-hand, a letter went out to schools, colleges and chief education officers with an assurance that past handling of these eyeballs held no health risk. Indeed ‘There continues to be





no hard scientific evidence that BSE is transmissible from either cattle or sheep to humans’ stated the directive, flying in the face of the publicizing of such evidence through a two-hour television documentary watched by over two million people, and ongoing newspaper reports confirming the link. With a lack of sheep’s eyes for dissections, schools and colleges were told that they would have to put up with pigs’ eyes, although the authorities realized that ‘these were too small for many inexperienced dissectors and could pose problems for religious groups’ (Times Higher Educational Supplement, 22/11/96). In the face of the introduction of sheep and goats into the equation, fantasies were aroused – who would eat a sheep’s or goat’s brains? Black magic ritualists? The general public was unaware that these are culinary delicacies in some quarters. Animal atavisms abounded – we were suddenly thrown up against the primitive realities of eating another’s flesh, especially, with the introduction of the goat into the scenario, an animal traditionally associated with contamination and perversion. Pious vegetarians were having an ‘I told you so’ field day (many of whom would drink milk or eat dairy products, forgetting that the initial contaminated ‘super-feed’ was used to increase milk yield). Rumours abounded about hamburger chains continuing to use large amounts of offal in their products. Abattoirs, now often filmed for short slots on television news, began to assume the dark aura once associated with asylums, mental hospitals and the infectious disease wards of hospitals. Some recalled the horrors described in Upton Sinclair’s 1906 novel The Jungle, a powerful critique of the exploitation of immigrant workers from Eastern Europe in the stockyards and meat trades in Chicago. The novel’s description of slaughterhouse practices – of what matter actually ended up in a sausage – caused such an outcry that the USA food laws were immediately changed. Sinclair described the recycling of huge mounds of rat-infested and mouldering meat; the common practice of ‘bulking’ – through processing meat with offal; and the regular loss of human fingers from slaughterhouse workers, now unavoidably destined to became sausage meat. Most importantly, throughout Britain, attitudes to animals in their countryside settings changed overnight. People no longer saw, through romanticizing eyes, the idyll inspired by the painter Constable of contented cattle munching on verdant pasture. Now they could only see fields full of unsuspecting animals on death row. The idyll was ruptured. A shadow had fallen across the pastures. The British government, forced to placate their European neighbours and restore confidence in British beef and its by-products, issued a



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directive to farmers across the land that all cattle over 30 months old would be culled in order to remove BSE from the food chain. This added to the misery of those farmers who already could not sell their beef. The directive had to err on the side of safety and so was extremely conservative, almost certainly promising death for many animals that posed no health risk at all. Provisions were hurriedly made for the delivery of thousands of potentially healthy cattle to slaughterhouses that only weeks earlier had been laying off their workers for lack of raw material as the bottom fell out of the meat trade. The animals were to be slaughtered and then incinerated, and this was reported with accompanying film on all the major television channel news slots. Graphic images of stiff carcases being pitched into blazing incinerators of course raised the spectre of the Holocaust, but in no way did these television reports expose the public to the reality of the transport, slaughter and burning of these thousands of animals. The crisis, concrete for the animals, CJD victims and farmers and slaughterhouse workers, was already virtual for the millions of habitual consumers of beef. By the summer of 1997, the government announced that the incineration programme would take over five years to complete because of both lack of facilities and resistance, through public outcry, to proposals for building new incinerators in conservation areas, mainly because of the threat of polluting smoke and grit emissions. Although 600 000 cattle had been culled over the summer of 1996, by late summer, while Britain was a long way from cracking its unemployment problem, anybody it seemed could get a job in an abattoir, as the government announced that there was already a backlog of 400 000 cattle on death row, being fed by farmers only to keep them alive until they were hauled off to the abattoirs. This, despite a weekly slaughter rate of 22 000 animals. In the autumn of 1996, the crisis offered another bizarre twist. The government had hoped to raise the slaughter rate to 55 000 cattle a week in the 30-months-and-over age category, before winter set in and costs of feed to the already doomed cattle would increase considerably. To help the farmers, the Government planned to charter a fleet of Russian refrigerated ships, anchored offshore, and each storing 20 000 carcases, as conventional land-based cold-storage facilities had already been exhausted. Thus the image was introduced, soon to be literalized, of rows or stacks of yellow-dyed, refrigerated carcases, floating in huge numbers just offshore awaiting eventual incineration and disposal: the animals now literally marginalized, kept out of public sight (and smell) and out of the public domain, ‘unfit for human consumption’, denied their last rites.





Not all cattle were incinerated. Between 1988 and 1991, due to lack of incinerator capacity, thousands of cattle had already been buried in selected sites all over Britain. Some burial sites were concentrated – one at Burnley in Lancashire contained 500 carcasses, and a landsite in Pewsey, Wiltshire, contained over 1000 rotting cattle. Questions in Parliament revealed that the then Conservative government had not issued lists of over 6000 of these sites, and that some of the landfills could pose health risks as the rotting carcases leaked disease-carrying prions into the water supply. While cattle heads were removed before burial, highly infectious spinal cords were not. There was speculation that some of the CJD deaths caused by BSE-infected cattle could have originated through drinking contaminated water supplies and not from eating meat. This would explain the puzzle that some victims claimed to have been vegetarians (although rendered cattle products do find their way into common foods such as biscuits, and as discussed, ideas about the possible length of the incubation period had changed, and changes in eating habits may therefore have occurred during incubation of the disease). The Independent (21/02/98) reported that infected cattle matter from a rendering plant may have leaked into the water supply and certainly had contaminated the surrounding soil. In August of 1997 there was a claim that liquid waste from cattle treated in another rendering mill had been poured down a well that led to an aquifer, potentially contaminating the water supply. Five of the then 26 nv-CJD victims had lived within a 25-mile radius of the plant (Independent, 30/08/97). This claim was rejected by the water companies in question as pure coincidence, and they pointed out that two different water boards served the victims in question. In 1997, Swiss scientists suggested that nv-CJD could be carried in our white blood cells, sparking a new crisis – that the blood supply bank for transfusions might be contaminated by the very prions, the rogue proteins, that were thought to cause BSE in cattle and CJD in humans. As these prions are found in white blood cells, the government had to make a decision whether or not to remove white blood cells from blood bank stocks. At a cost of £20 per blood donation, this would amount to a £50 million bill, but the cost to human lives could be immense if it were not carried out. Blood donations were now subject to an expensive filtering process, while supplies of blood plasma were being imported. The ‘green’ offal political blunder was turning out to be a huge economic as well as ecological and epidemiological disaster. Again, the image of this potential creeping disease was of an animality now entering the human blood supply as well as the food



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chain, potentially de-humanizing thousands, in what amounted to a health lottery. In 1995, a patient’s appendix was routinely surgically removed. Three years later, the patient died from nv-CJD. During the autopsy, the previously stored appendix was also examined and found to contain the pathogenic protein associated with nv-CJD. As this protein was found in lymphatic tissue, this implied that it could enter the bloodstream, with subsequent risk of cross-infection with other persons. Further, after the initial linkage in 1996 of BSE in cattle and scrapie in sheep, this information faded from public focus for a couple of years. In September 1998, however, this ghost came back to haunt the government and the British people. On the day that the Meat and Livestock Commission launched a £2 million campaign to persuade the British public to eat more lamb – a safe alternative to beef – the press reported that ‘mad cow’ disease had probably also got into the sheep population through feeding sheep infected offal. The Times (08/09/98) reported that it was ‘a distinct possibility’ that sheep were infected. Later that same month, a new type of incident appeared, invoking the spectre of mass human BSE infection. A tanker lorry containing ‘thousands of gallons’ of cattle blood from a herd of animals culled under BSE regulations was travelling from a slaughterhouse in south-west England through the west Midlands on the M6 motorway, when a seal on the tanker failed, causing the blood to pour across the motorway. The driver and his wife, four fire fighters who arrived to clean up the spillage, and two police officers who came to deal with the 25-mile-long tailback, were drenched with the blood and taken to hospital to be washed off and tested for infection. The Ministry of Agriculture claimed of course that the risk of infection was absolutely minimal. The image however is startling. The Guardian (24/08/98) reported the incident under the title ‘Blood and jam’! Predictably, the BSE crisis has also attracted its share of marginal human behaviour and a spawning of further malpractice, where the possibility of deliberate infection of cattle with BSE was unearthed in Ireland. The hope was to illegally claim the high levels of compensation the government were now forced to hand out to the beleaguered farmers. More positively, directly in support of the animals, the annual ‘Special Awareness Award’ in the British Environment and Media Awards for 1996 was awarded to ‘The Cow’, for ‘raising awareness of damaging farming methods that led to the BSE crisis’ (The Guardian, 7/11/96). Previous winners of the award had included Al Gore and Prince Charles.





Surely the animal world was fighting back – the BSE affair seemed ripe for such a reading and with serious intent. The whole crisis had been framed in terms of a serious error of judgement by humans driven by the profit motive at the expense of animal welfare. The future king, Prince Charles – a serious advocate of organic farming and often lampooned in the press as a slightly cranky Jungian because his close friend and spiritual advisor happened to be Laurens van der Post (who died during the BSE crisis) – publicly denounced ‘feeding cattle with protein derived from cattle or other farm animals, which almost certainly caused the BSE outbreak’ as ‘totally inappropriate’, where ‘perhaps BSE will come to be seen as one example . . . of how nature hits back when we violate her laws’ (Independent, 20/9/96). The irreverent, highly original French sociologist and cultural commentator, Jean Baudrillard, was moved to write an article for the periodical Liberation entitled ‘Revenge of the Cows’. Chris Horrocks (1996) rightly described this title as sounding like ‘a postmodern parody of a fifties “B” movie’. (Or it could be taken as an indirect homage to the anti-anthropocentric cartoonist Gary Larson, who entitled one of his collections ‘The Cows of Our Planet’ In a cartoon entitled ‘The Future (I’m sure of it)’ from Unnatural Selections, Larson shows a world taken over by cows, in which all human activities have been appropriated, and chickens are the new underclass. The Jazz club is ‘The Moo Note’, and the cinema ‘The Udder Palace’ which is showing ‘101 Dead Matadors’.) Baudrillard suggests in his article that the BSE outbreak and its human variant CJD could be seen as ‘a terrorist act on the part of the cows because they’ve been exploited, dismantled and damaged. It’s an act of terrorism through the virus!’ By the summer of 1997, despite ongoing deaths from CJD, confidence in the hamburger had been restored and McDonald’s was back on track, using British beef again, despite there being a continuing difficulty in persuading the European Community to lift its ban on British beef. By 1998, reports came through that beef was being consumed in greater quantities than it had been for the last 20 years, in spite of the BSE crisis and a massive drop in beef consumption at the height of the crisis. An upbeat note followed in the wake of the crisis. In October 1998, the Independent (7/10/98) under a joky headline ‘Bones will light homes’ reported the strange ecologically useful gift that the massive pile (340 000 tonnes) of powdered meat and bone meal made from slaughtered cows would offer us. A company had made a bid for the material, to be used to produce electricity from its three power stations, burning 85 000 tonnes annually. The ash would go to landfill.



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By late 1998, despite the establishment of an official inquiry into the crisis getting into full swing and recording a catalogue of politically motivated miscalculations and indecisions, the British beef crisis was rapidly becoming old news. Indeed, a new public confidence in meat dawned, which presented a deep irony as the BSE crisis had been shadowed by a health crisis with more actual deaths and hospitalisations – the E. Coli outbreaks of food poisoning from uncooked meats. Outbreaks of this kind are also more terrifying because they strike in a concentrated manner, within communities, and particularly affect those already sick and the elderly.

Animal slaughter or animal sacrifice? In the midst of the BSE crisis, at the beginning of the summer of 1996, the renowned philosopher and critic George Steiner was interviewed briefly on the regular lunchtime news programme on BBC Radio 4 concerning the government’s directive to slaughter what seemed to be an excessive number of cattle. Steiner’s appearance on a newscast – as a leading European intellectual – in itself was quite a surprise, but what he said in the few minutes allocated to him cut a remarkable swathe through the issues raised in both the scientific debate and the standard (ethically-centred) animal rights response. By framing the crisis rather in terms of animal rites, Steiner offered a religious and mythological response to the situation, reminding listeners in Britain that they live in a country with a tradition of religious or sacred animal sacrifice – the cattle sacrifice was central to Indo-European cult practices. Cattle were once honoured above and beyond their current status as utilitarian units within a secular economy. They were indeed honoured and valued as gods, or as direct envoys of the animal god. Ironically, three breeds of cattle that have now been found to be resistant to BSE – the miniature Dexter cow, and the rarer Kerry and Irish Moiled – are Celtic-style animals that may date back to the Bronze Age. ‘Perhaps there is something about these Celtic cattle’, came a direct hint from a veterinarian who keeps a small herd of the Dexter breed (Observer, 27/10/96), implying that they carry more than a particularly favourable genetic inheritance. They also carry an historical and cultural link to a time when the animal was not treated in a secular sense, merely as a functional unit, but as a sacred presence whose destiny was intertwined with that of the human carer. As noted in the opening to this chapter, there is, of course, also a strong nationalistic archetype at work in the association of Britain with beef that offers a lingering memory of





the centrality of cattle rites: the roast beef of Olde England; and a ‘Beefeater’, a term dating from the early seventeenth century, is a Yeoman of the Guard and a Warder of the Tower of London. To return to Steiner’s broadcast, he suggested that the most powerful way to deal with the situation, given the government edict, was to burn the cattle not privately, away from public view, but in full public sight (and smell). Pyres should be set up by main roadsides, by the motorways, so that the public would drive by and both see and smell the burning carcases. Then they would be forced to acknowledge – and feel – the tragic reality of the situation. And perhaps this may stir an atavism, a continuity with Indo-European, Celtic and Anglo-Saxon religious tradition, centred on human–animal relations. This shock of the real suggested by Steiner would reconstitute the crisis as sacred not secular, and put the animal (or rather the animal god) at the centre of the imposed and patently camouflaged slaughter. The minimum impact would be to bring home to the public the importance of a shared responsibility for the mismanagement of our relations to the cattle that we breed to feed us, and with the animal world in general. It was a timely reminder of Baudrillard’s (1994, p. 134) point that now we kill animals in slaughterhouses, we do not sacrifice them: ‘animals have always had, until our era, a divine or sacrificial nobility that all mythologies recount. Even murder by hunting is still a symbolic relation, as opposed to an experimental dissection. . . . Those who used to sacrifice animals did not take them for beasts’. We have moved, in other words, from an affective relationship with animals to an economic or utilitarian relationship – a marriage of convenience and a shift in values. Steiner’s few minutes of airtime came and went without comment or discussion, and probably hit few nerves, but it was an extraordinary plea. The dissimulation at the heart of the BSE crisis was riding on the back of the culture’s view of these animals as secular, functional economic units, merely ‘walking larders’. The religious and symbolic significance of the crisis was lost to the utilitarian perspective, and the voice speaking on behalf of animal rites was reduced to a whisper from perceptive commentators such as Steiner, as the collective protesting voice of the animals themselves was confined to their last breaths at the moment of stunning in the slaughterhouse, whether ‘infected’ or not; whether ‘mad’ cow or ‘sane’ cow.

From sacrifice to slaughter Scattered throughout Homer’s The Iliad are detailed descriptions of animal sacrifices to the gods, such as that of a bull sacrificed to Zeus by



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the Greeks, headed by Agamemnon: ‘having each spoken his prayer, (they) sprinkled their barley-meal on the bull’s poll; then one of them drew back its muzzle and slit the throat. Next they flayed the carcass, stripped the thighbones of flesh, and wrapped these in a double fold of fat. Slabs of flesh having been laid over them, they burned this sacrifice on dry branches’ (translation by Robert Graves, 1959, Book II). Achilles greets the deputation sent to him by Agamemnon to persuade him to re-join the Greek battle against the Trojans with an invitation to feast. The assembled party chop up the carcases of a sheep, a goat and a pig; slice, salt, and spit roast the meat; then sit down to eat, but first they move to offer the gods a sacrifice by tossing pieces of meat into the fire (ibid., Book IX). In a contentious article on the nature of sacrifice, Wolfgang Giegerich (1993) suggests that we cannot really talk of a psychology ‘with Gods’ (the primary example of which is post-Jungian archetypal psychology) without the reality of animal sacrifice to these divinities, while, paradoxically, ‘It is obvious that we moderns cannot offer bloody sacrifices to the Gods anymore and that we therefore probably cannot celebrate a true festival anymore’ (ibid., p. 6). He reports an anecdote concerning two great classicists – Walter Otto and Karl Reinhard – in which Reinhard challenges Otto’s belief in the reality of the presence of the Gods. Reinhard supposedly asked Otto if he prayed to Zeus, to which Otto replied ‘Yes’, ‘Thereupon Reinhard said, “But then you must also sacrifice bulls to Zeus”’! Giegerich points out that animal sacrifice accompanied a range of public activities such as the signing of treaties, building works, and religious festivals ‘in Europe down to late antiquity, and elsewhere until recently’. Thus ‘ritual slaughters were not performed in secret’ (ibid., p. 7), but involved public experience of what can now normally be privately experienced, and only in a completely secular sense, within a slaughterhouse. His argument is that the sacrifice of animal life, originating in the Palaeolithic hunt as a religious exercise, provided a reflective moment in which the human gained distance from the purely biological life and opened up a ‘clearing’ that first determined cultural life. The point of the slaughter is that such a moment of distancing and reflection is inherent to the act, and not an after-thought. Psychology and religion begin in the act of sacrifice, prior to the idea. The opening of the wound is also the opening of the soul, or the establishment of psychological life as opposed to a merely biological existence. Through animal sacrifice, as a religious act, ‘enfleshed’ biology was replaced by ‘irreal logos or soul’ so that ‘Now for better or worse, man lives in an





inverted world, namely in mind or soul, and has his body as well as the so-called outside world only within them’ (ibid., p. 14). Giegerich implies that contemporary life is now sense-less, dislocated from the act (of slaughter) as sacred, where it has lost its basis in religious sacrifice. The more distanced we become from such sacrifices, the more the Gods become abstractions, ideas, no longer connected with acts; and then ideals, further hardening into ideologies. Central to Giegerich’s argument is that a culture whose religious life is based on sacrifice of the animal (as god) has no need of utopian ideals, for soul and act are identified, where the act of sacrifice automatically brings death into life. He suggests that where we now live with mind-generated ideals that are divorced from death or drive death out in an utopian exercise, so we invert ‘the order of being’ (ibid., p. 16). Soul is now no longer linked to concrete actuality but to the irreal, leaving us to ‘suffer uncompromisingly the emptiness, meaninglessness, unrealness that its missing entails’ (ibid., p. 17). While Giegerich bemoans this ‘missing link’ to reality, suggesting that we live now in a hollow age, he suggests also that in the future perhaps the irreality of soul may be replaced by the ontologically real. We may re-discover the ‘missing link’ that once more makes the religious wholly immanent. Giegerich’s analysis is highly problematic, not just for the manner in which he appears to assume that a big idea such as what constitutes ‘reality’ is unproblematic or transparent, but more so for his uncertain conclusion. We are left with the faint promise of an arrival of a substitute for ‘killings’ as the generator of enfleshed soul, or concrete life lived as sacred act, some time in the future, rather than the more obvious conclusion that it is not ‘killings’ to which we need to reconnect, but the object of the sacrifice – animal life itself. Animal life revived – living, present, hailed and celebrated as the born-again god – not so that we can hack and slice it to death in the same breath, but so that we can appreciate (and learn from) its beauty, its self-display, its aesthetic presence and worth. Giegerich’s account is on the right track but with the wrong vehicle – again, it is not the reality of ‘killings’ from which we are divorced, but the animal itself, especially from the perception or apprehension of the animal as divine (and not the divine ‘in’ the animal, for divinity shines forth as the animal). Indeed, it is Giegerich (1989) himself, in an earlier article, who reminds us of the chasm we have created between human and animal in our post-industrial worlds, as animals simply become units in a high-protein economy, or objects for scientific experimentation, or anthropomorphized as pets. Perhaps the restoration of animal rites need not begin in the arena of killings, but in



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a reconsideration of what ‘animal’ may signify at this point in history. The restoration of animal rites may not indeed even begin with the literal, biological animal, but with a human-animal relationship rooted in an animalizing imagination – the central subject matter of this book. Giegerich’s literalism (that the soul is born of actual animal killings) itself offers a deathblow within another arena, where a further ecological battle is being fought – that of the imagination. If we deny ontological status – ‘reality’ – to the psychological and textual animal within its ecological niches of dream, fantasy, literature, film, and so forth, then we make extinct or nullify those animal presences. What then is the fate of a range of non-literal animals, exercising their presence and intentions in the contexts of a variety of animal–human relations, such as the Medieval unicorn resting its head in the Virgin’s lap; the shaman’s spirit familiar and the group totem; the salmon and stag in Celtic transformation myths; the stallion St Mawr in Lawrence’s novella of the same name, to whose magnificence humans have to adapt and aspire, despite their intentions to bend the horse to their wills; the boxer who floats like a butterfly and stings like a bee; the child who imagines herself to be lioness, songbird or mouse; the insects present during the night in countless people’s dreams across the world? While we may find Zeus represented in the actual bull in the field, and in the mortal blow to that bull, how do we literally slit the throat of Zeus where he appears as the bearded chthonic serpent by which the ancient Greeks also represented him? Indeed, perhaps such images exist precisely to depotentiate the actual sacrificial knife so that we are forced to sharpen our intellects, our wits, and our apprehensions, in the sacrifice of literalism and materialism on the altar of metaphor and image. ‘Animal’ seems to constitute an unproblematic category for Giegerich – that animal can only be transparently flesh and blood, biological, concrete. Yet he is already by his own hypothesized scenario for the emergence of the human soul (into which he collapses spirit and mind) offering a good reason why we should apprehend animal as a wider category than literal flesh. For it is in the sacrifice of the god to itself within the lore of a hunting community that the spirit of the animal god is realized. ‘Killings’ (the title of Giegerich’s essay) – conscious animal sacrifice of a sacred nature, rather than animal slaughter – does not realize the human soul, but the animal soul, now released as spirit animal and familiar. ‘Killings’ for Giegerich may be a necessary condition for the emergence of a cultural life of mind, but for James Hillman (1994) – in a closely argued riposte to Giegerich’s article – such a circumstance does





not provide the sufficient condition for soul-making. Hillman (ibid., p. 4) points to Giegerich’s unacknowledged historical fundamentalism – why should we need to turn back to early Greek religious life in order to appreciate the presence of Zeus in our lives? Does Zeus really need actual bull sacrifice today in order to be remembered? Thus, ‘Quite possibly Zeus remains Zeus even without the bull, because other sorts of sacrifices, other sorts of rituals are offered to him.’ Further, do the Gods want or require animal sacrifice of us? Hillman reminds us that what the Gods mainly want is to be remembered – kept in mind – and that this constitutes a psychological reality. Where Giegerich describes the absence of the Gods (or soul, or imagination) as a product of the inversion of existence from a biological reality to a conceptual irreality, and that this has led to an effectively meaningless, hollow life, Hillman reminds us that this is rather a product of our forgetting the Gods, of our not noting them in everyday acts, of our repression of the divine through secularism. How could we forget them in any case, when, as Jung reminds us, the forgotten God invariably returns as symptom, as disease? Hillman also points to philosophical problems arising out of Giegerich’s notion of what constitutes the ‘real’, particularly the latter’s refusal to give ontological validity and status to the psychological, the imaginal and the conceptual, which Giegerich opposes to the concretely ‘real’, as ‘irreality’. Here, by implication, we may return to the question raised earlier, in the Introduction: ‘what is an animal’? If the ‘real’ can be psychological, conceptual, imaginal, linguistic, as well as literal; then the ‘animal’ can be sign, symbol, metaphor, image, thought, felt presence, memory, notion, intuition, allegory. A bullish market, a bear hug, a snaking move on the sports field, a cold-blooded act, a lion-hearted friend, eagle-eyed, lounge lizards, the strength of an ox, asinine behaviour: we all know these because they refer us back to the animal presence that gives body to the image. Such animal presence in language tropes the purely nominalistic and refers it back to bodily movement, expression and display. The words are invigorated and aestheticized, present as ‘animals’, not literally, but figuratively. Also, if we give equal ontological status to image and object (the fact that we separate these categories in the first place points to an ontological fallacy introduced by Cartesian opposition between objects of the world and the sceptical mind that supposedly apprehends those objects, or casts their independent existence into doubt) then the animal in the dream is as ‘real’ as the cat on the sofa, or the eel in the river.



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As ‘Gods exist as images; that’s their reality’, and we apprehend them through ‘sensuous imagination’ (ibid., p.13), so, by extension, the animal god exists as image and we apprehend that animal presence sensually and imaginatively. What then may the appropriate response be to such presence? Not just to keep the god in mind, suggests Hillman, but also to not be trapped by another variety of literalism promoted by Giegerich: that the god can only be honoured through act. Giegerich’s insistence that the sacred is established through the act of ritual is marked by a narrowing of ritual itself to the act of sacrifice. Literal killings then deny the power and validity of reflection, visioning, memorizing, intellectualizing, poeticizing. The animal god is not raised to awareness just by the act of the spilling of its blood, but such a god may be ‘present anywhere to the heart of sensuous imagining and the mind’s eye that sees imagistically, imaginatively.’ Such psychological apprehensions also constitute animal rites. Further, to reinforce a point made above, does the god not appear spontaneously lest we should forget? Pan’s presence in panic attacks, Saturn’s in depression and gloominess, Jupiter’s in spontaneous generosity, Hephaestus’s in clumsy lovemaking, Aphrodite’s in the very shining forth of the things of the world – not even unexpected epiphanies, but continued presence, whether called or not. ‘The Gods are our prosperity’ suggests Hillman (ibid., p. 18), just as Jung reminded us that the Gods are in our diseases, and both would claim that symptom is a kind of prosperity, as it leads us back to the Gods – and, potentially, to the animal behind the god, and to the animating imagination behind the animal. Giegerich’s argument paradoxically offers its own deconstruction, for he reminds us in any case that ‘killings’ are still going on. Indeed, they never stopped – animal sacrifice gradually transformed into animal slaughter under the influence of a more popular god: Mammon, the god of economics, of profit. This is the god formulated out of the convergence of Renaissance mercantilism and the Protestant notion of the ‘Elect’ – that one could crudely buy one’s way into the afterlife (and numbers are limited) by accruing surplus capital in this world. The spilt blood of the animal, privatized in the slaughterhouse, now offers a sacrifice to a late capitalist economy and the profit motive. What else would lead farmers to feed animal protein and ‘green’ offal to herbivores, but the promise of richer yields? Hillman (ibid., p. 16) rightly points out that ‘The Economy . . . (is) . . . the God we nourish with actual animal blood.’ But he stops short of the extensive ramifications of such killings: not just through intensive farming; weekend sports such as hunting and fishing; and medical research; as Hillman notes, but also,





for example, through the thousands of animals killed the world over on highways, bounced off car and truck fenders. (In Britain 100 000 foxes die on the roads every year – that is one every five minutes. Indeed, foxes now have to be particularly ‘cunning’ just to beat the odds, to stay alive, for 100 000 are also killed every year by gamekeepers, 20 000 through fox-hunting and an estimated 10 000 by gassing, poisoning and other illegal means. This means that a fox dies approximately every two minutes in Britain as a result of non-natural causes.) We might also note other, everyday, ‘killings’ – rather than ‘sacrifice’ – through the side-effects of intensive sea fishing, for example, where dolphins are inadvertently caught in nets and effectively drowned; through thousands of migrating songbirds which crash into skyscrapers at night, confusing the buildings’ lights with the star patterns by which they orientate their migrations. Then there is massive ecological devastation – habitats ruined as a result of pollution and deforestation; animals such as the rhino hunted to extinction for their horns, purely for use in Chinese medicine as supposed aphrodisiacs; abuse and neglect of pets; and indiscriminate use of pesticides and insecticides not only in intensive vegetable farming but simply because insects bug us. We are led into hypocritical stances and shameful paradoxes – ready to decry the cooking of live animals at the table in restaurants in Thailand or China, yet visiting a McDonald’s drive-in without qualms, or picking up a frozen chicken at the supermarket, the very meat inscribed with the stress of that animal’s cooped existence. More, we show extreme prejudice in our analyses of human–animal relations, so often focusing on the near and dear, the warm-blooded, high profile relatives, that deflect our attention away especially from the cold-blooded and the slippery, from the spineless (the invertebrates); from the potentially disease carrying. London Zoo recently launched an ‘Adopt an Animal’ campaign, an animal sponsorship for businesses or individuals where you pay a nominated sum of money every year towards the upkeep of the animal. Its most expensive adoption is the Asian elephant at £6,000 per year, and this animal figures in the top five most favoured adoptions: 1. Sumatran tiger, 2. Black-footed penguin, 3. Asian elephant, 4. Asian lion, 5. Gorilla; while the least popular adoptions are: 1. Hissing cockroach, 2. Assassin bug, 3. Viper, 4. Hermit crab, 5. Rat. In light of these choices, we might recall, for example, that the difficult-to-cuddle Mantis is a primary god of the indigenous South African peoples; and that in ancient Crete the slippery and elusive octopus was revered just as passionately as the stately bull.



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Over a decade ago, Russell Lockhart (1987, p. 84), a Jungian analyst, offered a striking clinical observation. He noticed among his patients a significant and increasing number of ‘apocalyptic dreams’, or ‘apocalyptic visions from the unconscious’, whose tone was consistent – a sense of acceptance or inevitability of world catastrophe. While he does not refer specifically to an ecological crisis as a component of such catastrophe in his written account, he notes that accompanying this increase in apocalyptic images and tone in these dreams were images of animals: ‘a simultaneous and increasing appearance of animals, animals coming, animals watching, animals speaking, animals wanting to lead us, animals undergoing all manner of transformation’. Is Lockhart an early observer of the effects we may predict from one of Freud’s axioms – that what is repressed returns in dreams (and often in a distorted form)? Are these animals returning to inhabit human dreams because those same humans are exterminating them across the world (mostly through indirect means stemming from the overconsumption of resources by the ‘developed’ nations)? Certainly the animals that are exterminated are kept alive in simulation, in representation through television wildlife programmes in particular, providing a post-modern location for the cultural ‘dream’. The biologically dead animals are kept alive in discourse. Interestingly, Lockhart himself, in the same text that discusses the return of animals in dreams as synonymous with an increase in apocalyptic dreams, locates the ‘animal’ fully in human language. He develops an argument for the animal vitality of words as represented primarily in the poetic use of verbs: ‘Poetry’s language is verbs, vital and vivid verbs forcing involvement, inviting relationship rather than separation, immersion rather than distance’ (ibid., p. 83). Now this raises a dilemma: is the move that displaces the ‘animal’ from its biological existence to the habitat that is the human dream or human language, another version of the human extinction of animal species at worst, or at best, a containment of the animal in the intellectual zoo of ‘theory’? Further, do some suffering species of the dream or textual animal represent the symptomatic return of the repressed biological animal, after a literal oppression represented by their physical extinction? Or is the recognition of such ‘animality’ in dream and language not an anthropocentric appropriation but a recovery of the animal, for the sake of the animal image, and then not a return of the repressed as symptom or distortion? In this latter scenario, human consciousness



Animal wrongs


offers a valid medium for such a recovery, providing ‘housing’ for the animal, or an ecological niche (the Greek oikos – the root of ‘ecology’ – meaning both ‘household’ and ‘habitat’). Now the ‘animal’ is not just biological, but legitimately psychological and conceptual. Lockhart claims that his view of the animal follows that of Jung, who was ‘sensitive to animals and how they appeared in the world, in the imagination, in dreams’ (ibid.). He argues that ‘To reconnect to the animal, we must become aware of the animals in the psyche, the animal psyche, the animal in things, the animal in art, in world, in poems, in dreams, the animal that lies between us and the other’ (ibid., p. 84). ‘Animal’ is comprehensive, but where is its sense exhausted, where are its limits of representation reached? Specifically, which ‘animal’ are we then reconnecting to in Lockhart’s view? The animal has surely often been regarded in its own right (and rite) as ‘other’, not as what ‘lies between us and the other’, as Lockhart interestingly places the animal, as route to the Other. The animal then perhaps offers the bridge to ‘otherness’. To what ‘otherness’ may the animal then be leading us? Michael Whan (1994, p. 49) helps with this where he asks, ‘May it . . . be . . . the animal and not the human subject alone that brings meaning into the world?’ Animal then becomes the envoy of ‘meaning’. Whan’s use of ‘meaning’ here is the opening of the world in Heidegger’s sense (disclosure of Being) – a revelation of the world as extraordinary dwelling place and a house of language. (Lockhart, above, reminded us that ‘animals’ inhabit our language, as its animation.) The animal may then be seen as gate-keeper to this revelation of the world’s presence and interiority as an indwelling. Traditionally, animals guard the entrance to the underworld, such as the three-headed dog Cerberos in Greek myth. Dante’s The Divine Comedy begins with his imaginary descent into Hell under the guidance of his historical mentor Virgil. Dante finds that he has strayed from the familiar road into a dark wood, and attempts to escape by climbing a nearby mountain. He is turned back, however, three times, first by a leopard, then by a lion and finally by a she-wolf. In fleeing back into the wood, Virgil’s shade tells him that the only choice left is to descend into Hell with the guidance of the poet and mentor, for any further attempt to escape up the mountain will lead to attack by the wolf. Glosses on the text usually follow the medieval Christian morality tale perspective, pointing out that the animals, particularly the lion, represent ‘bestiality’ and only when the seeker has died to this sin (in the descent to the underworld) may he or she rise. Interestingly however, it is the animals themselves, as envoys, mentors or familiars, who force Dante to make that necessary descent.



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To return to the animal that brings worldly ‘meaning’ (and surely Dante’s trio of familiars act to reveal the interiority of the world to the seeker), Jung’s ‘animal’ in Whan’s view is suspect (and so by extension is Lockhart’s ‘animal’), for the animal in both Jung’s and Lockhart’s accounts ultimately is recognized as the bringer of ‘meaning’ only in the sense of what such meaning may signify for the human condition. Strip away this anthropocentrism and we have to ask what does the animal itself bring to the world that it may in turn introduce to humans in its role as familiar, without losing its presence through human appropriation? If it is Heidegger’s sense of dwelling and indwelling that offers some disclosure of worldly meaning (that for Heidegger is always a paradoxical revealing/concealing), then the animal may bring the common sense or apprehension by which we come to appreciate such dwelling in the world, prior to explaining the world. The animal then brings meaning as beauty, as display, as an aesthetic vitality, in its reminder that presentation precedes representation and simulation. If we dwell in a house of language (some may say a prison of representation), and that is our particular human animal display, then perhaps Lockhart is right to place emphasis upon the textual animal – the ‘animal’ that inhabits language as its poetic animation. As we shall see from Chapter 4, this is certainly D.H. Lawrence’s vision of the textual ‘animal’. To re-state the issue, does it matter that the animal is appropriated for human concerns, as an idea in the mind of humans, or as Margot Norris (1985, p. 17) suggests ‘pressed into symbolic service as metaphors, or as figures in fable or allegory’, rather than the animals ‘allowed to be themselves’? Is the biological order subsumed by the symbolic, so that we have a new ecological disaster on our hands, where animals may need to be liberated from ‘tropological enslavement to the human’ (ibid., pp. 17–18) else their immediate self presentation in the biological realm is lost, consistently displaced by turning animals into figures of speech, representations, psychological phenomena? Or, is life enriched by breaking down distinctions between the biological, psychological and conceptual, so that the animal becomes an ubiquitous phenomenon, enlivening the landscape of human language (and then the cultural landscape) through animality in verbs, just as the rattlesnake and the sidewinder enliven the desert? Let us test for a moment the notion that the animals ‘out there’ – literal, biological, ‘natural’ – are threatened by the rise of humanism, exhibited in a desire by humans to appropriate every area of experience, every inch of ground, every available phenomenon, whether this is through rational understanding (cognitive appropriation) or irrational,





actual territorialism (animal extinction, the ecological crisis). One view would suggest that we turn away from what we cannot understand, tolerate, integrate, appropriate, and exclude it as ‘other’. Refusing to hear the voice of the other as different from our own, we attempt to extinguish that voice in active ways (colonization) or passive ways (denial), and then we invent a voice for the now dead, the extinct or the excommunicated. But this, we know, is not the authentic voice of the other, and here we are talking of the animal other; this is rather the human re-inventing the animal voice. This is not authentic dwelling in a world of beauty, sublimity and terror, both presented and emblematized by animals, but an appropriation of that world in representation, as the human voice of bourgeois mediocrity, comfort, denial of bestiality, closure and dissimulation of ‘meaning’. Jean Baudrillard (1994, p. 133) does suggest that the inhumane treatment of animals (now often culminating in extinction) can be related to the rise of humanism: ‘animals were only demoted to the status of inhumanity as reason and humanism progressed’. He compares this process with ‘racism’, where an ‘abyss’ has opened between human and animal that follows the domestication of animals, ‘just as true racism follows slavery’. Animals have not only been made to work for us (productive members of a labour force in a capitalist economy) as ‘beasts of burden’, they have also become ‘beasts of demand’ where they are utilized as laboratory specimens, or sent into space as trialists; they have become ‘beasts of consumption’ – the meat trade; and ‘beasts of somatization’ where they have been forced into carrying a psychological life wholly invented by humans (pet worlds; training animals to perform or to show; animals in therapy; animals anthropomorphized for purposes of entertainment from Disney representations to television wildlife documentaries). Here, the human psyche has been injected into the suffering animal body. Once, perhaps, humans and animals co-existed in difference, in what we might call the Peaceable Kingdom, in Eden. Or possibly in agonistic difference, but not with the human sitting in magisterial pose on top of a pyramidal order of life. (Although here there is a danger of liberal humanism democratizing the pecking order of animal hierarchies.) In other words, the human existed as one animal among many, each respected for its particular qualities. Humanism, rather than offering a celebration of the uniqueness of humanity within the context of such a commonwealth, has rather exalted the person, brought hubris, where humanity is celebrated precisely for its break from the animals – celebrated for its rationality, its non-bestiality, its supposed monopoly of language and



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reflexivity. Now a gulf opens between human and animal in which, turning back to the animals, humans cannot bear to recognize the bestial even in the animals themselves: ‘Animals must be made to say that they are not animals’ suggests Baudrillard (ibid., p. 129). We have discovered another way to exterminate the animals: by denying their animality, their bestiality. Either we anthropomorphize them, or, in Baudrillard’s term, we extract a ‘confession’ from them that demonstrates that they are no longer bestial (and then incomprehensible and mute), but both comprehensible and able to communicate with us (on our terms, through our invented languages). Once the confession is obtained, then we can rest easily in our beds, for the animals are no longer dangerous Other, but incorporated into the ever-expanding human domain. As Genesis exhorts us, we will have dominion over them. The thrust of scientific inquiry, combined with the rise of humanism, destroys the naturalist’s immediate interest in the beauty or display of animals within habitats, replacing it with a desire to classify animals and study their anatomy and physiology, finally reducing them to genetic maps in a zoology of quantities and dead specimens, rather than qualities and living embodiment. The body of the animal is lost to the body of knowledge about that animal fit for human consumption, effectively exterminating the animal through a dissimulation, or turning the specimen into bottled knowledge. Through surveillance we extract the confession of the ‘lifestyles’ of animals and then lard these with anthropomorphic sentiments and both utilitarian and martial metaphors such as ‘camouflage’, ‘survival’, ‘dominance’ and ‘territorialism’. While we do study animals for their sake (conservation), we often act on their behalf only as a result of our putting them in danger in the first place. We experiment on animals in order to expand human knowledge; we exterminate them in order to expand our control over the earth’s resources, or to occupy space. We make them speak our languages rather than understand their own displays (primates taught human sign languages for example). We trap them in our own linguistic webs, turning actual animal into fable or parable for human concerns – Animal Farm studied by thousands of schoolchildren only in ‘translation’: from animal back to human concerns. We do not go to the animals willing to learn from them, or on their behalf, having suspended our anthropocentric desires. Yet they return to us time and again, like abused but faithful pets, forgiving us, refusing our semiological analyses for affective contact. Some animals, however, refuse such attachment and remain withdrawn, resolutely refusing to cooperate, disturbingly silent, just within our peripheral vision. These certainly will not make the





London Zoo hit list of favourite beasts. Yet they remain the most interesting because they disturb us so violently − the rat, cockroach, snake. We think of them as ‘dangerous’, or as ‘pests’, or ‘vermin’. They are wholly ‘other’. The Guardian (23/11/98) recently ran a front-page article headed more like a spoof from The National Enquirer: ‘Global warming chills spines with mutant insect invasion’! This revealed that ‘bugs are a more dominant life form on the planet than humans’, and are becoming more resistant to insecticides. Due to the fact that global warming now creates new niches for the bugs, many new species are heading for Britain, to add to the 20 000 already here. They are described by an eminent entomologist as ‘uninvited creatures’. A colony of 1000 scorpions has been spotted in Kent, and malaria-carrying mosquitoes have been seen on Anglesey. The entomologist reminds us that ‘Insects are a scourge on humanity. . . . They steal our food, suck our blood, bury themselves in our skin, and transmit serious diseases’. Readers are reminded that more deaths have been caused by disease-carrying insects ‘than all of man’s wars put together’. This reference to warring humanity reminds us that if insects are cast as the Terrible Other – acting out our most fundamental science fiction horror as the uninvited guest who takes over the planet – humans treat other humans in the same manner. The dominant human extracts from the marginalized human confessions of insanity (pitched against the supremacy of a language of reason); of racial inferiority (pitched against white supremacy); of religious inferiority (the confession of the heathen and the hope for conversion under the threat of eternal damnation); of the superiority of wealth (the confession of the poor); of the superiority of the male (the confession of woman and witch); of the inferiority of the primitive (pitched against colonialist supremacy), culminating always in calling the supposed inferior no better than an ‘animal’. When we train animals for performance in circus, seaworld or game shows such as the British television favourite ‘Pets Win Prizes’ (in which the pets – rather than their owners – are regularly humiliated as they are forced to participate in an animal equivalent to a human game show), we project onto them the human ideas of educability and sociability, and when our own children fail in these respects we also refer to them as no better than animals. In summary, we attempt to give animals voices they do not possess – rational human voices. Ironically, through this anthropomorphic exercise, we deny them the basic human right to remain silent. As well as biological animal ‘otherness’, we will explore a rich terrain of psychological and cultural animals – non-literal animal presences



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stalking dreams, herding in literature, springing forth in metaphor and image, or merely crawling by as the conceptually ‘different’ or ‘other’ against which we are able to mark territories: those of human identity, as subjectivities. Such textual animals also, perhaps, voice a need for conservation in an era of ecological awareness. How then do we give them body and voice? Our bridge could be back from the psychological to the biological, through a biologizing of our psyche’s narratives, or, in the specific case of animalizing, writing zoology. Text here becomes act, in a ‘biocentric’ writing (Norris, 1985). Through such writing, we recognize experience as preceding consciousness of that experience, rooted in what Santayana calls ‘animal faith’. Such terms, unfamiliar as they may seem at this juncture, will hopefully become familiars through the course of the remaining chapters, as we write a variety of animals into being.




