Antennae Issue 24 Final

IssueAntennae 24 - Spring 2013 ISSN 1756-9575

Literary Animals Look

Robert McKay – An Illustrated Theriography / Andrea Vesentini – The Vanishing Cow / John Miller – Illustrating the Fur Trade in Boy’s Own Adventure Fiction / June Dwyer – A Visit from the Doom Squad: How War Transforms Ways of Seeing Zoos / Udine Sellbach – The Archipelago of Old Age and Childhood: Creaturely Life in the Floating Islands / Claire Nettleton – The Caged Animal: the Avant-Garde Artist in Manette Salomon / Scott Hurley/Daniel Bruins – Engendering Empathy for Nonhuman Suffering: Using Graphic Narratives to Raise Awareness about Commercial Dog Breeding Operations / Katherine Bishop – The Anti-Imperialist American Literary Animal: Esure I nvisioning Empathy / Julian Monatgue – Volumes From an Imagined Intellectual History of Animals, Architecture and Man

Antennae

The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture

Editor in Chief Giovanni Aloi

Academic Board Steve Baker Ron Broglio Matthew Brower Eric Brown Carol Gigliotti Donna Haraway Linda Kalof Susan McHugh Rachel Poliquin Annie Potts Ken Rinaldo Jessica Ullrich

Advisory Board Bergit Arends Rod Bennison Helen Bullard Claude d’Anthenaise Petra Lange-Berndt Lisa Brown Rikke Hansen Chris Hunter Karen Knorr Rosemarie McGoldrick Susan Nance Andrea Roe David Rothenberg Nigel Rothfels Angela Singer Mark Wilson & Bryndís Snaebjornsdottir

Global Contributors Sonja Britz Tim Chamberlain Concepción Cortes Lucy Davis Amy Fletcher Katja Kynast Christine Marran Carolina Parra Zoe Peled Julien Salaud Paul Thomas Sabrina Tonutti Johanna Willenfelt

Copy Editor Maia Wentrup

Front Cover Image: Julian Monatgue, Volumes From an Imagined Intellectual History of Animals, Architecture and2 Man © Julian Monatgue

EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION ANTENNAE ISSUE 24

Collaboration is one of the most important values in the making of any issue of Antennae. This present one is an exceptional example of the results a collaboration driven by a sincere passion for the written word, images and animals can achieve. Besides thanking all the contributors whose work has enabled such interesting issue to arise, my warmest thank you goes to Susan McHugh and Robert McKay who have co-curated its content. Their expertise on the subject of literature and human- animal studies has indeed proved pivotal. Susan McHugh currently is Professor of English at the University of New England, USA. All of her research and some of her teaching focus on literary, visual, and scientific stories of species. In addition to publishing dozens of essays in peer-reviewed journals and edited collections, McHugh is the author of Animal Stories: Narrating across Species Lines (Minnesota, 2011), as well as Dog (Reaktion, 2004). She serves as Managing Editor of the Humanities for Society & Animals, and she is a member of the editorial boards of Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture, Animal

Studies Journal, H-Animal Discussion Network, and Humanimalia: A Journal of Human-Animal

Interface Studies. Along with Garry Marvin, she is presently co-editing The Routledge Handbook of Human- Animal Studies (Routledge, 2013). Robert McKay currently is Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Sheffield, UK. His research and teaching focuses on representations of animals and animal politics in literature and film since 1945. In addition to being the literature editor for Society & Animals, he has published essays on J.M. Coetzee, Angela Carter, Alice Walker and Margaret Atwood. In 2006, his co-written book (with the Animal Studies Group) Killing Animals was published by University of Illinois Press. A current research project looks at how the literature and culture of the post-war period complicates and exceeds public and political humanitarianism. Two essays from this are forthcoming, one on John Huston’s The Misfits (in Animals and the Moving Image, edited by Michael Lawrence and Laura McMahon) and another on James Agee’s ‘A Mother’s Tale’ (in Against Life, edited by Alastair Hunt and Stephanie Youngblood). Without further ado I shall take a back seat and let our co-editors take us through a literary journey populated by animals, humans, words and images…

