Living Knowledges: Empirical Science and the Non-Human Animal in Contemporary Literature

Living Knowledges: Empirical Science and the Non-Human Animal in Contemporary Literature By Joe Thomas Mansfield A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Sheffield Faculty of Arts and Humanities School of English October 2019 ii Abstract In contribution to recent challenges made by animal studies regarding humanist approaches in empirical science, this thesis offers a critical analysis of contemporary literary fiction and its representations of the non-human animal and the human and non-human animal encounters and relations engendered within the scientific setting. This is achieved through a focusing in on four different scientific situations: cognitive ethological field research, long-term cognitive behavioural studies, short-term comparative psychology experimentations, and invasive surgical practices. Sub- divisions of scientific investigation selected for their different methodological procedures which directly dictate the situational circumstance and experience of non-human animals involved to produce particular kinds of knowledges on them. The thesis is divided into four chapters, organised into the four sub-divisions of contemporary scientific modes of producing knowledge on non-human animal life and the distinct empirical methodologies they employ. The first chapter provides an extended analysis of William Boyd’s Brazzaville Beach (1990), using Donna Haraway’s conceptualisations of the empirical sciences as socially constructed to examine how the novel offers a reconsideration of field-based scientific practices and the interspecies encounters engendered there. The second chapter moves to the laboratory setting as reconstructed in both Colin McAdam’s A Beautiful Truth (2013) and Karen Joy Fowler’s We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves (2014), employing Bruno Latour’s theoretical deconstructions of the physical and conceptualised laboratory setting to reconsider how fictional instances can explore human and non-human encounters whilst navigating the situational circumstances of the space. The third chapter offers an analysis of Lydia Millet’s ‘Love in Infant Monkeys’ (2009), Karen Joy Fowler’s ‘Us’ (2013), and Ursula Le Guin’s ‘Mazes’ (1975), three texts exploring conceptual oppositions apparent within experimental cognition studies, read against Vinciane Despret’s considerations of the experimental situation as influential over human and non- human animal encounters. Finally, the fourth chapter reads Sylvia Torti’s Cages (2017) and Allegra Goodman’s Intuition (2010) as fictional examples of invasive scientific practices reliant on the non- human animal body as biomaterial, using Jane Bennett’s equalising vital materiality theory to re- balance these interspecies encounters in order to inform an effective evaluation of the epistemological logics at play against those fictionally represented. Taken together, these chapters enable the thesis to look across different scientific settings and attend to the specificities of each empirical situation, thereby contributing to the store of literary animal studies accounts regarding the empirical sciences and human and non-human animal relation in fiction by adding complexity and comparative understanding. Rather than survey many instances in contemporary literary fiction to achieve its goals, the thesis focuses on important texts in detail because of the depth and focus of their interest in alternative scientific settings. The chapters showcase different literary strategies by which to navigate subtle nuances and variances between epistemological logics and empirical methodologies, opening up the scientific setting to consider the non-human animal experiential situation and the human and non-human animal encounters and interactions that occur there. iii Acknowledgements I would like to thank the School of English at the University of Sheffield, who have always been extremely helpful during my studies, especially the Sheffield Animals Studies Research Centre community who have created something very special there and ensured I felt involved and participatory to. My sincerest thanks go to my supervisors, Robert McKay and John Miller, whose help, guidance, and endless patience throughout my studies have been invaluable and has constantly reassured me of my decision to return to Sheffield to undertake this research. In many ways, the work presented here marks the end of my academic life at the University of Sheffield, a time that started 11 years ago this year, and so my heartfelt thanks go to all of those people I was lucky enough to meet there and whose friendships are written into the pages of this thesis. I am particularly indebted to my great friend Richard Kino. His shared experience, cynicism, and constant humour meant I was never alone during the peculiar form of madness that comes with doctoral study. I would like to thank my sisters, Molly and Dora, and my brother, Archie, for their constant encouragement throughout the last four years, as well as Murphy, Maisie, and Mabel who were always with me. To Laura, who has for a long time been the greatest thing about my time in Sheffield and now in everything afterward. Thank you for your patience, kindness, and love – as well as living through it together with me. Finally, every word here is dedicated to my parents, Jane and Philip Mansfield, whose inexhaustible love and support are the foundation which not only this – but that I – am built on. Thank you – for everything. iv ‘Sometimes I sits and thinks, and sometimes I just sits.’ - A. A. Milne v vi Table of Contents Acknowledgements iii Introduction 1 Chapter One ‘Short on scholarly apparatus, but very readable’: Scientific Fictions of the Field in Brazzaville Beach 30 Chapter Two ‘Through the bars’: Literary Reconfigurations of the Laboratory Space 78 Chapter Three ‘The pits were designed, of course’: Representing the Experimental Non-Human Animal 122 Chapter Four ‘The human body writ small’: Revitalising the Non-Human Animal in Invasive Scientific Practices 166 vii 1 Introduction Man may be excused for feeling some pride at having risen, though not through his own exertions, to the very summit of the organic scale; and the fact of his having thus risen, instead of having been aboriginally placed there, may give him hopes for still a higher destiny in the distant future. But we are not here concerned with hopes or fears, only with the truth as far as our reason allows us to discover it. I have given evidence to the best of my ability; and we must acknowledge, as it seems to me, that man with all his noble qualities, with sympathy which feels for the most debased, with benevolence which extends not only to other men but to the humblest living creature, with his god-like intellect which has penetrated into the movements and constitution of the solar system – with all these exalted powers – Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.1 The excerpt above is the final paragraph taken from Charles Darwin’s The Descent of Man, representative of the textual moment Darwin formally applied his theory of species evolution to humanity.2 First published in 1871, the behemothic work is a study of many correlations existent between the physical and psychological evolutionary development of humankind and other non- human animal species, as well as a demonstration of evolutionary theory in human society as a civilized approach to natural selection. Darwin’s ending summation is both equally idealistic and optimistic in its proposed application of evolutionary theory, depicting a veritable utopia where humans and non-human animals coinhabit a world of discoverable universal truths. However, Darwin’s propitious epilogue was ultimately interpreted differently by those in the contemporary scientific community. Religious assuredness in man’s celestial favour was instead traded for a sense of evolutionary pride that justified resultant anthropocentric approaches that would 1 Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (Ware: Wordsworth Editions Limited, 2013), pp. 646-647. 2 A broad and valuable account of the philosophical nature and impact of Darwin’s evolutionary theory is provided in Michael Ruse’s Charles Darwin (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2008). 2 characterise the empirical sciences through into the next century and beyond.3 During the intermediary period, models of knowledge pertaining to human exceptionalism abounded to establish a species hierarchy, at the summit of which humanity assuredly placed itself. The intellectual powers of the empirical sciences were mobilized and turned to non-human animals to better understand human evolutionary history, to determine a range of possible futures, and most importantly, to reassure the higher destiny of man. The extract from The Descent of Man introduces main epistemological logics still at play within modern-day practices of scientific knowledge production, specifically those that use non- human animals. Darwin’s allusion to there being a ‘truth as far as our reason allows us to discover it’, demarcates systems of self-appropriation and deliberate selectivity in empirical methodological design. The ‘exalted powers’ of man, particularly his exclusive intellectual prowess and linguistic capabilities, are benchmarks of sentience by which non-human animal species are measured, categorized, and qualified within a species hierarchy that additionally determines human ‘benevolence’, distinctions that include scientific

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