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A mythological history of animal exclusion Our attitudes towards animals may be traced to biblical imperatives, and the Hebraic creation myths – ‘myths’, in the plural, because two separate creation stories open Genesis: the ‘seven day’ and ‘garden of Eden’ myths. While they were written at different times, they are crudely juxtaposed in the text, as we know it. The seven-day creation story that opens the Old Testament is actually the later myth, dating from the 4th century BC, where the Eden myth was written between 930 and 721 BC (Fokkelman, 1987). These stories offer two different versions of human–animal relations. The later, seven-day creation story puts the human ‘in command’ of all other creatures, as crown of creation (reiterated in Psalms 8:4–8): ‘God said, Let us make man . . . let us put him in command of the fishes in the sea, and all that flies through the air, and the cattle, and the whole earth, and all the creeping things that move on the earth. . . . Increase and multiply and fill the earth, and make it yours; take command of the fishes in the sea, and all that flies through the air, and all the living things that move on the earth’ (Genesis 1). In Eden however woman and man walk and talk with the animals in equality. This idealized ‘peaceable kingdom’ is referred to in Isaiah 11:8, where the newly suckled child is able to play safely by ‘the hole of the asp’, and put its hand ‘in the viper’s den’ without harm. Also, Yahweh is immanent in Eden, but wholly transcendent in the seven-day creation myth. These biblical creation myths, separated possibly by 500 years, offer then asting models of human–animal relations. The Eden myth is inclusive, describing human participation in animal life, or continuity amongst species, and an immanent Creator; the seven-day myth is exclusive, separating humans from animal life, and God from 26



Aesthetic Animals

humans, describing a discontinuity of Creation, where humans dominate. It is this latter perspective that characterizes what James Hillman (1989c, p. 95) calls ‘our Western tradition’s contempt’ for ‘the animal soul’. In a discussion of ‘nature’ and the ‘natural’, Jung (1976) refers to the Oxyrhynchus papyri, discovered in the Nile Valley in the early part of this century, which include early copies of the New Testament and apocryphal books such as the Gospel of Thomas. There is a particular papyrus, which Jung claims was not admitted into the New Testament by the early Church Fathers, despite being older than the Gospels, and equally authentic to them as a record of Christ’s original teachings. The text of this papyrus records a supposed conversation between Jesus and the disciples in which they ask him how one is actually transported to the Kingdom of Heaven. Jesus replies: ‘“The fowls of the air and all beasts that are upon the earth or under the earth, and the fishes in the sea, these are they that will draw you into the Kingdom”’ (ibid., p. 284). Remarkably, this is close to the typical teaching of an animal-centred or animal-directed shamanism, where the animal is the vehicle of illumination, the deity to whose realm the human is drawn and must aspire, and from this animal humans are said to be descended. Such contact with the animal god recreates the original continuity between species in Creation, returning us to Eden, among the animals, not separated from them. Given that we carry contradictory creation myths in the collective psyche it is not difficult to understand why our modern attitudes to animals may be confused: that we love them and fear them; that we make pets of them and torture them; that we see ourselves as part of the animal kingdom and as separate from it and master over it. Since the rise of a rationalist and humanist modernism, with its announcement of the death of God and scepticism towards ancient myth (replaced by the modern myth of science), one would think that biblical imperatives held little sway. However, as any good Jungian will inform us, we cannot so readily sweep away our collective history and its mythological soil. Animals already come with cultural tickets attached. They are signifiers – they carry meaning beyond their biological self-presentation and such meanings can be said to have been established upon some very simple structural principles. To remain with our biblical framework, recall that Yahweh saves all the species of animals through instructions to Noah to house them in the Ark. This seems like a fitting ecological metaphor, but it has been argued that the myth encodes a social regulation. The choice of animals by Noah is based not upon how animals appear, but upon what they represent for the human. Animals here are



Aesthetic Animals 27


treated as signs in a system, their meanings derived not from aesthetic self-display or presentation, but from representation, where the animal stands for something other than itself. While – in Genesis 7 – Yahweh appears to favour the entire animal kingdom in saving them, as all may enter the Ark, this is however subject to certain conditions where some animals are privileged over others: ‘Take seven pairs of all the clean animals . . . and two pairs of all the animals that are unclean’. The basis for such classification and taboo is offered in Leviticus 11 and, from the perspective of a structuralist analysis, reveals a human use of the biological world to erect a cultural sign system. The Levitican order offers a shorter list of so-called ‘clean’ animals such as cattle, and fish with fins and scales and a longer list of tabooed or ‘unclean’ animals such as camel, sow, chameleon, cormorant, and fish without fins and scales. According to Mary Douglas (in Baker, 1993, p. 111) the basis to such a classification system is that the ‘clean’ animals are those which chew the cud and have cloven hooves, and do not crawl on their bellies. Thus, the camel chews its cud but has an uncloven hoof. The sow has cloven hooves but does not chew its cud. Also, a taboo applies on the basis of whether or not animals are perceived as either whole or composite, as a basis to whether or not they are, respectively, holy or unholy (as ‘pure’ or ‘impure’). The animal is then used as a metaphor for a reflexive understanding of a principle supposedly operating throughout the natural world. What is unholy, unclean and to be tabooed (which also means to be feared and avoided) is what crosses borders, is a hybrid or does not easily fit a category system. This would allow us to read the taboos in a variety of ways – for example, animals which are seen to be lacking something or are incomplete (fish without fins or scales), transform (chameleon), or inhabit two environments (cormorant) are to be tabooed, for they cross boundaries, or offer mixed messages, upsetting an imposed order of ‘purity’. The classification reveals a hidden principle: intolerance of ambiguity. The same principle essentially pervades the purist strain of Modernism, that resists hybridization and transgression, and indeed has been identified as a consistent feature of the ‘Authoritarian Personality’ (Adorno et al., 1950), that itself is seen as the individual basis to fascism. In the Levitican order the animal becomes a vehicle for expression of a cultural order through a logic based on the privileging of a naive purity over ambiguity on the basis of selected characteristics. The animal is then deprived of its total and complex presence as it is viewed through human dogma not for what it presents (its self display), but, again, only for what it represents (its value as sign in a human code system, relative to other signs).



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If we follow Bruno Latour’s (1993) probing analysis, modernism can be characterized as a misconceived project for promotion of purity over the ambiguous and the paradoxical. In this analysis, Modernism is characterized by intolerance of the hybrid, where it uses the tools of oppositionalism and rigid classification to maintain conceptual boundaries between phenomena that are experienced in reality as complex hybrids. The quintessential opposition is between nature and culture; others include body and mind, science and art, male and female. But these purist divisions, so easily held as concepts, collapse in practice, which tends to hybridization, in-betweens, admixtures, compounds and complexities. Further, the more a conceptual purity is sought, the stronger is the return of the repressed hybrid, crossing boundaries and dissolving classifications. The notion of a civilized culture depends upon the maintenance of a strong boundary between nature and culture, animal and human. But the more we insist upon this boundary, following the hierarchical seven-day creation myth, the more the repressed nonhierarchical, plural and inclusive Garden of Eden myth will return, and return in a distorted form, poisoning the attempted purity of the human– animal opposition.

The return of the repressed animal A contentious scenario for the return of the repressed animal is that one of the possible sources for HIV-1, a major strain of the AIDS virus, is the green monkey of central Africa, which may have attacked, scratched and infected workers on forest clearance schemes. Naturally, if we slash back the habitat of these monkeys, they may fight back. One strain of AIDS may then be an indirect result of deforestation involving an unwanted incursion into an animal’s habitat. Does the British BSE scare discussed in the previous chapter also reflect the return of the repressed animal? Again, as Freud suggested, the repressed invariably returns in a distorted form. As a less contentious scenario let us imagine that the silence or incomprehensibility of madness, as the unknown ‘other’, excluded on grounds of purity, forced modernist rationalists to invent the fictional land of the unconscious in order to explain away madness and avoid contamination by the irrational (for the so-called ‘unconscious’ neatly parcels the irrational in a conceptual apparatus). By the same token could we not suggest that the silence or incomprehensibility of the animals has forced the same modernist rationalists to invent the psychological concept of ‘instinct’ to explain away the animal in us, or to provide a neat





conceptual cage for our animality? The repressed animal then also returns in distorted, inflated concepts – not only in symptoms of body, but also of mind. Let us track this animal, knowing that it will surprise us nevertheless. In Civilization and its Discontents Freud (1930/1994, p. 24) describes a civilized country as one in which ‘wild and dangerous animals have been exterminated’. In this phrase, recalling that this is the writing of the later Freud, he is also describing his own conservative views of the civilizing or socializing of the natural psyche. It may be true to say that the more civilized the society the worse are its attitudes towards animals (Green, 1992). While one of the moral precepts of the ancient Greek mysteries at Eleusis was to not be cruel to animals, this tradition has been superseded by a rationalist outlook that may be traced to Aristotle’s influence. Aristotle (in Clarke and Linzey, 1990, p. 6) suggested that humans are superior to animals because humans possess rational intelligence, where animals have ‘limited’ souls. Further, animals are not ‘political’ – they have no sense of justice; and have no obvious morality, no ‘perception of good and evil, of just and unjust’. Indeed, Aristotle says that animals are put on earth for human use, and that this could not be seen as an injustice because animals themselves are incapable of defining justice! Aquinas (Summa Theologica Q.XCVI) follows Aristotelian orthodoxy, suggesting that we can have no true intimacy with animals because they are irrational. Animals, according to Aquinas, are God-given for human use, and hence it is not sinful to kill them: ‘it is in keeping with the order of nature, that man should be master over animals’, and, ‘man, being made in the image of God, is above other animals’ (in Clarke and Linzey, 1990, p. 7). Stephen Clark (1994, p. 24) suggests that ‘Aristotle, the Stoics and the Epicureans all agreed that “animals” . . . were not reasoning beings’. Augustine (in Clarke and Linzey, 1990, p. 60) concurs with this bias, where ‘the irrational animals that fly, swim, walk, or creep . . . are dissociated from us by their want of reason, and are therefore by the just appointment of the Creator subjected to us to kill or keep alive for our own uses’. Rationalism in western thought has contributed four major approaches to denigration of the animal. First, Aristotle denies animals souls where he ascribes fullness of soul only to humans. Second, the Roman world and Augustinian Christianity, following Aristotle, makes animals our property and slaves, to use as we please. Third, the Cartesian outlook ascribes lack of feeling to animals and turns them from slave into soulless machine, prefiguring factory farming. Fourth, while restoring the



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human to the animal kingdom against biblical orthodoxy, Darwinism nevertheless places the human at the apex of animal life arranged as a hierarchy of neurological complexity. John Berger claims that contemporary human–animal relations are characterized by an absence of contact, epitomized in the nature of the gaze – where the fact that animals may gaze upon us is lost to the nature of our gaze upon them. Our gaze objectifies the animal, constructing it as imperfect ‘other’, as lacking. Such a relationship is a suffering one, where a meaningful contact with the animal is lost or deferred. Berger’s suggestion is that an authentic relationship to animal life has been corrupted by capitalist enterprise, where animals have come to be seen as a walking larder, a convenient food supply to be exploited on behalf of humans. In recent times, animals have become used more and more in scientific experimentation in the name of human progress, reducing the animal to object. We have moved, suggests Berger, from living with animals to living without them, and this is especially true of the urban majority. Clark (1994, p. 24) summarizes this position as ‘our present inattention to the interests of the non-human’. Robert Stein (1984, p. 7) suggests that we have traded our ‘animal– instinctual’ natures for a culture of mechanization, and that the ‘return’ of the instinctual human ‘cannot occur without the help of the animals themselves’. Stein reminds us that a fairy tale motif involves the redemption of the hero through ‘trusting or befriending a dangerous, repulsive or apparently insignificant animal’. As we encounter the animal– instinctual nature of ourselves, which Stein simply calls ‘the animal’, so we find it hard to familiarize ourselves with what may be ‘sick, misshapen, vicious and perhaps monstrous’. For Gary Kowalski (1991, p. 95), the presence or absence of animal life in relation to the meaning of human existence constitutes a theological issue, where he asks: ‘would we lose our own souls in a world without animals?’ Human experience, in these views, is impoverished without regard to the presence of animals. If entry into ‘Heaven’, as Jung’s reference to the lost Gospels would indicate, is dependent upon the animal vehicle, then surely full participation in life on earth is even more dependent upon our recognition of the value of the animal. While these accounts are highly empathic towards animal presence, they nevertheless imply rather than intend the animal as they lean heavily towards human interests and human psychology, and then deny the animal as wholly other, as autonomous. In a critique of Jung’s tendency to psychologize animal life, or reduce the biological animal to anthropological terms such as ‘instinct’, Michael Whan (1994), as indicated in the previous chapter, ventures that the





animals themselves may bring ‘meaning’ to this world. To pursue this line of imagining further, in such an animal–human relationship the human is not denied autonomy but gains through the heteronomy of the relationship to a familiar animal presence in a recognition of ‘difference’. The human is then, to return to our earlier discussion of Dante’s descent to Hell, pushed deeper by animal presence, or denied a return to the safety of the mountain (the moral, practical and intellectual ‘high ground’ of assumed human superiority). Further, to borrow from, and adapt, Emmanuel Levinas’s view of human-to-human heteronomy, the person remains, appropriately, ‘hostage’ to the ethical implications of the presence of the other – where, in this case, the animal familiar is both wholly, and holy, Other.

The return of the repressed human to an animal commonwealth A North American Indian teaching story offers the following paradox: you stumble across an animal caught in a trap. Your first response is one of pity, a desire to release the animal. On closer investigation however, you see that the animal in pain may also be savage and vicious. If you release it from the trap, it may attack you rather than display gratitude. What should you do, as your feelings sway between compassion and fear? As you contemplate this paradox further, you may come to realize that the ‘trap’ is not that in which the animal is caught, but the opposition created between you and the animal. A further paradox is that this opposition is not your invention – rather, you find yourself situated in it, as an aspect of cultural discourse. What if the animal in the trap is you, or rather the cultural discourse in which you find yourself trapped? Further, in releasing your own or the culture’s wild or savage animality (the repressed), will it attack you? Or should you leave it as it is, trapped and pained? We are now so accustomed to Freud’s famous assertion in Civilization and its Discontents – that culture originates in the repression of desire, of the instincts of unbounded sexuality and aggression – that we have perhaps become anaesthetized to his radical insight. Let us again consider Freud’s notion: cultural advancement is bought at a price. The instinctual or animal body that is polymorphous perverse sexually and – potentially – unpredictably violent, is cultured or tamed primarily through the ego defence mechanisms of sublimation and displacement. Freud came to see this as a necessary discontent – without it, civilization



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would not be possible. To repeat and enlarge on an earlier quote, according to Freud (1930/1994, p. 24), a country that ‘has attained a high level of civilization’ is one in which, among other characteristics, ‘wild and dangerous animals have been exterminated’, and ‘the breeding of tamed and domesticated ones prospers’. Recall that the wild and adventurous young Freud, love-struck, and passionate advocate of the use of cocaine as a prophylactic, gave way to the conservative patriarch who claimed to have given up sex in middle age in order to study it rather than enjoy it. When André Breton, the founder of Surrealism, finally gained a personal interview with his hero Freud, Breton apparently came away severely disillusioned. Freud reputedly said that what Breton stood for – the artistic representation of untrammelled desire or the direct articulation of unconscious life – he himself saw as dangerous, for such desire must be socialized, with a view to developing a healthy ego rather than living the experimental life guided by id or animal sense. If we return to Freud’s original insight in Civilization and its Discontents, what if we were to develop that radical view more fully, as the Surrealists had hoped to do? What if we were to privilege the animal body, the instincts, desire, rather than culture, reversing the orthodox western view that the animal, in relation to the human, represents lack? What if human culture were seen to be lacking in relation to the potential riches of the non-mediated biological life, that Jacques Lacan describes as the order of the real, outlined in the Introduction? Could it be that Freud turned his back on his own insight because it is unbearably convincing and historically accurate – that the animal is prior to the human? More specifically, the animal constitutes an a priori condition. As Jean Baudrillard (1994, p. 133) suggests: ‘Once animals had a more sacred, more divine character than men . . . and for a long time the animal order has been the order of reference.’ If we are to restore the radical effect of Freud’s insight, then we have to reverse the view that the animal offers lack in relation to human. Rather, we would see human cultural ‘advance’ (sublimation, mediation, interpretation, representation − Lacan’s order of the symbolic) as offering lack in relation to the powerful immediacy of the biological (aesthetic self presentation – the order of the real); the cultural then destined to always be plagued by fantasies of the biological. Nietzsche (in Norris, 1985, p. 8) offers a similar view in a different key, as an anti-anthropocentric sentiment that is worth quoting at length: ‘Once upon a time, upon a star in some remote corner of the universe glittering and bestrewn with innumerable solar systems, clever





animals invented knowledge. It was the most arrogant and untruthful moment in the “history of the world”; but it lasted only a minute. Nature had just taken a few breaths when the star petrified, and the clever animals died. One could invent such a fable and still not illustrate how purposeless and arbitrary the human intellect appears in the context of nature. For eternities it did not exist; and when it is once more extinct, nothing will have changed. For this intellect has no broader mission that would extend beyond human life. It is human, only, and only its possessor and inventor treat it as seriously as if the axis of the world revolved inside it. But if we could communicate with the mosquito, we would discover that it sails through the air with the same empathy and feels itself the flying centre of the world.’ Scratch the surface of any pre-industrial hunter-gatherer culture and you will find the same anti-anthropocentric sentiment (or, in this context, pre-anthropocentric). Indeed, in such cultures, the animal is often privileged as ‘centre of the world’, where animals provide reference for human culture as deities. Or, in such cultures, animal and human are identified, where the animal is not anthropomorphized, or appropriated by humans – as with our pet culture, or the typical TV wildlife experience – but humans are seen as aberrant examples of the totemic animal, from whom the people in question are descended. When the Amazon Basin Bororo say they ‘are’ Macaws, or the Uduk of the Sudan see themselves as brothers and sisters of the antelope, while we will not, as good Cartesian rationalists, take them literally, we must take them seriously. We cannot simply dismiss such identification as regressive (pre-logical, innocent, childish), a psychological projection, or a linguistic trick. This identification between human and animal is a way of saying that the animal is prior to human, provides reference, is deity, and must be seen as providing the vehicle for an affectivity that precludes divorce between the species. Wolfgang Giegerich (1989, p. 1) suggests that the lack rationalist western culture ascribes to animals could be read rather as a displacement of our impoverished relationship to them, or loss of familiarity, especially for the growing urban population. Our actual contact with animals today, suggests Giegerich, is one of absence: ‘the very meaning of animal today is one of the following: 1) extinct, 2) endangered species, 3) tourist attraction in zoo or reserve, 4) pet, 5) milk or meat producing machine within a highly industrialised farming enterprise, 6) guinea-pig for laboratory experiments, 7) biological organism and production of evolution’. Adding to this pessimistic list, we could also consider that (8) for many people certain animals are often only encountered squashed dead



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on motorways; or (9) adapted to urban environments, usually raiding rubbish bins; (10) encountered whole or part in freezer cabinets of supermarkets (the animal, such as a whole frozen trout, first encountered in vivid photographic detail in the wild on the container or wrapping – a photograph which is in fact a montage based on how we imagine, idealistically, the animal to be in the wild, free and healthy, and hence a perfect example of a simulacrum, a copy without an original); (11) as infestations, such as head or pubic lice; (12) in hyper-reality on TV wildlife programmes (where we see animals as we never would in the wild, with close-ups, dramatic cut-aways, intense action, in brilliant colour, with exciting commentary larded with anthropomorphic metaphors of sex, violence and domestic life, thus providing a vibrant simulation, but often reducing animal life to the status of human soap opera). Such televisual experiences are, of course, entirely optical and auditory, thus devoid of the so-called ‘lower’ animal senses of taste, touch and smell. The representation of animals in this way contributes to a post-modern, post-industrial culture seduced by hyper-reality and simulation of experience as a normative event (Baudrillard, 1994; Bogard, 1996). Thus, bestiality would represent the intolerable, as a principle of unmediated experience and hence of uncertainty, and such bestiality must be killed. Most importantly, it must be killed in the beasts themselves. Animals must be tamed, or represented through simulation and the simulacrum. If our animality were let loose, if the animal were to be freed from the trap, by Freud’s law of the return of the repressed it would necessarily act in a distorted fashion. However, what if we invite the animal back into our lives, a brazen return through the front rather than side door? Then we may find that the animal brings a gift of both the beautiful and the sublime. Our model could be the seahorse, who in the wild demonstrates a life of the aesthetic, of elegant self-display; who shows tenderness, wrapping a tail gently around the finger of prying zoologists just as the male and female seahorses go for walks with their tails entwined; who shows fidelity – a mate for life; and who throws the assumptions we make about gender in animal life into disarray, for it is the male seahorse who incubates the ova that the female injects into his birth pouch, and who eventually gives birth. Perhaps what frightens us about animals – just as it simultaneously intrigues us – is not their irrationality, their bestiality, their primitiveness, but the depth, the sublimity, the sheer range and unpredictability of their aesthetic self-display. While reading animals conceptually – as signs within a human system of meaning – deflects us from appreciation of their value in immediacy





of self-presentation, the aesthetic appreciation itself is blocked by our tendency to instrumentalism or to functional readings and explanations. How, for example, does a functional view in any way encompass the bizarre case of deep-sea organisms that give off eerie, coloured light, a kind of fluorescence, when other organisms in the same environment do not possess the optical structures necessary to see such light, yet humans do? It is as if these organisms had waited thousands of years for the invention of the bathysphere so that we could witness their display in its full glory! Their display offers us pleasure, and – where we have not appropriated these animals – so they generously intend us. For some animals, of course, their beauty does not rest with a gentle aesthetic display, but with one of power and aggression such as the lioness running down the antelope, the pinch and grip of the crab, the sucking and entwining octopus. For these animals, docility, lethargy and feebleness would constitute a distortion, and this of course is how we see the return of the repressed in such animals when they are exhibited in the zoo or the circus for our entertainment. Some contemporary scientists – notably Brian Goodwin (1995) and Stuart Kauffman (1995) – suggest that life is a self-organizing aesthetic system. Life is efflorescent, and has purpose in the sense that it wants to display or show. This is now termed the ‘emergent properties’ of systems, expressing a complexity in life forms that is best described in terms of process rather than content, and as maximum complexity at the edge of chaos. While systems tend to entropy and chaos, they are also capable of re-ordering at new levels of complexity, demonstrating emergent properties. Zoologists such as Adolf Portmann (1982; 1986) have also described animal life not through the tired anthropocentric, instrumental metaphors of war (camouflage, the fight for survival, territorialism, and so forth), but through the language of aesthetic self-expression and sublime presence. Portmann for example points to the ‘functionless’ aspect of much animal display as ornamental, as not serving functions such as delineating a territory or attracting a sexual partner. He notes for example that the singing of birds is largely a creative use of free time. (Even when our intentions are good, it is difficult to adequately describe such behaviour without resorting to the human metaphors of the leisure and tourism industries.) ‘Nothing useful!’ in these displays exhorts Portmann (1982, p. 33). Rather, they constitute a deep expression of form. In order to satisfy the call for what Roy Willis (1994) has termed ‘Humanity’s reincorporation in the natural Commonwealth’ we must shift from person-centredness to animal-centredness, and further, to animaldirectedness, learning from the beasts. It is the animals themselves who



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will surely lead us to reformulate the ecological crisis, as we respond to their intentions, for the animals already show that they do not want an an-aesthetic life, a life of numbing, insensitivity, a half-life. Rather they will awaken us through their sensitivities, their aesthetic presence, to our self-imposed numbness to the world. A cursory study of extant – and where records allow, extinct – huntergatherer cultures reveals a commonality: their religious life is centred on animal presence. The functionary who maintains contact with the world of animals in the literal and dream worlds (which are recognized as continuous, and not opposed or disjunctive) is the shaman, who primarily journeys in ecstatic trance to an otherworld of animal spirits to apologize to the spirits of animals killed in the hunt, and to check that the hunt taboos are not broken. Such small-scale societies demonstrate identity and familiarity with certain totemic animals and claim descent from them. They stress continuity with the world at large, rather than the discontinuity between person and environment described by modernist industrialized and post-industrial cultures. There is evidence from anthropology (Maybury-Lewis, 1992) to demonstrate that totemic, shamanic, tribal cultures also tend to lay stress upon what is hidden or covert in the world (such as an unseen, but felt spirit realm), rather than what is explicit or explicable. Such cultures are interested in conservation, equilibrium and continuity rather than change; and often see the world as a hostile place in which suffering is accepted and expected, so that people are charged with an anxiety motivating regular appeasement of spirits (in spite of the tendency for New Age pundits to idealize such cultures as peaceful, non-neurotic and optimistic). Indeed, the familiar animal, the totem, is expected to be both an educator/initiator and an aw(e)ful presence, both edifying and terrifying. Further, the ‘animal’ denotes not only the literal, biological animal, but also the spirit and dream animal, so that animals are apprehended psychologically rather than either perceptually or conceptually. Thus, for example, a Greenland Inuit shaman reports that he was initiated through being eaten by a huge polar bear: ‘It attacked me and crunched me up, limb by limb, joint by joint, but strangely enough it didn’t hurt at all; it was only when it bit me in the heart then it did hurt.’ And the shaman was regurgitated, stronger and wiser (in Halifax, 1980, p. 109). Note that it is the animal that incorporates the shaman, so that the shaman ‘inhabits’ the bear and not vice-versa (which would be to appropriate and humanize the animal). Joan Halifax (1982, p. 6) calls this animal-centredness and animaldirectedness characteristic of small-scale or tribal cultures a ‘cathexis to





the realm of creatures’. Gisli Palsson (1994) gives a telling account from a study of the history of fishing in Icelandic villages that illustrates such a cathexis and its modern dissolution or displacement. Prior to the modern industrialization and commercialization of fishing, the village fishermen would say that the only reason they had success in the catch was because of their own ‘fishness’. This gave them empathy with the catch and allowed them to appreciate the role of the water spirits in regulating how many fish could be caught, as a natural conservation. Today however fish and human are separated and there is no compassion for the catch, which is mediated by industrial process and commercial demands, leading to a danger of fishing-out the shoals. Palsson describes this shift as one from pre-modern hunters informed by ‘fishness’ to modern hunters informed by ‘technology’. This would describe a dramatic shift of values – from animal-directedness to person-centredness and beyond, to economic-directedness, the god Mammon displacing the traditional fish-god.

Three kinds of animal presence (and many unaccounted absences) We are constantly reminded by biologists of the significance of Darwin (and Wallace) returning us to incorporation into the animal world. Since Darwin, we now know that we share over 90 per cent of our genetic material with our closest relatives such as the chimpanzee. However, our brain capacity has doubled in just two million years, an extraordinary evolutionary leap leading to a unique scenario – the capacity for complex language use, reflection, and prediction. The cultural outcome of this is the human subject becoming an object of its own study. The human, while an animal, can then perhaps only know the biological in a highly mediated sense – the point made by Lacan in his insistence that the human is trapped in the culturally-enhanced imaginary (pre-verbal) and symbolic (verbal) registers of language, and then forever insulated from the register of the real, the now unknowable biological realm. This is registered as a lack, and promotes desire. The poet Clayton Eshleman (1983) suggests that such a mediation – a significant break from the biological, that he calls a ‘therio-expulsion’ – can be read from the evidence of Palaeolithic cave art from over 20 000 years ago. Eshleman sees the animals portrayed in such art not as naturalistic representations at all, but as images of animals seen in human dreams. If the human cannot be fully biological, can the mediation of the biological through the realm of the imaginary, rather than the symbolic,



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offer a unique form of animal existence for the human – an animality of the human psyche that does not suffer from the absolute severance from animal life of the symbolic realm? Such an animality would constitute a form of imagination in which the animal is neither reduced to instinct (as a misconceived attempt to recover the realm of the real, or ‘Nature’), nor wholly enslaved as linguistic tropes, as signs, symbols or allegories. What are our models of ‘animal life’ that would lead us to see the animal as significant for human existence? What do we mean by the ‘animal’? Let us return to our distinction between the three kinds of animal presence. The biological animal is the ‘taken for granted’ beast, treated in a literalist or essentialist manner. Ironically, this animal is also subject to reduction to its anatomy and physiology. Indeed, its genetic make-up or ‘map’ has become the primary biological signifier. Contemporary sociobiology has reduced us to the naked gene, where we are merely vehicles for the continuity of our ‘selfish’ gene pool. The biological animal is thus imagined literally, materially, and functionally or mechanically, and then reductively. But, as we suggest above, the biological animal can also be apprehended aesthetically. Laboratory zoology, and physiology and biochemistry have eroded the macro-perspective of natural history, where the animal is studied in the context of its habitat. Further, as has been said, watching animals in the wild has been displaced by watching virtual animals on TV ‘wildlife’ programmes. Second, is the animal of the mind, or animals utilized as signs in language or symbols in a system or code. Here, the animal is also troped, as figure of speech, such as a metaphor (‘a beastly situation’), simile (‘as sly as a fox’), or allegory (‘Wind in the Willows’, ‘Brer Rabbit’, ‘Animal Farm’). Or the animal is utilized semiotically as with the naming of sports teams (‘Toronto Blue Jays’, ‘Chicago Bears’) or cars (‘Jaguar’, ‘Beetle’). Or the animal is utilized symbolically (the bear representing strength; the peacock, vanity). Or, as in Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism, discussed in Chapter 5, biological animals, through their relations to each other, come to offer models of structural relations that the human may internalize as rules of representation (for example, eagle is to snake as air is to earth). The animal of the mind is an animal of social construction rather than an essentialist animal. Its presence is not defined by what constitutes it from within its own nature (identity), but how it is construed as an element in human culture. This returns us to our earlier discussion of a structuralist reading of the Levitican animals as a code for human conduct and rules of purity and contamination, inclusion and exclusion, singularity and hybridity. Here, the biological animal is imagined conceptually, or semiotically.





Third, between the biological and the mental, between animals in body and animals in mind, is the psychological animal, the animal experienced as image (or, the image generating the experience of ‘animal’). This animal is neither ‘real’ in the biological sense, nor ‘abstract’ in the cognitive sense, but participates in both the physical and non physical worlds. The animal appears in the psychological realm – or habitat of the personal and cultural psyche or imagination – as an image that is tangible and sensual and cannot be reduced to the realm of ideas, but is also not literal or concrete. The animal here is neither essentialist (has a closed identity), nor constructed (is an element in a human social system), but presents a separate discourse of animality that cannot be reduced to the biological or the conceptual. This animal is ontologically real, but it is neither just matter (literal), nor just an idea (construct). Rather, the psychological animal offers an aesthetic discourse as a language of images grounded in self-display. The location of this psychological animal offers a paradox. It is interstitial and most at home in the dream, and appears as the spirit or familiar animal common to the religious contexts of small-scale societies, including the animal-centred shamanisms that linger as elements of rural religious and folklore practices even in post-industrial countries such as Japan (Blacker, 1986). Gaston Bachelard – drawing inspiration from the work of the protoSurrealist Isidore Ducasse (whose work is described in Chapter 4) – has provided a caring and careful phenomenology of the psychological animal, while articulating the very nature of its appearance to consciousness, its presencing, as a species of the imagination. For Bachelard (1986, p. 27), ‘A need to animalize . . . is at the origins of imagination. The first function of imagination is to create animal forms.’ This would make the animalizing imagination pre-presentational rather than representational. For James Hillman (1981, p. 49), who, following Bachelard, has done more than anybody within post-Jungian psychology to establish animalizing as a primary type of imagination, the issue is how we might ‘Restore the animal sense to imagining.’ Prefiguring such views, the great Modernist poet of the darker passions, Rimbaud (1932, p. 37), suggested that ‘The poet is charged with humanity, even with animals’, which Edith Sitwell (ibid.), in a commentary upon Rimbaud, takes to mean, ‘that the poet bears the life of all humanity, of all animals, within his soul’. Sitwell, after Rimbaud, is then suggesting that care of animal life, the nurturing of animal presence, is not primarily the task of zoologists and naturalists, who study animals. Rather, it is the task of ‘poets’. Let us take this to include those who, following a shamanic tradition, would not baulk at the notion that (to paraphrase Nietzsche’s Zarathustra) the



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beasts may guide us, and that certain animal presences, as familiars, may offer a particular type of education. If it is the task of poets, rather than (or as well as) naturalists, to track these beasts, then we also need to track the apprehensions of these ‘literary beasts’, who write as the animal, not just about the animal. This is our task in the following chapter. The animalizing imagination should not be seen primarily as the psyche interiorized in the human, but constitutes an apprehension in which the interiority of the world at large is appreciated. In his 1928 essay ‘The Structure of the Psyche’, Jung (1969, p. 155) says, ‘I once experienced a violent earthquake, and my first, immediate feeling was that I no longer stood on the solid and familiar earth, but on the skin of a gigantic animal that was heaving under my feet’. This image of the world as a living animal is characteristic of shamanic and neo-shamanic views, from Turtle Island to Gaia. Plato – in Timaeus – also describes the Earth as a living animal. In primal cultures that appreciate the world as animal presence dreaming us into being, there is the conviction that the kind of image Jung describes is not a projection; it does not have its origin in the person, as response to the world, but has its source in an animated world which dreams the person, educating us into its presence.

Intestinal fever Let us move into a quasi-case study, as a celebration of the aesthetic animalizing imagination and the biocentric attitude introduced above. The case in question is the lowly pig – and our pig-nature. The choice of pig is to some extent arbitrary – the animalizing imagination would weave a story through the medium of any animal form. However, the pig does get a raw deal from humanity – it is one of the animals regularly receiving strong projections of bestiality. Yet the pig is drawn close to humanity in our association with it through domestication; in its innards so closely resembling those of the human; and in its appointment as the first possible animal heart donor for human transplant. To restore a celebratory vision of the pig we need to recall on the one hand the particular aesthetic of the animal embedded in the rich secular vocabulary of ‘porklore’: the tropes of the hog. And on the other hand, the sacred status of the animal exemplified by reverence for the sow goddess and boar god such as the Scandinavian Freyja and Frey; through the boar cults of the Celts (the tusked boar as the fearsome warrior, the sow as fecund); and through reverence for the sow sacred to the Egyptian goddess Nut, and the Greek Mother and Daughter pair Demeter and Persephone. Typical of reverence for the pig in Celtic lore is the Welsh





story of the hero Culhwch, from The Mabinogion cycle of stories. Culhwch is the arch-hero who quests for a bride (Olwen) and has to undergo a cycle of initiatory experiences. As with all hero cycles, the boy–man attempts to escape the binds of the Mother as he is paradoxically and inevitably drawn back into her powers. The hero in this tale has a sow for a mother, for ‘Culhwch’ means ‘found in a sow’s vagina’, or ‘born of a sow’, and this is what the myth tells (Layard, 1975, p. 7). In Celtic myth, human and pig are often interchangeable, and the pig is often referred to as immortal (Green, 1992, pp. 170–1). Domesticated possibly by 3500 BC, the pig was already revered much earlier. For example, goddess figures wearing pig masks, and images of pigs themselves, have been excavated in Eastern Europe, dating from the middle of the fifth millennium BC. Some of these figures have been impressed with grain, leading to speculation that the pig was associated with a fertility cult in which the fattening ears of corn and the fattening body of the pig were identified (Campbell, 1988, pp. 58–9). Frazer, in The Golden Bough suggests that Demeter and Persephone were anthropomorphized versions of earlier sow divinities, and describes the sacrifice of pigs to the underworld in the Women’s festival of the Thesmophoria. The required sacred meal of pork offered a communion, the participants feasting on the body of the goddess. There is a large literature on the sacred pig, an animal that has been important to the economies and mythologies in particular of SouthEast Asia, the Pacific Ocean islands, West Africa, Europe, and the South-East areas of North America. Central to such mythologies is the triangle: pig (sow) – woman – moon: ‘There is much coming together of “pig” and “moon” in primitive pig mythology’ observes John Layard (1975, p. 51), who sees such mythology as characterizing ‘the world of femininity’. Rather than reduce this to vague associations with ‘fertility’, it would seem that the pig, its sacrifice, and consumption of its blood and flesh are tied more directly to menstruation and the magical power of a woman’s menstrual blood. Jane Harrison (1962, pp. 152–3) says that ancient Greek religious festivals required purification rituals prior to participation in the rites, and that these might include animal sacrifice and eating the flesh of the animal god. The animal also offered the vehicle for sacrifice, as a pharmakon, the poison that heals, or the god replete with taboos (the simultaneously dangerous and beneficent god). One such purification ritual involved driving a young pig overland to the sea and ritually bathing with the pig, who became the accompanying god of purification. The pig may then later be sacrificed.



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In C.E. Evans’ (1987, p. 140) study of ‘the lost history of Europe’s animal trials’ is the case of a sow, in France in 1386, ‘sentenced . . . to be mangled and maimed in the head and forelegs, and then to be hanged, for having torn the face and arms of a child and thus caused its death . . . the sow was dressed in man’s clothes and executed on the public square’. Swinish behaviour; swinish amusement? While we may be horrified by such accounts, at least here the animal is being treated as a significant Other to be accounted for, and not discounted. The pig’s body is a god’s body, not only significant other, but sacred Other. That the eating of pig flesh is tabooed in Leviticus is a sure sign of their status as gods. Pigs traditionally bring divine gifts: they are said to see the wind and we too can obtain this second sight if we ‘Suck a blue sow’ or ‘drink a sow’s milk’. We could describe this as going the whole hog, happy as a pig in shit. And while the pig is unfavourably associated with dirt and waste, there is nothing wasted in its gift of sustenance to the human consumer, where ‘nothing but the squeal escapes the butcher’ (Clark, 1968, p. 17). In the final vignette of Quentin Tarantino’s (1994) ‘Pulp Fiction’ the hoods Vincent and Jules have just shot three men in cold blood and splattered the brains of another across the upholstery of a car interior. They are sitting in a diner, Vincent greedily forking a stack of pancakes with sausages washed down by coffee. In contrast, Jules pushes around a single muffin. They are discussing the merits of pork. Vincent offers Jules a sausage, Jules refuses: ‘I . . . don’t dig on swine’ because ‘They’re filthy animals. I don’t eat filthy animals.’ But, says Vincent with relish: ‘Bacon tastes good. Pork chops taste good.’ Jules suggests that a sewer rat may taste like pumpkin pie but he would never know because ‘I . . . wouldn’t eat the filthy motherfucker.’ Further, ‘Pigs sleep and root in shit. That’s a filthy animal. I don’t wanna eat nothin’ that ain’t got enough sense to disregard its own feces.’ How about a dog? asks Vincent. Don’t dogs eat their own shit? Yes, but I don’t eat dog either, replies Jules. But is a dog a filthy animal? queries Vincent. Dogs are not filthy but definitely dirty, suggests Jules; in any case a dog has a personality. ‘And personality goes a long way.’ ‘So by that rationale’ argues Vincent, ‘if a pig had a better personality, he’d cease to be a filthy animal’. ‘We’d have to be talkin’ about one motherfuckin’ charmin’ pig’, exclaims Jules. ‘It’d have to be the Cary Grant of pigs.’ The snake that runs through us like the casing of a sausage – the intestinal tract – is our outsides folded in, where the world out there insistently greets our inner-sense, by-passing the visual and auditory for





the lower animal senses. The guts have become a celebrated work of art – shortlisted for the 1995 (British) Turner Prize – in Mona Hatoum’s endoscopic exploration of her own body, filmed and projected back onto a circular floor area complete with a soundtrack of intestinal gurgling and rushing of fluids. Our delight, intrigue, and surprise at this work occurs precisely because what is normally non-visual and nonauditory is translated into a spectacle for the eyes and ears as it is simultaneously stripped of its taste, smell and touch. The gut weathers our excesses, and through it rolls our sustenance. From it we get gut responses, the intuition of the entrails, the animal wisdom of the gut feeling; the readiness for action that Nietzsche called ‘intestinal fever’. While poking fun at the folk belief, Flaubert, in his lampooning of bourgeois mentality collated as The Dictionary of Received Ideas, reminds us that nightmares ‘Come from the stomach’. Nightmares are where the imagination most insistently pathologizes, and the gut, replete with bacteria, is of course, day and night, busy making shit. The pig, Flaubert reminds us in his The Dictionary of Received Ideas, has insides ‘identical with those of a man’. Once, imagining himself inside the body of a pig in a dream, Flaubert finds his pig-nature wallowing in the innards and ejected fluids of human bodies: ‘I caught sight of clots of blood . . . blue intestines . . . the vomit of orgies . . . the greenish pus that runs from wounds’, where innards of pig and innards of human begin to be identified as one common sinking and stinking body: ‘All this gurgled inside my body’ as it also ‘lapped against my ears . . . I was eating and swallowing it all’ (in Mrosovsky, 1983, p. 14). The poet, seeing into the pig with an animalizing eye, invokes the pig’s revenge upon the human who would disparage the creature as low and filthy, where pig-nature has burrowed significantly into the psychological innards of the human and has then been everted in a reflex of disgust, so that the human is now endowed with an inside-out perspective and is found wallowing in his own despised interiority and inferiority. David Farrell Krell (1995, p. 121) cites Kafka’s description of vomiting as ‘to drag my entire insides to the outside’, which Krell sees as ‘a phrase that speaks the very dialect of the forest animal’, an animal that roots or burrows. Ejection of the gut’s contents, analogous to turning the body’s interior inside out, is the most basic of human reflexes and the original poetic utterance. Vomiting (as the behavioural aspect to the instinct of distaste or disgust) protects against potential poisoning, where the vomit reflex constitutes the primary act of discrimination and therefore forms the biological basis to aesthetics. As a discriminatory gesture, it is



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an act of purification, or closure, resisting the sublime (which demands a tolerance of sickness). The anti-hero in Maldoror by Isidore Ducasse (discussed in Chapter 4) dreams that he enters the body of a hog, ‘and that I was wallowing in the most foul mires’. The change from human body to pig body is welcomed as ‘a perfect and long-awaited happiness’ bringing an ‘ineffable sensuality’. The description is precise, for a sensuality that cannot be expressed in words restores animal nature, and to the human mind necessarily represents a mystery. For Hillman (1982, p. 288), the pig’s ‘exaggerated compulsive physicality is the very drive downward into the mystery of life’s materiality’. In The Odyssey, Homer sees the difference between human body and pig body as resting with the magical intervention of the sorceress Circe, who befriends the wildest animals and whose powerful potion turns Odysseus’ men into swine – in body only, for, their ‘minds were as human as they had been before the change’. In a compact re-telling of this story, the poet Thom Gunn (1979), in ‘Moly’, sees the ‘method’ of the human disappear into the ‘bulk’ of the pig, so that the mind itself becomes ‘streaked’ like ham or bacon, and adopts, or adapts to, pig needs – a precise poetic image of animal fecundity, of mind descending into matter and recovering the ‘ineffable sensuality’ described by Ducasse, that is a rich, fatty animal awareness, a new-found sensual pleasure. The animalized mind then adopts the body sense of the creature and enjoys an aggressive sensuality in rooting and burrowing: ‘My teeth tear, tear. I am the snouted creature/ That bites through anything, root, wire, or can./ If I was not afraid I’d eat a man.’ Like Gunn, Ducasse, in Maldoror, also restores this aggressive sense of animation, where, having become pig, the body wants to not only root but bite: ‘I tried out my teeth on the bark of trees; I contemplated my snout with delight’. In the poem ‘Moly’ Gunn sees virtue in Odysseus’s sailors’ entrapment in pig body, as he switches the reader from human perspective to that of the animal: ‘Oh a man’s flesh already is in mine’. Of the whole crew, it is only Odysseus who resists the magic of Circe, through ingesting the herb Moly, thus repeating the ancient battle not only between masculine hero and moon goddess as sorceress, but also between human heroic will and animal nature represented by the goddess’s familiars. The flesh of Odysseus’ sailors is however now fully ‘buried in swine’, fulfilling not only an identity of innards – Pig’s with humans; but also an identity of flesh, for human flesh is reputedly said to taste like pork. Again, Odysseus’ sailors (as does Maldoror) lose their bodies to regain embodied minds, minds that now can only live through





immediacy – unmediated perception – in snout awareness. The life of mind is then not separated from sense (the Cartesian fallacy) but recovers a sensual embodiment. Through myth, we have entered the realm of the real. Thom Gunn’s contemporary, the late Ted Hughes, in ‘View of a Pig’, says of pigs, ‘Their bite is worse than a horse’s –/ They chop a halfmoon clean out./ They eat cinders, dead cats.’ Pigs are like fevered people: ‘Pigs must have hot blood, they feel like ovens.’ People fevered by hunger (greedily taking half-moon bites out of pork chops) eat like ‘pigs’. Robert Grinnell (1973, p. 51) refers to ‘food and hunger’ as the primary expression of ‘the religious instinct’, rather than sex or power. (Subsequently reinforced by the current explosion of ‘eating disorders’, primarily among young women and often associated with self-harming, body image, sexuality, fashion, and consumerism.) What better model for hunger, and then the religious instinct, than the rooting pig, returning us to the fundamental emotions connected with taste, discrimination or the aesthetic instinct: anticipation, surprise, the pleasure of what is good to eat; and disgust exercised in the reflex of rejection, spitting out, vomiting? Through these metaphorical meals of pig flesh – and no less through actual ham or bacon – the animal god’s body enters our entrails not only for interior pleasure, but also for the pleasure of interiority. Through the meal, we gain an imagination of interiority. And in digesting Homer, Flaubert, and the poets such as Gunn and Hughes, we give body to imagination through sacred meals consisting of gustatory textual images of animals such as pig, developing a taste for the animating imagination, and then for the primacy of aesthetics or the imagination of taste. We should remind ourselves that the root of the word ‘aesthetic’ means to gasp, with an in-breath, in wonder, surprise or fear; also, to smell and to taste.