Giovanni Aloi Editor in Chief of Antennae Project

GUEST EDITORS INTRODUCTION ANTENNAE ISSUE 24

BEING AND SEEING

LITERARY ANIMALS

John Halas and Joy Batchelor Animal Farm, 1954 © Universal

Three pigeons, two cows, a horse, a goat, two geese, four sheep and an outraged, braying donkey look at the words “ALL ANIMALS ARE EQUAL BUT SOME ANIMALS ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS”. This scene takes place in a sequence of shots near the end of John Halas and Joy Batchelor’s 1954 film adaptation of George Orwell’s Animal Farm, the UK’s first animated feature film. In its portrayal of the same moment, the novel offered perhaps the most persistently recognisable twentieth-century literary archetype of hypocrisy. What is not often noted, though, is the vertiginous interspecies complexity at play in the filmic version of this coup de grâce in the sacrifice of an ethics of community in favour of naked self-interest.

For in this scene we find the film audience watching Halas, Batchelor and their team (themselves overseen by the CIA, who financed the film), looking at Orwell’s text, in which he portrays (via his narrator) a written text that has been produced by the pigs of Animal Farm; through it, they are looking duplicitously at all animals, some of whom are looking back, through that text, at them. So, if we take it

(as Orwell’s text certainly suggests we should) that it is not pigs but humans who are the quintessentially “more equal” animals—that is, the ones who trade on rhetoric to advance their own dubious exceptionalism —then what we have here is something really quite remarkable. It is a piece of text in which animals look at animals looked at by animals, looking at an animal who looks (through an animal) at animals looking at animals looking at animals!

Suffice to say, then, that such an involuted scene offers an especially intriguing moment to begin a reflection on the possibilities of political and aesthetic representation that emerge when we consider the more-than-human world in relation to the visual, the linguistic and the literary, the special focus of this issue.

4 Of course, the focus on looking was scripted for Halas and Batchelor by Orwell’s novel, which famously ends: “The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.” It is an illusion that anchors disillusionment, and might be seen as redeemed only by its being distributed across a multispecies and collective perspective. Revealing how literary animals trouble looking, in a broader perspective this scene multiplies the unfathomable eye of the whale Moby-Dick, and projects ahead to how this feature famously becomes the “face” of the animal in John Huston’s 1956 film of Melville’s novel. Rendered visual, then, literary animals look to the questions that this issue is intended to explore. How do people see animals in literature? What are the migrations of imagery between literature and other arts? How does literature visualise animal subjects and with what effects for their roles in other media? In what ways are such developments proving influential to visual, literary and animal studies, as well as other disciplines? Our contributors rise to this challenge in a broad variety of ways, even ones that implicitly query our objectives in calling attention to the cultural conditions that inform the ever-increasing presence of animals in the pages of periodicals like our journal. In an insightful and lively ‘chronicle’ of the meaning of animals in the covers of the New Yorker magazine, Andrea Vesentini accounts for some important ways in which these images reinforce the trope (made famous by John Berger) of animals as disappearing in modernity.

The preponderance of animals in children’s and young-adult fiction has been a mainstay for centuries, albeit one that has been studiously ignored by literary scholars, so their visual explorations of nonhuman life provide critical inroads into texts that otherwise remain all too often neglected in critical literary traditions. In a bold account of mid-nineteenth-century adventure stories for boys, John Miller’s essay exemplifies this new work by bringing fascinating insight into its visual representations of the Canadian fur trade as an important, indeed foundational, aspect of human-animal relations. Miller’s explorations of the ways in which imperial representational strategies shape understandings add depth to the range of material covered, and help to explain why the examples chosen linger, as both generally informative and individually exhibitive of a macabre, even perverse delight in their singularity.

The migration of the imperial gaze through combinations of verbal and visual spectacle is a theme underpinning many of our contributions. June Dwyer’s essay brings the focus on animal and human looking to contemporary popular nonfiction by comparing how Diane Ackerman’s and Lawrence Anthony’s wartime zoo stories differently work to transform non/secular (and implicitly post/colonial) rhetorics of animal captivity. Through careful close readings, her discussion also provides a useful context for understanding how visual texts inform these popular narratives’ relationship to longer histories of biblically -inspired animal imagery, particularly the paintings of Edward Hicks.

