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Introduction

Why do animals matter for literature? Would they constitute only another ‘end’ to be then conveyed by any given ‘medium’ – literature, for example? On the one hand, animals have indeed been portrayed in literary texts for

millennia, but so have other subject matters that similarly traverse human existence. Animal representations have been easily employed as just another component of the optical system of literature, seen as the humanistic, mediatic ‘Mirror of Man’. On the other hand, the recent scholarly attention towards literary animals highlights a more radical relevance of animality beyond that of mere topic: it could be argued that in recent criticism illuminated by

posthumanism and Animal Studies, animals matter precisely due to their matter.

The material embodiment of animals is believed to offer a stark contrast to the linguistic constitution of textuality, to the extent that animals ‘in’ literary texts are said to illuminate – and sometimes challenge – the workings of

literature. This view is easily encountered and widespread, and can be close- read in an array of scholarly work dedicated to ‘the question of the animal’ in literature. As a privileged example, one can read J M Coetzee’s musings on animality in The Lives of Animals as both an instance of, and an incentive for, this kind of criticism. With it, Coetzee – by the means of his character Elizabeth Costello – has encouraged the privileging of embodiment as the tenor of literary research into animals.

In this lecture disguised as novel, the fictional novelist Elizabeth Costello is invited to give a talk at an American university on a topic of her choosing, and she decides to speak about animals both in philosophy and in literature. The novel is basically divided into two parts, each corresponding to one of the talks she gives at different university departments. Her contribution to the approach to animals mentioned above is based on her focus on the animal’s radically alien being-in-the-world as compared to human reason and abstract thought:

To [human] thinking, cogitation, I oppose [the animal’s] fullness,

embodiedness, the sensation of being – not a consciousness of yourself as a kind of ghostly reasoning machine thinking thoughts, but on the contrary the sensation – a heavily affective sensation – of being a body with limbs that have extension in space, of being alive to the world. This fullness contrasts starkly with Descartes’s key state [cogito ergo sum], which has an empty feel to it: the feel of a pea rattling around in a shell.1 Coetzee has in fact become a sort of patron for literary research into animality, having been invited to contribute chapters to books on the topic and to give talks in Animal Studies conferences, as well as by being an author whose work is often the focus of said research.2 _{Accordingly, Costello offers later in} the novel her take on good and bad uses of animals in literature. Comparing the poem ‘The Panther’ by Rilke with Ted Hughes’s ‘The Jaguar’ and ‘Second

Glance at a Jaguar’, she argues: ‘In that kind of poetry, […] animals stand for

1 _{J. M. Coetzee, The Lives of Animals (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), p. 33. All} further references are given parenthetically in the text.

2 _{The interdisciplinary book on animal rights The Death of the Animal, edited by Paola Cavalieri,} not only includes contributions by Coetzee but also seems to reference his Costello lecture in the title. The second Minding Animals conference of interdisciplinary Animal Studies, held in Utrecht in 2012, had Coetzee deliver the opening lecture (again a short piece of fiction featuring Costello) and also contained a series of Literary Animal Studies panels on his work.

human qualities: the lion for courage, the owl for wisdom, and so forth. Even in Rilke’s poem the panther is there as a stand-in for something else’ (p. 50). To this ancient fabular textual animality – widely criticised nowadays as

anthropomorphic3 _{– Costello contrasts Hughes:}

Hughes is writing against Rilke. […] With Hughes it is a matter—I emphasize—not of inhabiting another mind but of inhabiting another body. That is the kind of poetry I bring to your attention today: poetry that does not try to find an idea in the animal, that is not about the animal, but is instead the record of an engagement with him. (p. 51) This approach has proved immensely popular with literary scholars, to the point that poetry (metonymically standing for all of literature) and

animality are said to be aligned in challenging human linguistic and rational limitations.4 _{Even beyond that, it has been suggested that what we may call the} literary branch of Animal Studies can contribute basically that: a

representation – and a defence – of the otherness of animals. Again, Costello offers us the model:

Writers teach us more than they are aware of. By bodying forth the jaguar, Hughes shows us that we too can embody animals—by the process called poetic invention that mingles breath and sense in a way that no

3 _{Tom Tyler has analysed in detail the symbolic work animals are required to do in philosophical} and literary texts in his CIFERAE: A Bestiary in Five Fingers (Minneapolis: University of

Minnesota Press, 2012). I shall return to his theses in my third chapter.