Animal beauties ‘There are few things uglier than a lack of reverence for animals’ suggested the groundbreaking scholar of Greek religion Jane Harrison (1963, p. 450), in 1911. (Thus implying the reverse: that reverence for animals introduces beauty.) She goes on to suggest that the exclusion of the animal from ‘the cycle of the divine . . . leaves a sense of chill and loneliness’, and bemoans the humanizing of the Olympian deities as a move away from the plenitude, colour, form and vitality of animal life to ‘the monotonous perfection of the purely human’. Once, Zeus was woodpecker; Athena, owl; Poseidon, horse, and so forth.



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The animal is first and foremost an aesthetic deity: a model for the immediacy of sense as a challenge to the culture’s privileging of the abstractions of mind, such as interpretation; for beauty before utility, for the raw before the cooked. The cosmos may then be returned to the metaphor that Plato in Timaeus wished upon it, that the body of the cosmos may be apprehended as a composite beast: ‘the animal which was to comprehend all animals’ (Plato, in Adler, 1990, p. 449). For Plato, the world is a self-regulating organism: ‘a living creature truly endowed with soul and intelligence’, again as a composite animal of which ‘all other animals . . . are portions’ (ibid., p. 448). Such a view, contemporary with the Hebraic myth that opens Genesis and predating James Lovelock’s ‘Gaia’ hypothesis by 2350 years, is also in tune with contemporary biology’s interest in complexity theory. The ‘intelligence’ of the creature that is the emergent cosmos and its composite worlds, has, as discussed above, been characterized as the overall (emerging) properties of systems whose maximum efflorescence is always at the edge of chaos, constituting ‘laws of complexity’ (Kauffman, 1995). Biologists such as Brian Goodwin (1995) are recapitulating the interests of an earlier generation of morphologists such as Adolf Portmann by attempting to restore interest in questions of how animals and plants come to achieve their forms. This approach refuses to reduce animals for example to chemical/genetic descriptions, and refuses to anthropomorphize animals through metaphors of a militaristic (‘camouflage’) or utilitarian (‘survival’) nature. From such a post-modern biology, ‘What will emerge is no longer . . . (an animal) . . . struggling for survival, but a rather different type of creature, described by different metaphors’ (ibid., p. 39). Goodwin celebrates the animal as a complex aesthetic organism, dynamic and self-organizing, again refusing the metaphors of struggle for survival (competitive individualism) bolstered by laws based on quantities, replacing these with descriptions of the qualities of animals. This approach follows Kant’s notion of aesthetics as ‘purposiveness without purpose’. Alphonso Lingis (1983, pp. 8–9), in a discussion of Adolf Portmann’s seminal work that demonstrates an aesthetic grounded in biology, points to a relationship between the display of animals and the perception of that display by other animals as a unity, defying functional or operational explanations. Animal display offers ostentation ‘over and beyond camouflage and semantic functions’. Display is a ‘Glory’ and ‘spectacle’ first, a functional language second. Display is for ‘appreciative eyes’ and ‘It is not surprising that humans . . . derived their sense of beauty from other animals’ (Lingis, 1994b, p. 135). Lingis’ Ark, however,





is elitist – stocked with jaguars, leopards and pumas, from which the drab and slow animal is excluded, mirroring the discriminatory human trope where ‘Puma’ make running shoes not orthopaedic sandals or wellington boots; and ‘Jaguar’ do not produce economy hatchbacks for shopping in town or lingering in the slow lane. While concluding that the ‘meaning’ the animal brings to the world is primarily aesthetic, let us not limit aesthetic to ‘beauty’, to high profile or ostentatious animal display; and let us not exclude from the aesthetic the sublime – the terrors of display. We should not exclude from the Ark either the woodlouse because it appears to be lowly, or the alligator because it snaps backbones and rips flesh. Psychological animals also intend the human psyche with differing intensities or levels of desire. Often, the sublime images (such as nightmare animals) make the greatest impact and linger longest, sometimes through a lifetime, and sometimes such images feel the need to recur, to impress themselves through the psyche upon waking or remembering consciousness, over and over. Animal images offer both tolerable and intolerable animal faces, animal postures, animal pelts, their smells and sounds, their atmospheres and presences. And, in the absence of such animality, we miss the beasts and call out for them, as we sense their approach, or feel that they are watching without directly intending, sometimes alone, sometimes in packs. Lacan was right to note that the human subject lives in a state of lack, which produces not only desire, but also paranoia. To continue with our celebration of animal beauties, echoing Plato’s model of the cosmos as a composite animal form, the animal kingdom itself, as a whole, may be imagined as a composite body: a complex, ranging organism showing organization in depth and self display in breadth, a multivariant aesthetic or sensual and sensory presentation of body. Zoologists and natural historians often prefer functional descriptions of animals to the emphasis (and bias) here upon immediacy of presentation demanding appreciation – a biology grounded in aesthetic. Typical of such an instrumental or functional approach is that of Beynus (in Masson and McCarthy, 1996, p. 190) in a natural history book written for the general public. This account resorts to a mixture of utilitarianism and hardheaded sociobiology in a description of the ‘purpose’ of the peacock’s extraordinary display. Beynus asks what it is about the peacock’s fan that makes the peahen interested and sexually receptive: ‘The iridescence? The graceful shape? The spots that look like eyes?’ None of these aesthetic features suggests the author, rather it is merely ‘the sheer size of the fan’, that itself signals something about the health of the bird carrying it. To carry such a fan, the adult male ‘must



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be both strong and wily’. Further, the female may not be drawn to the colour of the plumage, but to the fact that the ‘sheen shows that the bird is free from parasites’. Then females are ‘rewarded by passing on their genes’ through healthier offspring. In Beynus’s functionalist reading, first the peacock displays quantity not quality (a variant on our current obsession in the Information Age with raw quantity of information rather than imagination of such information). Second, following sociobiological orthodoxy, this secures a ‘future’ for the ‘selfish’ genes. Effectively, the magnificent display of this extraordinary beast is merely a receptacle for its guaranteed continuity – the safety of the genes. The aesthetic appreciation of the animal is then squashed, displaced by the utilitarian. Jeffrey Masson and Susan McCarthy (ibid.) offer derisive comment on this same passage, suggesting that the peahen may not be ‘thought of as a calculating gene-shipper’, but may find the peacock’s tail simply beautiful in its own right, as we do. Why ignore the self-evident? – the peacock’s tail is beautiful in its surplus, its swagger, and its wanton exaggeration (as is the rest of its plumage). Beynus’s reading is also Puritan, mean-spirited, resisting the model of biological life proposed by Georges Bataille (1991), based on the value of excess. Following Marcel Mauss’s description of the potlatch ceremony of Pacific Coast Amerindians, where surplus is not hoarded or re-invested as in Capitalism, but is bound to be given over as a gift, Bataille describes Nature as overabundant, working on surplus, or offering the free gift of abundant life through the fount of the sun’s light, that also paradoxically marks the star’s slow suicide or sacrifice. (Although the obligation to give more than one receives introduces certain complex anxieties into human relations – the ‘gift’ is also an ‘accursed share’ as Bataille notes in the title to his text.) Zoologists who are interested in animal beauty, such as Susan McCarthy, above, still however fall into a disguised anthropocentrism. This is to project or displace the Cartesian–Kantian human ‘subject’ onto the animal as if it were a subject whose interior life might match that of humans in mild representation. Masson and McCarthy describe the ‘emotional lives of animals’ with great sensitivity for the animal Other, but always through the assumed transcendental ground of a transparent human subjectivity that is necessarily then projected onto the animals despite constant injunctions in their text against the supposed anthropocentrisms and anthropomorphisms of other writers and commentators. Many writers on animal ‘experiences’, while intentionally of a broad animal rights persuasion, reinforce this human-centred fallacy because they have not first established a critical perspective towards





what they regard as human or anthropological experience, specifically human subjectivities. There is a dual process at work. ‘Animal’, set up as ‘Other’ through exclusion of whatever poisons the purity of the category ‘human’, comes to define the human. However, the human is also defined by what it includes, and this will involve a sense of animality, recovered from the animal world. As we ship this back to the category ‘human’, we want to limit it, qualify it, not shipping back a ‘bestiality’. Hence, we want animals to have human-like experiences and consciousness, so that we can include them as a defining feature of the human psyche. This process may be further grounded in, and made more complex by, the tendency to confuse the presentational event with the representational experience and recounting of that event. What if we were to switch focus from the inner life of the experiencer (animal or human) to the event experienced (animal or human display, set among a world in display)? This switch from presentation (the event itself) to representation (the event as experienced and recalled) reminds us that we might ‘see’ the self-displaying peacock in its own right as offering beauty. Of course, in a post-Kantian world of the crisis of representation, objections will be readily raised to this position. In the Kantian tradition, unmediated ‘immediacy’ of perception is impossible, as the world of objects is mediated, represented through transcendental human categories of space, time, causality and morality. ‘Reality’ or ‘Nature’ is always a construction. Schools of direct and indirect realism, where varying degrees of unmediated perception are recognized, and where it is noted that the environment intends us, or educates our attention, counter such an idealism. In such views (Adolf Portmann, James Gibson, James Hillman), what is often implied is that states of unmediated ‘immediacy’ are facilitated by an ‘animalizing’ of the human psyche, as a prepresentational state. This switch from idealism to indirect realism would celebrate display for its own sake, as Adolf Portmann celebrates the bird song that is ‘free’ or not tied to ‘function’. Also, it would switch attention to the act and away from the experience of the act, so that singing for the bird is now for the sake of the song, and neither for the bird itself nor the listener. It is the song’s individuation which now becomes central, supporting the view of the biological world as a selfgenerating, intelligent, deeply organized system concerned with emergence out of surplus – a system with ‘time’ on its hands whose purpose is primarily aesthetic: a purposiveness without functional purpose.



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3

Though in many of its aspects this visible world seems formed in love, the invisible spheres were formed in fright. (Herman Melville, Moby Dick)

Arks for the biological, cognitive and imaginary animals Ecological crisis is an established part of the post-modern condition. It is a crisis so huge that it has led to an apocalyptic numbing, an anaesthetic. The figures describing the loss of species and the parallel explosion in human population are so large, time scales are so pressing, situations so catastrophic, and predictions so complex, that it is difficult for concerned individuals to know how to act to save the animals, to aid in the conservation of nearly extinct species. Palaeontologists and biologists tell us that massive waves of extinction are part of the world’s history, but that in the past these were products of environmental factors such as meteorite collisions, or volcanic explosions, while now humans are the agents that have brought us to the brink of a world disaster. Five major mass extinctions have wiped out in each case between 76 per cent and 95 per cent of the species of the time. The Permian extinction of 245 million years ago wiped out 95 per cent of animal species. The last major extinction, 65 million years ago, wiped out the dinosaurs and allowed a platform for mammalian species to develop. Currently, about 10 per cent of life-forms may have been extinguished through human destruction of habitats, but this figure is open to an exponential leap as the human population is still exploding, requiring more and more resources to sustain its immediate growth. Estimates suggest that 150 years from now, one half of the world’s species are likely to have been made extinct largely through human 51



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intervention in the biosphere. Only 50 years from now, one half of the world’s forest-dwelling birds will have disappeared due to deforestation. The most pessimistic scenario sees us undergoing another mass extinction, in which biodiversity will dramatically reduce, while so-called ‘weed’ or ‘pest’ animal species such as rats and pigeons will flourish, competing for scarce resources with humans. (Interestingly, rats and pigeons are the staple laboratory animals for psychological research attempting to investigate and explain, by extrapolation, human behaviour!) What is different about the current wave of extinction is the rate of change. It is estimated that 13 million species of plants and animals live on Earth, but only 1.7 million have been ‘discovered’ and recorded. Extinction rates are crudely estimated at between 1000 and 10 000 times greater than the average extinction rates for the previous five major extinctions during geological history. Those intent on mapping the biosphere will inevitably be by-passed by species being made extinct daily as a result of human intervention. The World Conservation Union’s 1994 survey of endangered species includes many fish and insects as well as high profile mammals such as the Siberian tiger. They conclude that a quarter of the world’s mammal species, and over a tenth of bird species, are threatened with extinction, and that 1265 species have disappeared over the past 400 years. The list of nearly extinct species becomes a heartbreaking issue when one reads that (at the time of writing) only one male Spix’s macaw is left in the wild in Brazil, while there are just 30 in captivity; and the Vaquita population, porpoises from the Gulf of California, Mexico, has been reduced to only 96 known individuals. Why this offends is because it constitutes a loss of aesthetic possibility – extinction is a form of antiaesthetic or an-aesthetic, a numbing, just as we are numbed by the size of the catastrophe and feel powerless as individuals in the face of it. Biodiversity is not a question of quantities, but qualities, as aesthetic variety. Other surveys show that because of shrimp trawling off the coast of northeast Mexico, the female population of Kemp’s Ridley Sea Turtle has been reduced from 42 000 to less than 1000 since the Second World War. The Californian Condor had become extinct in the wild by 1987, at which time 13 of the 87 birds in captivity were released. However, five of these birds have already died – one was run over by an automobile, three flew into power lines, and one died from drinking antifreeze. The English population of the Starlet Sea Anenome, confined to East Anglia and parts of the southwest coast, is endangered due to pollution. The most publicized of endangered species, the Giant Panda, has



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been poached nearly to extinction, largely because their pelts were once used to stuff mattresses. Humans have also destroyed their habitat. Tourism and urbanization of the coast of north Africa has led to the Mediterranean Monk Seal seeking a new habitat in caves, but this has not been conducive to breeding, and the seal population is endangered. Agricultural development has led to the decimation of the habitat of the Ethiopian Wolf, which has also been extensively cross-bred with domesticated dogs, so that fewer than 1000 of these wolves now remain. The World Wide Fund for Nature produced a report in December 1998 on endangered species, which includes the British Skylark (whose habitat is threatened by changes in agriculture), and the Water Vole (threatened by the American mink, which has escaped from fur farms). These totemic species will be lost within ten years. This is but a partial list of casualties. Four main factors now lead to extinction of wild species: first, the destruction of habitats through conversion of forest into grazing and farmland, and through destruction of forest by the logging industry. Second, direct effects of pollution. Third, hunting to extinction, in many cases purely for one item such as rhinoceros horn. Fourth, collection for the pet trade. Destruction of fresh water habitats through pollution, endangering the lives of fish, amphibia and reptiles, and then affecting other species in the associated food chains, is likely to take over from forest destruction as the most significant ecological crisis in the near future. The debate spills out into the ethics of zoos – those in support of zoos point to the benefits of conservation and research, those against point to the potentially inhumane treatment of animals through removal from their usual habitats, and the turning of animals into spectacle or entertainment. And here we are not telling the story of many successful conservation campaigns and the establishment of wildlife ‘parks’ or natural habitats that are surveyed and policed. A campaign recently fought in Britain caused a major road scheme to re-route as it would disturb the habitat of a rare spider. The case was easily won – but then the British have a sentimental attachment to animals that may not be shared by logging and mining companies in Brazil. The debate is also displaced, perhaps to salve our consciences, by reference to evidence of decidely non-conservationist activities in earlier cultures. Flaubert, in his novel Salammbo, reconstructs the Punic world of Carthage in 241–38 BC. A group of Mercenaries, expelled from the city, begin to wander the countryside. Some way out of the city they come upon ‘a lion attached to a cross by its four limbs’: a crucified lion. ‘A hundred paces further on they came upon two more lions’, then



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upon a row of the crucified animals, some ‘of such huge size that the shafts of the crosses bent beneath their great weight’. The soldiers discovered that this was how the peasantry of Carthage displayed their revenge upon the marauding beasts. Closer to our own time, the need for fighting ships in Elizabethan England destroyed vast tracts of oak forest, and with it animal populations adapted to the forests. Iron Age farmers had much earlier also decimated huge areas of forest across Europe to provide grazing for domesticated animals. We are rightly concerned for the welfare of the threatened animals. These are the inhabitants of the non-mediated, biological realm of the real that we defended in the previous chapter as a realm of immediate beauty and sublimity in self-presentation. But do we have a similar ecological attitude towards represented, simulated, mediated or non-literal animals – psychological animals such as those prowling our dreams, and conceptual animals as metaphors and other figures of speech through which we both make sense of the world and re-invent it as culture? Do these ‘animals’ also need to be saved from possible extinction? How might they be housed, or how might their non-literal habitats be maintained? Is it enough that we proliferate them as ‘texts’ and as ‘discourses’? The animal of the mind – the conceptual animal – has certainly established itself as a vigorous element in contemporary thinking. Thomas Sebeok (1994, p. 66) distinguishes between ‘biological’ animals in an outer world, and ‘semiotic’ animals, in what the ethologist von Uexkull (1934) called an Umwelt: in Sebeok’s description, ‘self-worlds or the subjective universe’. Von Uexkull’s description of Umwelt includes ‘surrounding world’ and strictly describes how an organism might be studied within its immediate environment in terms of a continuity with that environment. Von Uexkull’s view is that the outer topology of an environment is somehow isomorphically represented for the organism via whatever receptors that organism possesses, offering an internal representation of the environment as a ‘semiotic space’. The orthodox anthropological view of ‘animals of the mind’ is summarized by Richard Tapper (1994, p. 55) as ‘the cognitive and metaphoric . . . uses of animals’. Tapper places emphasis upon what relations with animals may mean for human self-reflection and understanding. Such focus upon cultural constructions at the expense of the biological also focuses upon an Umwelt as a subjective universe, rather than as a participatory or extensive condition of co-existence where humans become significant in relation to the significance of other aspects of the environment. All anthropologists do not uphold such status of



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the represented animal. Tim Ingold (1994, p. 12), for example, holds a presentational view, where he suggests that ‘we perceive animals directly by virtue of their immersion in an environment that is largely ours as well, regardless of the images that we may hold of them, or whether we hold such images at all’, thus shifting us away from animals of the mind back to the biological creatures and their self-evident, phenomenal nature, as self-presentation. However, it is important that we bear in mind a democracy of our proposed three kinds of animal presence – biological, psychological and conceptual. For, as we encounter post-modern views of animal rights, we find discussion about literal animals laced with references to the animal as a vehicle for thinking about humans (the cognitive animal, as a structural element in thinking). What is usually excluded from such discussion, however, is the pre-modern ‘familiar’: the psychological animal that educates and initiates the human into an anti-humanism, away from person-centredness into an animal-directedness. Here, the animal is recovered from enslavement to discourses constructing human identities, to establish its difference, as radical Other. But, as we shall discover, this otherness (of animal familiarity) is itself not primarily of the biological realm but is also mental, cognitive or semiotic (the animal whose ecological niche or habitat is symbolic language), and most importantly, imaginal or fantastic (the animal whose habitat is the imaginary and pre-verbal). We need then an animal rights or welfare movement for the biological, semiotic/cognitive, and imaginary species – three Arks in one.

Animals and ethics Alongside the more literal animal rights activists has developed a school of moral philosophers who often quote Peter Singer’s (1976) Animal Liberation as foundational, although some of the issues in that book were prefigured almost a century ago in Rémy de Gourmont’s (1906) The Natural Philosophy of Love, a book about sex in the animal kingdom that avoids utilitarian descriptions of reproductive mechanisms to describe the aesthetics of animal sexuality. De Gourmont criticizes Darwinism for its privileging of the human, and makes a plea to see humans not as a culmination of Nature, but as ‘in Nature’: ‘Man will then find himself in his proper and rather indistinct place in the crowd, beside the monkeys, rodents and bats’ (ibid., p. 3). De Gourmont prefigures the pleas of moral philosophers concerning animal rights when he says that while animals may have a ‘smaller





liberty’ than humans, nevertheless, ‘when life begins liberty begins’ (ibid., p. 4). Also, he democratizes the animal kingdom: ‘We are animals, we live on animals, and animals live on us’, while healing the rift that theology has created between human and animal: ‘There is no abyss between man and animal, the two domains are separated by a tiny rivulet which a baby could step over.’ His polemic is tolerable because he insists upon us not viewing the animal world, and animal–human relations, through functional, mechanical eyes, but through aesthetics. Thus, what ultimately re-absorbs the human back into the commonwealth of animals, after theology’s demise and the secular re-imagination of Nature by Darwin, is love and sex: ‘Love is profoundly animal; therein is its beauty’ (ibid., p. 5). Again it is the animal, the beast, who leads us into appreciation, into aesthetic awareness. Mary Midgley, perhaps in Britain the most important philosopher to have concerned herself with animals and ethics, in a radio interview broadcast in October 1996, claimed that a decade ago no university philosophy department in Britain would have considered the animal rights issue as a topic worthy of philosophical debate, teaching or research. But now, almost every philosophy department had introduced this topic. In the same year, a vigorous debate followed the right-wing philosopher Roger Scruton’s media discussions and publication of some polemical pieces dismissing animal ‘rights’ outright, as a logical contradiction. Scruton distinguished between animal rights and human concern for animals and felt that he had exposed a new ‘soft’ thinking that had contaminated recent philosophy. Any decent rationalist, he argued, could not contemplate the suggestion that an animal, even apes and dolphins, could be assigned rights, for no animal could be said to entertain the notion of responsibilities. He claimed that we confuse the issues of humane actions towards animals (ascribing rights through an anthropocentric filter) with what animals could actually do for themselves. Scruton deliberately stirred in his own piece of controversy by explicitly supporting blood sports (he hunts), knowing that this would produce a sense of outrage from liberals and both the animal welfare and animal rights movements. (In Britain the animal welfare lobby, represented by the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, has only recently and very tentatively associated itself with the moral debate at the heart of the animal rights lobby.) Keith Tester (1991) offers the radical proposal that animal rights may not even be about animals. While stereotyping the animal rights movement somewhat through clumping together differing factions under one heading, Tester nevertheless makes the valuable suggestion that



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many who would say they support animal rights in fact engage in potentially contradictory behaviour such as eating meat and visiting zoos, while they might not support extremes such as blood sports or vivisection (and are thus supporters of animal welfare rather than animal rights). Tester’s argument is that shades of the expressed value ‘animal rights’ or ‘animal liberation’ in fact constitute a dissimulation. They disguise a human need for clearer identification of our own ground in contrast to the world of animals. This parallels the views of poststructuralists on human identity, which suggest that ‘identity’ is established through focus upon definitions of ‘other’. Through defining and marginalizing ‘otherness’, so we establish identity on the basis of exclusion. ‘Identity’ becomes defined by what we are not, what cannot be assimilated, or would taint supposed categorical purity (Latour, 1993). The more we debate the animal issue, suggests Tester, the more we drive ourselves away from identification with them (de Gourmont’s ‘tiny rivulet’ between animals and humans once more an ‘abyss’), to establish a deeper anthropocentric identity. Further, issues such as cruelty to animals are judged not by the apparent surface factor of empathic emotional response, but through displacement of a deeper, unconscious, desire to not touch the animal lest we are contaminated by it. ‘Animal rights’ is read rather as the disguised ritual avoidance of pollution by the animal world, centred on the fantasized dangers of touching animals (which echoes Levitican imperatives). This contamination or pollution can be read as literal, but is more importantly a contamination of the purity of the anthropocentric category or sign – ‘Man’ as opposed to ‘Animal’. Tester thus employs a stereotypical Freudian reading, to expose what he thinks is a hidden and sinister motive disguised by an outer quasiethical position: what really motivates this quasi-‘care’ for animals is a need to deny our own animality and assert our humanity by separating ourselves from the animals. This would imply a defence mechanism of reaction formation at work, with an outward motive and justification precisely the opposite of the unconscious desire. Thus we strongly identify with the position of the caretaker or steward, reinforcing our anthropocentrism, while unconsciously fearing contamination of our fully human souls through the polluting touch of the bestial. We are, in other words, still Aristotelian at heart, via Augustine, Aquinas and Medieval and Renaissance humanists, who themselves would never wish to admit humanity back to Eden after the expulsion from the Garden, because there we would be walking and talking not just with animals, but may find that the God who passes by in the cool of the evening with a quiet welcome is also an animal.




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A critique of Tester’s ideas, basically suggesting that his analysis is too extreme, is provided by Steve Baker (1993), whose Picturing the Beasts: Animals, Identity and Representation is a paradigmatical text for the equating of animals with ideas, or the use of animals in the mental life of humans, as constructs, concepts, linguistic tropes and other representations. From Baker’s text, one would imagine that the animal as representational idea is flourishing, while the presentational biological animal faces extinction. Commentators on the post-modernization and hyper-realization of culture, such as Jean Baudrillard, would point out that we have moved beyond the issue of transition from presentation to representation. We have now moved from representation to hyperrealization, virtuality or simulation. The pressing problem of extinction applies to both biological and psychological species, through their translation into simulations and simulacra (copies without originals). The virtualization and sanitization of the animal is, as we have repeatedly suggested, witnessed particularly in television wildlife programmes, where ‘wild’ is exterminated in the production of domesticated, consumer images. The animal is also Disneyfied through offering it as entertainment, and normalized, as it is (ab)used as a vehicle to promote socialized (oedipalized) human values of, for example, family life, territorial dominance and gender typing. These televisual animal presences seem no match for the violating yet loving familiars of the shamans, who are also imaginary beasts, but are rooted firmly in biological soil, and bear the stench of that soil. Our concern in this chapter will be the status of this third kind of animal presence after the biological and conceptual – the imaginal beast or the psychological animal. This animal is always on the verge of extinction, but this is not primarily the result of applied human will. The nature of imagination and its relationship to memory makes this variety of animal necessarily unstable, neither time-bound nor spacebound in the Kantian, humanistic sense of such transcendental categories, and certainly not subject to popular notions of causality. For example, just ‘where’ the habitat of a dream animal or a spirit familiar ‘is’ appears to be easily resolved by Kantian idealism. Surely, argues the good Cartesian–Kantian, the image is ‘in’ us, located in the house of ‘our’ imaginations and mental constructions, while we must admit that they are unpredictable in their appearance and sometimes unwelcome guests when they appear as suffering images or images of suffering. Yet they are characterized by their very spontaneity, their autonomy, their



The terrible familiar

intentions – including the need to make us jump, laugh, cry, smile, appreciate their very appearance, scare the wits out of us, make us sit bolt upright in our beds gripped in a cold sweat, eyes wide, the universe heavy on us and large, very large. And this returns us to the view that images are actually beyond the personal, or that the person is embedded in them as we are constituted by them; or that they visit as spirit forms, sometimes as familiars, quickly recognized as such. The animals that appear this way, as images, or as spirits or familiars, appear to have intentions, and appear to educate the person through those intentions. Yet we are confused with regard to their status: we do not want to recognize them as ‘real’. They are not flesh and blood. How can we talk of their ecologies, their households, their niches? But here we are creating an unnecessary encumbrance to their appearances, offering an un-ecological attitude – one of non-conservation. To conserve these animal images we must, as the religious perspectives of small-scale cultures teach us, familiarize ourselves with them, inhabit their worlds through our own world-making imaginations, and respect and return their intentions. We know their habitats as the media through which their presences are realized – dreams, visions, ecstasies, literature (oral and written), the visual arts. We do not need literal recourse to Arctic Tundra- or Brazilian Rainforest-inspired shamanic visions when we have film, sculpture, science fiction, and so forth. But the narratives of shamans nevertheless can provide a rich source of inspiration for us, denying our Cartesian and Kantian selves their characteristic and habitual responses: to dissolve the habitats and presences of psychological animals and thus create mass extinction of species of images. Certain attitudes or apprehensions, such as literalism, that are anti-metaphoric and anti-imaginal, automatically withdraw potential habitation for psychological animals. In one sense this is an act of discrimination, of marginalization, even extermination. Perhaps we are simply frightened by the fact that familiars often come in terrible guise and we must suffer their presences as we come to familiarize ourselves with their being and intentions, for the terrible familiar is not suited to what the economist Kenneth Galbraith (1992) has come to describe as our ‘culture of contentment’. It is not that we must be ‘macho’, tough, to accept the more suffering realities of the ‘terrible familiar’ – the animal image or spirit that comes out of the interstices of the imaginary to rake off your skin and leave your nerves exposed, and always appears through the medium of raw emotions – for heroism is one of the primary attitudes that negates the possibility of familiarity with the psychological animal. Where, then, may we look,





culturally and historically, for models of appropriate apprehension of the terrible familiar, an apprehension that may be called an ‘animalizing imagination’? Classical shamanism at core is concerned with initiations and lifelong education by such animal spirits. As long as we recognize and avoid the traps of New Age ‘neo-shamanism’ (appropriation, simplification and personalizing), that now overlays readings of traditional shamanic narratives (Noel, 1997), the classical shamanism of indigenous peoples provides a rich background against which to imagine contemporary animal–human relations and animal rites.

The shaman’s initiation in the shadow of the totem tree The animalizing imagination is characterized by an admixture of eros, pathos and pothos: love, suffering and longing. Or, it can be characterized by three valencies or dimensions: the affective–erotic, the pathologized, and the aesthetic. While the previous chapter inquired into the aesthetic aspect to animal presence, in this chapter the animalizing imagination offers itself as a paradoxical mixture of the familiar and the terrifying: the disturbance of love as the interruption of animality, or the irruption of consciousness by the often suffering animalizing imagination. The mythographer and historian of religions Mircea Eliade (1968, p. 61) in the context of a discussion of animal familiars in shamanism, says that ‘to communicate with animals . . . is to appropriate a spiritual life much richer than the merely human life’. But this deep familiarity with animal presence – encompassing the full range of animality: biological, conceptual, and psychological – comes at a price, as the paradigmatical examples of shamans’ initiations by terrifying yet loving animal familiars inform us. The typical initiation by an animal familiar may be found in shamanic lore from the Arctic Circle. An Inuit shaman recalls the story of his initiation or calling: while out hunting he was tipped out of his kayak by a huge walrus and taken deep under water, where the animal gored him, perforating the man’s lung and breaking his collarbone. The hunter manages to make it home, where a shaman cures him. In time, the hunter becomes a shaman himself, with the walrus as his familiar or spirit helper. Francis Huxley (1989, p. 254), who reports this story, suggests that ‘Solitude, danger, expectation, and pain are all intensives, and their effect is to swing a man from one extreme to another. What happens then is that the attacker – be it human, animal, spirit, or disease – is turned into a helper. . . . Spirit helpers are transfigurations of



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complaints, which is why their advice is so useful when shamans come to deal with the complaints of others.’ The animal spirit that kills also cures. To a literalist mentality such stories are negatively judged as fictions, fabrications, imaginings. Of course, says the psychological apprehension – it is precisely because they are imaginational that they possess the power to cure the sicknesses of literalism and conceptualism. Another Inuit shaman tells of being taken to a cave by an older teacher. The old man took off his clothes and went inside the cave: ‘It was not long before I saw a great bear come swimming along, crawl ashore, and approach’ says the novice. The bear entered the cave, and, upon seeing the old man ‘flung itself upon him, crunched him up, limb for limb, and ate him. Then it vomited him out again and swam away’ (in Halifax, 1980, p. 108). The old shaman said that this initiatory experience had happened to him several times, and on each occasion he had gained more power, or came closer to his helping spirits. Again, this is familiarity purchased at a cost. The animal released from the trap, discussed previously in the context of a teaching story, may either spring and maul, or show gratitude. In these initiations, it does both at once. It loves one to death. The initiation by a familiar may be more or less erotic – while it is always affective, a thorough emotional immersion. Father Martin Gusinde’s studies of the Yahga or Yamana peoples of Tierra del Fuego were conducted between 1919 and 1923, prior to the extinction of these isolated hunters and gatherers. Gusinde (in Campbell, 1984, pp. 160–1) gives an account of a shaman’s spontaneous initiation which is worth quoting at length: ‘A man could be strolling alone along the seashore, lost in dreamland . . . when he would suddenly find himself in the midst of a visionary spectacle of . . . “apparitions”. Around him crowds an immeasurable company of herrings, whales, swordfish, vultures, cormorants, gulls and other creatures. All are addressing him in flattering terms, respectfully, in the most friendly way; and he is beside himself, has no idea what is happening. His whole body numb, he drops to the ground and lies there without moving. His soul is consorting with the spirits, and feeling, while among them, an inordinate joy. Then suddenly, they are gone. . . . Waking from this heavy sleep, the man stumbles home. He hardly knows where he is. He falls onto his bed; is back in his dream; and again there appears the animal swarm. They are inviting his soul to join them. And it does so following them out onto the high seas. Moreover, there is one that is being especially amiable, in the most extravagantly attentive way, and this will become his familiar.’





This ecstatic imagining offers a love affair, and an initiation into visionary ability. In his novel The Sleep of the Great Hypnotist, Peter Redgrove describes a similar initiation involving a man walking on one of the Scilly Isles off the south-west tip of Britain, who moves through fear into trance as a flock of terns appears to be gathering in order to attack him; but, as his attitude changes, as he relaxes, so the terns begin to land on him, as companions: ‘they were like organs of his body, like feathered masks that he was wearing. . . . Suddenly all the wings raised and flapped together, and had anyone been watching they would have seen an appearance like a tall man standing in white flames that covered him. Then the birds launched themselves in the air, and left him. As he walked back along the path, he saw his companions . . . saluting him far above’. Rasmussen (1930) collected the following story from Aua, an Iglulik Arctic Circle shaman: ‘My . . . helping spirit was a shark. One day when I was out in my kayak it came swimming up to me, lay alongside quite silently and whispered my name. I was greatly astonished, for I had never seen a shark before; they are very rare in these waters’ (in Halifax, 1980, p. 113). All was not so cosy however – Aua also reported a feeling of ‘inexplicable terror’ accompanying the apparently tender visitation. The familiarity is fearful, terrible. The trance state initiation of the shaman offers a personal reinforcement of a cultural norm: an imagination of the world through an animalizing apprehension. While the vision is characteristically a ritual dismemberment and rebirth, or a shock into the new, the encounter is nevertheless often described in terms of a love affair. Ioan Lewis (1989, p. 51) notes that ‘shamanism includes a special relationship with a divinity or divinities’, which are often animal spirits that may strike up an erotic relationship: ‘ecstatic possession seizures are sometimes explicitly interpreted as acts of mystical sexual intercourse between the subject and his or her possessing spirit’. The Dayak of Borneo are said to act out the mythological sexual intercourse between the main deities of the upperworld and the underworld: the Hornbill and the Watersnake respectively. A priest (hornbill) and priestess (watersnake) become possessed by these animal spirits and enact the sacred intercourse. Roy Willis (1994, p. 19) calls such an intimacy between human and animal ‘a recurrent theme of ancient religion’, that ‘may well be the most archaic of all metaphors of cultural world-making, to judge by its world-wide distribution in tribal origin myths’. Ruth Padel (1992) notes that in classical Greek descriptions emotions are often ascribed to the intrusion of an invisible animal spirit that is said to enter the body.



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Drawing on the same martial metaphors we use for an ‘invading’ virus, that ‘wages war’ on the body, Padel shows that in early Greek tragedy, such metaphors are mixed with erotic reference. Animals, as spirits, enter the innards in a way likened to intercourse; and human sexual desire is itself described in terms of animal metaphors, one’s erotic desires likened to an irritant bee sting. There are modern accounts that keep this theme alive. Away from shamanic culture, but in the same spirit, Isidore Ducasse (under the pen-name Lautréamont) in Maldoror (1978, pp. 111–12) describes a man making love with a female shark: ‘The swimmer is now in the presence of the female shark he has saved. They look into each other’s eyes for some minutes, each astonished to find such ferocity in the other’s eyes. . . . Then by common accord they glide towards one another underwater, the female shark using its fins, Maldoror cleaving the waves with his arms. . . . When they are three yards apart they suddenly and spontaneously fall upon one another like two lovers and embrace with dignity and gratitude, clasping each other as tenderly as brother and sister. Carnal desire follows this demonstration of friendship. Two sinewy thighs press tightly against the monster’s viscous flesh . . . while their throats and breasts soon form one glaucous mass amid the exhalations of the seaweed . . . they joined in a long, chaste and ghastly coupling!’ A further typical example of the paradoxical mix of the erotic–affective and the suffering is given by Shternberg (in Halifax, 1980, pp. 120–3) in an account of a Siberian shaman who claimed to have a spirit wife. He says that she came to him in a vision, and threatened to kill him if he did not take her as a wife. When she is angry, says the shaman, she comes to him ‘under the aspect of . . . a wolf, so she is terrible to look at’. Sometimes she comes as a winged tiger. She brings him three helpers – a panther, bear and tiger, who appear in his dreaming. Although they ‘appear whenever I summon them’, says the shaman, the animal spirits are to be treated with great respect, for they ‘steal souls’. These examples rest firmly in the realm of the imaginal – the visionary world. Bernard d’Anglure (1994, p. 187) brings us back to the literal human–animal relationship of affectivity and of divine respect, associated with the breaking of a taboo in the hunt, and the mixture of fear and awe that this may bring. This illuminates the whole question of what quality of relationship between animal and human is privileged in an animal-centred and animal-directed religious context. In such settings, while certain relationships to spirit animals are validated and celebrated, some literal contacts are taboo. In a study of Arctic Circle Inuit hunters, d’Anglure says that it was not uncommon to find that





the male hunter, ‘Confronted with the still-warm body of a female bear that he had killed, was overcome with an irresistible sexual desire’, despite the power of the taboo. As Freud (1919, p. 61) reminds us, ‘The oldest and most important taboo prohibitions are the two basic laws of totemism: namely not to kill the totem animal, and to avoid sexual intercourse with totem companions of the other sex.’ Necrophilia and bestiality in one act? – not if you are offered the still-warm body of a god(dess). Not if your myths tell you this is the animal from whom your clan is descended, who is your initiator and guide to an otherworld of spirits, who has offered herself to you in a ‘give-away’ as food. Nevertheless you have broken a taboo, and realized the strange mixture of eroticism and terror, as well as inhabiting the complex boundary between the psychological and the literal. The taboo breaking is the only – albeit dangerous – gateway to the deeper familiarity that Freud (ibid., p. 187) describes as living in the shadow of the totem tree, the ‘general totem taboo, which . . . forbids anyone to sit in the shadow of the totem tree’, or to remain within the incestuous circle of the dangerous familiarity of your totemic ancestor animals. Michael Taussig (1987) suggests that, through an animalizing imagination, the shaman’s purpose is to mobilize the kind of terror illustrated above, in order to subvert it, to turn it into a healing power, a cure. Through the animal encounter, the shaman learns to face savagery, ‘not to eliminate but to acquire it’ (ibid., p. 391). The shaman follows this pattern in order to claim for himself the ‘savagery’ that allows him to visit a space of death – the otherworld of animal spirits – and this requires an animal courage in itself, associated world-wide in shamanism with the carnivore (Douglas, 1992). The shaman is sometimes seen as a wild-man, closer to the animals than to humans. Francis Huxley (1989, p. 249) describes the initiation of a Tungus shaman, who ‘is taken by a wild spirit and disappears . . . he kills animals with his teeth and eats them raw, and eventually returns dirty, torn, and savage, mumbling incoherent words’. These animal-based initiations are often savage: a Gitskan North American Indian shaman describes falling into a terrifying trance on a Vision Quest, in which ‘a large owl . . . took hold of me, caught my face, and tried to lift me up. I lost consciousness’ (Halifax, 1980, p. 184). An African !Kung shaman, in an account collected by Biesele (in ibid., pp. 54–62) says that when you go into trance, into ecstasy, and leave the body, you may visit ‘God’, who is not benevolent, but a ‘terrible thing’. ‘God’, it appears, is a composite animal body who is also the source of suffering. When you are in the presence of such a God in your



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trance journey it is likely that ‘flies cluster all over your sides . . . And mambas. Pythons . . . Bees. Locusts. . . . When you go there, they bite you . . . they bite your legs and they bite your body. . . . The mamba bites you . . . it is a foul thing. It kills you and you die’. The spirit animals – operating as the ‘influenza’ of the human mind – are located within God’s house, that is a bestiary. These animals constitute a mundus imaginalis that infects human life as it tempts such life. This infection, these animal poisons, are examples of a pharmakon or healing poison, for they give the ability to slip free from the traps of literalism in the death of the naturalistic perspective and the emergence of an animalinspired ecstatic trance or imagining. In the same !Kung shaman’s account, God’s penis is compared to a mamba; and God’s house is full of dangerous animals such as leopards and lions. The composite animal body of God greets you with a snakelike penis, that talks. There is only one way to survive this ordeal, says the shaman – only one way to not get killed: you must suffer the ordeal as an initiation, through becoming part of the waters from God’s penis, his urine. You do this through dancing the trance dance, and obtaining the ‘power’, the n/um, via a snaking movement that does not just simulate, but is said to be the actual stream of urine itself. Entering into the trance dance allows you to become as the power of God’s piss, and then you can, and must, enter God’s house as an animal, preferably small like a mamba: ‘If you go to him like a regular person, you’ll die. . . . But if you’re a snake . . . If you’re a mamba, you’ll stay alive’. Snaking like the stream of urine in your trance dance, you become snake-like and slither into God’s house, almost unnoticed, says the shaman. We might conclude that now the trance dancer is animalized, close to divinity, both infected and healed, poisoned to those perspectives that would defend against entry into the animal house: anthropocentrism, humanism, person-centredness. We might suggest that the corpse resulting from the death of such perspectives feeds the animal in the divine. In Arctic Circle shamanic initiations, we have met the common vision of being devoured by a huge but emaciated polar bear spirit, where for example the initiate is bitten in the heart and ‘dies’ only to be reborn with increased visionary powers (Kalweit, 1988). The vision occurs in an otherworld, a space where terror, healing and beauty intersect: ‘out in the great solitude’ (Halifax, 1980, p. 69). Howitt (in ibid., pp. 52–4), in 1904, talked with an Australian Wiradjuri shaman called Lizard’s Son, who said he was initiated as a youth by a dead man who came out of a hole in the ground. This ghost ‘rubbed me all over to make me clever’, says Lizard’s Son. Upon entering this space of the living





dead, the young initiate is shown his spirit helper, a tiger-snake. The snake leads him to other poisonous snakes that rub up against him, but do not bite, for now Lizard’s Son has the protective power of snake through his familiar. Ecstasy (moving out of the ordinary sphere of humanity, the world of known time, space and causality) and animal initiation, in this example, are co-dependent, mutually intentional, forming the archetypal structure of a shamanic cosmos and describing the exercise of an animalizing imagination. Such initiations then typically involve a mixture of terror and familiarity or intimacy, conflated in awe. The animal familiar both protects and educates as it shocks. The initiation further reinforces the cultural world-view that places value upon an animalizing imagination. As we have said, to the western mind, such accounts are easily dismissed, because they do not conform to literal sense perception or to the rationalism of a conceptual mind. But this is precisely their value for such a western outlook, for these accounts offer paradigmatical examples of initiation into an apprehension that places image prior to percept and concept, and that recognizes the imagination’s need to pathologize, or express itself in terms of suffering.