Because historically the visual predates any literary representations of animals by millennia, tracing the journey from images to words adds an important dimension to human self-identifications as such. Along this trajectory, Undine Sellbach sketches one multifaceted personal journey through art that imagines different potentials for interspecies relations. Inverting the conventional timeline of literary illustration, she guides us through the story that she composed around images initially produced by her father, artist Udo Sellbach, for his own inimical purposes at the end of his life. Rather than telling the story of how images created for private use go public, so to speak, Sellbach relays the process of making the world of mysterious beasts and transformations inside The Floating Islands.

The classic literary trope of writing the scene of artistic creation takes on a new significance through Claire Nettleton’s posthumanistic consideration of the Goncourt brothers’ novel Manette Salomon. Nettleton shows how the traditionally separated contexts of avant-garde aesthetics and natural history became intricately interrelated in the figure of the artist-as-animal in nineteenth-century France. Through comparisons of the novel’s depictions of Paris’s famous Jardin des Plantes zoo and its role in the institutionalization of natural history, Nettleton’s discussion also creates a rich context for challenging the “presentism” of current discussions of posthumanism, not to mention posthumanist theorists’ preoccupation with the challenges of visual narrative forms.

In recent decades, the development of manga opens new spaces for encounters with verbal, visual, and species forms. Offering a first-hand view of literary as well as visual artistic collaboration, Scott

5 Hurley and Daniel Bruins explain the choices involved in the process of writing and drawing a story to raise awareness of the lifelong behavioural problems fostered within commercial dog breeding operations. Locating their inspiration in the graphic novel’s capacity to foster empathy, Hurley and Bruins situate their anti-puppy-mill project’s overt activism in the context of other contemporary examples like Sue Coe’s Sheep of Fools, arguing for the broader development of the graphic novel as a crucial tool for pro-animal involvement in the twenty-first century.

These affective capacities also extend longer and more fraught histories of literary illustration, a point clarified by Katherine Bishop’s illuminating essay on the interplay of story and form in Ernest Howard Crosby and Dan Beard’s Captain Jinks, Hero. Bringing to light an understudied anti-imperialist American novel that is contemporaneous with the formerly isolationist US’s fateful turn toward empire, Bishop explores an unlikely strategy through which the story fosters empathy for enemies of the state through depictions of animals. Through a discussion of the novel’s animal imagery in concert with its illustrations, Bishop shows how it puts these aspects in meaning-generating tension, focusing on the use of pejorative animal imagery in order to call to account dominant worldviews and practices. Weaving together several threads across the essays, Bishop’s analysis indicates how the histories of word-image interplay continue to shape future possibilities for human-animal relating.

Calling attention to the importance of the materiality of the text, we have bookended the issue with two very different pieces that show the ways in which we judge animal books by their covers. Robert McKay’s image-essay provides a rich introduction to the choices behind some of the most haunting book-jacket art from the past seventy years. And the issue closes with a selection of artist Julian Montague’s faux books, which we dream of having written.

Although Literary Animals Look primarily focuses on writing that examines issues concerning animals in literary representation, we hope it will also act to provoke trans-disciplinary interest in the interplay between written and imaged animals: here, one might think of the different co-presences of visual animality and textuality in the works of Boo Chapple, David Shrigley, Julian Schnabel, or Sunaura Taylor.(i) That said, we hope equally that this issue will open up vistas for further explorations in the visual dimensions of literary animal studies.

Lastly, we are grateful to our Editor-in-chief Giovanni Aloi for creating space and providing support for this adventure. No venue but Antennae could offer the exceptionally inclusive approach to forms of art that are required for thorough engagements with how literary animals look to -- and at -- us.

Susan McHugh and Robert McKay

(i) See for example Chappel’s A Rat’s Tale (2007); Shrigley’s I’m Dead (2010); Schnabel’s Fox Farm Painting IV (1989); and Taylor’s The Lives of Animals (2010).