4 _{Two famous quotes which are constantly cited in such context are one by Bataille and} another by Derrida: ‘nothing […] is more closed to us than this animal life from which we are descended. […] In picturing the universe without man, a universe in which only the animal’s gaze would be opened to things, […] the correct way to speak of it can overtly only be poetic, in that poetry describes nothing that does not slip toward the unknowable. […] The animal opens before me a depth that attracts me and is familiar to me. […] It is also that which is farthest removed from me, that which deserves the name depth, which means precisely that which is unfathomable to me. But this too is poetry…’ (Georges Bataille, Theory of Religion, trans. by Robert Hurley [New York: Zone Books, 1989], pp. 20-2. Emphases in the original.) ‘Thinking concerning the animal, if there is such a thing, derives from poetry. There you have a

hypothesis: it is what philosophy has, essentially, had to deprive itself of. That is the difference between philosophical knowledge and poetic thinking.’ (Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, ed. by Marie-Louise Mallet, trans. by David Wills [New York: Fordham University Press, 2008], p. 7)

one has explained and no one ever will. He shows us how to bring the living body into being within ourselves.5 _{(p. 53, my emphasis)}

It is clear, therefore, that the argumentation depends wholly on the distinction between body and mind. Only insofar as animal being is taken to be saturated with embodiment can Costello argue that animalistic literary texts are able to account for a ‘bodily engagement’ with something other than language. In truth, it remains to be determined whether such animal

embodiment is anything other than merely the Other of language. If the very concept of non-linguistic, non-rational animal life whose phenomenality would challenge the powers of referential language can be shown to be caught up with linguistic function, then Costello’s ‘poetic invention’ would in no way transpose the limits of textuality.

As it is, Coetzee’s wording itself exposes the doubling effect that referentiality produces with respect to the matter of animal being: while the materiality of bodies (always first and foremost an animal body, even though Costello stresses the commonality of embodiment across the living) is taken to be that which lies outside of language marking its limitations, the same matter is also at work within language as that which makes representation possible –

5 _{It is curious, therefore, that literary scholars would defend a role for literature that differs} very little from manifesto or awareness raising material. Philosopher Martha Nussbaum’s work on animal rights, for example, ‘insists that the power of “sympathetic imagining” of the lives of nonhuman animals of the sort made available by literature (but not only there) is important and relevant to questions of moral judgment.’ (Cary Wolfe, What Is Posthumanism? [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010], p. 78). Wolfe shows, however, that ‘for Nussbaum literature serves as a kind of kinder, gentler supplement to analytic philosophy’s project of “sentimental education” stirring in us identifications, empathetic responses, and projections that may then be readily formalized in analytical propositions’ (Ibid., pp. 78-9.). And he quotes Geoffrey Harpham’s contention that ‘in Nussbaum, the specificity of literature as a discourse, an object of professional study, is almost altogether erased and replaced by a conception that treats it bluntly as moral philosophy.’ (Harpham, quoted in Wolfe, Posthumanism, p. 79.)

as the phenomenal, signifying breath which must be articulated with (signified) sense in order for ‘poetic invention’ to be. Therefore, within language itself, a corporeality which is always animalistic can ‘already’ be found, even ‘before’ linguistic signs attempt to reach for the supposed extra-linguistic matter of animal embodiment: the signifier as the material face of the linguistic sign, the concrete breath which is articulated with sense in order to produce meaning and reference.