The world is a suffering place Towards the end of his life, Jung (1967, p. 391) suggested that ‘The world into which we are born is brutal and cruel, and at the same time of divine beauty.’ The status of the accounts given above of initiation by the terrible familiar will be tied to the particular world-view or value perspective that one holds. Whether or not this view is legitimized or validated, moralized, aesthetically appreciated, and accorded either epistemological or ontological value, will depend ultimately upon the structure of the world-view. A shamanic world-view describes an interpenetration of worlds, especially a world of invisibles that pervades, supports and informs this world, seen in dream and vision, and in ecstatic trance. This otherworld is also described in shamanic lore as the ‘space’ inhabited after death (Taussig, 1987). The numinous may impress or express through pathology, and may be represented by the shaman to the culture through dramatic enactments of spirit journeys and initiations, often described as dangerous. As Hillman (in Christou, 1977, p. iii) suggests, ‘there are perils of the soul for him who investigates its unknown reaches (original italics). Alchemists, yogin, mystics, shamans record awareness of the mortal risks involved’. For example, Dioszegi (in Halifax, 1980, p. 61) records the initiatory vision of a Siberian Sagay



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shaman that begins at a crossroads. The crossroads is not only the place where ‘all the wild animals of the forest enter upon their trails’, but also ‘the path of the spirits of all . . . sicknesses’. In modern psychology the view that most closely resembles this shamanic perspective of relationship to disease as relationship to the personified or animalized spirit or god can be seen to be that of Carl Gustav Jung. For modern people, ‘The gods have become diseases’ suggests Jung (1967a, p. 37). The ancient (now repressed) pagan gods return as symptom, as disease; present no longer in Valhalla or Olympus, but in the solar plexus, the liver, the skin; and met in the consulting room. According to Jane Harrison (1911/1963), prior to these gods being personified, they were described as animal deities, often chthonic, and bringers of suffering. Central to a Cartesian worldview is the attitude that we can exercise control over our environments for human good. Included in what may be controlled are both natural animals and imaginal environments such as dreams. Non-Cartesian world views of small-scale cultures tend to see their environments not in terms of control, but in terms of participation in the given, where ‘environment’ would include the invisible world of spirits that also inheres to natural phenomena (Padel, 1992; Willis, 1994). The environment may be said to be animate, and intentional, while it ‘educates’ humans (who also act as intentional agents in the environment) (Reed, 1994). Further, there is typically a lack of positive idealism towards the environment, expressed as a lack of concern to adapt it to human needs, but rather to conserve and keep in balance the given. Indeed, as expressed above, it is common among such worldviews to perceive the animate environment as fundamentally hostile, or at least irrational and unpredictable, to which the response may be anxiety rather than a desire for control. The response of fear and awe to such a potentially or actually terrifying world may constitute the basis for the evolution of religious experience. What is the evidence supporting the fundamental apprehension of small-scale shamanic cultures that the world is a hostile place, full of malevolent spirits who must be pacified, primarily through the noncontrolling, but interactive, functions of shamans? Ioan Lewis (1989, p. 75) reports an example of a group in the British Honduras whose religious experience is primarily based around a possession cult, and the main bearers of the ecstatic trance are women. However, they are plagued by the imagined continual presence of a creature called the ‘devourer’ that comes to women especially in their dreams, and especially when they are menstruating: ‘This terrifying creature can assume





such various forms as a crab, snake, hen, armadillo, or iguana.’ It also possesses girls, leading them into trance dance. The invisible world of spirits may also be an unseen force indwelling observable natural phenomena. According to Balaji Mundkur (1994, p. 167), the San hunters of southern Africa address the rain as a ‘beast of prey’, and compare it to snakes such as the cobra and puff adder. The rain is said to pelt people with the ‘meat’ of these snakes. Also, Australian Aboriginals are said to fear ‘dangerous’ animals that they perceive ‘in’ the landscape (Lawlor, 1991). These are not natural animals of the hunt, but Dreamtime animals that may enter the human psyche to cause suffering. Drawing on the accounts of Reichel-Dolmatoff of the myths and rites of Amazonian Indians, Joseph Campbell (1988, p. 347) describes the Desana belief that animal spirits, or ‘gigantic prototypes of each species’ inhabit certain ‘houses of the hills’. Further, ‘Besides being the place where the animals live, the houses of the hills also contain illness’. These are the spirit places that shamans are said to visit in ecstatic trance. Animal presence and pathologizing are thus intimately linked in the world-view of these people. Pathology is given with life, as inevitable, but also necessary, and such pathology is carried by animal images, which form the fabric of a cosmology in the Desana culture. Also, there is a paradoxical intimacy at work – one gains familiarity with the animal spirits only at a cost. Using examples drawn from Homeric literature and Greek tragedy, Ruth Padel (1992, p. 140) suggests that early Greek apprehension of the world was not only animistic and animalistic, but also accepted the environment as inherently hostile: ‘The way in which tragedy’s first audiences experienced the world might well strike us . . . as surreal. Or more accurately, as superreal. A world crackling with temperamental, potentially malevolent, divinity.’ The invisible world then acts either autonomously or through the vehicle of a natural phenomenon such as an animal, which is psychologized. To the imagination Padel describes, the world is potentially and intentionally terrible, its terrors articulated through ‘the metonyms and media of animal aggression . . . teeth, beaks, airborne claws, scavenging, raiding, persecuting, impure; earthborn blood-drinking tongues, poisoning eyes, injected poison, stings or bites that madden and enflame’. Padel’s work focuses upon an hypothesized early Greek imagination of emotional life described through literature (and therefore it is open to question whether the literary examples she chooses actually represent a popular imagination). She claims that Homeric language



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described emotions as having their origins not in the person, but in the world: ‘Emotions are nonself and come from outside, not within’ (ibid., p. 151). Further, in this world-view, the human experience of emotion may be a consequence of nonvisible stimuli that assault or attack the person, usually in animal form: ‘the nonhuman world . . . is the prime source of disturbing passions in human beings’ (ibid., p. 150), where ‘Passion mauls, bites, stings’ (ibid., p. 119). In Padel’s reading of such literature, emotions are animalized – they bite like a dog or sting like an insect: ‘Different verbs make this attack ferociously baroque. Amussein, “to lacerate, scratch, tear”, is used of animal claws’ (ibid., p.120), while the same verb also refers to an emotional experience. These animal actions penetrate to, and act on, the innards: ‘Pain and worry lacerate the heart’ like an animal attacking. Diseases have external sources, variously described as hunters or carnivorous animals, attacking the body like the eagle devouring Prometheus’ liver: ‘Being open to emotion is everlasting vulnerability to something that gnaws the innards, which grows again, to be devoured again.’ The invisible animal presence often launches an ‘aerial assault’ that is the cause of an emotion or passion, dominated by ‘wings . . . a cardinal emblem of all the advantages over defensive humanity possessed by the nonhuman’ (ibid., p. 142). This is most potently carried by ‘“eagles” . . . a mixed image of savage, impure, scavenging beaks and claws’ (ibid., p. 130). Thus, to the Greek mind as described by Padel, the causal agency of emotions is invisible, but animal (or animalized). Even desire is potentially a suffering, where a biting passion, a spring fever, is referred to simply as the generic ‘gadfly’, as an irritating injection of poison that makes one mad through its sting. Madness itself is a manifestation of animal force imbibed from outside: a wolfish rage or a lupine or canine madness. The isolated body parts of animals provide specific images for emotional life, as an aesthetic of suffering: ‘Wings, teeth, claws, running and kicking feet, goads, rapes, stings, poison, arrow: animals and daimones together created a spectrum of assault’ (ibid.). (The chapter that follows describes literary modernist versions of this same assault by extreme images of suffering and aggression in animal form, that bear a strong resemblance to these descriptions from early Greek literature gathered by Padel.) Padel argues strongly that we should not project our own world-view onto this material, which we would read as metaphorical or fantastic. Rather, she claims them as direct, sensual experience for the early Greeks. They constitute a powerful catalogue of animal rites – the Greek mind that describes these animal-inspired irrationalities is conjuring





a religious experience grounded in the terrors of the sublime, in which the human is embedded: ‘Specific animals provide the Greeks, as they provide all preindustrial cultures, with most of their images of things to fear’ concludes Padel (ibid., p. 141). She thus challenges the notion of an animal familiarity characterized only by positive affect as the basis to sacred human–animal relations. Rather, Padel implies that specific animal presences that are not necessarily natural or literal can act as a stimulus to fear, and this in turn offers a ground for religious experience.

Four refusals of a florid and pathologized animalizing The rational mind finds accounts such as Padel’s intolerable, or wants to marginalize or exclude any such apprehension, as primitive, childlike and irrational. Given their cultural contexts, however, these accounts of course are neither misguided nor florid. Also, they are not particularly alien to the darker poetic imagination of Modernity (some strains of Romanticism), and such shamanic initiations have their counterpart in the western imagination, as illustrated below. However, before considering such examples, it may be useful to remind ourselves why we find these examples of shamanic animalizing so difficult to accept within a rationalist framework. In summary, these accounts challenge four principles of the post-Enlightenment, liberal humanist mind-set: first, the personalistic basis to humanism that excludes other life forms, including animals, from full aesthetic and ethical consideration. This centres on the perceived status of animals. Second, the resistance of such a mind-set to pathology, illness, disease, entropy, disorder, and failure, encompassed by two kinds of idealism or optimism – the conscious, shoring-up, resistance or refusal of optimistic medical philosophies to accept disease and suffering as an integral part of the human condition; and the naive optimism of innocence, now a foundational requirement of New Age thinking, personified by Voltaire’s Candide, and parodied in that account. Third, the refusal of Enlightenment philosophy (the Age of Reason which we are, to a large extent, still inhabiting) to see value in the irrational (symptomized in the Romantic backlash to the Enlightenment legacy). Fourth, the legacy of Cartesian philosophy that separates humans from the world of things and then judges that world to be inanimate and fully encompassed by the human mind, and indeed raises the sceptical question characterizing idealism – is that world a product of this mind? A first refusal of a florid animalizing, embodied in personalistic humanism, starts with the assumption that an external familiar as



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guide is redundant, surplus to the needs of a self-sufficient personhood. The self is taken as transparent, given, self-creating and self-defining. It is defined by identity, essence, and constitutes a universal structure – it is thus constitutive rather than constituted, a transcendent given. Personhood is accessible via introspection, or self-reflexive inquiry. There is no need to propose a reflective Other (such as the social, the cultural, language, history, animal, environment), for the self is by definition self-contained and self-reflective – agency resides wholly within. In post-structuralist views, this humanistic model of the ideal self is challenged for its lack of reference to construction of the self by other agencies, through reference to ‘difference’. Subjectivities are defined in post-structuralism not as self-defining and transparent, but as subject to conditions such as language, culture and history. Subjectivity must be situated, for example, with reference to influences of gender, race and subculture. Where self is defined in relation to other, and is constituted by exclusions now residing in the other, animals offer such an ‘other’ as location for difference. A second refusal of a florid animalizing focuses upon its unbearable and unacceptable pathologizing, which is resisted in a promotion of a set of ideals centred on the refusal of death and the valorizing of wellbeing. The presence of a familiar that insistently terrifies and terrorizes directly challenges such naive idealism. Indeed, one model of the origin of our religiosity, discussed later in this chapter, would say that it is because of an atavistic fear and awe of animals that our religious life possesses vitality. A third refusal of a florid animalizing, rooted in the rationalism of the Enlightenment project and sealed in Puritanism, rests with a rejection of what is seen as the impure animal itself, and of animality as bestiality. This view denies or marginalizes the animal for the same reason that it marginalizes the child, the insane, the savage and the feminine (in psychology, the ‘hysterical’ feminine as the unpredictably emotional and erotic). These have become categories of otherness that transgress the category of rationality – they are ‘irrational’ only as they are produced through what is excluded by the Enlightenment model of the rational categories of ‘adult’, ‘sanity’, ‘civilized’ and ‘masculine’ (non-hysterical, or non-emotional). Just as the child may be seen but not heard (i.e. not given a voice of reason, a political or civic voice, until ‘adult’); the insane incarcerated and treated to restore ‘normality’; the savage civilized and thus redeemed from eternal damnation (and also from ‘laziness’, thus converted to the Protestant work ethic); and the feminine masculinized (both oedipalized and denied clitoral sexuality





in Freud’s scheme, in order to dampen so-called hysterical–erotic outburst), so the animal must remain bestial, reminiscent of the darkness of Nature and redolent of its suffocating earthy stench. To become animal is to slip from reason – the otherness of Mr Hyde, Frankenstein’s monster, and Dracula, whose collective blood lust ties them with the unpredictable cruelty of the child upon the child, the witchy menstruating woman who has her familiars, and the supposed cannibalism of the savage. A fourth refusal of a florid animalizing itself flatly refuses the external existence of a terrible other, a familiar, and reduces any psychological or imaginational apprehension to conceptual explanation. This worldly and psychological presence of the familiar must be, in the exercise of Cartesian doubt and Humean scepticism, unknowable except within one’s own mental state. It is therefore made extinct even as it is apprehended. Apprehension of the animal becomes a problem to be solved, not a phenomenon with which to familiarize oneself, appreciate, fear or respect. In summary of all four refusals of a florid and pathologized animalizing, Little Red Riding Hood, the confused child, must banish the wolf, calling upon the strong, upright woodsman, who will wield his cleaver with its cutting edge of rational inquiry that seeks closure, transcendental certainties and masculine divisions.

Fear of animals: the origin of religiosity? The second refusal of a florid animalizing outlined above, grounded in a world psyche that pathologizes as it animalizes – an environmental psyche, and not a privatized human psyche – exposes the naivety of the orthodox and dominant Enlightenment view of rationalism and idealism. However, there are world-views in our culture that do accept familiarity with the populated environment and that do take account of terror and suffering as intrinsic to the world, questioning the hegemony of the values of idealization, utilitarianism and rationalism. One of the reasons why archetypal psychology may be said to offer such a complement to pre-modern world-views is through its insistence upon pathologizing as inherent to imagination. One of the main architects of such a view is the late Alfred Ziegler (1976; 1983), who provided a thorough critique of the underpinning values of conventional medical psychology as a naive and idealistic ‘Rousseauian optimism’, which he contrasts with a more realistic ‘morbism’. Ziegler, a psychiatrist and analytical psychotherapist, offers a ‘morbistic’ view of medicine, as a critique of the orthodox medical ideals of health, wellbeing and wholeness that



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he calls ‘sanistic’ (from the Latin sanitas, ‘health’). His perspective also challenges the orthodox allopathic approach to healing, where symptom must be eradicated rather than articulated, and is seen to be of no value in the healing process. Thus, suggests Ziegler (1976, p. 64), ‘the human species is by nature morbid and can escape its fate only in death’. This statement, echoing the Spanish philosopher Miguel Unamuno’s description of life as a ‘sickness unto death’, offers a dark but clearly articulated world-view. Further, ‘morbism . . . is a clinical description of the suchness of man . . . the notion of indigenous pathological tendencies’. The more we pursue the ideals of health and happiness, defined as freedom from pathology, ‘the more fanatic these pursuits, the more they lead us into distress and morass’ claims Ziegler (ibid., p. 65). This may be seen as a kind of self-contamination through the repression of indigenous pathologizing. Ziegler (ibid., p. 54) challenges ‘Rousseauian optimism for its failure to recognize that distress is natural’. Such views should not be confused with either an idealization or romanticizing of sickness itself. He does not conflate sickness with spiritual transcendence, nor does he read illness in terms of an opportunity for, or initiation into, spiritual progress. For Ziegler, there is no virtue in illness, but ‘suchness’ – it is given with the psyche. Adolf Guggenbuhl-Craig and Neil Micklem (1988) also warn of a tendency to moralize sickness, either to negatively value it, or to idealize or romanticize it in a positive valuation, or a symbolizing. They call for an ‘agnostic’ approach to illness, where we might accept that ‘we do not know what disease is all about’ (ibid., p. 144). Does Ziegler’s apparent pessimism have any empirical evidence to take it beyond a merely intuitive hypothesis? Ziegler (1976, p. 57) himself has researched the emotional colouration of dreams and suggests that during Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep, when dreams are most easily recalled, we display ‘innate, natural tendencies’. It is here that human nature is free from its cultural attitude and may reveal a biological authenticity. Do we then dream, as Rousseau’s model would suggest, with ‘serene and harmonic, even joyous’ affect? No, suggests Ziegler (ibid., p. 58), our natural state is rather one of suffering and pain: ‘The results computed from a number of groups have always remained roughly constant. Under laboratory conditions, 30–40 per cent of the dreams take place without any noticeable feelings, emotions, and moods. The remaining 60–70 per cent are three to four times more often unpleasant than pleasant.’ Is this a research-induced effect, a characteristic of ‘laboratory’ dreams? Ziegler suggests not, for in dreams recalled in home environments, while the effect is less pronounced, there is still bias towards





unpleasant emotions. He does not say whether or not the difference between ‘laboratory’ and ‘home’ dreams is significant in itself. However, he does conclude that ‘in the scale of emotions, anxieties by far outweigh all others’. The general view offered by orthodox medicine may be seen as a naive position of idealism in Ziegler’s view (ibid., p. 64) where he quotes the World Health Organisation’s ‘Definition of Health’, as ‘“the state of complete physical, mental and social wellbeing and not merely the absence of illness and infirmity”.’ Ziegler’s (ibid., p. 63) ‘morbism’ adopts a contrary view of ‘as is’, challenging ‘The assumption that nature really means well and intends us to be happy’, as well as the concomitant view that suffering is a result of our lack of understanding, or of incomplete control over natural forces. The biologist Balaji Mundkur (1994) suggests that the religious experience itself may be grounded in the expression of the so-called ‘negative’ emotions of fear, dread and anxiety, which themselves are experienced as responses to actual or supposed fear-inducing stimuli. This would be an opposing view to that of Wolfgang Giegerich, discussed in Chapter 1, who, while describing the origin of the religious experience in the sacrifice of the animal in the hunt, describes this as an overcoming and subsequent transformation of the biological, in order that the cultural human might emerge, thus suggesting a model of distancing from the animal in a ritual exercise of control, sublimating instinct. Mundkur’s (ibid., p. 178) view is that the emotions of anxiety, fear and dread form the biological basis to an intrinsic religiosity: ‘a state of mind incited by beliefs in forces perceived as supernatural and numinous that must be appeased’, where ‘awe is the only stuff of which religiosity is made’ (ibid., p. 173). Such ‘forces’ in shamanic cultures are described as ‘spirits’, often pictured in the forms of animals, some of which are taken up as familiars in an extraordinary example of human– animal aesthetic, affective–erotic, and imaginative relationship. Certain animals would be particularly important to early humans, suggests Mundkur, although we cannot predict that these would necessarily be the more obvious natural fear-raising predators. For example, the Inuit describe a malevolent spirit of the seal, while the natural or biological seal is perceived as harmless. Whatever the status of the animal – biological, conceptual or imaginal (psychological) – Mundkur suggests that the most revered animals will be those raising strong ‘negative’ emotional response: awe, fear and anxiety. The mechanism through which religiosity is



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grounded is hypothesized as the sublimation of such emotions which would give rise to ‘mental images perceived as natural forces’ (ibid., p. 153). Here, however, Mundkur offers a circularity: that belief in a malevolent spirit world raises emotions, which leads to images forming an hallucinatory or fantasy basis to a religiosity, which in turn reinforces the view of a world inhabited by malevolent forces, as spirits. What his model does not propose is how to get out of this circularity – that is how belief in a malevolent spirit world originates. He does say that all humans share a ‘physiological sensitivity to specific environmental stimuli’ (ibid., p. 151), but this would imply that only natural stimuli of a frightening sort, such as predators, would originally have raised fear or awe. What Mundkur does not account for is why innocuous animals would originally ever be established as fear-creating spirits, through internal representation (such as the seal for the Inuit, mentioned above). Ragozin’s view, offered at the end of the last century, which stimulated Mundkur’s model, does limit the awakening religious experience of awe to a basis in fear of actual predators: ‘fear and loathing’ of ‘powerful animals’ (in ibid.). Mundkur’s sophistication of Ragozin’s view is the suggestion that a reverence for an animal, felt as fear or awe, could become ‘aggravated by stress-related anxiety and depression’ (ibid., p. 142) of a generalized nature (from the everyday stresses of survival in the widest sense). Thus, early humans may have lived with a background of stress, for which animals either feared or revered (which could be in awe, but may be innocuous) could become a focus. In the case of fear-arousing animals, this directly challenges the view of the sociologist Emile Durkheim – that human–animal relationships are grounded in a fundamentally positive affective state, where totem animals are revered because they are seen to be kin, or intimates, or protectors. Durkheim thus suggested that ‘The sentiments at the root of totemism are those of happy confidence rather than of terror’ (in ibid., p. 144), and generalizes this to the human animal, where social relationships may also be built upon positive solidarity, to form an ideal society. Such idealism is strongly challenged by views such as those of Ziegler, where suffering is recognized as inevitable (but to some extent remediable), and totemism is rooted in terror rather than happy confidence, contrary to Durkheim’s view. But such terror is introduced through, and mediated by, the presence of a familiar, and is then a strange terror: promising, erotic and sublime. For Mundkur, fear and anxiety as motivating factors go beyond their immediate utility and adaptive value as survival (fight and flight





mechanisms). Rather, they are elaborated upon in ritual and cultural forms, to offer a basis to aesthetics and religion. Animals become symbolized, metaphorized, imagined and deified, but this transformation process remains rooted in a range of strong emotions. The main release for such emotions would involve the placation of the animal spirits upon which these emotions were concentrated, and the main functionary for this would be the shaman. Thus, the shaman’s relationship to the animal is essentially based in emotional experiences of suffering, but, as argued above, such suffering is mediated through a strange familiarity with the animal spirit, who loves us to death. The suffering is then paradoxical, but familiar to us all, for love hurts. What Mundkur’s model misses is the paradoxical mixture of the suffering with the erotic – a persistent theme in stories of shamans’ initiations. The placatory attitude of the shaman towards a hostile or potentially hostile animal spirit, originally rooted in fear, does not explain why shamans describe animals as approaching them with erotic, familiar or protective intentions. Perhaps religiosity could be more completely defined as based in a mixture of affection and fear: the paradox of a terrifying familiar. This would fit the evidence presented by the accounts of shamans’ initiations related previously.

Animals, anxiety and dreams That the dream may offer a window onto our biological existence, as Alfred Ziegler claims, is given some credibility in developmental studies of dreaming, where children’s dreams may be seen to be less culturally contaminated than those of adults (Hunt, 1989). Does the developmental study of dreams and dreaming have anything to tell us about our relations to animals, especially the theme pursued here of the terrifying familiar? Mundkur (1994, p. 153) points to the strong affective bonds that children make with animals, and the generally positive attitudes they hold towards animals, noting that Freud ‘remarked accurately that: “Children have no scruples over allowing animals to rank as their full equals”.’ However, suggests Mundkur, children are also ambivalent ‘about a few selected species of animals whose appearances and habits invite both amity and wariness’ (ibid.). Fear of animals expressed by children may in fact be more generalized than this remark implies. Affectivity can go in both directions – we can experience strong, positive affective bonds with certain animals as well as strong feelings of fear or even dread with others (both biological and psychological). While individual animals may raise particular emotions, this leaves the generalized



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category of ‘animal’ in a position of paradox and ambiguity: both familiar and frightening. An early (1933) survey from New York city schools cataloguing the spontaneous reported fears of 398 5 to 12-year-old children by age groups, sex, school group (public or private) and IQ, listed 18 such main fears or anxieties (Jersild et al., in ibid., pp. 157–8). What is striking about the reports of these city children is the incidence of fears of animals, specifically of being bitten, swallowed or scared by animals. ‘animals’ as a primary fear category (at 17.8 per cent of all responses) rates overall – across all age groups considered together – as second only to ‘supernatural events and beings’ (at 21 per cent). Also, this was before the era of television, where images of potentially scary animals are readily observed. For younger children, aged between five and six, fear of animals constituted the largest response (27.3 per cent), over the ‘supernatural’ (20.2 per cent). This is reversed by ages seven to eight, where the ‘supernatural’ became the primary fear (26 per cent) and ‘animals’ came second (22 per cent). By ages nine to ten, animals came third in importance after the ‘supernatural’, ‘bodily injury and physical danger’ and ‘the dark, and being alone’, with ‘frightening noises’ a close fourth. By ages 11 to 12, ‘animals’ occupied the fourth most frightening category after ‘supernatural events’, ‘the dark, and being alone’ and ‘bodily injury and physical danger’. While age difference was a significant factor, sex, schooling and IQ differences were found to be not significant. The study was partially replicated by other researchers in 1978 and produced similar results. Mundkur (ibid., p. 157) reports a 1965 study of 500 American children aged between 5 and 14 that supports the evidence above. The children, from urban environments, reported ‘wild animals’ as the single most consistent fear and not, as one might expect, factors such as dangers from traffic or infections from germs. Moreover, the younger children were more likely than the older ones to report an animal as the single most important source of fear. From several similar studies, Mundkur concludes that ‘the fear of wild animals in general declines steadily from a frequency of about 80% cent in 5–6-year-old children to . . . 23% in . . . 13–14-year old children’, in which a fear of snakes in particular may remain predominant and continue into adulthood. Cross-cultural evidence also supports these American studies. It seems that where children demonstrate anxieties or fears, younger children, up to the age of four to five years, tend to focus fear upon ‘a specific animal or animals’ (ibid., p. 156). Mundkur suggests that this fear may or may not then





decrease in intensity, but it is likely to be replaced by a more generalized anxiety in the older child, which may include ‘imaginary creatures’. However, the fear of a single animal in particular, such as the snake, may continue throughout life. While Mundkur suggests that such fears, however irrational, are based on natural or biological animals, such a conclusion is not so transparent. What is striking about these studies, once one cuts through the exact percentages (offering a typical objectivistic smokescreen to a fascinating phenomenological study), is that the distinctions between literal and psychological animals are not so readily drawn by the children themselves, and this continues into adulthood. Fear of ‘snakes’, for example, may be as powerful in the presence of a dream image as the literal animal. Mundkur does report, however, a number of studies that look at animal imagery in dreaming, demonstrating a striking frequency of such images across age groups and cultures. Such studies commonly reveal that animal dreams are often accompanied by anxiety or tension (confirming Ziegler’s catalogue of studies reported earlier). Cross-cultural evidence shows some significant differences between the frequency of reported animal imagery in dreams across small-scale tribal cultures and urban adult Americans. In a 1981 study of anxiety dreams in a Brazilian tribe, 30 per cent of the fearful dreams centrally involved animal images, including ‘visions of assaults by venomous insects, serpents . . . and jaguars’; while in a 1969 survey of Australian Aboriginals, South Sea Islanders, and North American Indians, between 23 per cent and 51 per cent of dreams contained significant animal imagery. A 1966 survey of the dreams of 1000 adult urban Americans showed, however, a frequency of only 7.5 per cent of animal images. These results would perhaps be expected, where urban Americans do not experience animals as central to their lives or religious endeavours. However, the picture changes when we look at studies of children’s dreams. A 1973 study of children’s dreams up to the age of 14 in a sample taken in London recorded that in dreams involving a strong element of fear, 20 per cent had animals named as the cause of the anxiety (ibid., p. 161). This would confirm the notion that in adult westerners not only do animal images in dreams seem to recur less frequently – or are remembered less easily, than in the dreams of children – but also that animal images are again linked with anxiety dreams. Studies such as these suffer, of course, from our lack of knowledge about dreams that are not recalled. Foulkes (in Hunt, 1989, p. 42) attempted to overcome this recall problem by studying dreams of young children in a sleep laboratory, where the children could be



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woken after a dreaming period within normal sleep (indicated by rapid eye movement), and could be studied over a long period of time. Foulkes reported that the most common dream images for three to five year olds were animals, which seems to support Gaston Bachelard’s intuitive notion of a primary formal imagination at work in the human psyche as an animalizing imagination (an imagination that expresses itself through animal forms) – most powerfully at work in the less socialized, for adults do not report the same consistency of animal images in their recalled dreams. This evidence of animal presence especially in children’s dreams, and the link between animal presence (whether fantasized or literal) and general anxiety in both urban children and adults in small-scale cultures, seems to indicate that the terrible familiar is an ubiquitous phenomenon. This dangerous yet close animal presence transcends cultural and historical constraints, and may indeed be the final cause of human religious endeavour, and not the literal animal sacrifice, as suggested by Wolfgang Giegerich, described in Chapter 1. Indeed, if there is sacrifice involved, it is the psychological terrible familiar who may be seen to force the human to sacrifice attitudes of naive optimism, idealism and heroic control, to create the ghost human who is racked by the nightmare, and must experience uncertainty and paradox, as we are ‘killed’, ‘eaten’ and ‘regurgitated’ from the stomach of the world bear in the image of the Arctic Circle shaman.

A poetics of imaginary violence: the animalizing imagination at work in the writing of Ted Hughes The late Poet Laureate, Ted Hughes, offers a modern animal-centred shamanism through the medium of writing, of poetry in particular, returning us to Rimbaud’s suggestion that it is the poets who carry the presence of animals, or exercise an animalizing imagination most directly. The shamanic imagery in Hughes’s poetry has been articulated at length by Stuart Hirschberg (1981), and this section will offer a supplement to that work in the context of the argument for the value of a particular kind of imagination – an animalizing – that recreates classical shamanizing for our times. Hughes’s use of animal imagery constitutes evidence that archaic shamanism’s voice is represented in contemporary life through art. Michael Tucker’s (1992) comprehensive account of a ‘shamanic spirit’ evident in the work of a range of modern artists, including painters, sculptors, writers and musicians, includes many who would probably claim no direct interest in, or knowledge of, shamanism.





Hughes (1992), however, does explicitly claim such an interest and displays such a knowledge. In an early poem, ‘Ghost Crabs’, Hughes (1967a, pp. 21–2) introduces the reader to giant crabs inhabiting both this world and the spirit world, that emerge as ‘An invisible disgorging of the sea’s cold.’ The crabs seem intent on violence, but it is not against humans, for ‘Their hungers are homing elsewhere.’ They can pass easily through walls, even bodies, and ‘We cannot see them or turn our minds from them.’ Not and turn our minds, for the crabs intend our attention, while their violences are turned upon each other in a frenzy: ‘They stalk each other, they fasten on to each/ other,/ They mount each other, they tear each other to/ pieces,/ They utterly exhaust each other.’ We cannot turn our minds from them for ‘They are the powers of this world’, while ‘We are their bacteria,/ Dying their lives and living their deaths.’ The crabs are a metaphor for ‘the turmoil of history’, and, ‘These crabs own this world.’ Hughes is articulating a shamanic cosmos, where the animal living in two worlds offers a vehicle for our experiencing of those worlds. The animals intend us in violent and chilling ways, especially in the dream, where we might ‘jerk awake to the world of our possessions/ With a gasp, in a sweat burst’ (ibid.). Hirschberg (1981, p. 8) suggests that ‘Hughes makes contact with a feral energy at the heart of the cosmos, mindless, luxuriant, capable of bringing death and revitalizing the dead, a terrible power to be both summoned and feared. This force is vastly superior to anything he sees working in man. In fact, it is totally alien and indifferent to man’s welfare’. The sweat, to which we awake, despite the hot animation of the dream animals, is a cold sweat. This conforms to the terrible familiarity characteristic of the anatomy of the shamanic initiation. Hughes sees feral energy as the very body of the world, which itself is perhaps best articulated through a poetic imagination. Hirschberg (ibid.) suggests that ‘For Hughes, in his earliest animal poems, the process of writing the poem recreates the rite of blood brotherhood between the Shaman and his animal Helper. Whether hawk, bear, jaguar, or pike, among others, Hughes establishes a mystical alliance . . . with his animal familiars.’ In these poems, biological animals are ‘seen through’, offering a revelation of a spirit animal or collective familiar typical of shamanic experience. The animal becomes both the vehicle for the ‘seeing’ or imagining (as the familiar) and the primary object of that ‘seeing’, while writing offers the ritual invocation of the animal familiar. For Hughes, especially in his earlier animal poems, the cosmos affords a composite animal body that is also a terrible presence, so that the



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Jaguar mutters ‘some drum-song of murder’ (Hughes, 1967a, p. 25); the bear is ‘the ferryman/ To dead land’, who ‘is glueing/ Beginning to end/ With glue from people’s bones/ In his sleep’ (ibid., p. 41); the rat in a trap attacks ‘heaven and earth with a mouthful of screeches/ like torn tin’ (ibid., p. 162); and gnats ‘are the nails/ In the dancing hands and feet of the gnat-god’ (ibid., p. 180), an image that resonates especially with the !Kung description of the animal realm of the deity who inspires the trance dance, a deity that is a composite animal god, and might well be gnat-god. Hughes’s technique is to suddenly open out from the particular, concrete instance to an energetic, animalized cosmos, offering a psychotherapeutic intention – the cure of literalism – while staying close to the animal body and its aesthetic. In a book addressed to children, on how to craft poems, Hughes (1967b, pp. 16–17) sketches his own initiation into writing as shamanic: ‘at about fifteen my life grew more complicated and my attitude to animals changed. I accused myself of disturbing their lives. And about the same time I began to write poems’, as if the animals brought the inspiration. Hughes (ibid., p. 19) describes the genesis of ‘the first “animal” poem I ever wrote. . . . The Thought-Fox’ as a piece of shamanizing. The poem begins in imagination and in imaginal geography: ‘I imagine this midnight moment’s forest’ into which an animal form, a spirit animal, spontaneously walks: ‘Across clearings, an eye,/ A widening deepening greenness,/ Brilliantly, concentratedly,/ Coming about its own business.’ The shamanic and poetic trance enacted, the animal familiar appears suddenly, bringing with it the gift of a complete poem: ‘Till, with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox/ It enters the dark hole of the head./ The window is starless still; the clock ticks,/ The page is printed.’ In Hughes’s account, the poem was written ‘in a few minutes’, and he notes that the poem is about ‘a fox that is both a fox and not a fox. What sort of fox is it that can step right into my head where presumably it still sits. . . . It is both a fox and a spirit. . . . It is very real to me. The words have made a body for it and given it somewhere to walk’ (ibid., p. 20). The spirit animal is embodied, given sense, while imagined. But it is not literalized – it is psychological, conceptual, and textual, but not biological. It is totemic. However, it is biologically ‘grounded’, or seen through a biological imagination, while it bears the trace of the ‘natural’ fox (‘hot stink’). It becomes familiar, both guide and muse. Hughes (ibid., p. 21) claims that he ‘made’ it, ‘through imagining’. As the shamanic tradition says, every shaman must have an original animal, or primary familiar. Also, says Hughes, ‘I have it with me wherever I go.’





The poet’s inspirational fox-spirit is an informing guide, equivalent to the Inuit shaman’s polar bear. Hughes (1967b, p. 19) confirms this in his claim that the fox poem (or rather the fox invoked through the writing of the poem) cured a sterile phase in his writing: ‘I had written nothing for a year or so’. In the following chapter, we describe a similar totemic fox familiar inhabiting a story by D.H. Lawrence.

The gaze returned Peter Abbs (1989, pp. 166–7), in describing the importance of imagination to learning and pedagogy, draws on Mary Midgley’s view that ‘Culture’ may be seen as ‘the completion of instinct’: ‘That is exactly the notion of a conservationist aesthetics! Culture is the outgrowth, the articulate culmination of our biological nature’. Art is not a derivative expression, suggests Abbs, such as the sublimation of libido (Freud) or an outcome of a dynamic of economics (Marx), but ‘The biological grounding of a symbolic life’ – this makes art ‘fundamental’. David Farrell Krell (1992, pp. 113–14), in a discussion of Heidegger’s view of the animal, proposes the psychologically accurate notion that ‘animality (is) nothing zoological’, returning us to the value of an animalizing imagination and its educative bestiaries. Yet we must also ground such bestiaries in the aesthetic realm, and so would do well to note Gaston Bachelard’s (1986, p. 3) assertion that in the contemplation of animal imagery ‘the burning animal origins of our passions are revived before our terrified eyes’. The animal awakens us to the passions, which may then perhaps be returned also to biological animals in direct appreciation of their display through our cathartic response. Just as we are able to metaphorize nature, so we can also biologize the metaphor or the image, turning back through the linguistic orders of the symbolic and the imaginary to the extra-linguistic world of Lacan’s order of the real, as an aesthetic reflex. As we have seen, Lacan suggests that encultured humanity is estranged from this mysterious order that nevertheless provides the ground for life, a subterranean transcendental realm beyond personal unconscious and collective unconscious, both of which by definition are symbolic realms ordered by human language. Let us simply suggest again that this order is constituted partly, but significantly, by the ‘animal’ Other, that awakens us to its presence and then, of necessity, to our passions. Perhaps the animal gazing upon us, even, or especially, offers this awakening, when we are not aware of its gaze. In this gaze, perhaps the



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animals as a collective body constitute the underearth order of the real, watching (and by ‘gaze’ we might also mean whatever the animal body ‘gives off’). Maurice Blanchot (1981, p. 104) suggests that ‘the force of the gaze . . . sets free the essence of the night’. His context is a discussion of the Orpheus/Eurydice myth, and he is referring to Orpheus’s glance back at Eurydice through which she disappears into the Underworld just at the point of imminent exposure to the Upperworld. But Blanchot’s phrase may be adapted to the watching and waiting composite animal body referred to above, whose collective gaze releases upon humanity a force of wonderful and terrible darkness, like a charged and gathering storm cloud. We meet this collective animal gaze forcefully in the following section, where we consider Freud’s analysis of the pivotal childhood dream of a patient who became known as the ‘Wolf Man’, and now prowls psychoanalytic literature in that guise. In the dream, the child awakens in what Ted Hughes describes as ‘a sweat burst’, to see, outside his bedroom window, a group of white wolves sitting silently on the branches of a large walnut tree. The wolves fix the child with their silent gaze. The child is forever animalized. Hélène Cixous (1991) describes the gaze of humans as an animating gesture, ‘a state of animal watchfulness’, but let us again reverse the roles, dissolving the anthropocentric tendency and returning the gaze to the animals, as a mark of respect, for it was from the animals that we initially learned how to gaze. There is a legend that the gaze of both the female tortoise and ostrich creates enough warmth to hatch their own eggs; and, in the case of the psychological animal that is the mythical basilisk, the gaze is notorious – reputedly, strong enough to kill.