CONTENTS

ANTENNAE ISSUE 24

8 An Illustrated Theriography Book covers, and more specifically dust jackets, are perhaps the first site in the conversion of a book into a fetish object; the five parts of the jacket paper, four times folded, constitute the primary erogenous zones in the erotics of bookselling. If the high price publishers are charged by the chain bookseller for a place at display tables is anything to go by, the foremost of these is the cover; it must offer its appeal to the eye instantly to arouse attention, but with enough charm to induce the potential reader into engaging a hand, to pick it up. For book designers, too, it’s clear that the heavy lifting of illustration tends to be exerted in producing the cover. Text by Robert McKay

29 The Vanishing Cow Starting from 1934, the covers of The New Yorker began to portray images of melancholy animals looking at the changes occurring in the American landscape at the time, endangering their presence in the modern way of living. The essay chronicles the story of the vanishing animal, a recurring theme of the magazine’s covers from the mid- thirties to the mid-sixties, as a visual counterpart to the advancement of progress and the effects it had on the landscape, as well as on the utopian pastoral ideal that it purported to democratize among the middle class. The thread linking these New Yorker covers therefore offers a modern rendition of an American Paradise Lost, and the artists’ illustrations become what Akira Mizuta Lippit calls ‘virtual shelters for displaced animals.’ Among several popular magazines, The New Yorker was by far the greatest chronicler of this loss, despite its urban focus, or perhaps thanks to it, as it allowed a sense of unbiased detachment and urbane condescendence towards the suburbs and the country. Text by Andrea Vesentini

48 Illustrating the Fur Trade in Boy’s Own Adventure Fiction The second half of the nineteenth century witnessed a remarkable proliferation of writing for young male readers. Boy’s-own fiction, as it came to be known, routinely featured a daring protagonist journeying through foreign lands in the service of the crown. Consequently, such texts are notable for their intimacy with the material practices of empire, representing and stimulating exploration, conquest and rule. Depictions of wild and savage beasts are a prominent part of the genre’s undoubtedly successful formula. Animals operate as metonyms for the exotic lands to be conquered and as antagonists in the hero’s struggle for self-assertion. As the adventurer emerges victorious, the narrative gaze is drawn unerringly to the wounded animal’s body in endlessly re-imagined scenarios of victimhood relentless in their schadenfreude. Animal suffering seems an integral part of both the politics and the pleasure of these texts in an era that, paradoxically, also saw significant attempts to legislate against cruelty to animals. Text by John Miller

58 A Visit From the Doom Squad: How War Transforms Ways of Seeing Zoos This essay looks at texts that describe two war-ravaged zoos—the Warsaw Zoo that was all but destroyed in 1939 by extensive Nazi bombing, and the Baghdad Zoo that was damaged by American air strikes and then looted during the beginning of the Second Iraq War in 2003. The fate of both zoos demonstrates that as war disrupts cultural and material environments, it often disrupts the traditional visual tropes that are associated with these environments. Text by June Dwyer

68 The Archipelago of Old Age and Childhood: Creaturely Life in the Floating Islands The Floating Islands book began with a vast collection of small drawings, made by my father, Udo Sellbach, towards the end of his life. The drawings show a child in a row boat, surrounded by a floating archipelago inhabited by an alternate evolution of insects, birds and beasts. I wrote a story in response to this strange natural world. In the process, childhood and old age, began crossing over, opening up a creaturely realm at the edges of human time and space. Text by Undine Sellbach

75 The Caged Animal: the Avant-Garde Artist in Manette Salomon From Eugène Delacroix’s majestic lions to Rosa Bonheur’s roaring tigers, animals occupied a privileged place in nineteenth century French art. However, these imagined representations of animals did not reflect the tragic reality of caged animals in the urban sphere. This study is a posthumanistic consideration Manette Salomon (1867), a French novel about art written by Edmond and Jules de Goncourt. The novel depicts the menagerie of the Jardin des Plantes in Paris as a natural paradise where artists are able to experience a profound connection with animals. Text by Claire Nettleton

91 Engendering Empathy for Nonhuman Suffering: Using Graphic Narratives to Raise Awareness about Commercial Dog Breeding Operations Animal activists have challenged commercial dog breeding operations in a number of ways. Writing to state legislators, publishing articles in newspapers, picketing at the sites of breeding facilities, and keeping blogs and websites with pictures of and articles about animal misery are among the most common tactics. These strategies have had success in raising awareness about the inhumane treatment of dogs in these facilities. While we support these efforts, we want to introduce another way to oppose puppy mills: the graphic narrative. Text by Scott Hurley Images Daniel Bruins

