The possibility that animals are people like me is one that eighteenth-century writers repeatedly register by way of the figure of personification. In this tradition, personification is not anthropomorphism, at least as anthropomorphism is understood by Barbara Johnson (glossing Paul de Man)—as “a comparison, one of whose terms is treated as a given (as epistemologically resolved).”17 Unlike anthropomorphism, eighteenth-century personification does not naturalize the human being by “treat[ing] as known the properties of the human.”18 At the same time, to adapt Johnson’s formulation slightly, eighteenth-century personification does treat as known the properties of the person. The constitutive attributes of personhood are routinely identified in eighteenth-century texts: speech, action, and the social relations that both enable and result from speaking and acting. But there is much that remains epistemologically unresolved. What counts as evidence of speech, action, or sociality? Who or what might bear such attributes, or participate in such relations? The sort of knowing that would resolve such questions is itself an uncertain and contingent activity that takes place in the context of other people, in response to the movements of others. Personification, in this tradition, is a figure that registers the sort of quasi-natural, quasi-figurative creatures that all animate beings are.
By focusing on the “poetic art” of “restor[ing] … animality,” I hope to recover a post-Cartesian moment that is not simply, or even chiefly, one of modern consolidation and triumphal human exceptionalism, but one that is marked by its own animal turn. Consider the opening of Denis Diderot and Louis Jean-Marie Daubenton’s 1751 Encyclopédie entry on “Animal”: “What is the animal? Here is one of those questions by which one is all the more embarrassed, the more philosophy and knowledge of natural history one has.”19 Diderot and Daubenton are remarkably frank about the insufficiency of philosophical and natural-historical knowledge in apprehending animal life. Their self-consciousness about this insufficiency points toward an extraordinary aspect of the eighteenth-century animal turn: the conviction that if we are not to be embarrassed by the question of the animal, we need literary as well as scientific forms of knowledge. This is a point to which eighteenth-century writers repeatedly call attention. The protocols of empirical observation cannot tell us what the animal is (or who or what is an animal), because the constitutive attribute of animal life—animate motion—is not something we can “certainly see.” To apprehend motion as self-motion—as meaningful answer or a demonstration of mind—the evidence of the senses alone will not serve. This is why patently figurative animals like Crusoe’s Poll or Thomson’s “houshold feathery People” are so central to any effort to restore animality. In an important sense, animals really are rhetorical figures, as well as living beings. Indeed, they are rhetorical figures because they are living beings.
Animals and Other People elaborates this crucial insight about animal life, so important to eighteenth-century writers and worth recovering more widely in our own. When we apprehend animals (including humans), we are never in the territory of strictly literal description, relying solely on the evidence of our senses. Any description of animals involves what we might call personification—if we understand personification not as a rhetorical ornament that could be stripped away, but as a fundamental part of our descriptive and conceptual repertoire.20 It is a figure of words and of thought that is essential to apprehending certain kinds of beings, to distinguishing them from things.
Motions Discourse
I shall not ask Jean Jacques Rousseau
If Birds confabulate or no,
’Tis clear that they were always able
To hold discourse at least in fable
—William Cowper, “Pairing Time Anticipated: A Fable”21
At this point, I want to begin to specify some of the claims I have been making about animal life, animate motion, and literary figuration by looking at the case of William Cowper, and his experiments with animal fable in particular. In its original publication, the opening lines of Cowper’s poem “Pairing Time Anticipated: A Fable” directed readers to a note, perhaps Cowper’s, perhaps his editor’s, that sends up “the whimsical speculations of this Philosopher.”22 The poem and note refer to Rousseau’s well-known caution against the use of fables in early education—a section of Emile that begins by imagining the puzzlement of a child reading La Fontaine: “Foxes speak, then? … the same language as crows?”23 Over the past two and a half centuries, Rousseau’s remarks on fable have generated their own considerable puzzlement, and readers continue to debate precisely how he understands the fable form, and the problems it poses for young readers. By contrast, the opening lines of Cowper’s fable have not seemed to call for much comment. The original annotation offers a straightforward gloss of the poem’s apparently straightforward point: to the philosopher who argues “that all fables which ascribe reason and speech to animals should be withheld from children,” Cowper retorts, “what child was ever deceived by them, or can be, against the evidence of his senses?”24 Perhaps a whimsical and speculative philosopher understands so little about literary conventions as “to interpret by the letter / A story of a Cock and Bull” (6–7). A poet, like a child, knows better. Cowper’s birds can speak, as animals in fable have always been able to do, because they are not animals but vehicles for human beings or human meanings.
Poems like Cowper’s “Pairing Time” can appear to offer little to readers interested in the lives of animals, for the simple reason that Cowper seems to articulate: the figures of fable have nothing to do with actual animals. For many scholars of the recent animal turn, the literary and philosophical culture of Cowper’s era is especially guilty of generating fabulous animals—including the most fabulous creature of all, the generic figure of “the Animal” that functions, as Jacques Derrida puts it, to “corral … a large number of living beings within a single concept.”25 On this view, the eighteenth century—under the auspices of Cartesianism, the Enlightenment, or modernity—invents generic and fabulous animal figures at the same time and by the same logic that it occludes or oppresses living nonhuman beings. The proliferation of generic and figurative animals in this moment is a symptom of the violent disappearance of actual animals from the real world, or at least from the realm of meaningful ethical consideration. This is a view I argue against throughout the book, but one that is widely held by scholars of the current animal turn, who regard animal figures with suspicion, worrying that “the yoke of human symbolic service” renders animals in themselves invisible.26
For scholars who share this view, one of the central tasks of literary animal studies is to liberate animals from the confines of Enlightenment figuration and abstraction—to bring animals into view in our literary and cultural histories by recognizing that they are already there, not as figures for human beings or ideas, but as subjects in their own right. In Laurie Shannon’s elegant shorthand, borrowed in part from Claude Lévi-Strauss, the turn from figurative animals to the real thing requires that we move from thinking with animals to thinking about them.27 Animals may be “good to think [with],” as Lévi-Strauss put it, good figures for human arrangements, and good tools for human thought. But being good to think with has never been very good for animals. For such scholars, the literary liberation of the animal involves recognizing that “literal reading [is] a proper part of the critical repertoire”—a means of freeing animals from the confines of fable or the corralling of the general singular, to exist in all their particular and material reality.28 In The Accommodated Animal, Shannon shows the considerable rewards of such an approach, demonstrating persuasively that for many early modern writers “the terms and conditions of human sovereignty over real animals operate as an example of tyranny—not just an emblem for it.”29 In this book, though, I am interested in writers like Cowper, for whom being an emblem is not necessarily opposed to being an example, nor always qualified by “just.”30
It is difficult to see how