Freud’s familiars: excluded from the shadow of the totem tree As shamanic poets make, invoke or recreate animal familiars with lasting presence, so may psychotherapists. The intention, whether acknowledged or not, is common, while the medium differs: the poet privileges writing and reading, the psychotherapist privileges speaking and listening (as in the ‘talking cure’). Freud, the father of modern psychotherapy, was fascinated by animal presence, especially as the symptoms of animal phobias. Such animal phobias characterized some of his earliest case studies, and his Totem and Taboo (1919) – the most ‘Jungian’ of Freud’s works – explicitly links psychotherapy and totemism, but in a manner that psychologizes, or provides a psychological reading and ‘explanation’ of pre-modern ‘animism’. In his usual manner, Freud hits





on some marvellous connections between culture and psychology, but offers a reductive reading in the final analysis, viewed through the exclusivity of a psychoanalytic lens. In the case of animal phobias, this was to see every case cited as reducible to a father–son issue within an unresolved Oedipal complex. In oedipalizing his patients’ animal dreams, Freud the psychologist by-passes the more traditional shamanic reading of the visitation of the animal spirit that defines a vocation through an animalizing, and shifts the patient from the errant margins into the familial centre, where there is the promise of a steady job and a decent personality. Freud reads the classical totemism of so-called ‘savages’ psychoanalytically, so that the original animal god/totem becomes the primal Father, whose authoritarian grip on his ‘horde’ the sons must loosen, through murder, to achieve autonomy or cultural progress. The reading is also gendered. Apart from sops to ‘matriarchal descent’ within a totemistic family tree or lineage, Freud admits in Totem and Taboo that the feminine side of familial relations is beyond him, and then is unacceptably glossed over. His focus on the Oedipal conflict – as a story of a mixture of father–son hostility and love interrupting regressive and fixated mother love – of course, excludes consideration of mother–daughter relations in particular. Further to this gender bias, Freud’s account is also anthropocentric. Totemism, despite all the assimilated anthropological evidence of the time that Freud was able to review, is eventually translated from animal–human relations to father–son relations. The animal deity as root of the totem tree is humanized as the primal father whose power must be usurped by the murdering sons, as a liberation from his authority in the birth of plural culture and a release of individualism. The guilt and subsequent reparation ceremonies the hunting societies carry out for the mythical killing of the first animal totem now becomes the guilt carried by the sons. The reparation is an acknowledgement of the suffering of the ambiguities of a love–hate relationship with the father, in which tender feelings are harboured for the lost patriarch. Freud then slays the very animal to whom he introduces his readers, in a psychoanalytic gesture. Also, the taboos against slaying and eating the totem animal are seen as reasons for emerging from the shadow of the totem tree, or family tree, as an incest prohibition. As we marry outside our totem tree, so we are deflected from relations with the dangerous familiar closest to us. Surrounded by taboos of exclusivity, our intimacy is curtailed, our familiarity denied. Most importantly, we are socialized or normalized by moving out of the



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shadow of the totem tree. Staying within its shadow is dangerous – but this is precisely the territory inhabited by those who would break these taboos to investigate the results – the shamans. It is only by testing the taboos, by gaining an unusual intimacy with the familiar, that we acquire an extraordinary vision, and for this we risk our sanity. Given Freud’s reading of totemism, which is now exposed as normative, reductive and unable to stand the shocking cold and fear in the inhospitable but rewarding shadow of the totem tree (the animal–human ‘incest’ of familiarity), we might ask how Freud’s animal phobia studies would look if read shamanically, totemistically, with an animalizing eye rather than a humanizing psychoanalytic eye. The year is 1907, the place, Vienna. In an early session of his psychoanalysis, a young military officer describes to the analyst a terrible punishment with which he had become so obsessed that it had driven him to seek help. A colleague had described the punishment to him as one practised in the Orient: an offender would be tied face down and a pot strapped upside down on his buttocks. The pot contained rats, and the only means of escape for the trapped animals would be to bore their way . . . Here, the patient, already in a state of high anxiety, is unable to complete the description. The analyst interjects: the rats would bore their way ‘into his anus’. The analyst with the last word was of course Sigmund Freud, and his patient, the ‘Rat Man’. Freud observes that the patient presents a mixture of disgust and pleasure, hinting at repressed sadism. Obsessed with this perverse but fascinating image of torture, the Rat Man elaborates: the same punishment will be applied to both his fiancée and his father unless the patient returns a small sum of money lent to him by a fellow officer. In fact, no such transaction had ever taken place between the Rat Man and this officer – the loan was a fantasy. Similarly, it does not concern him that the torture cannot be applied to his father – who is dead – nor to his fiancée, mixing as she does in the genteel circles of middle class Vienna at the beginning of the twentieth century. Of course, reasons Freud, the Rat Man’s symptoms cry out for interpretation, and, within Freud’s conceptual system must have their genesis in some childhood trauma. Freud does discover that as a child the Rat Man had suffered from constant lower intestine and anal irritation due to worms, and anal eroticism had played an important part in his developing sexuality. He does not, however, consider this to be the root cause of his patient’s symptoms. The analyst settles on a far more obscure interpretation as the curative one: that the Rat Man’s ritualistic thoughts, his morbid desire for both his girlfriend and dead father to be anally penetrated by





the rat, is a disguised hatred of those he loves most. Freud believes that he has uncovered in the Rat Man a previously unacknowledged mixture of love and sadistic hatred focused upon the father from an early age and now echoed in his relationships with women. This ambivalence constitutes a rat-trap declared as an obsessional neurosis. The neurosis is held in place by the fantasy of the binding debt. The Rat Man’s father, also an Army officer, had accumulated a large gambling debt, and had become, in the slang of the time, a ‘gambling rat’. (‘Rat’ is a term we still use for excessive enthusiasm, such as a ‘water rat’.) A friend had bailed the father out, but when he came to repay the loan, the father was unable to find his benefactor’s address. The Rat Man had hated his father, and harboured feelings of violence towards him, for this unpaid debt. His obsession with anal torture was fuelled by his inability to bring to consciousness, and accept, the ambivalent erotic and sadistic feelings he held for his father. The rat had become a symbol for both the dirty money owed by his father, and the dirty penis that wanted to anally penetrate the father, to inseminate him and to humiliate him, as a simultaneous act of love and hate. Nowhere, of course, does Freud consider this complex of issues from the rat’s perspective. The archetypal trapped rat that bores its way to freedom through the back passage has also bored its way into our contemporary psyches, where the rat is relegated to the sewer. A recent newspaper article reports: ‘The rats that once spread the plague are on the rise in Britain’s cities and countryside. And where you see one, there are thousands.’ (Guardian, 18/10/97). While sewerage systems have grown, the privatized utilities that now run them have significantly reduced the previous amount of baiting and poisoning of rodents. Domestic rats are noticeably on the increase, and can gnaw their way easily through modern plastic pipes in comparison with the old lead plumbing. The article further reports that ‘rats outnumber people’. There are over 60 million of them in Britain and their reproduction rate is awesome – one pair can produce a colony of 2000 in a year. Rats that once brought bubonic plague have been replaced by those that threaten with tuberculosis. Bacterial infections from rat urine can be caught in lakes, reservoirs and even puddles; and we fear infections from droppings, if they are free to scamper across our kitchen work surfaces or root in our food cupboards. Returning to Freud and the Rat Man, no wonder that the boring and gnawing rat bites back in its significations, as bad debt and sadistic penis, for it has been relegated by humanity: trapped in a stereotype of low life, figured as torturer and tormenter. Ironically, having trapped



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the rat in imagination as both shitty and disconcertingly fertile, the more sewers we provide, the more the rat breeds. We might imagine that, in Freud’s famous case study, it is not the father but the rat itself – the animal – that is at the centre of the Rat Man’s obsessions. It is then the return of the repressed rat that forms the patient’s symptoms, as the boring and repetitive gnawing of obsessional thought. If there is a debt to be paid by the Rat Man, it may be that it is neither to his fictive fellow officer, nor to his father, but to the maligned animal, the imaginary rat itself. This reading casts the animal image as, potentially, a visiting shamanic familiar, a terrible familiar: pathologized yet erotic, animalized, and yet neurotic. Korean shamans revere the rat familiar as the totem animal of the New Year. The persistence of the rat reflects the return of the year upon itself to gnaw away at its own body as another cycle of time. The rat is the initiator in Eastern astrology, and it is the rat that will not let go of the Rat Man’s psyche, forcing him into recognition of the animal’s presence through seeking therapy. Freud, however, refuses the animalized psyche for the humanized, reading the rat symbolically, rather than appreciating it phenomenologically. Freud brings together in one psychologically constructed site – the fantasizing human psyche – three elements: sex, animal and suffering (both suffering human and suffering animal). The site can be read as simultaneously de-humanized, eroticized and pathologized. Freud was right in his particular focus that these animal irruptions occur as fantasy and arise neither concretely in the body nor conceptually in the mind (although the symptoms arising from such an imaginary psyche find both body and mind expression, as psychosomatic neurosis). He was also right in stressing both the erotic and suffering nature of such fantastic animal visitations, and in recognizing their initiatory nature. But in reading such initiations through his own formulations of psychoanalysis, he humanizes the animal presence, as a symbolic representation of personality dynamics, situated in a developmental pattern. In losing the significance of the animal presence, Freud also misreads the very conditions that define a significant form of shamanic initiation – an erotic but suffering encounter with a fantastic animal Other, initiating a vocation and a character. The irony of this is that Freud’s project – the patriarchal oedipalizing of both psychology and culture, originates in his interest in totemism, recounted especially in part IV of Totem and Taboo, first published in 1913. The anthropological literature of the time described totemism, primarily the sacralization of animals, as harbouring two taboos: first, do not kill or eat the totem animal; second, the banning of sexual relations





between a man and a woman of the same totemic clan (which is another way of saying: do not initiate sex with the totem animal). Transposing this to the Greek myth of Oedipus, Freud saw the breaking of these taboos through the hero unwittingly killing his father and marrying his mother, where the father replaces the primary totemic animal, now set in a family myth. In substituting father for totem through the Oedipal myth, Freud humanizes and personalizes what was previously animalized, reducing totemism to family dynamics. In other words, he oedipalizes what was previously animalized, as the newly invented vocation of the psychoanalyst displaces the potential of Freud as shaman (the role finally taken up in the psychoanalytic father circle by Jung). Where the death of the original totem animal is replaced by the death of the imaginary primal Father, that releases the individuality of his children, or initiates humankind into psychological autonomy, Freud champions secular humanism over totemic religiosity. Again, he ignores a possible shamanic reading for the Rat Man case that would ask in the first instance: what does the animal, the rat, want from the patient, or from Freud as the Rat Man’s soul doctor? In replacing his religious function with secular analysis, does Freud perhaps miss his vocation? The Rat Man is the prelude to two other important animal phobia cases. Perhaps the most famous dream from the psychoanalytic archives is that of the so-called ‘Wolf Man’, who entered analysis with Freud in 1910, three years after the Rat Man. Just before his fourth birthday, and subsequently marked by what his family saw as a radical character change, the Wolf Man dreams that his window flies open. In the dream, he sits bolt upright in bed, to see just beyond his window six or seven white wolves sitting absolutely motionless on the branches of a large walnut tree. They stare at him intently. He is momentarily fixed by their collective gaze, and screams. The boy wakes up, terrified. The dream is accompanied by a dreadful and lingering fear that the wolves will eat him. Within six months, this dream has generalized to a phobia of animals, and the boy grows up to realize sexual compulsions of an anal sadistic and masochistic nature. His adult eroticism is only fully enjoyed through doggy-style sex with women that he stereotypes, as ‘lower class’, who must have large and prominent buttocks. Freud, in a fantastic leap of faith, reconstructs from his conversations with the patient a supposed primal scene as the genesis of the Wolf Man’s ills. He educates the patient into accepting this interpretation as the final cause of his adult sexual predilections and his neurotic fear of animals. The Wolf Man, at age one and a half, had supposedly



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witnessed his parents having vigorous sex three times running within the same encounter, at least once doggy-style, and possibly anally. The patient himself had said that he had seen animals copulating in such a fashion, but Freud refused this as causative, preferring the supposed parental bedroom scene, or primal scene, as the initiatory and traumatizing fantasy moment. (Freud came to believe that such memories retained their psychological power whether they were ‘real’ or ‘fantasy’, and should be taken seriously rather than literally in the therapeutic work, as ‘screen memories’.) The silent, watching wolves then became distorted representations of the screen memory of this bestial sexuality – the vigorous, thrilling, yet terrifying sex acts displaced onto frozen animal watchers, as a distortion (and coagulation) of desire. The wolves, supposed Freud, represented split-off parts of the voyeuristic child’s psyche, fixated by the fantasy image of his parents’ lovemaking – the mix of emotions separated and kept in cold storage as repressed memory, until teased out through the therapeutic encounter. At one level, Freud’s hermeneutic contortions seem absurdly baroque. Yet, as with the Rat Man case, Freud brings together on one symptomatic site the very conditions that traditionally define a shamanic initiation by a terrible animal familiar: eroticism, pathologizing (or suffering, through symptoms of animal phobias and sexual neuroses) and animalizing (the initiatory and imaginary animal presence). However, in his emerging psychoanalytic discourse, Freud reduces this complex to the psychodynamics of the patient, set in a family triangle, as imaginal wolves become split-off parts of the person’s psyche, now described conceptually, and tied to the – supposed and fantastic – traumatic bedroom scene. (It will take the later development of the Object Relations school of Melanie Klein to partially recover the autonomy of the psychological animals, as transitional objects in the child’s development.) Again, how would this look from the perspective of the watching white wolves who appear in the dream as phenomenological realities, or autonomous objects? What do the imaginary wolves want? Do they really want to be humanized, reduced to personality dynamics: psychologized, oedipalized? Are they, like the trapped rats, forced to present their presences through the symptom, only to meet a machinery of psychological interpretation that refuses their autonomy and phenomenality? While the rat familiar of the Rat Man appears in the sewer of the human body and is pathologized as anal sadistic eroticism, the wolf familiar of the Wolf Man forces its presence upon the boy through the intensity of its gaze, or the collective intensity as a group of watching





wolves. This is pathologized as scopophilia or voyeurism, which secondarily reproduces the very conditions of the primal scene that supposedly so excited the boy as a frozen watcher of his parents’ vigorous sexual antics. What the wolves seem to want is recognition of their sacrality, for the boy becomes awe-struck in their presence, as if he had looked upon the face of a god. Are the wolves staring down the fragile ego, stripping it of its humanity, animalizing it as they sacralize it? In the widest sense, is the imaginary rat, and then the imaginary wolf, attempting to reclaim its sacred presence in the face of its degradation by humans: the rat as dirty, the wolf as rapacious (vermin and scavenger respectively)? Is the intention of the wolves to initiate first recognition, and then dialogue, as an animal familiar would, and again is the discourse of psychoanalysis then persistently misrepresenting that intention through its reading of the imaginary animal as a component of the human psyche that may be reduced to psychological explanation? In this sense, psychoanalysis misrepresents the religious experience of humans, Freud turning religious initiation into psychological episodes. The return of the wolves as an object of conversation in therapy presents an opportunity to dialogue with them, as Jungians do in active imagination, but Freud’s method refuses this intention. Further, Freud attempts to normalize such idiosyncratic, phenomenological experiences through interpretation, while such experiences are important in religious contexts precisely because they are singular, away from the norm, and this is also precisely why they come to be represented as symptoms, or as abnormal psychology, where trauma offers initiation. A five-year old boy, never analysed directly by Freud, but rather at a distance through conversations with the boy’s parents, who themselves were advocates of psychoanalysis, develops a phobia for horses. This is supposedly based on seeing the large genitalia of stallions, and of other male animals at the zoo, and connecting the power and sexuality of these animals with the power of his father, as potential castrator, where the horse was most feared because it may offer a terrible bite. Importantly, it is specifically a white horse that Little Hans fears will bite him. Not a dark, muscular, sinewed and bodied horse, but a phantom horse whitened to transparency or translucency, a ghost horse that is wholly imaginary, yet brings both the reality of suffering (the phobia) and eroticism (the phobia associated with the stallion’s prominent genitals). Further – and this is vital in terms of the perplexing, at once loving and terrifying, presence of an animal familiar in shamanic initiations – while Little Hans was reluctant to leave the house, afraid that a large



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dray horse in particular might bite him, at the same time he felt compelled to seek out horses. Every inhibition has its compulsion. (Importantly, we should note that horses – certainly ghost horses – seemed also to go out of their way to seek Little Hans.) While Freud reads the horse as signifying the castrating father, and Little Hans’s phobia as fear of that castration, what if the erotic and pathologized components are correctly inferred, but incorrectly attributed? Not what does the horse symbolize, but what does the cocksure fantasy stallion and the imaginary biting dray horse want of Little Hans, as it presents itself phenomenologically to the frightened psyche of the boy? Again, in a shamanic context, such visitations are initiatory in a religious sense, as a direct experience of an extra-human world populated by sacred, often terrifying, presences. The desiring and suffering initiation, that is given meaning in an animal-centred shamanic discourse, is seen in these formative examples of psychoanalytic discourse not as an opportunity to restore ourselves to the animal commonwealth, but as symptom to be cured or normalized through humanistic practices. We should also note the gender bias in these accounts – the Rat Man, the Wolf Man, Little Hans – under the eye of the patriarch Freud, all confined within the Oedipal text. In these largely father–son stories, perhaps Freud also reminds us of the manner in which the patriarchy has not only come to appropriate, dissimulate, deny and distort the feminine in a savage mis-representation of its desire, but also has come to appropriate and distort animal intention and animal presence, which is pre-human, and pre-gender. From the point of view of totemism, Freud’s interest in familial incest focuses upon the right areas for the wrong reasons: again, erotic and disturbing familiarity with an animal totem or initiator is reduced to father–son issues. In discussing animal phobia cases, Freud (1919, p. 198) says, ‘In every case it was the same: the fear at the bottom was of the father, if the children examined were boys, and was merely displaced upon the animal.’ In fact it is Freud himself who, in his own term, displaces the totemic structure by substituting ‘father’ for ‘totem animal’ or familiar. Freud (ibid., p. 199) notes a case of a nine-year-old boy with a dog phobia whose fear had apparently led him to say ‘Dog, I will be good’, which Freud says is ‘really’ a reference to the father’s prohibition of masturbation. For Freud (ibid., p. 201), ‘certain traits of totemism’ return as animal phobias – again an insightful reading, but one which, from the point of view of totemism would lead us to suggest that the little boy above is identifying with the animal as familiar: ‘Dog, I will be good’ because you are my god-form, who has chosen me.





Freud, the archetypal modernist investigator into the psyche – the imaginal realm strung between body and mind, a metaxy of ghosts, spirits, familiars, dream and fantasy; an unconscious, Other or absent realm; or an autonomous system of signifiers as language codes – finds himself entering an established or epistemic historical stream of shamanic healing, in a culture that has lost touch with such a world. Having to re-invent the language of shamanism as a modernist psychotherapy, Freud follows the dominant post-Enlightenment discourse of humanism and personalism, reading the animal visitations symbolically and conceptually (rather than phenomenologically, as in shamans’ accounts), thus reducing the visiting familiar to personality dynamics. The very conditions that define a shamanic initiation – an erotic but suffering encounter with a fantastic animal Other, that defines a vocation and a character – are taken up by Freud in a precise manner in the early case histories of the Rat Man, the Wolf Man, and Little Hans. But they miss the viewpoint, the intention, of the animal familiar itself, through their overdetermined personalism. What should we then do with these terrors discovered by Freud as necessary sufferings of the human at the hands of fantastic or unsightly animal presences? First, we can map them phenomenologically, rather than psychoanalytically, and re-read Freud through the lens of literature on traditional shamanism, to discover a quality of relationship between the terrible animal familiar and the human, as an issue of animal rites. Second, given that we no longer live in small-scale shamanic cultural settings, are no longer animal-inspired hunters, but posturban beings with plural, sometimes virtual, identities, we can map these archaic visitations through sublimation in aesthetic form, as art. We have already demonstrated this in the shamanic voice of the poet Hughes, and ‘writing’ the animal is the subject of the following chapter. Freud’s narrative case studies are already regarded as literary pearls. While he did not achieve the Nobel Prize for Science, Freud did win the Goethe Prize for literature. Where we might re-read Freud’s case studies as shamanic initiations into an animalizing imagination, we should note again that Freud’s own, original, intertwining of psychotherapy and totemism unfortunately also substitutes the normalizing (or oedipalizing) practices of psychotherapy for the radical practices of shamanism. Freud himself is normalized where he adopts, and subsequently adapts to, the Oedipus complex as his central pillar of psychoanalysis, valorizing the bourgeois family triangle. Deleuze and Guattari (1984, 1988) refer to this as the ‘imperialism’ of the oedipal. The unconventional shaman, however, stays within the shadow of the totem tree, or



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is explicitly ‘incestuous’ with the familiar(s) that inhabit this family tree, because the breaking of the taboo, dangerous as it is, brings creative reward – reward unobtainable through socialized practice, out of the shadow of the totem tree. We have argued that it takes courage to stay in the shadow of the totem tree as naked shelter. This arena is marginal, anti-oedipal, transgressive, and stands for the value of radical art. If it is ‘chicken’ to move out of the shadow of the totem tree into a culture of contentment, or normalized and socialized practices of mediocrity, does benefit accrue from anti-oedipal transgression, suffering the shadow of the totem tree as naked shelter? The more radical analyst Sandor Ferenczi reported to his more conventional mentor Freud that a little boy, age two and a half, holidaying in the country, urinated into a chicken coop where his penis was bitten or snapped at. When he returned to the same place for a future holiday, his behaviour became strange – he acted like a chicken, identified with the animals, returning over and over to the coop in compulsive behaviour. He gave up human speech for cackling and crowing chicken talk. While at age five he began to speak normally, his topic of conversation was obsessive: poultry, particularly stories and songs concerned with these animals. He had achieved a remarkable familiarity with their world. His play demonstrated love for, and fear of, chickens. He particularly loved it when the chickens were slaughtered to eat – he would make up a ritual dance, prancing around the dead chickens for hours in a state of high excitement, lifting their bodies and kissing and stroking them. The boy, Little Arpad, said that he was a chicken who would one day grow into a ‘cock’ (Freud, 1919, p. 202). Freud’s reading is predictable – the initial pecking chicken is misidentified with the potentially castrating father, who must now be appeased (father as totem) through ritual. The ‘cock’ reference is obvious in such a reading. Freud (ibid., p. 203) admits that there is ‘a valuable correspondence with totemism: the complete identification with the totem animal, and the ambivalent affective attitude towards it’, but again refuses the simpler totemic reading for the more obscure psychoanalytic gesture. Again, ‘the coincidence of love and hate’ (ibid., p. 239) towards the significant object is precisely the dilemma of the totemic as well as the Oedipal attitude, but Freud can only humanize what might be left as a theriocentric issue. In this humanizing move, he also walks out of the shadow of the totem tree into the safety of normalizing psychological theory. In this sense, it is oedipally infatuated psychoanalysis that is ‘chicken’. The animalized boy already has the badge of courage, having identified with the chickens in a ritualized shamanic madness.





As far as chickens go, the cult trash-film maker John Waters remains with them in the shadows, in acts of transgression as art. Waters’s ‘art’ must be read with tongue firmly in cheek, where it offers a trash aesthetic. In ‘Pink Flamingos’, a chicken comes between a couple making love (odd in itself). Odder, the man cuts the chicken’s head off on camera and stuffs the bleeding neck against his crotch, in simulated sex. Waters, in the face of an animal rights outcry, replied that the chicken, which was going to be killed and eaten anyway, got to be a movie star and was screwed in the same scene, which is more than most humans achieve in a lifetime! Waters was no stranger to animal-inspired transgressions – in an early film ‘Mondo Trasho’, his transvestite hero(ine) Divine is seen crawling through pig shit as she has a vision of the Virgin Mary; and in the closing scene of ‘Pink Flamingos’ she eats a freshly-laid dog turd on camera to the background strains of ‘How Much is That Doggy in the Window?’. All of which Waters claims as ethically demanding cinema. Waters’ post-modern ethic and trash aesthetic is however far removed from the depth of ethical concern raised by Shakespeare’s characterization of Timon in Timon of Athens, whose gradual disillusionment with the human world leads him to identify more with ‘uncontaminated’ animal life. Having been repeatedly taken for a ride by those whom he took to be his friends and having sought solace in a cave in the woods to detach himself from humanity, Timon finds ‘The unkindest beast more kinder than mankind.’ As Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1984; 1987) remind us, in their groundbreaking, two-volume dismissal of a culture of contentment, Capitalism and Schizophrenia, one of the major elements of the anti-oedipal attitude is ‘Becoming-Animal’.



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Zarathustra’s zoo The animalizing imagination is central to a shamanic world-view. In our non-shamanic culture, such an imagination has been explicitly acknowledged only by a handful of artists and writers such as Joseph Beuys, Ted Hughes, Penelope Shuttle and Peter Redgrove, and by some psychotherapists of a Jungian persuasion. However, many more artists and scientists almost certainly retain a shamanic tradition in their work in an unacknowledged fashion, or recreate shamanism for our times. To varying degrees, an animalizing imagination is represented in specific works by Isidore Ducasse, Gustave Flaubert, Friedrich Nietzsche, and D.H. Lawrence, who we may think of not as writing about animals, but as writing like animals, as literary beasts. These writers have familiarized themselves with psychological and linguistic or semiotic animals, yet they carry over the necessary trace of the biological. More, in specific works, and to varying degrees, they are already possessed by the animal in ways that are recognizably ‘shamanic’, or echo shamanic ‘familiarity’. In Thus Spake Zarathustra (1.4) Nietzsche warns of the dangers of cutting our ties with the animal. He likens ordinary humans to a rope strung across an abyss. One end is attached to the animal world, the other to the Superman, Nietzsche’s extraordinary human. Those who fail to cross the abyss by means of this rope will go under – they will fall into the abyss. Those who recognize and maintain the bridge’s origins in animal passions, at the same time as they strive towards a realization of the extraordinary human, will go over – the bridge will be maintained in the very act of crossing it, an act that Norris (1985) calls an ‘animal gesture’. One sure way of going under is to tame the animal passions, which must pulse, stay electric and provoke, true to their 95



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Dionysian purpose. Domesticating the passions leads to dullness. However, few are able to live with the dangers of the provocative animal, that Nietzsche calls the ‘beast within’. If the beast is cultivated without due care and precaution then it may turn upon its host and promote, in Nietzsche’s words, either ‘lust’ or ‘self-laceration’. Through the character and voice of Zarathustra – in the later sections, written while he was supposedly suffering from the kind of madness precipitated by syphilis – Nietzsche says, ‘the fear of wild beasts hath been bred in man from the first, including the fear of that beast which he harboureth and feareth in himself . . . “the beast within”’ (4.15). Zarathustra however opens his account with a celebration of the animal: ‘May my beasts guide me.!’ (1.1), in praise of his familiars the Eagle and the Serpent, who represent soaring aspiration and earthly wisdom respectively. Importantly, Nietzsche does not oppose these two forces but yokes them: ‘an Eagle swept in wide circles through the air, and from it hung a Serpent, not as prey but as friend, for it lay coiled about the Eagle’s neck’ (ibid.). The prophet Zarathustra, invoked as Nietzsche’s fictional sage, seems to prefigure contemporary animal rights sympathizers: ‘More perils found I amongst men than among beasts’ (1.10) says Zarathustra, and ‘He that hath understanding walketh amongst men as amongst beasts’ (2.3). However, despite Zarathustra’s (1.14) claim that the beasts are ‘perfect’, he shows – among other anti-animal sentiments – a distaste for the fly, worm and adder, which are poisonous. Further, the swine is to be pitied; the bitch to be distrusted; the hen to have ‘weak intellect’; the oyster to be ‘loathsome and slippery’; the ass to be restricted to a laughable ‘Heehaw’ (in German ‘I-A’, a pun on ja, ‘yes’, to have no mind of its own, to say ‘yes’ to anything – to be a ‘yes-man’ or a contemptible ass); and the toad to be ‘repulsive’. Further, echoing the Levitican judgements concerning who shall have more berths in the Ark, certain animals are privileged – ‘wild dogs’ are unacceptable, and are to be ‘changed into birds’ as ‘sweet singers’; and butterflies ‘know most of happiness’. Zarathustra is a proto-New-Ager in some of his sentiments; he wants to overcome gravity, to ‘teach men to fly’ like the birds. Typical of spiritual teachers, of gurus, he privileges the transcendent spirit exemplified by the birds (also privileged in the biblical Ark) over the heavy, slow, ponderous, hidden or suffering blood-soul configured as the poisonous and dangerous animals, or as the low and infirmed. Zarathustra has his ‘beasts of honour’ – the eagle and serpent – heading an animal hierarchy whose guiding value is robust good health. The Superman



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becomes an overseer, characterized by power and fitness. Nietzsche rejects Darwin’s notion of ‘adaptation’ as puerile – this brings everybody down to a common denominator. The robust adult does not adapt but forges a niche through ‘a will to power, which from the inside increasingly subjects and appropriates the “external”’ (in Norris, 1985, p. 76). In other words, a controlling will, a mastery over Nature. Further, Nietzsche is inconsistent in his animal reference. At one moment obsessive, precise, detailed, stretching a point to absurdity, where, for example, in Ecce Homo (his aggrandizing autobiographical sketch) he says that Thus Spake Zarathustra took ‘exactly’ eighteen months to gestate, which ‘might well suggest, at least among Buddhists, that I am fundamentally an elephant cow’ (ibid., p. 245). Yet, at another point Zarathustra says ‘I am glutted with my wisdom, like a bee that has gathered too much honey’ (ibid., p. 84). The bee gathers pollen not honey. Nietzsche is ahead of the game, but this time on the distaff side, failing the male heroic precision of the Superman with simple misinformation. Nietzsche’s references to animals in Thus Spake Zarathustra, in the face of an admittedly powerful animality in the writing style (reflecting his self-confessed method of philosophizing with a ‘hammer’), are almost wholly an appropriation of animal presence to illuminate the human condition, and do not directly serve the animals themselves, as ancient gods or exemplary aesthetes. This attitude may be contrasted fruitfully with that of the painter Franz Marc, who would perhaps be a more obvious example of a ‘biocentric’ artist, ‘speaking’, in Norris’s (1985, p. 170) definition of biocentrism, ‘as the animal’. Lynton (1989, p. 48) suggests that Marc ‘immersed himself in . . . the life of animals’; while Marc himself asks: ‘Is there a more mysterious idea for an artist than to imagine how nature is reflected in the eyes of an animal? How does a horse see the world, how does an eagle, a doe or a dog? It is poverty-stricken convention to place animals into landscapes as seen by men; instead we should contemplate the soul of the animal to divine its way of sight.’ Franz Marc offers an excellent example of animal-centredness moving to animal-directedness through the animalizing imagination. In contrast, Nietzsche, through the voice of Zarathustra, tends to privilege human concerns over animal presence. In one of Zarathustra’s animal-based parables, ‘The Leech’ (4.4), the prophet, lost in meditative thought and walking through marshy land, accidentally treads heavily on a prostrate man. The man, angry with Zarathustra, explains that he is lying in the marsh in order to attract leeches, ten of which



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have attached themselves to his arm, which is bleeding profusely. When the man realizes that this is the great prophet Zarathustra, he praises the chance meeting – that he should be here in the domain of the leeches who bite him for his blood, and now comes a greater leech, Zarathustra himself, who also ‘bit him for his blood’. He calls Zarathustra the ‘great leech of conscience’. Note that he does not see himself as a leech upon Zarathustra, but that the prophet himself is leech upon this man. The man goes on to tell Zarathustra that he is an expert on the world of the leech, indeed he is the ‘brain’ of the leech, and this has become his whole intellectual world, his chosen study or specialism. His world is confined to this particular spot in this particular marsh with these particular leeches, and nothing else is of consequence. Zarathustra neither praises nor condemns the man, but invites him back to his cave for further discussion. The reader is left to puzzle the potential meanings of the parable (any good teaching story should have multiple possibilities). Is this a satire on narrow intellectualism, as specialist inquiry? Is the man intellectually stupid because his specialism is slowly bleeding him to death, face down in a bog? Is Zarathustra’s intrusion and invitation an opening to a wider perspective, given that the man sees Zarathustra as a bigger leech, one of ‘conscience’? But, as the bigger leech, and given that the entire tone of part IV of Thus Spake Zarathustra is an ironic mocking of guru-like wisdom, is the man in fact seeing the prophet as simply the bigger leech in the sense of luring him to another kind of stupefying narrow-mindedness? Whatever the parable denotes, the question remains – what of the leech in all this business? Here, the animal is reduced to a vehicle for human desire, used merely as illustration, in the most conventional and stereotypical way (leeches as bloodsuckers, as parasites) – a figure of speech flying in the face of Nietzsche’s usual decrying of metaphor and subversion of the interpretative and opaque for the obvious, a transparent and robust rhetoric. In what sense might the parable be at all ecological, saving the leeches, or speaking on their behalf, or attempting to celebrate their perspective in the kind of empathy Marc promotes above? In no sense, for Zarathustra’s invitation to the man to visit him in his cave for further teaching notably excludes the leeches. Margot Norris’s (1985, p. 17) suggestion that Nietzsche’s philosophizing constitutes an animal gesture that resists pressing the animal ‘into symbolic service as metaphors, or as figures in fable or allegory (invariably of some aspect of the human)’, which she also refers to as ‘tropological enslavement to the human’, can be seen to be misguided, or offers



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a particular (mis)reading of Nietzsche. The example of the leech in itself confirms this – what could be more metaphorical, fabulous, allegorical or anthropomorphic? For Norris, Nietzsche’s ‘biocentric’ writing offers a twofold animal gesture – first, a literary forgetting in the insistence of subversion of interpretation, of metaphor, metonymy, parable, and allegory; and second, the unrepentant and unremitting rhetoric of the originator, the self-generating author. While Zarathustra certainly fulfils the latter role, he dispels the former notion, for his style is as hermeneutic as it is plain, as parabolic as it is linear. Of course Nietzsche restores animal passion to the human condition, and Norris (ibid., p. 79) offers a valuable re-interpretation of the Superman ‘as a recuperated animal, and animal “recovered”’ in two senses: first, recovered from the onslaught of a ‘pathogenic’ culture; and second, in terms of recovery, or reclamation, of the instinctual human. But here, it is the human animal that is the pivot around which other biological phenomena revolve, while Nietzsche’s Ark, as we have seen, excludes the infirmed, the less robust and the lowly animals. While he brings us back to our bodies and resists the life of a disembodied mind, this is within the fiction of optimal wellbeing, or robust good health. The best use for the lowly or suffering animals in Zarathustra’s wisdom is to illustrate what may be negative about the human condition – a double disservice to these animals, casting them as first lacking in their own realms, and second as offering models of paucity or lack with respect to the human condition. While Nietzsche’s writing, as the animal, properly scorches from the page and lays bare many human hypocrisies, it also, by its heat, so often attempts to purify, to proselytize elitism. While admitting to an animal nose, a talent to smell ‘the innermost parts, the “entrails” of every soul’, Nietzsche (ibid., p. 89) attributes this animal sense to a ‘cleanliness instinct’, and Norris (ibid.) observes that ‘These acutely sensitive instincts preserve him from the pathological contamination of unclean humans, riffraff’ (so Nietzsche ventures into the dangerous territory of ideas of groups defined by purity). Thus does Nietzsche identify with the eagle on the one hand (elitism) and the serpent on the other (poisonous intent). We can applaud this perspective stylistically, as a literary ‘pure animal aggression’ (ibid.), or we can see it as an incorporation of the biological into the personal psyche, where, in time, Nietzsche comes to suffer from the very sadomasochism he predicts in those who would not be able to articulate the presence of ‘the beast within’. In a letter of 1888 (the year, in a tactful biographical sketch in the ‘Everyman’ edition of



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Zarathustra, that ‘His brain gave way’), he confesses that ‘My speciality was to endure extreme pain . . . with total clarity, for two or three days in a row’ (ibid., p. 87). The endurance of such pain, from persistent headaches, and according to his medical records, linked with a degenerative brain disorder resulting from the contraction of syphilis, has been read by Norris as a ‘determination not to deny or evade the problem of his infirmity’, but to suffer it as ‘an animal fatalism about his body’. Yet, if Nietzsche had recognized value in suffering, or even that suffering is inevitable if not remediable in many cases, his Superman would surely have been described as necessarily flawed. Nietzsche’s stoicism sounds less like an instinctive self-healing and more like an heroic gesture replete with masochistic tendency. The animal may retire to lick its wounds, but it does not begin with a philosophy of ideals, a valorizing of wellbeing, which will inevitably lead to disillusionment as suffering sets in. In this sense, Nietzsche does not seem to have learned from Zarathustra’s much-loved beasts. Nietzsche’s heroic aspiration to ‘rule the world’ (in ibid., p.81) is human folly – the leeches know better. Graham Parkes (1994, p. 215) claims of Zarathustra that ‘Not since Aristotle’s magnificent treatises on animals has such a vast and varied bestiary crawled, soared, swum, trotted, and slithered through the pages of a philosophical text.’ This claim hinges on the descriptor ‘philosophical’. While over 70 species are mentioned by name in Zarathustra, Flaubert’s St Antony refers to about 80 species, not including fabulous animals, and over 180 animal forms – precisely 185 according to Gaston Bachelard’s count – glide, stride, slither and crawl through the pages of Isidore Ducasse’s Maldoror). Both Flaubert’s and Ducasse’s texts moreover could be read as ‘philosophical’, for they are parables in the style of Zarathustra and certainly introduce important ideas and stimulate reflective thought. Nietzsche certainly caught the Dionysian plague – Zarathustra wants to lure people away from the herd, away from the boredom of domesticity, just as Dionysos lures away the Maenads, who trade the bloodless grind of the domestic for an intoxication fuelled by animal passions. Zarathustra wants to form a new herd, a company of the dangerous who are ‘Rope-dancers’ (1.1), the ‘over-goers’ rather than the ‘undergoers’, referring to the bridge over the abyss that is the umbilicus connecting animal and extraordinary human. But ‘Zarathustra shall not be shepherd and sheepdog to a herd!’ The prophet is, rather, like the wolf who will ‘entice many away from the herd’ (1.1) into dangerous territory and company. Again, Norris (1985) would place Nietzsche among a select group of writers – ‘biocentric’ artists who do not write about



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animality, but write as the animal, primarily through a deconstruction and subversion of the dominant anthropocentrism in our culture. Yet, despite Norris’s (1985, p. 73) claim for his ‘aggressive polemic’ as an ‘animal vigor’, and Parkes’s claim for his prophetic philosophical text as saturated with animal life, Nietzsche does persist in anthropomorphism, in turning the animal into a figure of speech in the service of human concerns. Rather than revealing the extraordinary animal in the ordinary human, Nietzsche sees the way back to the animal as the cultivation of the superman, the extraordinary human. This does not subvert anthropocentrism, but raises it to a new meaning. For Nietzsche, in any case, humanity mainly rests below the threshold of what he would consider to be human. Humanity itself is not yet anthropomorphic. A generation before Nietzsche, two books had appeared, both written in France, which offer something closer to a complete subversion of anthropocentric tendencies. Each of these gave themselves over to a Dionysian force, which resulted in truly ‘biocentric’ writing and offered a celebration of the savage aspect of animal passions. These texts are Gustave Flaubert’s St Antony and Isidore Ducasse’s Maldoror, the latter written under the pseudonym of ‘Comte de Lautréamont’.

Flaubert’s beasts Gustave Flaubert offers his own bestiary prowling the pages of his great work on the struggle between asceticism and the animal passions: The Temptation of St Antony, an articulation of the mentality of a 4th-century ascetic and desert Saint, and an anatomy of an arch-anchorite’s solitary sadomasochistic visions. Flaubert’s own description of the ‘beast within’ predates Nietzsche and is uncannily close to the latter’s own preoccupation with a Dionysian intoxication, an infection by animal violence. In Flaubert’s case, however, despite the outward evidence of his deterioration from the contraction of venereal disease (and the side effects of the mercury treatment he was prescribed), he claimed to have ‘so fathomed’ both ‘Lunacy and lust’ that he would neither go mad (as Nietzsche did) nor become obsessed by sadomasochistic sex (the picture one could draw of St Antony from Flaubert’s singular tale). The world, according to Flaubert’s St Antony, is ‘full of wonderful anatomies’ (1983, p. 229). Although regarded as the father of modern realist writing Flaubert’s earlier work is characterized by a surreal imagination, akin to that of his contemporary Isidore Ducasse. The vibrant signatures of animal life stalking practically every page of Flaubert’s St Antony show a marvellous animating and animalizing imagination at



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work, every bit as compelling and chilling as that exhibited by Ducasse in Maldoror and celebrated by Bachelard’s commentary, discussed in the following section. Flaubert’s St Antony, begun in 1848, was rewritten in 1856, and again redrafted and finally published in 1874. Ducasse’s Maldoror was written in 1869. Celebrating the ‘wonderful anatomies’ of animals in particular, Flaubert (ibid., pp. 220–1) sometimes writes as an imagist persuaded by neo-Platonism: ‘since Substance is one, why are Forms so various? There must be, somewhere, primordial figures whose bodies are nothing but their image. If one could see them one would discover the link between matter and thought, what Being consists of!’ Yet it is evident that Flaubert himself, who shifts his epistemological ground from a Platonist idealism to a mythical realism in the course of redrafting St Antony, could ‘see’ these bodies that are images in the hundred or so references to animal forms inhabiting that text. How does Flaubert realize the animalizing imagination? First, to be as the animal is to experience unmediated perception, believing ‘like a brute, in the reality of things’ (ibid., p. 160), in the primacy of selfpresentation of a phenomenon (the thing appreciated before it is explained). Second, the animal represents at once both continuity and origins, described in terms of a primordial chaotic state where creatures lay sleeping, nascent evolution more an involution, a fold in the biological fabric. In this condition, all forms find a common ground: ‘finger, fin and wing are confounded’ (ibid., p. 172). Third, the animals, through their utterances – which we might equate with their displays – constitute the biological ground of life itself: vital, ‘palpitating’, both strong and subtle as ‘the voices of all creatures, the roaring and the cooing!’ (ibid., p. 158). Fourth, the animalizing imagination is exercised through the moral code of the hunter that is realized in an intimate, identificatory relationship with prey, so that ‘who kills an animal will become that animal’ (ibid., p. 103). The animal prey of course is the god and familiar. Fifth, Flaubert goes to the animal world for the embodiment of language. For example, he describes perching ravens making thick, black lines; a body as blue as a blowfly, another as cold as snakeskin; disembodied eyes that are mollusc-like; and devastation is imagined as a dromedary let loose in a field of maize. Sixth, the animating imagination realizes depths through suffering, perversity, pathology: flies eat up a corpse first smeared with honey; bodies are chewed by rats’ teeth; a goat is chopped up and cooked in rancid butter; udders are ripped from cows; a lynx’s eyes are put out. There are moments of Dionysian frenzy, where St Antony’s visions take



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on a sadomasochistic edge and the visionary space is populated by typically Ducassian images: ‘Lightning flashes. Hail falls. . . . There came squalls, full of wonderful anatomies. . . . They rain from the sky, they spring from the ground, they flew from the rocks. Eyeballs are everywhere flaming, and mouths roaring; there are bulging breasts, elongated claws, gnashing teeth, the smack of flesh on flesh. Some give birth, others copulate, or in a single mouthful eat each other up’ (ibid., pp. 229–30). Flaubert describes how these conjured animals, in hot frenzy, form a carpet around St Antony, inducing an enantiodromia – from flame to frost – where the visionary suddenly feels a desperately cold fear, panics as snails creep up his calves and he senses the presence of snakes on his hands. Spiders then induce terror as they enmesh him in their webs with chilling efficiency. Flaubert calls this composite animal terror the ‘mythological howl’ (ibid., p. 16), a vision that may be connected with his own epileptic attacks, described in a letter of 1853 as like a hedgehog turning its prickles in on itself. Seventh, in Flaubert the animalizing imagination is realized through specificity in the image, reading like a list from a Renaissance Art of Memory primer: for example, a howling dog licks the fingernails of a fresh, bleeding corpse; a battalion of birds in triangular formation is described as like a slice of metal quivering at the edges only; there is a pack of jackals, one in a posture of defiance; an eagle pecks at its moulting feathers. Eighth, there is animal movement and posture that animates the image, such as camels galloping; cows lowing; tarantulas ticking; scorpions slithering; mules browsing; eagles both wheeling and croaking; jackals screeching; droning mosquitoes; hissing snakes; leaping toads. Ninth, the human becomes as animal. Not the animal anthropomorphized, but the human – theriomorphized – bellows like a bull; feels like flying, or yelping and howling; wants to ‘have wings, a carapace, a rind’ (ibid., p. 232) and yearns to divide itself up. Tenth, the animating imagination is realized in its most potent signature where the gods themselves are animalized, often as terrible or sublime: the dead are taken to heaven on the beaks of birds; the gods and goddesses are variously elephantine, fish-bodied, breathed out through the nostrils of a tiger, or accompanied by a variety of familiars – Diana with lions on her shoulders wears a dress of leaping animals, bulls, stags, griffins and bees; an ape squats adoringly by a goddess; Persephone sports a blue cloak on which doves flutter; Zeus has an eagle between his legs; Neptune rides a dolphin; Apollo’s chariot is driven by horses, Cybele’s by lions, Bacchus’ by lynxes, Ceres’ by oxen; Silenus rides a donkey; a butterfly flutters around the mouth of Aphrodite;



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a god sits astride a crocodile; a goddess of beauty kneels on a parrot’s back; another god transforms – from fish to tortoise to boar. Unlike Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, who seems to absorb animal life to promote the vigour of his wisdom in an heroic gesture, the anti-hero of Flaubert’s St Antony seems to dissolve in the presence of animals and allow them absolute presence, so that we smell the herd, we feel the slime, we know at once that the animal is suddenly upon us – clicking, lowing, snuffling, hovering, snapping; and that it is both a divine and sublime presence.