110 The Anti-Imperialist American Literary Anima: Envisioning Empathy As animal imagery can highlight trends and tendencies in ourselves and in others that we might ignore otherwise, its use can denaturalize in- and out-group compartmentalization, especially in times of national division. By showing how animal-related arguments and representations function in anti-imperialist American literature from the period surrounding the Philippine Revolution, this article explores the machinations of empathetic tactics in anti-imperialist literature, using Ernest Howard Crosby and D an Beard’s Captain Jinks, Hero (1902) as its central text. Using animal-centric illustrations and connecting their rhetoric to that of their fellow-activists, animal advocates allowed anti-imperialists to polarize positive and negative feelings across lines of empathy, rather than nation, and push back against the tide of visual culture supporting imperial action. Text by Katherine E. Bishop

125 Volumes From an Imagined Intellectual History of Animals, Architecture and Man Julian Montague’s series of faux books are part of a larger project called Secondary Occupants/Collected & Observed. The project consists of a series of installations, photographs and small mixed-media projects considering the relationship between animals and architecture. At the center of the work is an unnamed fictional author/investigator who appears to be obsessed with the way that animals occupy architectural structures. The books are meant to be the reading material of this character. Text and Images by Julian Montague

AN ILLUSTRATED

THERIOGRAPHY

1943- 2002

ROBERT McKAY

ook covers, and more specifically dust jackets, are perhaps the first site in the conversion of a book into a fetish object; the five parts of the jacket paper, four B times folded, constitute the primary erogenous zones in the erotics of bookselling. If the high price publishers are charged by the chain bookseller for a place at display tables is anything to go by, the foremost of these is the cover; it must offer its appeal to the eye instantly to arouse attention, but with enough charm to induce the potential reader into engaging a hand, to pick it up. For book designers, too, it’s clear that the heavy lifting of illustration tends to be exerted in producing the cover. But, as any second-hand book lover knows, a lightness of design touch on the spine is most likely to generate a response, by rewarding the rightward tilt of the head (for me, anyway) that’s needed to navigate the strange axial geometry of horizontal text running downwards. Conventionally, thereafter, the front flap will offer guidance and the back cover reassurance, but the back flap is always the most ambivalent and therefore full of possibility, finally offering a vision of authorship—perhaps as egotism, perhaps as intrigue— that will destroy or enhance readerly pleasure. Coming to books, then, is simultaneously affective and rational: with body and mind, idea and object, luck and judgment, improvisation and convention, freedom and manipulation all at work. That is to say, it is far as one can imagine from the humanist ideal of pure linguistic communication from one mind to another. The books in this annotated theriography, a brief tour through some of the postwar animal writing that has spoken to me, all similarly demand of their readers that they look beyond conventional ideas of the human, both on and under the covers.

“What is it, Mother?” he asked. “What is it, Mother?” His mother answered, between gasps, “It – was – He!” Bambi shuddered and they ran on. (p. 76)

The unsurprisingly modest success of Disney’s version of Bambi when released in 1942 doesn’t stop Cape leading with the film tie-in on the jacket of this edition: the fate of Salten’s work to be eclipsed by its animated cousin was already sealed. Indeed, Disney went on to use his Perri (1938), advertised on the back of this edition, as the inspiration for a 1957 film in its True -Life Adventure series. That Whittaker Chambers translated this classic animal story is also now largely forgotten, its recognition in turn eclipsed by farce. Accused of libel in 1948 after infamously naming U.S. State Department official Alger Hiss as a communist, he proved his case by producing incriminating microfilm documents which he had hidden inside a pumpkin.

Felix Salten A Life in the Woods [1923], translated by Whittaker Chambers [1928], 6th UK impression (London: Jonathan Cape, 1943) Design and illustration uncredited. 10

Wishing to make himself more like a homo-professor Mmaa, he tried to throw up his thorax and stand on his hind legs. Only the first part of this experiment was successful, and he fell back heavily to the termitan posture. (p.103)

Professor Mmaa’s Lecture is an insect novel consonant with other artistic attacks on the human self-image in the post-war, whether voiced by Beckett or shown by Bacon or Chadwick. Working themselves in film, writing and drawing, in the late 1950s the Themersons held an avant-garde salon called The Gaberbocchus Common Room, “a congenial place where artists and scientists and people interested in science and art can meet and exchange thoughts”. Stephan himself, then, must have delighted in reading ‘Some Account of the Termites, which are found in Africa and other hot Climates’ in the letter of Mr Henry Smeathman, of Clement’s Inn, to Sir Joseph Banks published in the 1781 edition that gave him his cover image. Although the source has been digitized by Google, the image on the image has been corrupted, the tactility of the original fold-out plates resisting the will to complete digital visuality.