The bruising bestiary of Lautréamont Composed by an Uruguayan émigré who died in Paris in 1870 at the age of twenty-four, Isidore Ducasse’s prose poem Maldoror was later acknowledged by André Breton as a primary influence upon the development of Surrealism. With its pathologized imagery and bizarre reference to animal forms, this book also inspired the historian of science and phenomenologist Gaston Bachelard to articulate a type of imagination – ‘animalizing’ – which reverses the common notion that the life of imagination arises from a biological ground (instinct leads to image) for the surprising but marvellous notion that imagination creates the natural, as a ‘biological dream’ (Bachelard, 1986, p. 28). ‘Animalizing’ realizes nature in imagination: ‘The first function of imagination is to create animal forms’, suggests Bachelard (ibid, p. 27). Bachelard then shifts our interest away from both immediate selfpresentation of animal life, and re-presentation in cultural form, to a pre-presentational ‘animalized’ categorical imperative – a formative knowledge or apprehension that is a zoological imagination. Further, through Ducasse’s writing, a poetic image is often drawn from a concrete (sometimes violent or violating) animal act, reminding us ‘that our vices are concretized in the animal kingdom’ (ibid., p. 26). Maldoror has been described as a book of ‘animal parables’ that articulates a dynamized imagination based on the ‘aggression of animals’ (Stroud, in ibid., p. ix), animals that are engaged in ‘terrible and frenetic acts’ (Hillman, in ibid., p. 113). We are interested here in Bachelard’s reading of Ducasse, rather than Ducasse’s work itself, which is glossed brilliantly by Bachelard in Lautréamont. However, we should remind ourselves of the originality of Ducasse’s use of animal life as a vehicle for understanding and expressing an intense energetic of life that also recognizes its inherent pathologizing or openness to suffering. For Ducasse, marginalized animals such as the louse become a means by which we animate life at the margins,



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or ‘animaginatively’ redress our comfortable indifference to the pathos of existence. Through an imagination of the louse and the crab, Ducasse realizes the energetics of the grip, the pinch and the nip. These animals embed in flesh, losing their claws or limbs rather than loosening their grips, as Bachelard notes (1986, p. 19). Ducasse describes how the louse’s grip and sucking of blood is out of proportion to its size. If it were to grow physically into these powers, it would be as big as an elephant and would crush the human. The louse is a terrible familiar, and Ducasse essays our affective–erotic relationship with it that is shot through with disgust and suffering. In this sense he refuses both the idealization and anthropomorphizing of animal life. The animal god is wholly ‘other’ and lousy. (We can also add some species of louse to our list of disappearing animals, for, as their hosts are endangered, so are the lice that feed off their blood, such as the Pygmy Hog Sucking Louse, that is an ectoparasite on the endangered Pygmy Hog, now restricted to Assam, India.) Bachelard’s use of the term ‘animalizing’ offers a positive reading, reversing the usual applications of the word when used in English. To put his usage into context, the first recorded use of ‘animalize’ in English was 1741, derived from the French animaliser: ‘To represent in animal form’, which is a mild and non-commital variant of the word. Current definitions of ‘animalize’ include similarly mild descriptions such as ‘To convert into animal substance’, but now largely include more emotionally loaded content: ‘To reduce to animal nature; to sensualize’ (Shorter OED); and ‘To excite the animal passions of; brutalize, sensualize’ (The Random House Dictionary). ‘Sensualize’ was recorded in English as early as 1612, as ‘living sensually’, and is defined as ‘To render sensual; to explain by reference to sensation’; and especially ‘to imbue with sensual habits or dispositions; to inure to vicious indulgence’ (Shorter OED). From the ‘sensual’ to the ‘vicious’ seems quite a leap. ‘Inure’ itself is a strong word, meaning to burn in, to brand, to establish through deep repetition – so that there is an obsessive–compulsive desire inherent to ‘sensualize’. Indulgence, carnality and excess are synonymous with sensual; as are sexual, animal, animalistic, fleshly, lustful and gross. Roget’s Thesaurus gives ‘indulgence, licence, sensuality and debauchery’ as synonyms of ‘animalism’. Where animalizing implies sensuality, it is then along a dimension from the light erotic to the debauched and excessive, with a bias in the definitions above towards the latter end. ‘Animalizing’ appears to embody both an imagination of terror, of the savage, as well as the sensual and erotic. This reinforces the accounts of the



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‘terrible familiar’ from the previous chapter, the initiating animal spirit that is both instructive and frightening, an intimate who shocks. These definitions also echo the ‘problematic duality of the animal symbol’ (Willis, 1994, p. 19), where ‘animal’ can mean both pet and vermin, both teddy bear and beast, both the serene and the savage. ‘Sensualize’ and ‘brutalize’ are given as two main synonyms for animalize. Definitions of ‘brutalize’ focus on the irrational and the inhuman, the savage, although the origin of the word, the Latin brutus, means heavy, stupid or dull, and referred to the supposed lack of intelligence of the animals rather than ‘savagery’ (which itself refers to the untamed wilderness, the animals’ habitats). The definitions above, however, do demonstrate a bias – towards defamation of the animal, towards the beastly, where the animal is brute or crude. They are in general reductive readings of ‘animal’ – animal taken as inferior, as well as irrational. Bachelard’s fecund and constructive view of animalizing – drawn as it is out of Ducasse’s perverse and demanding bestiary – redresses the balance, challenging reductive and destructive views of animalizing and animality. In suggesting that animal forms may be a fundamental language for the productive imagination, Bachelard then validates animal presence. His view may be seen as a modern complementary description to that of the traditional forms of shamanism discussed in the previous chapter. Where Bachelard sees the imagination of animals as originating in the human psyche, a shamanic world-view sees an extrahuman origin for animal spirits or familiars. And where the shamanic view sees the human psyche as educated by the visiting animal familiar, Bachelard sees the animalizing psyche, through the vehicle of human participation, as an active creator of the biological realm. While Bachelard’s formulation of a species of imagination drawn from his study of Ducasse’s singular prose poem does not involve a study of the biological animal, his study does offer a psychological education – more precisely an education of imagination – that can lead to a new vision of the biological animal. Maldoror stimulated Bachelard to propose a distinct ‘animal life complex’, a way of looking at the world that is aesthetic, vital and grounded in originary animal forms. Ducasse’s imagery itself, in Maldoror, resonates with the traditional shaman–familiar relationship, but now placed in a modern setting. For example, there is the description given in the previous chapter of the hero embracing a female shark that recounts a dangerous familiarity, suggesting indeed familial incest. The human discovers symmetry with a terrible animal familiar in a highly charged atmosphere of intrigue, terror and sensuality. Ducasse is described as a ‘poet of muscles and



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cries’, who adopts a ‘vigorous poetry of aggression’. But these aggressive and vigorous muscles and cries, says Bachelard, are not ‘in’ Ducasse the author, but ‘in’ the language, as this language affords potent animal metaphors (Bachelard, 1986, p. 4). That there may be an animality at work in language is precisely what Nietzsche had attempted to demonstrate through subverting self-reflexive figures of speech to allow a slowbrewing and brutal language to finally break into storm. Bachelard’s concern is with a poetic, rather than logical, basis to mind; and his analysis of Ducasse’s work is a piece of psychological literary appreciation – yet throughout his account one never strays far from the sense of animal form. His vision of an animalized imagination is of a psychological outlook that is educated poetically and aesthetically, yet serves to revitalize the biological. For Bachelard (ibid., p. 31), there are ‘symbolizing powers active in nature’ and ‘the bestiary of our dreams animates a life that returns us to biological depths’ (ibid., p. 86). Further, Bachelard suggests that an imagination based on animal forms essentially pathologizes, through a distortion or deformation of the natural that is re-creative. His symbolist and surrealist bias is evident in such a suggestion. He does not find the extraordinary, especially its pathologized varieties, in the mundanity of the given biological, but suggests that the sublimity of the biological is a product of imagination deforming and thus re-defining the natural (the ordinary): ‘The imagination is not, as its etymology suggests, the faculty for forming images of reality; it is the faculty for forming images which go beyond reality, which sing reality.’ (Bachelard, 1983, p. 16). Imagination allows us ‘to surpass the human condition’ (original italics) (ibid.). Bachelard joins the artists and thinkers of the ‘animal gesture’, those who would displace the anthropocentric perspective by an aesthetic animality, in his insistence upon the necessity of animalizing to the power of poetic life and its animating conversation with the biological realm, or literal material life. Through the animalizing of language Bachelard subverts secular humanism. Richard Kearney (1991, p. 88) notes Bachelard’s “‘subversive humanism”’, ‘which conceived of the human being as a de-centred subject nourished by a poetic power which transcended its control’. (Bachelard is then in the Nietzschean tradition of those who would claim to subvert anthropocentrism while championing the humane.) The human is then incorporated into an autonomous psyche that is characterized by the aesthetic of animal life. This psyche is continuous with the biological world and it spontaneously creates a language of animal forms. Imagination is then prior to experience, or shapes experience, as Plato first proposed: ‘The imagination will see only if it has “visions” and will



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have visions only if reveries educate it before experiences do, and if experiences follow as token of reveries’ (Bachelard, 1983, p. 16). Another way of putting this would be to say that reverie shapes events into experiences. Bachelard’s equating of imagination with reverie is a product of his method – a phenomenological survey of uses of imagery in literature primarily, informed through metaphors of the four elements (fire, earth, air and water) on the one hand, and metaphors of form and movement on the other. The former he calls a ‘material imagination’, the latter, ‘formal imagination’. The distinction employs two of Aristotle’s four causes (material, efficient, formal and final): ‘The imagining powers of our mind develop around two very different axes . . . we can distinguish two sorts of imagination: one that gives life to the formal cause and one that gives life to the material cause – or, more succinctly, a formal imagination and a material imagination’ (ibid., p. 1). One aspect of the formal imagination is the ‘animalized imagination’ – human reveries based on animal forms and animal movement. Bachelard sees the animalized imagination, or animalizing, as both a ‘dynamic imagination’ and a ‘muscular imagination’, where the dynamism of the animal is linked to the form. The ‘animalized imagination’ is then an aspect of human consciousness structured around, informed by, and vitalized by, animal forms and motions. Bachelard always returns to specifics of the animal body and its movements as the formal model for animalizing, and does not attempt to establish a model of the mind, but a psychology of imagination based in aesthetic apprehension. Bachelard (ibid.) makes the further distinction that the formal imagination arises from the human psyche, from ‘the feelings and the heart’; where a material imagination derives from the outer environment, from ‘images that stem directly from matter.’ Thus, while the animalized imagination in Bachelard’s view is an imagination constellated by animal form, he describes it as less ‘natural’ than the material imagination, because its origin is in a metaphorizing of animals. Importantly, the human imagination may then already, spontaneously, produce animal forms, rather than natural animals necessarily acting as models for the imagination. Bachelard (1986, p. 81) suggests that ‘there is a reciprocal action between the naive imagination and animal images’, and this reinforces his seminal, and controversial, proposal that is worth repeating for its bold, intuitive power: ‘The first function of imagination is to create animal forms’ (ibid., p. 27). To use Kant’s distinction, the animalizing imagination is productive rather than reproductive – it generates animal forms rather than modelling itself on animal form. Does imagination then educate perception prior



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to meeting with actual animals, the psychological animal framing the zoological? This would support Krell’s reading of Heidegger on animals, noted in the previous chapter, where ‘animality (is) nothing zoological’. Rather, animality may be historical. Perhaps our phylogeny, or species evolution, bears atavistic possibilities – traces of animal life and forms that are imprinted in the sense in which ethologists describe ‘innate releasing mechanisms’. When 30 caged finches were sent from the Galapagos Islands to California in 1939, they moved from an environment free from birds of prey to one with such predators. Despite never having encountered a bird of prey over thousands of generations, these finches instantly gave out cries of alarm when a bird of prey first circled overhead in their new habitat. The ‘archetypal image’ or atavism was stimulated, and a symbol grounded in biological reality was realized as a behavioural expression (Stevens, 1998). We could see such atavistic behaviour in humans, as responses to animal symbols held as innate releasing mechanisms. In the presence of animals, we might perceive in an enhanced manner, the animal offering the generalized symbol that is equated with the ‘extraordinary’ or ‘numinous’, the very symbol that leads cultures to see animals as divinities. Rather than animality being ‘nothing zoological’, as Krell suggests, it is perhaps ‘supra-zoological’, as Bachelard implies, offering an enhanced zoology. The cycle of events would then be: animal presence releases an animalizing imagination informed by a bestiary of psychological animals, which in turn enhances our perceptions of the animal world.

An imagination of violence It cannot be denied that the zoological images inhabiting the language of Ducasse and then of Bachelard, as the body-parts of animals, engage in savage and apparently cruel acts. But this does not suggest a fascination with sadism or masochism. The philosopher Isaiah Berlin (1991) remonstrates against ‘the pursuit of the ideal’, where ‘the search for perfection does seem to me a recipe for bloodshed’ (ibid., p. 18). An imagination of violence may be the best ground for prevention of the literalizing of violence, or acting-out. Animalizing, as Bachelard describes it, is not even an imagination of violence but a violating imagination that spontaneously pathologizes and denies excessive idealism. As described in the previous chapter, in a world-view that imagines hostility and the unexpected from a catalogue of spirit forms including animal spirits, a violating imagination offers an acceptable part of the fabric of life. For a culture whose world-view demands only the ideal, the optimal, wellbeing



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and the predictable, every violation by the imagination is a rent in the fabric of that fragile structure. As Robert Dupree (in Bachelard, 1986, p. 136) reminds us in an essay on Bachelard’s reading of Ducasse’s Maldoror, we must not mistake ‘poetic violence for a recommendation of or invitation to physical violence’. Rather, the animal violences in Maldoror represent an ‘extreme consciousness of suffering’, whose ‘shock value . . . is meant to educate the imagination’ through aesthetic arrest. Animal images also offer specific metaphors through which human pathologies may be contemplated and re-imagined. Specifics of violence are characterized through specifics of form: beak, claw, talon, pincer, sucker. Bachelard (ibid., p. 80) suggests that ‘The quickest way to describe a human aberration is to compare it with animal behavior.’ And, in a marvellous twist, Bachelard describes how the human imagination itself might create an animal kingdom: ‘A complete classification of animal phobias and philias would yield a sort of affective animal kingdom’ (ibid., p. 79), as these imaginings stacked with affect are turned outward to re-vitalize the zoological world.

Gendering the ‘animal(e)’ While such talk of violence and violating acts is carefully tempered by the psychological caveat – that here we are suggesting that an imagination of violence will prevent a literalizing of violence, an acting out – there is still a suspicion that we may be inappropriately tying the animal in with a particular interest of the aggrandizing male of the human species. Look at the roll-call: Flaubert, Nietzsche, Ducasse, and later, D.H. Lawrence. Does this not represent a monopolizing of animal–human relations and the animalizing imagination in a predictable fashion, through the male voice? Norris’s (1985) account of the ‘biocentric’ tradition in art, Beasts of the Modern Imagination, is undoubtedly one of the key texts in the articulation of an animalizing imagination and is written by a woman. Yet Norris offers a further list of men who, she claims, write (or draw) as the animal: Charles Darwin, Friedrich Nietzsche, Franz Kafka, Max Ernst and D.H. Lawrence. But do they write as the dominant male animal? Only in a final chapter describing why Ernest Hemingway is not a representative of the biocentric tradition does she make a clear link between a masculinized, heroic style of appropriation (including control over animals) and an anti-animal sentiment. A patriarchal attitude could as readily be linked to control of animals as control of women, personified in a mythological hero such as Herakles (the archetypal lion-tamer and ‘strong man’ of the circus)



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who was eventually forced, at the end of his Labours, to dress in a skirt and act as docile servant to a woman – Omphale (whose name means ‘navel’, suggesting that the hero is finally drawn back to the umbilicus and apron strings). One of the wealthiest men in Britain is an entrepreneur who owns several large companies and is an avid big-game hunter, a member of the dying breed that Hemingway so vociferously represented (this man was profiled in The Guardian, 13/11/96, when 53). His passion for hunting is such that he has bought 300 square miles of the Kalahari Desert from Afrikaaner farmers who themselves displaced the indigenous peoples (one of the few remaining small-scale cultures on Earth), and removed all trace of human settlement. He maintains a politically correct conservationist front, for example stocking his land with eight of the remaining 300 black rhino left on Earth. However, he describes this territory as his ‘own little country’ of which he is ‘president’ and his ‘citizens are animals not people’. Not only is he political lord over the animals, but there are also economic interests at work. He claims that if the black rhino is to be ‘protected in perpetuity, there has to be a commercial element to it’. Hunting, he says, ‘plays a vital commercial role’ – so the conservation of the black rhino will be funded presumably by those who are prepared to pay very large fees for the right to hunting trips in this appropriated piece of Africa. The god of Economics is placed above the animal. He boasts that he ‘shot everything in sight’ on hunting trips in the bush when he lived in West Africa for five years during his late teens and early twenties. He suggests that it is ecologically correct to ‘cull’ certain animals, and hunting is his preferred method – for example, ‘Lions are a bloody nuisance. They’re big and dangerous . . . and they breed like rabbits’ (the man himself is described as a ‘powerfully built’, ‘aggressive’ businessman, who has ‘four children from two marriages’). While he claims that ‘For every animal that I shoot I put 10 back’, he typifies the masculinist, controlling attitude toward the animal, where the preferred animals are those that bring out the ‘primitive’ qualities of ‘Man the Hunter’ – the animals configured as quarry, duelling partners, warriors; the hunt described through the metaphors of war games: ‘Man is a predator’ he says, and a hunt must be ‘an equal contest’. In deep contrast to this man, Hélène Cixous – a writer and central figure in the new French feminism, who is as comfortable with philosophical theory as she is with fiction and drama – writes about the clitoris and masturbation under the title ‘I have an animale’ in a wry, short piece called ‘Confession’ (1991, p. 34). She feminizises ‘animal’ as ‘une



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animale’, punning on the ‘ani-male’; and her ‘con-fessions’ puns on the French slang con (cunt). Her ‘animale’ is also of the bush, but here the bush is the pubic hair, and the animal a ‘bird’ that ‘makes its nest’ in her. The animal is not a rival with whom one sets up a life-or-death manly struggle – biased of course to human pleasures – while remarking on the animal’s supposed dignity as one looks down the barrel of an elephant gun or the flex of the deep-sea fishing rod (so phallic, so obvious), playing Hemingway. The ‘animale’ is not so easily appropriated by the human: ‘The animale is badly brought up, capricious and cumbersome. She comes when I call. When I don’t call, she comes. She gets me into fixes.’ Familiar? Cixous suggests that the ‘old Wolf’ (the controlling male) wants to separate woman from her animale: ‘“If you bring her up, you will become more and more beastly”’, says the Wolf. Here is biocentric writing that values an animalizing imagination – the animal realized in sexuality, in the body, yet as an unpredictable force, and particularly beastly to the would-be stifler of that force, the male Wolf. This ‘animale’ that is close to the body, of the body, gendered of necessity to separate it from the male intruder, is conscious of the Hemingway position that would always set the human against the animal as a rivalry, an Oedipal conflict in which boy becomes Man only through the death of the animal (announcing the birth of the hero). While he stands puffed up, cocky, as the conqueror cradling the smoking gun, so the animal (the real cock, the wished-for phallus, as muscular and elegant animal) rests limp in the bush, dead to the world – slaughtered, not sacrificed. Feminist critics of D.H. Lawrence will not be surprised to discover that the cock was one of the animals with which he identified. Another familiar for Lawrence was the wolf – echoing Cixous’s ‘Old Wolf’ as the controlling male. However, our task in the following section is not to dwell on Lawrence’s portrayal of women, but on his portrayal of human– animal relations, and his passionate concern for the animality of both women and men.

Red dawn wolf: D.H. Lawrence’s zoological imagination The last of the ‘Animals’ section of D.H. Lawrence’s collection of poems Birds, Beasts and Flowers!, ‘The Red Wolf’, is patently autobiographical. Set in Taos, New Mexico, which Lawrence saw as his spiritual home, a ‘pale-face’ (Lawrence himself) converses with an ‘old demon’, who is the indigenous American Indian. The pale-face has strayed from the ways of his homeland and abandoned his ‘white God’. He asks the old



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man for guidance. The ‘old demon’ calls him ‘a lost white dog’, but the paleface persists, demanding that the old man touch his red beard and trust that his intentions are good and his courage in place. The red beard now becomes the animal’s pelt. Lawrence shows that he is not cut off from animal wisdom. In his earliest ‘animal initiation’ short novel, The Fox, Lawrence had already put himself inside the skin of this European cousin of the wolf. The fox, as ‘red-dawn-wolf’, was already a familiar. The old man warms to him a little, now calling him (presumably from the trace of the beard) ‘Thin red wolf of a pale-face’, offering a significant shift in status from the ‘lost white dog’. The thin red wolf persists in his demands for acceptance: ‘I am come. I am here. The red-dawnwolf/ Sniffs round your place/ Lifts up his voice and howls to the walls of the pueblo/ Announcing he’s here.’ In this declaration the red dawn wolf shows no fear of the other ‘dogs of the dark pueblo’, and the old man accepts his transformation: ‘wolf, he calls me, and red’. The twist in the tale comes in the final lines: ‘I’m the red wolf, says the dark old father.’ The poet (Lawrence) replies: ‘All right, the red dawn wolf I am.’ Lawrence has travelled from the east of the rising sun (Europe) to the west of America (Taos, New Mexico), finds his spiritual home, and realizes his wolf nature in a romance of the wild. In his last prose work Apocalypse (published posthumously in 1931), at first glance against the grain of his own illness, Lawrence claims ‘the supreme triumph is to be most vividly, most perfectly alive’ as we might see this in ‘flower and beast and bird’. To be ‘alive’ for Lawrence was not simply to stay healthy, but to be in a focused animal attention, in an animalized state of imagination, whatever the body’s condition. His motto for life is already heralded in his first novel The White Peacock: ‘Be a good animal, true to your animal instinct.’ For this rare gift of intensity, a short life is a fair swop. Lawrence’s ‘biology’ – his logos of bios, or writing of life – is characterized by quality not quantity, intensity not longevity. During the last ten years of his life, Lawrence (who died in 1930) produced a body of work in which he formulated a biological model in the tradition of Romantic science after Goethe, shaping a sacred zoology and offering a primary example of an animalizing imagination at work − an imagination working through animal forms and on behalf of animal life. During 1920–21 he wrote two polemical essays on psychoanalysis, which offer a contentious exposition of a vitalist life philosophy, and also began the collection of poems Birds, Beasts and Flowers!, which he finished in 1923. The exclamation mark insisted upon by Lawrence in the title summarizes his view of life as aesthetically arresting,



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awe-inspiring and extraordinary. These poems offer a view of animal– human relationship that is shamanic, where the animal acts as familiar, guide and initiator. Three ‘animal initiation’ novellas were written during 1921–27: The Fox (1921), an extended and revised version of a story first written in 1918; St Mawr (1924), the story of a bay stallion’s effect upon the psyche of a disillusioned woman; and The Escaped Cock (1927), a reworking of Christ’s resurrection as a discovery of sensual life and denial of the Ascension, initiated through an encounter with a particularly fine cockerel as a herald of life’s glories. Lawrence’s manifesto of the biological imagination, the essay Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine, was written in 1925 in Taos, New Mexico. Critical reception of this later phase of Lawrence’s work, that includes a move to the short novel form as a vehicle for expressing his evolving philosophy of life, has often been hostile (Bergonzi, 1970). J.I.M. Stewart (1963, p. 569), for example, finds in the novella St Mawr ‘long passages of inconsequent near-raving’, although Anthony Burgess (1985, p. 212) describes this extended story as ‘a brilliant piece of fiction.’ Keith Sagar (1982, p. 26) suggests that ‘Lawrence’s discovery of the short novel form in 1921 seems to me to have been disastrous for his art’, offering ‘mere vehicles for his current ideas’ that are ‘misanthropic and desperate’. An alternative view is that these later works are not ‘misanthropic’ but anti-anthropocentric, and not ‘desperate’ but courageous, offering what Burgess (1985, p. 273) has cleverly applauded as Lawrence’s ‘courage of his own contradictions’. Lawrence had already spelt out his mistrust of the human condition through the early novels, fearing that most people will not flower, or find their dignity: ‘Humanity itself is dry-rotten, really’ Birkin says to Ursula in Women in Love, followed by a piercing anti-anthropocentrism: ‘there would be no absolute loss, if every human being perished tomorrow. . . . Don’t you find it a beautiful clean thought, a world empty of people, just uninterrupted grass, and a hare sitting up?’ Lynn Margulis (1998), in a newspaper article entitled ‘Life on Earth doesn’t need us’, suggests that ‘Humans are not the centre of life’, and asks ‘Why should Homo sapiens, as the species is inaptly named, of all species, continue?’ (Margulis is the co-author, with James Lovelock, of the ‘Gaia’ hypothesis – that the Earth is a self-regulating organism). In St Mawr, Lawrence had speculated on a future evolutionary scenario, where ‘The race of men (is) judged in the consciousness of the animals they have subdued, and there found unworthy, ignoble.’ Lawrence’s body of work directly opposes all human fundamentalisms and their various desires to purge the Earth of non-believers. It can



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be read as a manifesto on behalf of animals, where the perfection of our relationship to the Other of the biological world depends upon withdrawal – withdrawal of privilege, and of our desire to classify, control or mould that world, thus frustrating the taxonomic urge through cultivation of the aesthetic eye. Here, explanation precedes appreciation, and leads to the death of our animal attention. Lawrence’s hare then sits up to be noticed, rather than to be eradicated, classified, or appropriated as symbol. The hare offers a self-presentation unsullied by anthropocentric desire or linguistic trope. Given that the entire taxonomic classification of the plant world has recently shifted its basis from outward form to genetic structure, and that animal taxonomies will surely follow this lead, we now move further away from unmediated appreciation of the biological to its conceptual clarification, based on ‘naked’ genes. The chemical imagination then precedes morphological/aesthetic appreciation, leading to the demise of our own animal attention. Having made a plea for ‘unmediated’ perception of the presentation of animal life, we also have to recognize that animal life is re-presented as it is written out by humans, and that such writing may also offer an animal act on the part of humans, as biocentric writing (Norris), or the exercise of an animalizing imagination (Bachelard). We recognize that both activities can happen at once or in parallel, as the simultaneous appreciation of the presence of the biological, psychological and conceptual animal. Our task is then to track the animal of privilege, or how certain kinds of animal – biological, psychological, or conceptual – come to be legitimated in differing cultural contexts, and other animal presences come to be marginalized or exterminated, as differing forms of ‘ecological’ crises. While Lawrence offers a plea for direct perception of animal self-presentation, requiring an education of attention on the part of humanity, he also offers an excellent example of the animalizing imagination at work through the tropes of language, where the animal is both psychological and semiotic species. However, Lawrence insists that the biological precedes the psychological, and in this respect echoes Bachelard’s view that the animalizing imagination is grounded in the biological. However, a plunging back into the unpredictable and sensuous current of biological life that is normally smoothed over by civilized behaviour and distance from the wild, is not for Lawrence a mere return to primitivism. Rather, as he articulates such a move through the cultural medium of writing, he demands that animal life is essayed as it is appreciated, so that animal appreciation becomes an act of writing as well as natural history, in which, again, the very act of writing itself is animalized (but



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not primitivized, or made naïve). Paradoxically, as we recover a biological imagination and articulate this through an artistic sensibility, so we seem to contribute to the very culture that threatens to drive us from our animal condition (and birthright). But Lawrence’s method offers a writing into life rather than a representation of life, subscribing ‘to an art whose function vis-à-vis life is to serve as a stimulant rather than a simulacrum’ (Norris, 1985, p. 191). As we write into, rather than about, life, so we connect aesthetically with it, rather than technically. In this move of writing into life, Lawrence imagines that we are mobilized by our entire biological heritage (echoing Haeckel’s notion that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny). We cannot help but bring our biological history to shape our biological imagination. In a recovery of our species ancestry through an animalizing imagination, so we live what Lawrence variously calls a ‘blood consciousness’, ‘instinctive knowledge’ and ‘species intensity’. This notion shifts us from a quantitative biology to a science of qualities. Our current medical obsession with longevity, or life at any cost, whatever its quality, offers a quantitative view of life mirroring science’s privileging of function over form and quantity over quality. As we have noted, Lawrence’s view calls for a life based on intensity, or quality, of existence. In the novella St Mawr, Lawrence wonders ‘if we could get our lives straight from the source, as the animals do, and still be ourselves’. His response offers a wonderful vision of the democracy of animal life, a flattening of neo-Darwinian, classificatory hierarchies: ‘A pure animal man would be as lovely as a deer or leopard, burning like a flame fed straight from underneath. . . . He’d be all the animals in turn, instead of one fixed, automatic thing.’ What is it for the human animal to live a ‘species-intensity’? First, and foremost, the artist lives and dies for her art, is ‘dead’ without it. This compulsion and obsession goes without saying. Second, Lawrence’s model of writing biology confirms a narrative intelligence, and is not the same as understanding biology in a technical sense. Here, Lawrence’s biologically-inspired model of the artistic impulse (implying that good science is an art form also) privileges an aesthetic vision of life over a functional one, recovering a vitalistic tradition of biology against the grain of the dominant mechanistic (and reductive–genetic) view. Again, ‘aesthetic’ is not used here to refer to ‘high’ art, refinement of culture, or specialist knowing, but to common-sense perception as a concentrated act of attention, a bodily-sensibility as the gasp of breath one takes in a moment of wonder or awe. As Norris (ibid., p. 191) notes, ‘Like Nietzsche, Lawrence would subscribe to a notion of aesthetics as “applied physiology”.’



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Lawrence’s aesthetic biology privileges bios over logos, indeed celebrates life and its appreciation (wonder), prior to its explanation (technical efficiency). Here, phenomena are not biologically studied, but biologically imagined. Where, for example, the palaeontologist Richard Fortey (1997, p. 14) says: ‘We start to understand our (natural) history by seeking to collect and classify’, we see a post-Enlightenment view at work that is not a biological imagination but a biological understanding. Fortey chooses his words wisely, in the process exposing current biological orthodoxies: problem solving privileged over problematizing, and naming and classification (order) exercised as forms of control over what might otherwise be regarded as chaotic. As Fortey (ibid., p. 15) also notes, in the current reduction of biology to molecular and genetic interests, even naming has become ultimately objectified, as species are ‘being numbered rather than named, given molecular signatures which can be recognized again even without a name’. In such a functional biology the un-named and numbered are reminiscent of all our forms of de-naturing and objectification (from social security tags, to prisoners, to Holocaust victims). Lawrence’s biological imagination remains in life, but reinvents life through the medium of poetry, confirming life’s self-evident sacrality. The function of literature for Lawrence, as described through the later works, is not to provide a lens through which one greets life, as metaphor preceding the ‘real’. Rather, the given biological is articulated through the literary imagination. Writing itself becomes an animal act, not a representation of life but a participatory and celebratory gesture. The self-display of life invites participation rather than reflective distancing, so that immediacy, the heat and vitality of the occasion impel the writer. Again, the artist writes not about the animal, but as the animal. Thus, Norris (1985) sees Lawrence as a typically ‘biocentric’ writer who could only exist after Darwin’s particular reading and writing of nature. However, Lawrence can be read as anti-Darwinian, certainly as regards his animism, and his aesthetic, shamanic and Romantic zoology, treading rather the path opened by Goethe. Darwinian and Goethean biology can be differentiated in their treatment of the relationships between form and function (which, on a wider scale, can be seen as a relationship between aesthetic and utility). Darwin attempts to explain the evolution of form in functional terms (adaptation and selection). Form is then a product of function: the giraffe’s neck a result of preservation of a useful yet spectacular variation on form through natural selection, enabling the animal to reach succulent foliage out of the reach of other ground-living animals. To such adaptations, the neo-Darwinians



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have added functional glosses – for example, seeing the giraffe’s markings as offering camouflage. Goethe’s biology, preceding Darwin’s by a generation, sees function as a by-product of form. Form is primary in Goethe’s view and is reducible to a number of archetypal patterns (Goethe was the founder and namer of ‘morphology’). Form, however, cannot be reduced to function. ‘Wherever I looked, I saw a picture’ said Goethe (in Hartley, 1995, p. 19), suggesting that the world is self-evidently, or intuitively, aesthetically determined – biology as a cascade of self-display both beautiful and terrible or sublime, and bent on variety. Darwin sought an explanation where Goethe cultivated an appreciation of nature’s variety. Darwin’s science is one of quantification and law (logos), breaking down forms and analysing them. Goethe’s science is one of qualities, resisting analysis and attempting to encompass nature as a self-displaying aesthetic corrective to mechanistic vision. While Darwin emphasizes the place of chance variations (now read genetically, as the mutation of genes), his overall view is that of the Rationalist, for natural selection is bent on maximizing adaptability. The Romantic Lawrence (1971, p. 11) describes his science as irrational or intuitive: ‘to my mind there is a great field of science which is as yet quite closed to us. I refer to the science which proceeds in terms of life and is established as data of living experience and of sure intuition.’ Lawrence opposes ‘life’ to the study of ‘mechanistic functioning’ (ibid.). Lawrence first encountered Darwin’s ideas during 1907–8, the years he was at College in Nottingham. At first he enthusiastically embraced Darwinian materialistic science, which offered such a change from the claustrophobic religious pieties encountered in his immediate community. However, it is evident from the development of his writing and ideas that while he still to some extent clung to the notion of species competition for survival, his developed biological model rejects materialism for an aesthetic morphology. By 1920–21, Lawrence (ibid., p. 14) could write: ‘I do not believe in evolution’ as upward progress. Rather he offered an historical model of cyclical change and recurrence. Lawrence would have appreciated the rise of a post-modern biology of qualities (Goodwin, 1995; Kauffman, 1995), in which the more mechanistic and teleological aspects of Darwin’s ideas (popularized in neo-Darwinian views such as sociobiology) have been thoroughly challenged through an interest in the evolution of form that resists functional-teleological explanation. These views recover a Goethean interest in morphology against the dominant stream of biology’s reduction to genetic explanations, where a post-modern biology of qualities emphasizes the macro-



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view of evolution of form, within evolution of complexity through laws of self-organization. Lawrence prefigures this interest in complexity through emphasis upon intensity of life rather than duration. Lawrence’s animalizing imagination also prefigures the new, or post-modern, biology where he focuses upon immediacy and complexity of aesthetic self-display prior to functional readings. Lawrence’s Romantic interests move against Darwinian functionalism also, as a challenge to the latter’s puritanism. Lawrence follows William Blake’s ‘Exuberance is beauty’, rather than John Wesley’s ‘waste not, want not’. The Protestant religious orthodoxy of Darwin’s time promoted a ‘Natural Theology’, that offered a biological orthodoxy: each species was specially created and every form offered a function in a mechanical Universe underpinned by reason and order. While Darwin radically questioned this Creationism, his legacy has done little to displace the hegemony of function over form, of utility over aesthetic, flying in the face of the magnificent efflorescence of the world as an explosion of self-display that might be appreciated prior to being explained. Adolf Portmann, who was for many years professor of zoology at the University of Basel until his death in 1982, is one of the few biologists to have championed this aesthetic view against both Creationism and Darwinian functionalism. Portmann (1982, pp. 29–30) characterizes Darwin’s evolutionary model as ‘technologically oriented thinking’, summed up in the designers’ catch-phrase ‘form follows function’, where ‘only functional value shows the way to natural form’. Turning to the ‘so-called lower world of animals: for instance, sea stars, and sea urchins or sea anenomes, as well as jellyfish’ for his primary examples, Portmann (ibid., pp. 32–3) points out that ‘So far, no one has attempted to explain the multiplicity of colorations in the visible image of these animal forms by an appeal to some special adaptation.’ Such colouration offers neither camouflage, nor sexual attractor, but serves rather as ‘ornamentally effective formations which reveal absolutely no functional value but which constitute the expression of characteristic inner structure’. In other words, self-display, or efflorescence, for its own sake. ‘Nothing useful!’ exclaims Portmann, offering a succinct manifesto of his aesthetic zoology. Rather, these colourations offer a revelation of identity and a celebration of difference: ‘an incredible richness’, and ‘a storehouse of wonders of very intimate beauty’. Portmann calls this aesthetic both ‘expressive property’ (ibid.), and ‘self-representation within the realm of appearance’ (1986, p. 2). Such a view of uncluttered or unmediated phenomenality (which is perhaps better thought of as self-presentation rather than ‘self-representation’)



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echoes Lawrence’s biological imagination and naturalist’s eye, where, for example the ‘poppy glossy’ turkey cock has wattles ‘the colour of steel-slag which has/ been red hot/ And is going cold,/ Cooling to a powdery, pale-oxidised sky-blue’. Lawrence describes no reason or purpose for the ‘queer dross shawl of blue and vermilion’, merely that it is ‘A bit of slag still adhering, after your firing in the/ furnace of creation’ (from the poem ‘Turkey-Cock’ in Birds, Beasts and Flowers!). This is simply a celebration of sheer excess, beauty for its own sake, that Portmann (1982, p. 34) describes as ‘forms which have their boundaries beyond mere necessity!’. Our purpose here is not to create an opposition between utility and aesthetic, for form and function can be in dialogue. Rather, it is to bring the aesthetic, and the naturalist’s eye, in from the margins in an age where zoology is reduced to genetic scripts, information, and signs, losing the turkey’s wattle to its explanation and determination, in a new flush of Darwinism. While Darwin himself may never have completely lost his naturalist’s eye, so beautifully exhibited in his account reaped from the voyage of ‘The Beagle’, his later theorizing, with its emphasis upon utility marginalizes it. Romantic biology, following Goethe, resists such functionalism. Indeed, Schelling’s Naturphilosophie promoted a cult of form, extending Goethe’s groundbreaking ‘morphology’, or comparative quality of forms, where every individual example is shot through with numinosity. Every form is holy. Lawrence’s biology enters this Romantic tradition of a pantheistic cosmos with ease: ‘I admit a God in every crevice’ he exclaims in the poem ‘Bat’. Instinct itself is seen as sacred, where the ‘religious instinct’ is equated with the ‘creative instinct’ (Lawrence, 1971, p. 18), subsuming even the sexual instinct, which may come as a surprise to those who have stereotyped Lawrence’s interests. Further, and this is Lawrence’s biological imagination at work, ‘religious’ endeavour is neither moral as pursuit of an ideal, nor intellectual as pursuit of an idea, nor revelatory as preparation for illumination, but is based on intensity of living, on pulse, on ‘quickness’ of existence. It is energetic. In St Mawr, Lawrence’s character Lou Witt compares the great stallion’s life force with that of humanity. Where St Mawr ‘burns with life’, most of humanity has ‘a deadness’. Lawrence complained of science studying dead specimens rather than life itself. Lawrence’s own short life, plagued by illness, should be measured against its intensity and energy. Norris (1985, p. 188) notes that ‘The Laurentian cosmos (Nature) is a plenum full of interrelated creatures and things that are neither equal nor fixed as a result of differences in degree and kind of power.’ Lawrence



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refuses an hierarchical reading of difference. Rather, life is a field or web, a dynamic system with emergent properties. Difference is configured in terms of more or less vitality and intensity of living. Most importantly, ‘vitality’ as energetic is not read mechanistically, but aesthetically. Vitality does not just mean movement, but intensity of display and intensity of attention towards the display of form. Lawrence had come into contact with the German Romantic tradition largely through his elopement in 1912 with Frieda Weekley, a cultured German who was to become Frieda Lawrence. According to Mark Kinkead-Weekes (1996, pp. 39–40) Lawrence was reading Goethe, or reading about him, by 1912. Through a visit to Germany with Frieda in 1912, Lawrence encountered the work of the ‘Blue Rider’ school. The painters Franz Marc and Wassily Kandinsky had given the name ‘Blue Rider’ to an artists’ almanac they planned to produce on a regular basis from 1911. The name arose from a common love of blue, Kandinsky’s love of riders, and Marc’s obsession with horses. Marc attempted, in his own phrase, to ‘animalize art’, and says, ‘I am trying to . . . empathize pantheistically with the tremulous coursing of the blood in nature, the trees, the animals and the air’ (Marc, in Hartley, 1995, p. 375). Marc wanted viewers of his animal paintings to ‘feel the inner trembling of animal life’ (Marc, in Partsch, 1991, p. 38). This was a genuine attempt to see the world from the animal’s perspective: ‘transporting ourselves into the soul of the animal in order to divine its visual world’ (ibid.). As with Lawrence, and Nietzsche before him, Marc found an ‘undefiled vitality’ in animals that he could not see in humanity (ibid., p. 39). For Lawrence, ‘flame’ or ‘fire’ became the primary metaphor for this pure vitality. In her first meeting with the stallion St Mawr, Lou Witt was surprised to notice that ‘a dark, invisible fire seemed to come out of him’. Lawrence essays his notions of zoological energetics in what begins as an autobiographical account set in New Mexico: Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine. A porcupine has attacked a dog and left it with many painful quills in its nostrils and lips, which Lawrence begins to patiently pluck one by one. Having plucked most of the quills and relieved the dog’s agony, Lawrence decides that he should shoot the offending porcupine, an animal that he personally finds ‘repugnant’. The essay uses the incident as a springboard for a manifesto of biological vitalism. Lawrence proposes four principles in two groups. The first two principles come under the heading of ‘existence’. They refer to species or types, not to their individual examples. Here, life can be seen in terms of (a) the dynamics of predator-prey relations, and (b) in terms of a spectrum of energetics as ‘power’ and ‘vividness’ of living. To be



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more alive is not necessarily to be better adapted or to live longer, but to display ‘species intensity’. In contrast to ‘existence’, where individual members of a species may either suffer or benefit because of the overall nature of the group, what Lawrence calls ‘being’ – as opposed to ‘existence’ – refers to individual examples. Here, he follows Nietzsche’s view that individuals may offer atypical examples of the group type. Each ‘being’ is itself incomparable, unique, and holy. Unfortunately, you cannot have ‘being’ without ‘existence’, so that it is inevitable that the extraordinary may suffer in relationship to the ordinary within species evolution. ‘Existence’ refers to the dimensions of time and space in which ecosytems flourish or perish, as things in relationship to each other (such as predator-prey). However, ‘being’ refers to participation in a ‘fourth dimension’, which Lawrence sees as the numinous, where every animal for example is just as it should be, like ‘the frog at full leap’. Such a dimension can be compared with Marc’s animalizing of art and Bachelard’s animalizing imagination. When we turn our animalized eye onto every individual creature in its ‘being’, there is no other imperative but to wonder and appreciate. Here is an Eden, a Commonwealth, a magical, full democracy – Prospero’s island, an Ark of familiars. However, in the realm of ‘existence’, a gritty realism cuts across this psychological animalizing to reveal the Darwinian sediment of competition for survival, where utility offers premature closure to interest in form. Where Lawrence says in St Mawr, ‘A pure animal man would be . . . all the animals in turn’ he is, in his own turn, in ‘being’ mode. However, in ‘existence’ mode, Lawrence can in the space of two pages of text call the porcupine ‘demon-like’, ‘lumbering’, ‘squalid’, ‘unpleasant’, ‘like a great tick’, ‘a bug’, ‘stupid’, ‘repulsive’ and ‘repugnant’. Throughout this novella, nature is by turns either full of ‘glamour’ or ‘squalor’. Lawrence falls foul of his own terms of ‘existence’ in his (in)famous sexism, where ‘energy’ in nature is often described in phallocentric terms, privileging masculine animals, turkey cock over hen, peacock over peahen; or, where there is reference to both genders (for example the poems ‘SheGoat’ and ‘He-Goat’), the genders are stereotyped – the he-goat all phallus, the she-goat all passivity. In the ‘existence’ register of zoology, the bat is ‘highly vindictive’, ‘disgusting’, ‘impure’, ‘unclean’, and ‘obscene’. Where ‘being’ invokes tolerance of animal life, ‘existence’ brings forth prejudices, and invokes Darwinian fictions and frictions such as ‘struggle’, ‘survival’ and ‘adaptation’. This contradictory position may seem to offer a weakness in Lawrence’s zoological model, but its paradoxical nature can be seen to offer the necessary friction for a dynamo



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to writing biology, as a dialectic between the orders of the Real (‘existence’) and the combined Imaginary and Symbolic (‘being’). Indeed, there are times when Lawrence pursues the dialectic to synthesis, and this is most evident in the application of his zoological model to the human animal as species. Here, a dilemma is raised where, in terms of ‘existence’, the human is supreme predator, but in terms of ‘being’, our vitality is patently lacking. While we meet the criterion for successful species ‘existence’, we do not meet the criterion for successful ‘species intensity’ or individual ‘being’, that Lawrence often refers to as ‘nobility’. As a species we are then dominant but energetically impotent. ‘Species intensity’ normally gained from relationship between members of the same species, such as sexual relations, is frustrated for Lawrence (following Freud), where individual instinct is sublimated in the service of culture. Ironically, our art suffers, or is impotent, because of this severance from desire. Hence, we need another kind of relationship to rekindle this desire. Lawrence finds this in the most traditional relationship of all: human–animal relationship of a totemic nature; the familiarity between human and animal that characterizes traditional shamanism, that is both deeply religious and erotic. In his poem ‘Snake’, Lawrence is faced with a venomous snake, where ‘The voice of my education said to me/ He must be killed’. However, the man finds that he strikes up an immediate familiarity with the snake: ‘But I must confess how I liked him’, and ‘Was it perversity, that I longed to talk to him?/ Was it humility, to feel so honoured?/ I felt so honoured.’ The snake brings a gift, resulting in a humbling of the man in its presence. Burgess (1985, p. 156) suggests that Lawrence ‘likes animals to maintain their otherness’. Lawrence is not about to force through the conceit he tenders in a poem on the mosquito: ‘Am I not mosquito enough to out-mosquito you?’ No, he is not, for he realizes in the ‘Fish’ poem that ‘Fish are beyond me’, and that he is ‘not the measure of creation’. Animals are typically referred to as deities, otherworldy, in shamanic fashion. In his novella The Fox, Lawrence describes how two women’s lives are disrupted by a young man returning home from the Great War, who is invited to work for them. The women – March and Banford – have a close relationship and run a smallholding, where they raise fowl. The women’s lives are filled, but not fulfilled. Their existence lacks a necessary friction, and invites an interference. Two related events come to disrupt their sparse, but comfortable, lives. First, a fox starts to kill the fowl. The more manly, ‘robust’ of the women, March, encounters the fox: ‘She lowered her eyes and suddenly saw the fox . . . his eyes were



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looking up. They met her eyes. And he knew her. She was spell-bound − she knew he knew her.’ The fox had become her familiar: ‘his knowing look seemed to have entered her brain...she was possessed by him’. The fox ‘had become a settled effect in her spirit, a state permanently established’. Finally, she dreams of a fox: ‘She stretched out her hand, but suddenly he bit her wrist, and at the same instant . . . whisked his brush across her face, and it seemed his brush was on fire, for it seared and burned her mouth with a great pain. She awoke with the pain of it, and lay trembling as if she were really seared.’ This has all the features of a typical, traditional shamanic initiation: a dream animal visits as a familiar and strikes up an erotic relationship, but on the animal’s terms. The animal initiates through a wounding, a bite, and leaves a feeling of hurt or pain. The human animal is branded with her familiar. In this story, we also recognize Lawrence himself as the the fox’s cousin, the red dawn wolf, his animal familiar stalking and searing the characters of his own imagination. But, as the shamans say, it is the fox, the animal itself, that brings the gift of imagination. The second interruption to the women’s idyll arrives in the form of a young soldier who turns up at the smallholding seeking some work. He is offered temporary accommodation, but is struck by March and seeks a relationship with her. March at first resists, and notes that Banford is getting jealous of the man who would steal away her companion. However, March begins to identify the man with the fox: ‘to March he was the fox’, and is drawn to honour him for this reason. The two interruptions by fox and young man are identified as one, or two sides of one coin. The young man, Henry, even gives off the odour of the fox, where March ‘could at last lapse into the odour of the fox’. However, as Melissa Partridge (1982, p. 17) suggests: ‘By identifying the boy with the fox, Lawrence removes him from the human frame of moral reference and releases him into an amoral world of wilderness and predation.’ Henry then kills the fox himself, where March’s ‘eyes went black and vacant’ as she hears of the death of the animal, and immediately wants to feel the fox’s brush against her skin. Henry preys on March, almost tricking her into marrying him, as if March had now become the fowl to Henry the fox. March resists at first, as if she knows that you do not ‘marry’ a familiar, but maintain a respectful distance. She feels an allegiance to her companion Banford, who is by now terrified of Henry. The young man cuts down a tree and it falls on Banford, killing her outright. March and Henry marry, with the man promising to take her to Canada and a new life, but the woman is already exhausted, has lost her vitality, ‘being’, or animal sense. No matter how much she promises herself,



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within this trap of a failed relationship, that ‘She would keep awake’, or maintain her animal attention, be ‘in’ life, she seems to fail: ‘she was so tired . . . And sleep seemed near.’ The young man was no replacement for the animal familiar. In The Fox, a woman–animal familiarity that produced sustenance, vision and deep attention was broken by an intrusive male figure, representing a kind of degenerate predator. A similar theme is pursued in St Mawr, which again is full of reference to shamanic animal initiation, and the function of the call of the wild. The heroine Lou Witt is in a failing marriage to the aristocratic Rico, who quickly loses all fire to his bourgeois tastes and dependencies. Their sex life falters. Lou craves the instinctual life, and buys a bay stallion, St Mawr, for Rico, as a substitute for the lost animality of their relationship. Rico is already compared to a domesticated dog, and Lou hopes that the horse might metaphorically kick some horse sense into his routine existence. Her hopes turn out to be literalized, when the horse reacts to Lou’s bad temper as he attempts to control the stallion during a ride, the horse rearing up, toppling over on the man and crippling him. From first meeting, St Mawr becomes a familiar for Lou: ‘She laid her hand on his side, and gently stroked him. . . . And she was startled to feel the vivid heat of his life come through to her.’ The ‘mysterious fire of the horse’s body had split some rock in her’ and she went home from the encounter, lay down in her room and wept. She had a vision of the ‘large, brilliant eyes’ of the horse, ‘Almost like a god looking at her terribly out of that everlasting dark’. She had never felt a passion of this kind with Rico, who, upon the offer of the horse, had said to Lou that he had no feeling for horses, the animal would be a waste of money, and if she wanted to buy him something he would ‘prefer a car’. Lou finds the penetrating stare of her familiar the only thing to her that is ‘real’, although it is also ‘terrifying’. Again, the typical pattern of shamanic initiation is complete: an erotic and terrifying encounter with a familiar that initiates into a mystery, an otherness, which cannot be ignored or explained away. Lou is animalized, her senses deepened. But what can she now do with this imagination, this wild, intense attention? Rico’s accident forces her into a choice: rather than stay with him in his convalescence, she seeks refuge with her mother, who is sympathetic to her dilemma, and plans to set off for New Mexico, to buy a ranch, taking the horse with her. Here, her transformation is complete, as she is introduced to a wilderness, scenery that comes to substitute for the animal. She reclaims her identity as neither ‘a lover nor a mistress nor a wife’. Where does St Mawr lead her? To a recovery



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of an ability to live through a keen attention, an animalized state of awareness, which she could never find in London and in her relationship with Rico. In New Mexico (again, an autobiographical statement by Lawrence), Lou finds ‘something wild’, a ‘spirit’, ‘that will hurt me sometimes’, but that saves her from ‘cheapness’. This spirit has also revealed to her that her ‘sex is deep and sacred’. It is the sacred nature of sex, and the mistake of asceticism, which Lawrence takes as a theme for a third ‘animal initiation’ short novel, The Escaped Cock, first published under the title The Man Who Had Died. And it essays another animal–human familiarity, this time between a man and a cockerel, that awakens the human to another kind of life, a new level of intensity. The story reworks the resurrection of Christ, as a figure that wakes not knowing whether he is alive or dead. In this twilight world, he emerges from a tomb just as a particularly beautiful cockerel utters a ‘splitting crow’ as it looses itself from a rope that has been tied to its leg to prevent it roaming. The cockerel is ‘resplendent with arched and orange neck’ and has ‘a special fiery colour to his crow’. The man is still staggering around in a limbo state, having emerged from the tomb to ‘the animal onrush of light’. As the man emerges into the world, so he soaks up its immediacy and sensuality. The synchronous cock’s crow, as if heralding his rebirth, rouses him ‘as if electricity had touched him’. He meets the escaped cockerel, which seems to intend him, as familiar: ‘the cock, with the flat, brilliant glance, glanced back at him, with a bird’s half-seeing look. And always the man who had died saw not the bird alone, but the short, sharp wave of life of which the bird was the crest’. The bird becomes an emblem for the brilliance of life, which the man soaks up in his dazed state: ‘The doom of death was surge of life.’ At this precise moment, in Lawrence’s parable, the Ascension is forestalled as the Christ-figure seeks sensual experience (paralleling the Buddha’s earthly quest), immediacy, a phenomenal existence: immanence rather than transcendence. The cockerel, as initiator and familiar, points the way to the man discovering, later in the story, a new kind of spirituality through bodily pleasures with an initiating woman. As Sagar (1982, p. 42) says, ‘The cock had now fulfilled his role of messenger and pointer of the way.’ The cock is picked up by the man, just as the animal’s master appears, and is returned to its owner, but there is the feeling that it cannot be tethered, domesticated, but is destined to trumpet the glory of life as it wishes. It is easy to see Lawrence as that cockerel. Or, rather, it is easy to see the familiarity between Lawrence and the cockerel, for Lawrence does not invite transfiguration into animal, but deep familiarity, as



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a means of achieving ‘being’ as the wholly attentive human animal. Lawrence also rejects the symbolizing of animals. In a letter to a periodical, ‘The Laughing Horse’, he attacks ‘modern symbolism’, where, for example, the horse stands for human ‘passion’. For Lawrence, the horse does not ‘stand for’ anything but its own nature: ‘hoofs, irresistible, splintering hoofs, that can kick the walls of the world down’ (Lawrence, in Sagar, 1982, p. 30). Lawrence then immediately values the selfpresentation of the animal, refusing its reduction to machine or transformation to symbol. The Romantic tradition of zoology has continued this tradition in the work of biologists such as Brian Goodwin (1985, pp. xiii–xiv) who suggests, in a discussion of post-modern biology’s challenge to neo-Darwinian views: ‘Organisms cease to be simply survival machines and assume intrinsic value, having worth in and of themselves, like works of art.’



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5

Totemism and animalizing: animals as signs This unnatural history of human–animal relations has tracked three kinds of animal presence: the biological or literal, the psychological or imaginal and the cognitive or conceptual. This could be reformulated as animal presences in the realms of the non-discursive Real, the preverbal Imaginary, and the discursive (verbal, linguistic and textual) Symbolic, respectively. This chapter will concentrate particularly on the fate of the latter animal presence – the conceptual species, cognitive animal, or an animal of the mind – in an age obsessed with information and cognition. If there is a privileged animal, it is the constructed animal as sign (and quite what this means will be addressed in the first part of this chapter). This animal has become the dominant culture’s theoretical familiar, the darling of both modernist and post-modernist intellectuals, and has led to the temporary demise of interest in both the biological animal and the animal as image. How does an animal become a familiar? The material explanation, given by the functionalist anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski, is simply because it is ‘good to eat’. Yet animals portrayed in Palaeolithic cave art do not represent a walking larder, but more a frozen dream. From our earlier accounts of shamans’ encounters with a terrible familiar, we can see that it would be pretty hard to eat some of the patently psychological beasts presented in those accounts! These ‘animals’ are autonomous, non literal, providing rather the image-fabric to a world of spirits and dream beings that interpenetrate and make indeterminate this ‘real’ world, or make ambiguous transcendental certainties that we devise for evaluating the ontological status of the so-called ‘real’ or ‘natural’ world. In contrast to the material apprehension, the conceptual 128



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move is to treat the animal not as ‘good to eat’ but as ‘good to think’, in the phrase of the structuralist anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, where the animal is no longer treated as a presentational being, but as a sign in a system, a representation, forming the model for a structure of mind and a classification of the natural world. Strung between the biological animal in the natural field, and the conceptual animal in a field of signs offering a mental structure, is the psychological animal, which is ‘good to imagine’, or which, if we follow Bachelard, is necessary to imagination, for the ‘animal’ (as an animalizing imagination) constitutes imagination’s inherent vitalism and grounds imagination in the sensuous and the aesthetic. This animal makes direct, phenomenal appearances as images (and makes a claim upon us to treat it imaginatively), which need not be classified, catalogued nor appropriated for human understanding, but which may educate the attention of humans in an aesthetic sense. The psychological animal is autonomous, unpredictable and potentially pathologized and pathologizing, but may come with erotic–affective and educational intentions, as familiar and guide, and is treated as such in classical shamanism. While this chapter addresses the presence and status of animals of the mind, it is from the perspectives of both the biological and psychological animal that we may critically address the interest particularly of structuralists (following Lévi-Strauss’s work) in this conceptual or cognitive animal. James Long, a British merchant who had contact with the Algonquin north American Indians in the eighteenth century, recounted the story of an Ojibwa Indian who claimed that he had accidently killed a bear on a hunting trip. The Indian was deeply upset, because his ‘totam’ (sic) animal was the bear itself. Later, recounted the Indian, he was attacked by a bear, who knocked him to the ground. The animal then ‘spoke’ to him, asking him to explain why he had killed the first bear during the hunt. The Indian told Long that he spoke back to this bear, explaining that the killing of the first animal had been a mistake, precisely because the bear was his totem animal. The bear forgave the hunter and assured him that neither he nor his tribe would be avenged for the accidental killing. The hunter, however, told Long that he could not forgive himself for the mistaken killing: ‘my totam is angry, I shall never be able to hunt any more’ (in Knight, 1991, p. 118). Referring back to the discussion concerning world-views in the previous chapter, within the frame of a Cartesian outlook, the account above of the Ojibwa Indian is mythological, fantastic, or allegorical. Viewed through a non-Cartesian frame, however, there is a description of an





animal–human relationship of an order based on the narrative realization of a ‘dreamtime’, a continuity between waking life and the dream. Roy Willis (1994, pp. xxvi–xxviii) characterizes the Cartesian world-view, based as it is upon fantasies of control and domination by humanity, as ‘Faustian’; and non-Cartesian views, based upon continuity between human and world and an applied democratic view of life, as ‘Arthurian’. The latter, ‘Arthurian’, participatory, non-Cartesian view – echoing the world-view of the Ojibwa Indian – is characterized as highly syntagmatic rather than paradigmatic, with a ratio of high ‘continuity’ (of relationship to the environment) to low ‘separation’. That the animal ‘speaks’ to the hunter is equivalent to saying that the hunter listens attentively to the environment. What is immediately striking about the account of the Indian as told by Long is that it is the animal, and not the hunter, who appears to control the hunt. This is congruent with mythologies of traditional hunting societies, where an original pact is said to have been made between the first hunters and the first hunted animal(s), and the animal sacrifices itself to the hunter in return for a complex ceremonialism of appeasement. Long’s account dates from 1791, and introduced the word ‘totamism’ into the English language (ibid., p. 117). Nearly two centuries before, in 1609, Lescarbot had introduced ‘totem’ (aoutem) into the French language, demonstrating that the word had currency among early explorers of the North American continent well before Long. Both Long and Lescarbot used the word to refer to a ‘familiar spirit’ (Shorter OED). A contemporary definition says that totemism is: ‘a complex of ideas and practices based on the belief in kinship or a mystical relationship between men (sic) and natural objects, such as animals and plants’ (The New Encyclopaedia Britannica); and that ‘The religious magical attitude by which primitive peoples confront animals may be called animalism. . . . The best known form of what may be called animal worship is totemism’ (ibid., vol. 26, p. 576). ‘Mystical relationship’ and ‘magical attitude’ are neat ways for a rationalist mentality to exclude the supposedly irrational, which is then judged as inferior, or is marginalized as misguided, or is seen as an aberration to be treated. Again the Cartesian world-view is privileged over other outlooks. What is then not emphasized in such rational views is the quality of human–animal relations illustrated by the Ojibwa Indian’s account, which includes a participatory familiarity with a world of psychological value as well as biological virtue. The first mythographers, social anthropologists and ethnographers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries described



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totemism not as an individual’s identification with a feature of nature such as an animal, but solely in terms of group identification with that feature. Some modern definitions of totem follow this convention: ‘The hereditary mark, emblem, or badge of a tribe, clan, or group . . . consisting of a figure or representation of some animal, less commonly a plant or other natural object, after which the group is named’ (Shorter OED). The dissolution of any distinction between individual familiar and group totem, in which one may see a sacred relationship to an animal as valid across a variety of social contexts, characterizes ‘neototemistic’ (or neototemic) studies (Ingold, 1994; Wills, 1994), where the term has a far less specific usage than that ascribed to it by the early anthropologists such as Tylor and Frazer. Also, such studies have rescued totemism as a legitimate idea from its invalidation through the seminal critique of Lévi-Strauss (1964), that is perhaps best understood by putting the use of the term totemism into a historical context. ‘Totemism’ may be seen as signifying both a sacred and aesthetic attitude to human–animal relationships or towards the animal in its own right, as opposed to a wholly secular and functional outlook typical of our attitudes towards animals as walking larder and experimental objects. Whether or not an animal totem refers to a group emblem or an individual familiar is then secondary to the issue of the basis upon which a relationship is made to a totem. For example, is the animal essentially emblematic, signifying a nominal relationship only? Is there a functional or economic relationship (the animal as provider of sustenance)? Is there an aesthetic dimension involved, based for example on an emotional experience (the animal is feared, is treated with awe, is admired, and so forth); and is there a consequent ‘religiosity’ (Mundkur, 1994) involved – a sacred experience that moves beyond economic necessities? McLennan first established the study of totemism through two short accounts of the worship of animals and plants in so-called ‘primitive’ societies, in 1869. These accounts confirm that human-animal relations in such small-scale societies are characterized by a religious veneration of certain animals, based on principles specific to the society. (For example, there does not seem to be a general rule among small-scale societies that either the animals hunted, the predators, the most common animals, or the natural animal in itself – rather than an imaginary or fantastic animal – will be the the centre of a religious experience.) Early accounts, such as those of McLennan, Tylor, Frazer, and Long, characteristically describe the connection between the human and the




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1. a genealogy, where a human group’s descent is traced from mythical animal ancestors – the original meaning of the Algonquin otototeman was a brother–sister blood link. Frazer (1906/1957, pp. 901–2), for example, suggests that ‘when a savage names himself after an animal, calls it his brother, and refuses to kill it, the animal is said to be his totem’. He continues with a description of Australian Aboriginal totemism, where the soul of an adolescent after ritual entry into adulthood is said to be wrenched from the youth and allowed to rest in the totem animal, so that the two are indelibly linked. Also, souls that have not been placed in this manner during the intensive initiation rituals may transmigrate at death into an animal. He reports that in such groups, there is a belief in descent from a single animal, where the human ‘forefathers have been under certain obligations to the creatures’ (ibid., p. 904), arising from hunting pacts or similar mythological transactions. 2. a pedagogic dimension: the animal – as natural (biological) or spirit (psychological) animal – is taken as initiator, guide and educator. 3. an ecological dimension: the human–animal relationship is a focus for a wider explicit sympathy with the world at large. 4. an affective, erotic dimension where animals and humans supposedly once had (and in spirit form can still can engage in) conjugal rights, a deep familiarity is evident, and the affect characterizing the animal– human familiarity can be both positive and negative. The totemic relationship, in Frazer’s (ibid., p. 916) model, involves the establishment of a ‘sympathetic relation with an animal’, where a transaction occurs. Thus, there may be the original pact, made in dreamtime, to uphold. Or, in initiation rites, a youth is said to be ritually killed so that the human being is also killed, in order to birth the human–animal relation of intimacy. The animal, in return for the keeping of the human soul, will give ‘a gift of magical powers’ such as trance vision, or bestow a keen perception upon the hunter. Frazer (ibid., p. 906) is in no doubt about the central place of affectivity and familiarity in the totemic relationship, where he reports ‘a story of a Basque hunter’ who said that a bear had killed him. The bear was then said to have breathed its soul into the man so that the bear died, but the hunter was brought back to life. The ‘animistic’ views of early anthropologists such as Tylor suggested that so-called ‘primitives’ inhabited a child-like, innocent and



animal totem as sacred, rather than secular and functional. This involves at a minimum the following conditions:

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irrational animistic world, where inanimate matter was seen to be alive, and spirits inhabited the world. This view was derived from the suggestion of these commentators that dreams, waking visions or hallucinations, and fantasies or thoughts of death – the most alien of experiences to a rational mind – afforded the basis to religious experience. Animals were linked clearly with such experience not simply because of the associations of the hunt, but because animals were grouped, along with children and ‘savages’ (and often women), in the same category of a harmless, even charming, world of the irrational. Such tender-minded views offer an idealization of nature and the natural, as innocent. These Romantic views were displaced by more tough-minded ideas based on secular, utilitarian, functional and nominalist arguments such as the sociological perspective of Emile Durkheim (1912; 1915). Such views challenged the perspective that totemism was based on human– animal affectivity, and the secular-material status of the animal, which – in Durkheim’s analysis – is simply ‘good to eat’. Durkheim’s view drives a wedge between the social and religious aspects of totemism, shifting emphasis away from human–animal relations to an intense anthropocentric focus. He further defines religion as an intellectual error, and suggests that its mechanism is a projection of a desired social solidarity. Totemism, in his view, is an example of the irrational projection of a group seeking security in the face of insecurity, onto an aspect of nature that is itself deemed to be secure. Solidarity then rests with the totem, not the group. To resolve what is taken to be an intellectual error, Durkheim suggested that the projection needed to be withdrawn, where the group takes up its own power or identity, through solidarity. Society itself then becomes both the subject and object of worship. This reverses the early views of totemism as describing solidarity with nature, for now the solidarity is with the reified social, and has a completely anthropocentric and secular focus. The critique of the validity of an affective model of animal–human relations as an explanation of totemism is completed by Lévi-Strauss, who challenges the view that animals and humans should be seen as effectively implicated in a web of interconnecting events and phenomena. As a preface to the account of Lévi-Strauss, and in the wake of his critique of totemism as a fictional category, it should be noted that there has been a revival of interest among field workers and scholars in the ‘affective’ variety of totemism first generated by the turn of the century anthropologists (Tapper, 1994; Ucko, 1994). Chris Knight (1991) likens totemism to the phoenix. No matter how much theorists attempt





to destroy it, it keeps rising from the flames, renewed. Roy Willis (1994, p. 5) announces that ‘Though officially pronounced dead nearly 30 years ago, totemism absolutely refuses to “lie down”. Indeed, it presently exhibits a vitality recalling the great days of Frazer’, leading to ‘a veritable “totemic revival”.’ Peter Ucko (1994, p. xvii) defines totemism as ‘the special kinship and/or ritual relationship between humans and animals’ in the widest sense, and notes that totemism does not necessarily involve a taboo upon the killing and eating of the animal in question. He further suggests that the debate between ‘individual’ or ‘group’ totemism, discussed earlier, has been supplanted by a phenomenology of differing kinds of totemism, where some or all may be shown in any one cultural context. He includes: (1) myths of direct descent from animals; (2) an intimacy in relationship between ancestors and animals in a mythological time; (3) the possibility of an interchange of forms between humans and animals in life or after death; (4) tribal or emblematic totems; and (5) individual totems or familiars, often initiatory and guiding spirits. Also, suggests Ucko, ‘totemism’ is only one of the ways in which we might describe special human–animal relations, and the use of the term may be seen to differ between disciplines. He claims that archaeologists (his own discipline) tend to use totemism in a wider and more relaxed way than anthropologists, who usually employ more specialist uses of the term. Specifically, the anthropological literature tends to restrict totemism to archaic and disappearing lifestyles of small-scale huntergatherer communities. Ucko (ibid., p. xviii) believes that this view cannot be supported, for totemism, as ‘the complexity and sophistication of metaphor between human and animal’, is a trans-historical phenomenon, present wherever animals and humans interact. The current wave of interest in totemism within disciplines such as archaeology – a type of ‘neototemism’ – assumes that a sacred and metaphorical relationship between humans and non-human animals offers a fundamental and universal experience. This shifts the discipline focus for totemism from anthropology to psychology. Such a relativizing of totemism raises interesting but complicated issues. It implies for example that our relations to pets can be as ‘totemic’ as the palaeolithic hunters’ and cave artists’ relations to the cave bear; and that relations to mediated animal images (for example on television), or animals in dreams, may be as ‘totemic’ as relations to biological animals in the wild. Such a radical relativizing (and psychologizing) of totemism is largely due to the influence of the anthropologist and structuralist Claude Lévi-Strauss.



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Lévi-Strauss’s (1964) seminal questioning of the validity of the category of ‘totemism’ describes such a category as ‘invented’ by anthropologists, and projected onto a bewildering mass of information concerning human–animal relations in small-scale societies, in order to make sense of such material. For Lévi-Strauss, anthropology’s view of totemism may be likened to the person searching for his or her keys under the street lamp not because they lost them there, but simply because that is where the light is. In other words, studies of totemism, he claims, have been looking in the wrong place – to the actual relations between animals and humans, rather than the derived meaning that humans may gain for their own psychological classification of the world. Such a classification is based on seeing animals as one among many possible elements in a total system of signs inviting analogical reasoning – a structuralist perspective. Human kinship systems in this view are not based on some mythical pattern of descent from the totem. Rather, for example, social classification is an explicit system of meaning based on structural relations of one phenomenon to the other that is modelled on nature. As an example, by analogical reasoning hawk is to otter as air is to water; and hawk clan totem is to otter clan totem through the same analogy (air to water). There is no invocation of a mystical bonding between actual or spirit hawks (or otters), and human members of the clan; and no need to invoke mythical lineages or genealogies. Lévi-Strauss’s view thus has serious implications for a model of an animalizing imagination based on familiarity, sympathy, or positive and/or negative affectivity between animal and humans; and it would deny the aesthetic implications of such an imagination for a purely logical conclusion concerning the structure of mind. Also, it translates the actual animal into an animal of the mind, thus making not only the biological, but also the psychological, conform to the conceptual. Both the literal animal and the animal image are reduced to elements or signs in a conceptual system or field. Lévi-Strauss first dismisses the functional view of Malinowski and others, that animals are totemic because they are ‘good to eat’. The evidence does not support such a generalization – in some cases the totem animal is hunted and eaten, such as salmon for the Indians of the northern Pacific coast; in other cases it is not (such as the wolf, for various North American Indian groups). Second, he challenges the notion that a numinous and affective relationship between human and animal



Lévi-Strauss’s critique of ‘totemism’


is the core of totemism, and implicitly rejects ideas of an aesthetic appreciation as the key factor in the persistence of human–animal relations. The affective view is seen as a hangover from the nineteenthcentury social anthropologists who tended to idealize primitive peoples as child-like, innocent and in a participation mystique with nature, such as Frazer’s (in ibid., p. 2) view that ‘totemism assimilates men to animals’. Rather, Lévi-Strauss considers the natural world as a whole – of which animals are obvious and high profile members – to constitute a system of signs offering a convenient model for a system of human thought or a structure of consciousness: ‘The animal world (is) not utilized merely because (it is) there, but because (it suggests) a mode of thought’ (ibid., p. 13). Animals are not appreciated for their display, or what they connote, but for what they denote or signify. Animals are not admired for their presentational aesthetic worth, but because they offer ‘the logical power of systems of denotation’ (ibid., p. 14) – a product of their representation. Moreover, the denotation is afforded not by animals on their own, but through the structural relations of one animal to another. Thus, claims Lévi-Strauss (ibid., p. 95), when the members of two clans with their totems ‘declare that they are two species of animal, it is not on the animality but on the duality that they place the stress’. It is the structural opposition as an idea, not the actual animal model, that is primary. Then, as outer models for an inner cognitive structure, animals are ‘good to think’. How does Lévi-Strauss make this leap from outer, empirical observation, to the inner workings of conceptual or mental life? His thesis concerning totemism follows from his wider programme – to map fundamental structures which may govern the life of mind, that can be further reduced to how the brain itself may operate, as the logical structure of thought. He proposes an invariable law of logic, generating oppositional pairs or binaries (such as the ‘raw’ versus the ‘cooked’, or ‘nature’ versus ‘culture’), that is seen to generate the structures of all mythologies – products of a universal species mind that works through a common logic. Lévi-Strauss borrows from Jean-Jacques Rousseau the idea that the rules for such logic are acquired through natural observation, and have their genesis in an affectivity that must be rejected in the move from nature to culture, from animality to humanity, from identification with nature to separation from nature. Rousseau suggested that the natural world might offer a stimulus for the logical operations of human cognition – that the mind is structured in reflection of structural relations in the environment – for example, animals seen in relation to each other



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in terms of qualities (big : small, fierce : tame, adventurous : timid). Early humans, speculates Rousseau, were in sympathetic identification with nature, exhibiting an undifferentiated consciousness. The logical properties afforded by the environment offered a model for differentiation, assimilated as structures of consciousness, and then projected as a cultural order, a differentiated society, such as the establishment of kinship patterns. Rousseau suggested that the passage from nature to culture was set in the context of a widening relationship to nature fuelled by population increase and the need for diversification in ways of satisfying basic needs. In order that such diversification might be sustained, transformations had to occur in technical and social spheres of human life. Such transformations occurred through the media of the very objects in nature that provide for economic sustenance, as these objects are seen to relate one to another. Lévi-Strauss (ibid., p. 100) suggests that natural objects such as animals, ‘had to become objects and means of human thought’. Rousseau hypothesized that extensive and ‘repeated attention’ of a consistent type extended to animal species would have offered a model for consciousness, as ‘a kind of reflection’. (This offers a quite different model to the hypothesized birth of reflective consciousness afforded by Wolfgang Giegerich’s model outlined in Chapter 1.) Lévi-Strauss (ibid. p. 101) describes a ‘triple passage (which is really only one) from animality to humanity, from nature to culture, from affectivity to intellectuality’. Consciousness switches from affective identification with an animal to distinction from animal as ‘other’, where the animal then becomes the vehicle through which social differences are registered and maintained, offering ‘conceptual support for social differentiation’. The passage from nature to culture brings the ‘emergence of a logic operating by means of binary opposition and coinciding with the first manifestations of symbolism’. Lévi-Strauss offers a manifesto for anthropocentric reasoning, where animal presences are assimilated to human thought. ‘Totemism’ is then construed as ‘an original logic, a direct expression of the structure of the mind (and behind the mind, probably, of the brain)’ (ibid., p. 90). This logic is one of ‘oppositions and correlations, exclusions and inclusions, compatibilities and incompatibilities’. Lévi-Strauss’s model suggests that it is precisely because early humans were able to identify with animals in an affective bond that they were also able to distinguish human from animal, for the process of identification offers a close noticing of differences and distinctions, as well as similarities (affections). According to this model, it is through knowing animal life





intimately that we were able to internalize a range of properties inherent to their presence, offering the basis to a structure of consciousness. Animal life internalized becomes a cognitive code for humans that is then externalized or acted out in culture (for example, in the formation of clans), based on a ‘logic of distinctions and oppositions’ (ibid., p. 103), a derived code, itself a basis to discursive thought. ‘External analogy’ is then moved to ‘internal homology’ (ibid., p.78) through ‘a series of logical connections’ (ibid., p. 80) and projected back onto the world as a rational mode of consciousness that is uniquely human. However, this supposed development of a structure of human mind and logic is achieved at the price of withdrawal from the biological world (or, rather, the biological world is withdrawn into a conceptual or semiotic space, perhaps a space of theory created entirely by the structuralists themselves). While human self-realization in such a model is the supposed gift of dis-identification from the affective bond with animals, Lévi-Strauss’s reading of Rousseau offers a route for human separation from animal life in two senses: first the turning of actual animals into mental structures (a disembodying or deliteralizing of natural animals); and second, the breaking of an affective bond with animal life that constitutes a sacred relationship to the animal, to be replaced by a secular relationship, where animal, no longer flesh and blood intimate, becomes abstract language or code. Again, the passage from nature to culture is thus bought at a price. Lévi-Strauss describes this as a movement from ‘ritual’ to ‘mythology’. From the point of view of the affective familiar, this theory would constitute a sacrilege. The orthodox view, that interest in the animal leads to ritual such as the ceremonial propitiation of the death of the hunted animal, is inverted by Lévi-Strauss. He suggests rather that the primary interest on the part of humans is towards meaning (and classification), and this leads to an interest in the animal world. Mythology is the culmination of the search for meaning and classification, and is distinguished from, and privileged over, ritual. Mythology is the vehicle for human selfrealization of the structure of the mind, as the expression of the human mind reflecting upon its own structures. The paradox that emerges from this mind reflecting upon itself is an ever-increasing alienation from nature, a loss of sensuous and concrete contact with life in a move ‘toward the intellect’ (ibid., p. 72), which Lévi-Strauss takes as the inevitable, and crowning, aspect to human separation from animal life. Ritual, in contrast, is seen as pulling people ‘away from the achievements of the “mind” . . . towards animalistic life, or towards undifferentiated unity with nature’ (ibid., p. 84). Ritual, suggests Lévi-Strauss, is



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essentially ambiguous – it confuses categorization, especially oppositional thinking. Ritual works by maintaining ambiguities between animals and humans, and body and mind. Given this dilemma, the human may seek ritual as a means to recover an animality, a natural sense or sensuous experience. However, ‘mythic thought’, as culture’s inevitable supremacy over nature, must win out, insists Lévi-Strauss, for this is the imperative of the mind, where mind has primacy over the body of nature. Thus, in Lévi-Strauss’s scheme, myth is a mode of mind, where ritual is a regression to animality and affectivity. Now we can see more clearly how Lévi-Strauss stands in relation to animality and totemism. His is an idealist project washing its hands of realist-materialist views and of both a psychology of imagination and a psychology of emotion. His bias is towards the cognitive. ‘Animals are good to think’ becomes ‘animals are good only because they can be thought’, otherwise they are not necessarily of interest. Sensuous life is lost to mind, as the sensuous imagination is also by-passed. His project may then be seen as more logical than psycho-logical – courting logos but rejecting psyche. Surprisingly, Lévi-Strauss does distinguish the individual shaman– familiar relationship from totemism. Where the particular animal representing a ‘collective totem’ offers a ‘mediating and metaphorical . . . relationship’ (ibid., p. 20) to the human, based on observation of nature, the guardian spirit or familiar is of a different order. This ‘animal’ is seen to be a singular spirit representative of an entire species and not a natural or biological model. Carmen Blacker (1986, p. 65), however, contests this view, while she also recognizes the power that Lévi-Strauss’s critique holds over scholars in the field. She describes shamanic practices in Japan through specific examples of the veneration of the literal fox and snake and their spirit counterparts as protective familiars for a family or village: ‘It is perhaps perilous to use the word “totem” in view of the work of Lévi-Strauss, who tells us that the term no longer has any real meaning. Nevertheless, it still seems to me to be a useful one by which to designate an animal which lives in a special and mutually beneficial relationship with a particular family’. The revered animal in return protects the family and offers itself as a spirit medium for healing through seance. Blacker insists that ‘totem’ can be used to describe an animal in the sense of either literal animal or a spirit familiar, and whether it is employed by an individual, a family or a village group, where, in her examples, the totemic animal is called upon in ceremonies particularly concerned with healing and clairvoyance.





Further, there is a strong argument to see the shaman (or any contemporary equivalent) as master of ambiguity, that Chris Knight (1991, p. 769) refers to as the ‘imaginist’ role. If this is the case, then the shaman is precisely the figure who would attempt to restore ‘ritual’ (characterized by affectivity, ambiguity and paradox) over ‘ceremony’ (characterized by clarity and applied structures of oppositionalist thinking) in Lévi-Strauss’s scheme, in order to recover a sensuous animality (thus inverting Lévi-Strauss’s model). The animating imagination rather than the oppositionalist mind may drive such ritual, denying the structure of mind that would categorize in terms of binary oppositions. LéviStrauss may then be seen to be projecting his own theoretical systematizing back onto accounts of totemism to discover supposed structures of the mind (and brain) in his own hypothetical oppositional system. His bias towards a cognitive reading of human–animal relations is further based on a certain view of developmentalism – where he sees ritualistic affectivity as primitive, but mythical thought as culturally developed. His standpoint can be seen to privilege detached intellectual rationalism over affective and sensuous animality. Where Lévi-Strauss’s project gets us thinking about the psychology of human–animal relations, it is – from the point of view of both classical shamanism’s and contemporary ‘Arthurian’ anthropology’s understanding of the sacrality of animal life – for the wrong reasons. While he offers a sophisticated view of the structures of consciousness and the transformations of these structures through language, his project is mentalistic and idealistic, excluding a sensuous human imagination drawing on the aesthetic life of the body. The universal mental structure Lévi-Strauss sought in binary oppositions is flawed from the perspective of poststructuralist thought, which exposes oppositional thinking not as a ‘given’ in nature (constitutive) and common to all cultures, but rather as culturally specific (constituted). Such oppositional thinking resists the value of borderlines, ambiguity, paradox and transitions for a philosophy of identity, a totalizing explanatory principle, and then offers a convenient logic of oppression, where one pole is privileged over the other as they are opposed, making the other inferior or marginalized (white over black, male over female, civilized over primitive, rational over irrational, adult over child, sane over mad) (Derrida, 1981). To this list we could add human over animal. In summary, Lévi-Strauss’s contribution to the study of human– animal relations demands that we see animals as a structural system performing a semantic function similar to that of grammatical categories in language. Natural stimuli are transformed into animals of the mind,



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becoming cognitive phenomena. In this move, the biological animal is reduced to a mere instrument in the logical game of classification, as a sign only; and the affective–erotic and pathologized psychological animal is frozen out by the dominance of the conceptual, or even forced out at knife-point. This same knife’s theoretically sharp blade creates unimaginative binary divisions, as oppositions rather than differences. The information age, ushered in theoretically by structuralist analysis with its fundamental language of binary oppositions echoing the language of early computers, does not easily play host to the pre-modern, shamanic animalizing imagination. This may not be a product of the nature of information processing itself, but the manner in which that processing has been appropriated and represented as gendered – as a masculine enterprise (reinforcing the stereotype that women are machine-phobic): for example Sadie Plant (1997) points out that women in general are relegated to the keyboard in the workplace, while men fix the computers. Most importantly, Sadie Plant’s work in particular has recovered the central place of women in the history of the development of computers. Lynn Leeson (1997) confirms Plant’s view that Lord Byron’s daughter Ada Lovelace, ‘wrote what is now considered the first computer program in 1843’. While Ada has been cast as the ‘helper’ of the inventor of the proto-computer Charles Babbage, Plant maintains that she effectively corrected his work and was instrumental in his ‘discoveries’. Plant (1997, pp. 11–12) also reminds us of the archetypally feminine nature of our images of the information age: that we talk of the ‘Net’ (the Internet or World Wide Web), conjuring images of spinning and weaving that have long been used in the political wing of ecofeminism: ‘the digital machines of the late twentieth century weave new networks from what were once isolated words, numbers, music, shapes, smells, tactile textures, architectures and countless channels as yet unnamed. Media become interactive and hyperactive’. The information revolution may not have brought masculine order but feminine possibility: actively and hyper-actively energized for Plant, ‘delirious’ for Arthur Kroker and Marilouise Kroker (1997), whose edited collection is called Digital Delirium. In whatever direction the information age (as sequel to the machine age) is gendered, it may still be seen as displacing an animalizing imagination born of premodern mentality. The following section will sketch the larger dimension to this possible crisis of animalizing within the framework of human-machine relations – from modernity’s valorizing of machines to post-modernity’s celebration of the cyborg and its possibilities – asking whether such a development will constitute the




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conditions for a mourning, as the apparent passage into obsolescence of an affective animalizing imagination.

William Gibson’s (1984) disturbingly ‘near future’ novel Neuromancer, in which he introduced the word ‘cyberspace’, begins, ‘The sky above the port was the colour of television, tuned to a dead channel.’ ‘Nature’ is thus referred to technology, which becomes the primary model. That thin, leaden strip of sky, coffin-like, hovering just above our cities, is hued to the colour of a dull sunset at night from the combined effect of major street lighting and the lights from minor roads and buildings. The street lighting, a dulled or smoky sunset orange, is itself overpowered by local effects of the lights from buildings such as office blocks, that are, in contrast, silver like the moon. Culture re-forms nature and casts a halo around the nightlife of the city as a simulation of sun and moon. That halo however is a death trap to migrating songbirds. Recent studies in North America have shown that songbirds migrating in their thousands from Canada south for the winter utilize flight routes (known as ‘flyways’) determined by geophysical conditions – for example, they hug the sides of mountains to best use the convection currents. Right at these sites, snuggled in the curves of mountain ranges, is a string of Canada’s and North America’s largest cities, which also benefit from the protection of the mountains. The birds orientate in large part by star patterns, and so they fly at night. As they approach the cities, the bright lights emitting from the tallest buildings – the corporate business skyscrapers – confuse them and, dipping their flight paths, they collide with them. Hundreds of thousands of migrating birds die this way every year. Modernism, with its legacy of steel and concrete skyscrapers, acting as a monstrous bird swat. A 1996 newspaper report from Toronto gives this story a strange twist. So many dead songbirds can be found at the foot of the biggest buildings in downtown Toronto early in the morning that they now constitute part of the staple protein diet of the homeless, poor and dispossessed. (The phenomenon that has been tagged ‘at homelessness’ in the world.) It is as if humans had built flyswats on a grand scale, operated by the rich and powerful modernist corporations who are also the greatest consumers of energy and the most attached to machines. This, at the expense of the gentle songbirds who give their tunes freely, and who now give their protein to the powerless, the poor, who scavenge the garbage and sidewalks for food, like stray cats and city foxes.



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The reverence we once had for the animals, as deities, we now reserve for the machine, especially the computer with its squashy vegetable dissimulations – Apple, Apricot; and the automobile with its animal presence: Jaguars in the fast lane, Beetles in the slow lane, engines alternately purring and roaring. A recent spate of advertising for one model of car juxtaposes a sleek, successful species of animal and a sleek, successful make of automobile whose model is now updated, with the text playing on the notion of the ‘survival of the fittest’ as the evolutionary dynamo. A human–machine relationship has replaced the traditional human–animal relationship of small-scale societies. The transition has not been difficult, for the orthodox Cartesian perspective that underpins our world-view already sees the animal (and the human body) as a machine. This mechanistic view of the body can be contrasted with the Romantics’ imagination of the body as organism and process. A new wave of interest in human–machine interaction, stimulated by the information technology revolution and robotics, has posed interesting questions (especially ethical considerations) about such an interaction, and even offers paradoxical notions such as the ‘organic’ machine (Crary and Kwinter, 1992). Deleuze and Guattari (1984, p. 285) call humans ‘desiring machines’, where ‘it becomes immaterial whether one says that machines are organs, or organs, machines.’ Indeed, ‘Everything is a machine’ (ibid., p. 2), thus blurring distinctions between human and animal in one catch-all phrase. Deleuze and Guattari have etymology on their side, for a ‘machine’ is ‘A structure of any kind, material or immaterial’ (Shorter OED), so perhaps we are narrowed by our modernist imagination of ‘machine’, which tends to be technical, industrial or militaristic, and views the machine as a mechanical apparatus needing initial external stimulation or programming. The post-modern, post-industrial child may be more likely to grow up with a personal computer or games console than a pet, doing his or her animal watching through television. Indeed, a recent craze has been for cyber-pets. The spirits inhabiting the Internet – raw information, hanging in the limbo of cyberspace, cruising the information superhighways – has replaced the spirit world of animal familiars. If the machine comes to replace the animal in our affections, will we be disembodying, or stripping the flesh so to speak, from our animalizing imaginations? The poet Ezra Pound (in de Gourmont, 1992, p. ix) implied this over a generation ago: ‘In his growing subservience to, and adoration of, and entanglement in machines, in utility, man rounds the circle almost to insect life, the absence of flesh’. Is an imagination formed by the machine age a revelation of that old saw that the insects will one day





take us over – so that in defiance we too must build our busy, exoskeletal, computer-driven colonies, but with a silicon rather than a carbon base? Will the consciousness of the metal, plastic, glass and silicon machine replace the organic consciousness, so that we are guided by ‘the . . . sterile networks of communication, in this insensitive world of quantities’ (Comandini, 1988, p. 104), denying the erotic-affective dimension to life? Already there is ‘love’ and ‘sex’ on the Internet and in virtual spaces – mainly pornography – but no comingling of fluids in the animal sense. ‘Safe’ sex indeed, but transparently cerebral and optical, bypassing the animal senses of smell, taste, and touch, where Internet pornography also reinforces the voyeuristic male gaze. What place does an animalizing imagination have in a secular culture with its icons of cyborgs and computer-based images? Now we worship the machine and its utility, within a cult of information without imagination – information for its own sake, generated, stored, and retrieved or ‘processed’. Our writing and communication is aided by information technology – but again language, the word, is ‘processed’, not imagined. ‘Process’ – a word that to the Renaissance imagination would have conjured up the processional, the recreation of tradition, the historical; or the round of the seasons, something passing through time: ‘Three beautious springs to yellow Autumne turn’d In processe of the seasons have I seene’ (Shakespeare, Hamlet, I.v.37). ‘Process’ in our times has come to take on an industrial meaning: something that has gone through the machine, chopped, pulverized, enhanced, flavoured, such as processed foods. This is neither to opt for a Luddite mentality nor to argue for an intrinsic soullessness to the machine, but to ask again what is our imagination of the machine – and has this imagination replaced that traditionally bound to animal life, or does this machinic imagination extend and deepen the organic imagination of animalizing? As pre-industrial cultures used animals to think and imagine with, and saw the animal as deity, perhaps we now not only literally use machines to do our thinking, but also use metaphors of machines to make sense of the world; and have made the machine our self-creating god (the ultimate robotic fantasy is, of course, the machine that transcends itself). The battle between a machinic and organic world-view has been central to the rise of modernism, and was hotly debated at the beginning of the twentieth century with the rise of Futurism. Post-modern commentators such as Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari have transformed machine–animal opposition through their models of ‘organic machines’, mentioned above, where ‘machine’ is used to refer to any structure in process (a human organ, the human body, a body of culture). In this



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view, as with the ‘cyborg’, animals and machines coincide, given equal value as ‘desiring machines’. While an historical view of the rise of the computer exposes a masculine appropriation, as outlined earlier, a historical view of the rise of the machine in general exposes potential political appropriations. The following section suggests how the machine can become both a masculinized and fascist tool, where these qualities are already recognized as inherent to the machine’s energetics. In Futurism, the machine is both imagined mechanically rather than processually and organically, and is privileged over the animal. But again the Futurists saw these qualities (or rather quantities) as embodied by the machine itself, which then becomes their deity, as the god of quantitative speed. In this, they certainly prefigured our current worship of the computer as the fastest calculator and manipulator of information on Earth.