Stefan Themerson Professor Mmaa’s Lecture, with drawings and endpapers by Franciszka Themerson (London: Gaberbocchus, 1953) Design uncredited. The gravure on the jacket is reproduced from the12 philosophical transactions of the Royal Society – 1781.

The monkey dropped. Without pain he remembered the assembly of animal shapes that had been presented to him the night before, though he could not now tell if the experience had any reality. It came to him that all these kinds of creature could, though he had no time to work it out, be

arranged as a progressive series. It must have been with the idea of

adding to, perpetuating or improving that series that the Professor had exorted him to try and try, to seek something that had always been just past the horizon of his understanding. (p. 101)

In 1965 Brigid Brophy published ‘The Rights of Animals’ in The Sunday Times; this essay was an inspiration to the “Oxford Group” of philosophers that included Stanley and Rosalind Godlovitch, Richard Ryder and David Wood. With Brophy and others, including the novelist Maureen Duffy, members of the group produced Animals, Men and Morals (Gollancz, 1971), an early work in the flourishing of pro-animal writing and thought in the 1970s. Ásgeir Scott’s beautiful, delicate and melancholy illustration of the eponymous ape’s retreat from the approaching reader captures the novel’s shame at humanity’s misbegotten, violent and asymptotic attempts to know other species.

Brigid Brophy Hackenfeller’s Ape with decorations by Ásgeir Scott, 1st UK edition (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1953) Design and illustration by Ásgeir Scott. 14

It is our duty to admit that no plan and no system governed this childish ranging far and wide. She sought no field-mouse, did not try to find the track of a hare, and, as we have seen, even gave up burrowing in the mole-hill when she had gone just far enough to enjoy a whiff of its velvety fragrance. She was looking at everything, sniffing at everything, and abandoning everything for the next remembered excitement close at hand. (p. 123)

In the 1950s, Secker & Warburg published J. R. Ackerley’s My Dog Tulip (1956). In the same year, another of the century’s great dog books was written; but by the time Niki: The Story of a Dog appeared in English, Dery was in prison, sentenced to nine years for ‘overthrowing the order of the state’ during the Hungarian revolution of 1956. The simply organised midcentury aesthetic of Colin Sawyer’s design is energized by Niki’s proud tail, inquisitive if pensive eyes, and raised paw, ready to run. These features, like the novel itself, are quietly revolutionary statements of the fundamental needs for creativity and mutual empathy in humans and in dogs that no social system can suppress.

Tybor Dery Niki: the Story of a Dog, translated by Edward Hyams, 1st UK edition (London: Secker & Warburg, 1958) Design by Colin P. Sawyer, illustration uncredited. 16

Roslyn looks at the horse running only a yard to one side of her. She could reach out and touch its eyes. It is a medium-size brown stallion, glistening with sweat. She hears the high screaming wheeze of its breathing, and the strangely gentle tacking of its unshod hooves on the hard lake bed. It is stretching out now, and its stricken eyes seem blind and agonized. Suddenly, from behind, a noose falls over its ears and hangs there askew. (p.108)

This is the third incarnation of Arthur Miller’s work about the end of the mustang hunt, The Misfits , which appeared as a story in Esquire in 1957 and was filmed by John Huston in 1961 (it was both Clark Gable’s and Marilyn Monroe’s last film). The publishers rather grandiosely claim this is a “new medium […] a ‘cinema-novel’”. Miller says more simply (if self- regardingly) that it is written in “an unfamiliar form, neither novel, play, nor screenplay […] every word is there for the purpose of telling the camera what to see and the actors what they are to say” (p. ix). It thus holds a peculiar place in the visual history of literary animals, or the literary history of visual animals. The jacket design, however, speaks more to the film’s cross -marketing as a unique combination of different aspects of postwar artistic prestige. On this jacket, the work of Miller, Huston, Monroe, Gable et al is joined by the abstract illustration style of Don Ervin from advertising design pioneers George Nelson and Co. and the photo of Miller by Erich Hartmann of the Magnum agency, who had exclusive rights to document the film-shoot.