Machine against animal: the Futurist manifesto The extreme right in political circles eagerly took up the Italian poet Marinetti’s Futurist manifesto, first published in 1909. It offers an anthropocentric, literalizing perspective, which runs counter to an animalizing imagination. Marinetti (in Chipp, 1968, pp. 284–5) opens his manifesto with an ego inflation. A group of writers had been up all night: ‘An immense pride swelled our chests because we felt ourselves alone at that hour, alert and upright like magnificent beacons and advance guard posts confronting the army of enemy stars staring down from their heavenly encampments.’ The Futurists idealized modern machinery, such as automobiles, in which they recognized an animal vitality of a new sort. Marinetti continues: ‘We went up to the three snorting beasts to pat lovingly their torrid breasts. . . . The furious sweep of madness took us out of ourselves and we hurled through streets. . . . And we sped on, squashing the watchdogs on their doorsteps who curled up under our scorching tires like starched collars under a flat-iron. Death, domesticated, overtook me at every turn to graciously offer me her paw’. Rather than the machine being enlivened by the animal, the animal is subjected to domination by the machine, indeed is troped, as a machine metaphor. The machine becomes an instrument of political and social control and domination, servant to its human master. In the narrative Marinetti then crashes violently, ending up in a ditch full of muddy water: ‘When I got out from under the upturned car – torn, filthy, and stinking – I felt the red hot iron of joy pass over my heart!’ (ibid., p. 285). Then fishermen armed with poles, ‘With patient and





meticulous care . . . put up a high framework and enormous iron nets to fish out my automobile like a great beached shark’ (ibid., p. 286). The manifesto exhorts control through human power, extended through the energy of the machine. Animacy, as the characteristic of animals, is transferred to machine through the metaphor of perpetual motion. Not only are the dogs flattened where the speed of the machine is exalted, but also the shark is devalued as it is imagined mechanically (an image which may be compared fruitfully with the Inuit shaman Aua’s tender but disconcerting meeting with his shark familiar, and Ducasse’s account of the vigorous familiarity between Maldoror and the female shark, both told earlier. Neither of these accounts express the anthropocentric dominance so clear in Marinetti’s account, and neither would support the machine metonymy of automobile : shark). The hubristic phrase ‘death domesticated’ suggests the presence of the controlling hero, inflation at work. This is confirmed as Marinetti’s manifesto continues: ‘We intend to glorify the love of danger . . . we wish to exalt the aggressive movement . . . the cuff, and the blow. . . . There is no more beauty except in struggle. No masterpiece without the stamp of aggressiveness. Poetry should be violent assault against unknown forces to summon them to lie down at the feet of man. . . . We will glorify war – the only true hygiene of the world – militarism, patriotism. . . . We will destroy museums, libraries, and fight against moralism, feminism, and all utilitarian cowardice. . . . For art can only be violence, cruelty, and injustice. . . . Erect on the pinnacle of the world we hurl forth once more our defiance to the stars!’. The animal has been appropriated as part of a political form of domination – fascism – yoked to the machine and to an aggressively heroic, indeed sadistic, discourse. Such a stance deliberately sets out to shock, and to ‘plumb the pits of the absurd’ (ibid., p. 285) in Marinetti’s words; but it is not the shock value that is of primary interest; rather, it is the literalizing of an image as a political gesture. This stance may be seen as anti-imaginal, defending against the irrational on the one hand, and the vulnerable on the other, through a black and white ideology. Totalitarianism, especially fascism, has often been associated with the irrational and intuitional, unfortunately tainting the value of irrationality in other circles of activity. In contrast, ‘intolerance of ambiguity’ has been described as one of the characteristic features of the ‘Authoritarian Personality’ (Adorno et al., 1950). We certainly cannot equate rationality with fascism, or irrationality with liberal humanism. Indeed, there are dangers in moving too far in making an opposition of ‘rational’ and ‘irrational’, or ‘animal’ and



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‘machine’. For example, Norris (1985, p. 7) notes that, ‘The machine, as the emblem of the rational, obsesses the thinkers of the biocentric tradition and becomes the perennial target of their critiques.’ Nevertheless, in the Futurists’ manifesto the machine is set against animal life, and becomes a metaphor for two conflated forces: control (domination) and speed (mania). Mania offers a defence against the possible irrationalities of depression. Such an attitude parallels Alfred Adler’s (1992) description of the ‘will to power’, which he describes as a neurotic defence against the suffering of ambiguity. The fear of depression combined with intolerance of ambiguity once more characterizes the human condition as it embraces right-wing totalitarian principles, or readily adopts a fascist mentality. The missing third element to complete the fascistic type would be the cult of hygiene – an anti-animal sentiment. In 1914, the Futurist painters published a collective manifesto which claimed, ‘We Futurists ascend towards the highest and most radiant peak and proclaim ourselves Lords of Light, for already we drink from the live founts of the sun’ (Chipp, 1968, p. 293). This offers a pathology of spirit – an hubris that could be termed an Icarus-complex, or a Bellerophon-complex. These mythical heroes fall from the sky, scorched, bucked, demonstrating the dangers inherent to overly-ascensionist perspectives, either idealistic (ideologically driven) or involving transcendent versions of the spiritual. Typical of such a perspective would be the Futurist painter Carra’s mini-manifesto of 1913: ‘We are against the false-hood of the fixed law of the gravity of bodies’ (ibid., p. 308). These too are anti-animal sentiments, rising above the instinctual, the binding of soma or flesh and blood. Eighty years on from the Futurists’ manifesto, their future is now with us as our ‘near future’ fantasies are already realized in pockets of the world such as urban Japan, the Pacific Rim cities and some parts of California. The human–machine relationship is not only embodied in the benefits of technology such as computers employed for educational purposes, but also in the controversial popular film images of pathological cyborgs in films originating with ‘Robocop’ and ‘Terminator’, spawning sequels and copies, where the serial-killing cyborg is characterized by its amorality (and its stereotypical masculinity). The cyborg (cybernetic organism) is an enhanced fusion of machine and flesh (now used in a wider sense than the ‘robot’, to include any version of extensions to the human sensorium, mind and imagination, provided by technologies such as the personal computer, biotechnologies and bioengineering). Whatever morality the cyborg might demonstrate, then, has two roots – the inorganic and the organic worlds,





where the neurological becomes a compound of hard, soft, and wet machine. Some contemporary commentators such as David Toop (1992, p. 34) reject the organicity and affectivity of the ‘terrible familiar’ human– animal complex that we have argued may characterize the religious lives of small-scale hunter-gatherer societies, for a post-industrial (again ‘near future’) human–machine religion in which information itself is all powerful: ‘Magic presently runs more powerfully through the invisible pathways of the human/machine interface’ than through the traditional figure of the animalized shaman, declares Toop. A new kind of shaman figure is embodied in the cyborg: ‘a postmodern monster whose physiology reconciles technoculture and nature, dystopia and Arcadia, simulacrum and original. The cyborg signifies biology morphed by technology, a playfully perverse notion that permeates technocultural discourse’. ‘Playfully perverse’ – or a sinister return of Futurist totalitarianism? Toop’s vision rejects a poetic of animalizing based in the senses, in flesh and in affect, for technologies of artificial intelligence, reinforced by a mock-scientific language drawn from information technology. His discourse offers a now familiar dense techno-speak, again celebrating a culture of information, not imagination. He endorses a trans-ethical ‘pop’ shamanism extolling the virtues of mass access to computer-generated cyberspace, and virtual reality, where the senses are forced into passivity in an anti-animal gesture, as they are showered with electronic stimulation – an artificial aesthetic arrest at needlepoint. Cyberspace is defined by the novelist William Gibson as ‘the electronic consensus-hallucination that facilitates the handling and exchange of massive quantities of data’ (in Shippey, 1993, p. 3). Again, an information overload of techno-speak. The quantitative (bulk) displaces the qualitative – events preferred to experiences, weight and density of information becoming the dominant form of imagining, forcing a culture of trivia, for that attachment to bulk combined with really serious ideas would prove fatal, so things have to be kept light – hence the metaphors of skimming and surfaces: ‘browsing’ and ‘surfing’ the Internet. Lévi-Strauss’s fatal blow to the erotic–affective nature of the animalizing imagination discussed in the previous chapter is repeated in a new guise. As the literal animal is reduced to a sign in a system of structural differences and then acts only as mediator for cognitive construct in Lévi-Strauss’s scheme, so, in the new technological models, affective, face-to-face experience is replaced by a fascination with technical memory. The way that information is managed



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(processed, stored and retrieved) becomes potentially more interesting than the information itself or even the production of that information. Cyberspace is said by Shippey (ibid.) to be, ‘a kind of symbolic landscape’, and ‘there is a strong element of shamanism about it’. In what sense? In response to a story by Gibson, Shippey suggests that, ‘for millenia there has been a superstition that the shaman who sends his soul out of his body may go too far . . . and not return’. This sounds a little like the objection raised by orthodox psychoanalysis in the post-war years concerning accounts of shamanic journeying, and their seemingly irrational descriptions of meetings with spirit animals or familiars, such as being eaten and regurgitated by the spirit polar bear, or other terrible initiations (as discussed in Chapter 4). Were these shamans not too far out? Did they not go so far out that they could be judged to be mad, deranged, deluded? Were they not out of their minds? Perhaps these new accounts of cyberspace shamanism are, like Lévi-Strauss’s view of totemism, so far into their minds that they have lost their senses. Virtual reality, artificial intelligence, robotics, cyborgs, human– machine interface, all these can be seen as in-sensate and insensitive; a world created out of senses and in artificial mind. A world of quantities not qualities; where data and information may be seen to offer a sense-less, and then restrictive, imagination, an imagination that is anaesthetizing or refuses the aesthetic in the root sense of the word (as ‘sense perception’). This world of pure information is then also potentially insensitive as well as desensitizing. Most importantly, the world of the cyborg is non-erotic, for the hybrid human-machine runs on programmes not passions. The erotic–affective dimension is ignored; and importantly, the ethical implications are skimmed, such as the amoral shadow of the cyborg as mindless or unreflective killer, echoing the monstrous machine of the Futurists’ vision, embodied in the animal-crushing automobile (not forgetting that each of us is now a part of that image – a reminder again of the 100 000 foxes killed each year on roads in Britain, that constitute only a part of the total automobile-induced deaths of animals – including the human animal in tragic numbers). Again, this is not a Luddite-inspired critique. The information technology age will require, and is rapidly stimulating, a new aesthetic. The aesthetics of the post-modern information age is a major new area of study, already affording a huge literature. Let us briefly consider some of the complexities of this emerging site for study.




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We can argue that the full entry into the machine age, now the age of information, constitutes an abandonment of the erotic and affective body and the body of relationship to the animal world. By implication, the composite body of human–animal familiarity – as a psychological relationship of disturbing familiarity – is also dissolved into the communication channels of virtual space, where our near future eroticism will be played out, according to the cyberspace pundits. This emerging orthodoxy, from the point of view of animality, seems to offer a sterility, as an aesthetic impasse. These same pundits however could point out that we are prepared to see human–animal relations through an imagination of the affective and erotic, but when it comes to the machine we fall back into a stereotypical imagination of the machine as sterile (mechanical). They might claim that what we are missing is the sexy nature of information, and further, the erotic in the inorganic. From this perspective, a new aesthetic emerges. First, they might establish the sexiness or eroticism of the human– machine relation. Everybody would agree about the car as fetish and sexual object, read psychodynamically as either Freudian phallic extension (the Ford ‘Probe’ was a recent automobile design). As Jungian animus (the car as extension of libido in the new assertive woman exemplified by what was acclaimed as the first feminist road-movie: ‘Thelma and Louise’). Or as Kleinian Good Mother/Good Breast, as the comforting, womb-like receptacle that quietly, gently and safely delivers us – paradoxically, at speed – from one business meeting to another, from work to home, from one shopping location to another, from one holiday location to another; and feeds us as we drive. This automobile has in-house entertainment, reclining seats, and sexy fetishistic interiors. Indeed, many advertisements play upon car rides leading to couples making love (where road holding substitutes for massage), or making up after an argument (automobile interiors as the new consulting room). Advertisers also place great emphasis upon the quiet, smooth, safe ride, delivering us from door to door, including the paradoxes of safe, loveable cornering at speed (hugging corners) and safe breaking – cars as safe as mother’s milk. Here, the car is less an erotic object in its own right than an extension of the erotic (and related traits) in humans – the machine is then invested with eroticism rather than any intrinsic erotic nature being revealed.



Objections: information is sexy, machines are erotic and the human–machine relation offers constructive metaphors

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A deeper and darker eroticism surfaces in J.G. Ballard’s 1973 novel Crash, which more than 20 years later was turned into film by David Cronenberg, with explicit sexuality and violence, raising predictable outcries from the moral majority and achieving cult status overnight, such that younger people now think of Crash wholly in terms of Cronenberg’s film rather than Ballard’s more disturbing and certainly more artistic earlier novel. The violence in Ballard’s novel is not primarily perpetrated by humans upon humans, but through metal upon flesh in car crashes; while the sex is stimulated by such crashes, leading to more than one reviewer of the film using the pun title ‘Auto Eroticism’. Over 20 years ago, Ballard had envisioned the car, through this novel, as an extension of the sexual and erotic body and as a kind of highly vulnerable snail’s house for the soft-bodied sexual psyche, prone to frightening crashes that offered literal body inscriptions (wounds and scars) that themselves become fetishistic nodes for erotic fixation. Ballard’s description is especially disturbing because the car transforms in his novel from a passive object tied to the desires of its occupants and its voyeurs, to an active, autonomous agent literally providing the vehicle for a perverse eroticism, where the car comes to control the passions of persons. It is when the car is out of control (the crash) that it delivers its strongest exhibition, and its greatest atrocity. Here, the car achieves total autonomy that is characterized by self-destruction – precisely the opposite of our usual programming of machines (but only an intensification of their built-in obsolescence). Given the ready acceptance in recent times of car chases and violent car crashes in film and television (now a standard motif), and, independently, of explicit sexuality on screen, Ballard’s book touched on the taboo area of the intertwining of these two elements: the car crash and explicit sex, offering an erotic imagination of the machine. For Ballard, art must inhabit these taboo areas in order to rehearse (in this instance) the ethical implications of the eroticizing of machinery. Ballard is not encouraging a literal connection between car crashes and sexuality, but mapping a geography of the imaginational link between soft-bodied sex and the hard-bodied ‘vehicles’ for that sex (both stationary and speeding). This is the problem with translating the book to the screen, for, although it was claimed that Ballard approved of the adaptation, the film literalizes what Ballard writes as metaphor. His book is not just a catalogue of sex in cars, but a deeper probing of cars embodying sex, especially the fast-moving car, as it gains independence from the driver. As both driver and car fly out of control, Ballard explores the taboo area of the eroticism of the death wish, in the context of the possibility of





the crash. The intertwining of machine and possible death in the crash is then starkly reversed in the connection between machine and a possible life of hospitalization after the crash, where the victim may be on life support. The life of the machine and the life of the human are rudely juxtaposed through common participation in sexual eros (life wish) and sexual thanatos (death wish). The main character, Vaughan, is obsessed with the relationship between cars, violent crashes and sex. His obsession is described by one of the other characters in the novel: ‘It isn’t sex that Vaughan is interested in, but technology.’ Technology becomes sexy, especially if it is pathologized, or bruises back. Vaughan becomes attractive sexually only in partnership with the car: ‘Detached from his automobile, particularly his emblem-filled highway cruiser, Vaughan ceased to hold any interest’. In Crash the automobile becomes the projected animal body, as metallic eros (in a review of Ballard’s novel and Cronenberg’s screenplay adaptation, the novelist Will Self (Observer, 24/11/96) describes the plot as a focus upon the desire for ‘metallic consummation’). Ballard describes a ‘language of invisible eroticisms’ that extends for the characters in his novel from the body of the car to X-ray machines and other hospital equipment. The mainly metallic hardware most intimately associated with extensions of the body is also then infected with the body’s desires. Again, it is not just that the machinery is felt to be erotic as a fetish response, rather its inherent eroticism is exposed for all to see – especially the car body’s vulnerability in the crash (echoed in the ripping, tearing and opening of human flesh in the accident, and in flesh probing flesh in accidental sex). Ballard invents ‘metallized excitements’ through ‘shared dreams of technology’, where even an aluminium air-vent beckons ‘as invitingly as the warmest organic orifice’. Whole buildings with their contoured light systems (echoing the lighting of motorways) are not invested with eroticism, but reveal such eroticism through their embodiment: in glass, metal and plastics surfaces that are slick, curvaceous, and inviting, and also – in the desire Ballard invites in the reader – welcome rupture, to inspire a depth to their otherwise perfect, reflective outer surfaces. Is this simply a semantic trick on Ballard’s part – a forced metonymy of orifices and surfaces, of play between the organic and inorganic: car body to penis, air vent to vagina, slick metallic surface to skin surfaces slicked by sexual fluids? Is the animal body of desire, lust, eroticism and sexual encounter so readily replaced (or troped in language) by the car body, the metal, plastic, glass and rubber of the machine? In his 1996 novel Cocaine Nights Ballard describes ‘the torching of the automobile’



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as ‘One of the modern world’s pagan rites’, eerily recalling the image of torching thousands of cattle carcases suspected of harbouring BSE, discussed in Chapter 1. Through such an image, perhaps the body of the automobile does stand for the animal body, receiving the same paradoxical mixture of familiarity and contempt: the car body herded in motorway congestion, let loose in driving for pleasure, slaughtered on the scrapheap but sacrificed in the enthusiast’s workshop in a religious recycling of parts where its body is tended, scrubbed, polished, animated by design. Moreover, where the greatest danger for palaeolithic peoples was the animal hunt or animal attack, contemporary humans place themselves in relatively greater danger every time they get behind the wheel, racing down motorways, or weaving through crowded streets, adrenaline pumping. In an innovative claim for the value of human–machine affectivity and familiarity, Donna Haraway (1991), a feminist and primatologist, has attempted to integrate human–animal and human–machine relations. She views cyborgs in a positive light. Haraway idealizes the cyborg as a potent symbol of alterity and of the blurring of ideologically driven genres and distinctions. For her, a cyborg – ‘a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism’ (ibid., p. 149) – is a boundary breaker, a disrupter of classifications and arbitrary groupings. The cyborg represents a challenge to our cognizing the world in terms of ideal classifications that can so easily become ideological. For Haraway, the cyborg does not represent domination by information, but its exact opposite: cyborg consciousness rather offers an informing perspective concerning the potential liberation from such domination. In an interesting twist, Haraway uses ‘cyborg’ ideologically – as a political metaphor, a challenge to ‘troubling dualisms’ (ibid., p. 177) such as male/female and mind/body, which invite oppositional thinking, and then dominance of one term over another, or the privileging of categories (as we explored earlier in the chapter, through a critique of Lévi-Strauss’s possibly oppressive use of the oppositionalist mentality). The cyborg refuses classification as either animal or machine, as human or machine, as organic or inorganic, and as male or female. Where we experience such ambiguity in our consciousness, ‘we find ourselves to be cyborgs, hybrids, mosaics, chimeras’ (ibid., p. 177). The cyborg is ‘illegitimate’ in this sense, and also ‘has no truck with . . . seductions to . . . wholeness’, or transcendence ‘into a higher unity’ (ibid., p. 150). The cyborg then presents for Haraway the ambiguities necessary for the human to re-incorporate into kingdoms and contexts beyond the anthropological. In this sense it shares common ground with the incorporation





of humans into an animal commonwealth and the shamanic world view of the human having ready continuity with an otherworld of spirits, familiars and dream figures. Haraway sees ‘the line between humans and animals’ as reduced ‘to a faint trace re-etched in ideological struggle’ (ibid., p. 152). For her, since Darwin, the notion of human–animal separation is impossible and its maintenance merely supports an outdated anthropocentric rationalism. Her education as a biologist leads her to an assumptive position, that there is simply no mileage in a debate that neatly separates animal from human, where: ‘The last beachheads of uniqueness (of the human) – language, tool use, social behaviour, mental events’ have gone; and ‘nothing really convincingly settles the separation of human and animal.’ She argues that animal rights activists and some moral philosophers, as well as biologists, have effectively closed the ‘creationist’ gap between human and animal, and have ‘discredited’ the breach between biology and culture. The gap that used to exist between human and animal is now however, in her view, a potent site for inhabitation by the cyborg. The cyborg offers an emblem of ambiguity, and a metaphor for inhabitation of the boundary. In this proposal, Haraway progressively deliteralizes or metaphorizes the cyborg, using it as an ideological abstraction. (This presents a paradox in that the human–computer interface cyborg is already semi‘virtual’, and then to some extent deliteralized as a matter of course.) The cyborg becomes a vehicle in a discourse of marginality where, as a feminist, she would equate the position of the cyborg with that of women; and as a biologist interested in simian behaviour, would equate the cyborg with the position of apes in relation to humans. Neither women nor apes are legitimized in a patriarchal, anthropocentric world, suggests Haraway, but are marginalized. Haraway’s interest in the cyborg initially seems to have a significantly different focus from that expressed here, of the literalizing of the cyborg as a popular image of violent, amoral killing machine. However, what the two discourses have in common is a critique of violent and violating colonialist, patriarchal discourse. How they differ is that Haraway sees in the cyborg a metaphor of marginality that can be mobilized against such (perceived) patriarchal discourse, while the cyborg – as the first part of this chapter argues – can also be described as a critical element that has already been appropriated by a culture of masculinized violence, as a representative and prominent emblem. This point could be made in criticism of Ballard’s ‘metallized excitements’ and the erotic imagination of the violent and violating crash (a metaphor which could



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readily be extended to the masculinization of economics and its fear of ‘crashes’ in the money markets, which might be seen as the postmodern version of castration anxiety). This view would suggest that the cyborg mentality and eroticizing of machine merely reproduces the tradition (and oppressions) exemplified by Marinetti and the Futurists, where the images of violent cyborgs and violent car crashes in popular culture seem to offer an image of mechanical violence that ultimately suffers, first, from the seductive ease of literalism – of being taken concretely; and second, from its mechanical imagination of the machine. To draw a contrast between such a literalizing and the kinds of (albeit masculinized) poetic animalizing discussed earlier through the work of Ducasse, Bachelard, Nietzsche, Flaubert, Lawrence, and Hughes, the lacerating and ripping weapons or hands of the cyborg do not constitute a productive image for example of the crab’s pincers, but literalizes them as weapon. This loses the image of the pincer to the information gained concerning the effects of laceration. A martial cyborg imagination ignores the aesthetic arrest felt in the presence of the crab’s claw, as it sees only a functional weapon. In this sense, while it may be currently more fashionable, the machinic imagination could be said to be far less fecund than an animalizing imagination. The Australian performance artist Stelarc specializes in a technophilia of body-enhancement, attempting to hitch himself up to a complex circuitry of robotics and computers that produce muscle stimulation allowing his audience to manipulate his body at a distance through a computer, creating a type of cyborg as a ‘fluid self’. Stelarc (1996) claims that it is time to question whether the human body offers ‘an adequate biological form’. But, he suggests that people will not be ‘taken over by cyborgs. It’s more likely that the body will swallow the machine’. Typically, Stelarc thinks with a mechanical imagination and comes to a literal conclusion. He wants the machine to be a body but imagines this more human cyborg mechanically. Perhaps the ‘fluid self’ could be better served through metaphors derived not from an imagination of the body as machine – returning us to compound the tired errors we have already committed in the name of Descartes – but of the body inspired by an animalizing imagination, conjuring the familiarity of animal presence.




At the close of the year in 1998, an animal liberation activist, imprisoned in Britain for arson, almost starves himself to death in protest at the government’s inaction on investigating certain abuses in uses of animals in research. It is the first time that such extreme action has been taken by somebody as protest against the treatment of animals in laboratory experimentation. His hunger strike will have inflicted irreparable damage to his body. A concerned mother writes to the newspaper in protest, pointing out that her daughter’s serious illness was only kept in abeyance because of drugs developed through testing on animals. A newspaper article (Independent on Sunday, 27/10/96) reported that ‘Animal rights . . . are suddenly sexy. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (Peta) is launching its latest campaign against the fur trade . . . with the help of one of the world’s leading model agencies.’ Eight super-models posed naked for 60 seconds in front of the press to launch the ‘Peta’ campaign, turning ‘animal rights into the sexiest cause on the catwalk’. Serious animal rightists who protested against the stunt on the basis that it was reinforcing sexist stereotypes of women (in fact four of the models are male) were told that they were ‘confusing sexist with sexy’. Nothing these days could be more about the animal display of the human form than fashion, and if this draws attention to the plight of animals, then fine. But the stunt will be as far away from a celebration of animal rites as the cat-walk is from humans able to walk, stalk, fall from heights or noiselessly pad as gracefully and powerfully as a cat, big or small, wild or domesticated. Yet our desires and imaginations inhabit this space of the walk of the cats with ease. The animal rites inspired by the animalizing imagination are also far from being sexy, while they are explicitly erotic and affective. They are far from being 156



Postscript

showy, glamorous or parading, while they are explicitly aesthetic. Worryingly (and properly so), the psychological animal that demands its rights and rites or simply bends us to such supplications, is an unexpected familiar who also terrifies, ensuring that the high-minded human will never effectively walk the cat. David Degrazia’s Taking Animals Seriously (1996) – written by a philosopher specializing in biomedical ethics – is destined to become a classic in its field. Arguing for a ‘coherence model’ of ethics, in which norms are adjusted according to the pragmatics of individual cases and occasions, Degrazia (ibid., pp. 9–10) makes a closely argued case for recognizing the moral status of animals ‘and that much of our current use of animals is ethically indefensible’. He makes a plea for serious consideration of the mental and emotional lives of animals, and points out that a ‘second generation’ of philosophers, led by Mary Midgley (1993), have provided persuasive, elegant and powerful extensions and adaptations of the foundational texts of animal rights – Tom Regan’s (1983) Case for Animal Rights and Peter Singer’s earlier (1975) Animal Liberation – that first brought academic respectability to the animal rights movement. Texts such as Degrazia’s are a timely reminder of our need to review the quality of human–animal relations and the status of animals in the biological arena. In this book, however, that review has been enlarged to also include animals of the mind, of text, and of the imagination. From the noticing and witnessing of these latter animals of the psyche may be derived a form of apprehension that Gaston Bachelard termed an ‘animalizing’, as a type of imagination exercised through the vehicle of animal forms, presences and dynamisms. Contemporary accounts of such an imagination may be linked profitably with classical shamanizing with a view to each illuminating the other as post-modern and premodern mentalities respectively. The anatomy of such an animalizing imagination can be summarized as affective–erotic, suffering (inherently pathologized), and aesthetic (and, by implication, anti-literal, anti-mechanical and anti-utilitarian). A more contentious suggestion, derived from Bachelard, is that such an imagination of and through animal life precedes and informs perception of literal or biological animals, or is pre-presentational, deepening us to the aesthetic of that realm as the display of animals. Further, the animalizing imagination in the human psyche provides a habitat or niche for psychological animals, so that ignoring or denying these animals and their habitats (for example, through a concretist or literalist imagination) creates an ecological crisis of the imagination. Let us then widen the debate of animal rights to include the dimension of animal rites. Finally, it may be that a cultivation of



Postscript 157


human–animal relations across the three states of the biological, conceptual and psychological will result in a fruitful familiarity with animal presence, welcoming the animal as muse, as inspiring familiar. However, we are warned that such a familiar can be terrible (if it is to be fruitful) – its bite may be worse than its bark – while it will attempt to love us to death. To return to Degrazia’s title – Taking Animals Seriously – we must seriously engage with the literal ethical and ecological issues of, respectively, animal rights and animal welfare. But, as we take animals seriously, we need not also just take them literally, where we recognize the differing values of animals of the field, the mind, culture and the psyche, giving attention to the dream animal and animal representations in culture, just as we attend to the welfare of the dwindling rainforest species. Animals of the imagination intend us as well as animals of the forest or woodland, perhaps regarding us, the human animal, as potential familiars, in an overall exercise of animal rites. In this recovery of totemism for an age of post-modern textuality and global ecological concern, let us welcome these non-biological animals with open minds.



158

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abattoir, 7 Abbs, Peter, 82 adder, 96 Adler, Alfred, 147 aesthetic, xiv–xv, xvii, 16, 21, 26–50, 56, 60, 117, 129, 157 aesthetic reflex, 82, 107 affectivity, xiv, 133, 135–6 affective–erotic, 60, 75, 132, 148, 157 AIDS, 29 american mink, 53 Andahazi, Federico, xii animal biological, xiii, xvi, 19, 39, 82, 115, 157, 158 conceptual, xii, xvi, 15, 48, 55, 58, 115, 129, 158 psychological, xii, xvi, 15, 48, 55, 58, 115, 129, 158 semiotic, 39, 54 spirits, 65, 68, 74–6, 92, 106 textual, 15, 25 animalizing, xiii, xv, xvii, 15, 25, 40, 60, 64, 66, 70–2, 95 defined, 105, 108, 155, 157 animism, 132 ‘animal faith’, see Santayana, George animal god, 11, 12, 14 animal liberation, 57, 156 Animal Liberation, see Singer, Peter animal rights, xiv, xvi, 11, 55–7, 156, 158 animal rites, xiv, xv, 11, 15, 157 animal sacrifice, xvii, 12–18 animal slaughter, xviii, 12–18 anthropocentrism, xiv, xvii, 24, 33, 34, 36, 49, 57, 65, 84, 107, 114, 115, 137, 154 anthropomorphism, 23, 34, 99 ape, 103 Aphrodite, 103 Apollo, 103

Aquinas, 30 archetypal psychology, xvii, 72 Aristotle, 30 armadillo, 68 asian elephant, 18 asian lion, 18 asp, 26 ass, 96 assassin bug, 18 atavism, 109 Athena, 46 Augustine, 30 authoritarian personality, 28, 146 automobile, 150–3 Babbage, Charles, 141 Bacchus, 103 Bachelard, Gaston, xiii, xv, 40, 79, 82, 129, 157 formal imagination, 79, 108 Lautréamont, 104–10 material imagination, 108 muscular imagination, 108 Baker, Steve, 58 Ballard, J.G., 151–4 Cocaine Nights, 152 Crash, 151–4 basilisk, 83 Bataille, Georges, 49 Baudrillard, Jean, 10, 12, 22–3, 33, 58 bear, 81, 129 polar bear, 37, 61, 64, 65 bee, 65, 97, 103 Beowulf, xi Berger, John, 31 Berlin, Isaiah, 109 bestiality, 35 Beuys, Joseph, 95 binary opposition, 137 biocentric writing, 25, 97–104, 110, 115, 117, 147 biology of qualities, 118–20 165



Index

Index

bird, xiv, 103 bird song, 50 black-footed penguin, 18 black rhino, 111 Blacker, Carmen, 139 Blake, William, 119 Blanchot, Maurice, 83 blowfly, 102 Blue Rider school, 121 boar, xi–xii, 104 Breton, André, 33, 104 BSE (Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy), xvii, 1–12, 153 bull, 12–13, 18, 103 Burgess, Anthony, 114, 123 camel, 28, 103 camouflage, 117–19 Campbell, Joseph, 68 capitalism, 31 cat, 3, 156 cattle, 1–12, 28, 102–3 Ceres, 103 chameleon, 28 chicken, 93–4 Circe, 45 Cixous, Hélène, 83, 111–12 CJD (Creutzfeld–Jakob disease), 3–10 Clark, Stephen, 30–1 cobra, 68 cockerel, 112, 126 cockroach, 24 complexity theory, 36, 47, 119 cormorant, 28 cow, see cattle crab, 68, 80, 105, 155 creationism, 119, 154 crisis of representation, 50 crocodile, 104 Cronenberg, David, 151 Culhwch, 42 culture (as the completion of instinct), 82 Cybele, 103 cyber-pets, 143 cyberspace, 142–9 cyborg, 141–9

D’Anglure, Bernard, 63 Dante, 20–1 Darwin, Charles, 38, 56, 97, 117–20, 154 darwinism, 31, 116, 127 deforestation, 52 de Gourmont, Rémy, 55 Degrazia, David, 157 Deleuze, Gilles, 92, 94, 143, 144 Demeter, 41, 42 Derrida, Jacques, 140 Descartes, René, 155 cartesianism, 30, 58, 59, 67, 70, 72, 129–30, 143 developmentalism, 140 Desana, the, 68 Diana, 103 dinosaurs, 51 dog, 69, 96, 103 dog phobia, 91 dolphin, 103 donkey, 103 Douglas, Mary, 28 dove, 103 dromedary, 102 dream, 19, 67, 73 animals in children’s dreams, 76–9, 158 Ducasse, Isidore (Lautréamont), 40, 45, 63, 95 Maldoror, 100, 102, 104–6, 110 Dupree, Robert, 110 Durkheim, Emile, 75, 133 dynamic imagination, 108 eagle, 69, 96, 103 eating disorders, 46 ecocriticism (defined), xvi ecology, xv, 158 ecological crisis, 37, 51 ecological psychology, xvi Eden, 26, 27 Eleusis, 30 Eliade, Mircea, 60 emergent properties (of systems), 36 emotions (and animalizing), 68–79 Enlightenment, 70–1, 117 eroticism, 150–2, 156 eroticized imagination, 87, 89



166

Eshleman, Clayton, 38 ethics, 55–7, 157–8 ethiopian wolf, 53 Evans, C.E., 43 evolution of form, 117–20 extinctions, 51, 53 familiar, xvi, 41, 55, 59–66, 75, 80–1, 102, 114, 124–6, 128, 134, 146, 158 fascism, 145–7 feline spongiform encephalopathy, 3 Ferenczi, Sandor, 93 finch, 109 fish, 28, 38, 104, 123 Flaubert, Gustave, 44, 53, 95, 100 Temptation of St Antony, 101–4 fly, 96, 102 food poisoning, 11 Fortey, Richard, 117 fox, xi–xii, 18, 81, 124, 139 Frazer, James, 131–2, 136 The Golden Bough, 42 Freud, Sigmund, xi, 19, 123 animal phobia cases, 83–93 ‘Little Arpad’, 93 ‘Little Hans’, 90–1 ‘Rat Man’, 85–8 ‘Wolf Man’, 88–90 Civilization and its Discontents, 30, 32–3 Totem and Taboo, 64, 82 Frey, 41 Freyja, 41 Futurism, 145–7 Gaia hypothesis, 47, 114 Galbraith, Kenneth, 59 gaze, 31, 82–3, 89 Genesis, 26, 28 giant panda, 52 Gibson, James, 50 Gibson, William, 142, 148 Giegerich, Wolfgang, xvii, 13–7, 34, 79, 137 giraffe, 117–18 gnat, 81 goat, 5, 102 Goethe, 113, 117–20

167

Goodwin, Brian, 36, 47, 118 gorilla, 18 griffin, 103 Grinnell, Robert, 46 Guattari, Felix, 92, 94, 143, 144 Guggenbuhl-Craig, Adolf, 73 Gunn, Thom, 45 Gusinde, Martin, 61 Halifax, Joan, 37, 63, 65 Haraway, Donna, 153 Harrison, Jane, 42, 45, 67 Hatoum, Mona, 44 hedgehog, 103 Heidegger, Martin, 20, 21–2, 82 Hemingway, Ernest, 110 hen, 68, 96 Herakles, 110 hermeneutics, 89 hermit crab, 18 Hillman, James, xvii, 15–17, 27, 40, 45, 50, 66 Hirschberg, Stuart, 79 hissing cockroach, 18 Homer Iliad, xi, 12 Odyssey, 45 hornbill, 62 horse, 46, 90–1, 103, 125, 127 Hughes, Ted, xi–xii, 46, 79–82, 95 humanism, xvii, 21, 27, 65, 70–1, 88, 107 personalistic humanism, 70–1 Humean scepticism, 72 Hunt, Harry, 76, 78 hunter-gatherer cultures, 34, 37, 92, 102, 130 hunting, 53, 111, 153 Huxley, Francis, 60, 64 hybrid, 28, 29 idealism, 50, 70–1, 74, 75, 109 iguana, 68 image, 103 imagination, xiii, 17, 39, 40, 49, 80, 104, 107, 124, 140, 144, 158 information, 49, 128–55 information processing, 141



Index

Index

Ingold, Tim, 55 initiation, 66 insect, 24, 69, 78, 143 instinct, 49 Internet, 141, 143–4 intestines, 44 Inuit, 60, 61, 63, 74, 146 jackal, 103 jaguar, 78, 81 jellyfish, 119 Jung, Carl, 20–1, 27, 31, 41, 66, 67 Kandinsky, Wassily, 121 Kant, Immanuel, 47, 50 Kantian, 58, 59 productive and reproductive imagination, 108 Kauffman, Stuart, 36, 118 Kearney, Richard, 107 Kemp’s Ridley sea turtle, 52 Kinkead-Weekes, Mark, 121 Klein, Melanie, 89 Knight, Chris, 133, 140 Kowalski, Gary, 31 Kroker, Arthur, 141 Kroker, Marilouise, 141 !Kung, 65, 81 Krell, David Farrell, 44, 82 Lacan, Jacques, xiii, 33, 38, 48, 82 imaginary, xiii, 38, 123, 128 real, xiii, 16, 33, 38, 82, 117, 123, 128 symbolic, xiii, 33, 38, 123, 128 language, xiii, 19, 38, 39, 69, 102, 107 Larson, Gary, 10 Latour, Bruno, 29 Lawrence, D.H., 95, 112–27 Apocalypse, 113 Birds, Beasts and Flowers!, 112–13, 120 Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine, 114, 121–2 St Mawr, 114, 116, 120, 122, 125–6 The Escaped Cock, 114, 126–7 The Fox, 113, 114, 123–5 The Red Wolf, 112–13

Lawrence, Frieda, 121 Layard, John, 42 leech, 97–8 Leeson, Lynn, 141 leopard, 20 Levinas, Emmanuel, 32 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 39, 129–41, 148 mythology, 138 ritual, 138–9, 140 Leviticus, 28, 43 Lewis, Ioan, 62, 67 Lingis, Alphonso, 47 lion, 20, 53–4, 103, 111 literalism, xvii, 81, 155 Lockhart, Russell, 19–20 locust, 65 Long, James, 129 louse, 104–5 Lovelace, Ada, 141 Lovelock, James, 47, 114 lynx, 102, 103 Mabinogion, 41 machine, 141–55 ‘mad cow’ disease, see BSE Malinowski, Bronislaw, 128 mamba, 65 Mammon, 17, 38 mantis, 18 Marc, Franz, 99, 121 Margulis, Lynn, 114 Marinetti (and Futurism), 145–7 Marx, Karl, 82 Masson, Jeffrey, 49 masturbation, 91 McCarthy, Susan, 49 mediterranean monk seal, 53 Melville, Herman, 51 menstruation, 42, 67 metaphor, 154 Micklem, Neil, 73 metonymy, 146, 152 Midgley, Mary, 56, 82, 157 modernism, 27, 29, 70, 92, 141, 142 morbism, 72 morphology, 118, 120 mosquito, 103, 123 mule, 103



168

Mundkur, Balaji, 68, 74–8 mundus imaginalis, 65 Natural Theology, 119 nature, 39, 55, 128, 137 Neptune, 103 New Age, 37, 60, 70, 96 New Testament, 27 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 33, 44, 95–101, 116 Ecce Homo, 97 ‘superman’, 96, 99–100 Thus Spake Zarathustra, 95–101 Noel, Daniel, 60 Norris, Margot, 21, 95, 98, 110, 116, 117, 120, 147 n/um, 65 Nut, 41 octopus, 18 oedipal, 58, 84, 88, 92–4 anti-oedipal, 94 oedipal conflict, 112 Olwen, 41 Omphale, 111 Orpheus and Eurydice, 83 ostrich, 83 Otto, Walter, 13 owl, 46, 64 oyster, 96 ox, 103 Oxyrynchus papyri, 27 Padel, Ruth, 62, 68 animalized emotions and ancient Greek mind , 68–70 palaeolithic cave art, 38, 128 palaeolithic hunt, 13 Palsson, Gisli, 38 Parkes, Graham, 100 parrot, 104 Partridge, Melissa, 124 pathologizing, 60, 66, 71, 87 patriarchy, 154 peacock, peahen, 48–9 Permian, 51 Persephone, 41, 42, 103 pet, 24, 34, 53 pharmakon, 42, 65

169

phenomenology, 40, 87, 89, 91–2, 108, 134 pig, 28, 41–6, 96 pigeon, 52 Plant, Sadie, 141 Plato, xiv, 41, 47, 48 neo-Platonism, 102, 107 platonist idealism, 102 Timaeus, 47 pollution, 53, 57 porcupine, 121 pornography, 144 Portmann, Adolf, 36, 47, 50, 119 Poseidon, 46 post-modernism, 51, 55, 58, 128, 141, 148, 158 post-modern biology, 118–19, 127 post-structuralism, 71 Pound, Ezra, 143 pre-industrial cultures, 70 pre-presentational, 157 primal scene, 89 prion, 3, 8 psychoanalysis, 83–93 puff adder, 68 purity, 28, 39, 57 python, 65 rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, 73 rat, 18, 24, 52, 85–7, 102 rationalism, 30, 34, 70–1, 118, 154 raven, 102 realism direct, 50 indirect, 50 mythical, 102 Reinhard, Karl, 13 representation, 50, 58, 116, 117 Redgrove, Peter, 62, 95 Regan, Tom, 157 religiosity, 72–6, 131 Rimbaud, Arthur, 40 romanticism, 70, 113, 118 romantic science, 113, 127 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 136–8 ‘rousseauian optimism’, 72 Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA), 56



Index

Index

Sagar, Keith, 114, 126 salmon, 135 Santayana, George, xiv, 25 scopophilia (voyeurism), 90 scorpion, 103 scrapie, 2, 5, 9 screen memories, 89 sea anemone, 52, 119 sea star, 119 sea urchin, 119 seahorse, 35 Scruton, Roger, 56 seal, 74 Sebeok, Thomas, 54 self-presentation (animal display), xv, 26–50, 54–5, 118–20 semiotic space, 54 Shakespeare Hamlet, 144 Timon of Athens, 94 shamanism, xvi, 27, 40, 59, 60–6, 79, 95, 114, 123, 139–40 neo-shamanism, 60 shaman, xvi, 37, 60–6, 76, 81, 124, 149 shamanizing, 157 shark, 62, 63, 106, 146 sheep, 2, 9 Shuttle, Penelope, 95 siberian tiger, 52 sign, 28, 35, 39, 128 signifier, 27 Silenus, 103 simulacrum, 35, 58, 116 simulation, 33, 58 Sinclair, Upton, 6 Singer, Peter, 55 Sitwell, Edith, 40 skylark, 53 slaughterhouse, 7, 12, 13 sleep laboratory, 73, 78 snail, 103 snake, 24, 65–6, 68, 78, 96, 103, 123, 139 sociobiology, 39, 49 soul, xiv, 14, 15 soul-making, 16 spider, 103 spix’s macaw, 52

stag, 103 sumatran tiger, 18 Stein, Robert, 31 Steiner, George, 11–12 Stewart, J.J.M., 114 structuralism, 39, 136–41 subjectivity, 71 sublime, 45, 70 suffering, 66–70, 102–3 surrealism, 33, 104 symbol, 39 taboo, 28, 37, 64, 87 Tapper, Richard, 54 Tarantino, Quentin ‘Pulp Fiction’, 43 tarantula, 103 Taussig, Michael, 64 technophilia, 155 tern, 62 terror, 75 Tester, Keith, 56–7 television, 34, 35, 39, 58 text, xv, 54 textuality, xii–xiii, xvi, 128, 158 Thesmophoria, 42 toad, 96, 103 tortoise, 83, 104 totemism, xvi, 34, 37, 64, 75, 81, 83–7, 123, 128–40, 158 defined, 130–2, 134 neo-totemism, 131, 134 totem tree, 64, 83–5 Toop, David, 148 Tucker, Michael, 79 Ucko, Peter, 134 umwelt, 54 vaquita, 52 violence, 110, 146 viper, 18, 26 Voltaire, 70 walrus, 60 Waters, John, 94 watersnake, 62 water vole, 53 Wesley, John, 119



170

Index World Wide Fund for Nature, 53 worm, 96 Zeus, 12, 15, 16, 48, 103 Ziegler, Alfred, 72–6 zoo, 53 zoology, 109, 117, 121–3



Whan, Michael, 20, 31–2 Willis, Roy, 36, 62, 130, 134 wolf, 83, 88–90, 100, 112–13, 135 she-wolf, xii, 20 woodpecker, 46 World Conservation Union, 52

171

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