Arthur Miller The Misfits, 1st US edition (New York: Viking, 1961) Design by Don Ervin, author photo by Erich Hartmann. 18

Napoleon stood up and, casting a peculiar sidelong glance at Snowball, uttered a high pitched whimper of a kind no one had heard him utter before. At this there was a terrible baying sound outside, and nine enormous dogs wearing brass studded collars came bounding into the barn. They dashed straight for Snowball who only sprang from his place just in time to escape their snapping jaws.

Animal Farm is currently the highest-selling Penguin Modern Classic paperback, but it has been released in a bewildering number of editions. Its series of different covers would make an intriguing study in postwar jacket design, from the austere two-tone green diagonal design of the 1945 first edition to the Heidegger-influenced street art style of Shepard Fairey’s 2008 UK edition and the Halas and Batchelor-quoting brooding dark red 2013 edition by David Pearson Design. As time passes, designers have emphasized different aspects of the novel’s meaning, but Paul Hogarth’s crazed depiction twists Romek Marber’s classically cool grid design with a focus on Napoleon’s key moment of repressive political violence. This in turn evokes the work’s insidious ability to threaten the reader with the nightmare of duplicitous political rhetoric.

Geaorge Orwell Animal Farm [1945], 17th reprint of 1951 Penguin edition in association with Secker & Warburg (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967) Design uncredited, but is based on a general20 design by Romek Marber, illustration by Paul Hogarth.

Eco-Fiction raises important questions about man’s place in the system: • Will man continue to ignore the warnings of the environment and destroy his source of life? • Will he follow the herd into the slaughterhouse?

This book’s jacket illustration is the epitome of macabre eco-gothic: a space-helmeted man apparently suffocating in a sparse but regenerating nature world, with the symbolic raven of death cawing his demise. The grandiose gesture of the image echoes the troubled humanism of the subtitle description—itself a nice example of the confluence of descriptive discourse often used on anthology covers and the didactic style that propels this one. The book itself is a slightly desperate document, collecting texts from the 30s to the 60s, some realist, some science fiction, and one from 1839, that are only at a widest stretch interpretable as attempts to address early 1970s environmentalist concerns. But the histrionic jacket design suggests that the crisis is so pressing that any resource may be conscripted to answer it.

John Stadler (Ed.) Eco -Fiction, 4th reprint or 1971 Washington Square Press edition (New York: Pocket Books, 1973) Design and illustration uncredited, the front cover image bears the signature "Michael Eagle".

On the fourth and lowest deck were all the beasts whose size it had been feared would sink the ark: and here the darkness was absolute. (p. 198)

Drawson’s illustration presents a colourful tableau of a recognizable Biblical story, but with unexpected twists. Why is there a blue boy, and who is the Amazonian woman in red, leaning like one of Modigliani’s androgynous figures were it not for the shapely bust, and why is she paying no heed to her lost parasol? Why is a frightened cat leaping from a matronly woman and, wait, … were there really bacteria on the ark? Stylistically combining as it does the garish backdrops of the 19th century popular stage with the obliquely viewed faces of cubism, the image is a neat evocation of the unsettling self-reflexive awareness of Findley’s political novel, which itself plays in classic postmodernist style with familiar narratives and moods (Biblical story; the talking animal tale; sentimental fiction). This story, we can guess, may well end with a new covenant between humans and animals, if not with God, but it will not necessarily be one that retains the conventional pattern of power.

Timothy Findley Not Wanted on the Voyage [1984], 1st UK edition (London: Macmillan, 1985) Design by David Wyman, illustration by Blair Drawson, author photo by Elisabeth Feryn.

My momm y went to the incinerator. She was not allowed to suckle me. I’m a herbivore but I was made into a carnival. (p. 49)

The dustcover bears a life-size image of a steak pictured against a silver background which resembles a meat display; inside is reproduced a price ticket bearing the legend: ‘ENGLISH,

10lbs’. The process of purchasing this book was thus uncannily (or was for this vegan, at least) like a trip to the butcher shop. But an entirely strange trip, when the steak attempts such a surreal form of aesthetic seduction, by hijacking the text on the butcher’s name- ticket. Levy, who has only recently begun to receive much public recognition (on the Booker Prize shortlist in 2012 for Swimming Home), is one of the UK’s most innovative contemporary writers, her work a persistent reimagining of the possibility of ethnic, sexual and species identity. With Diary of a Steak, she challenges her reader to accept but also to critique the position of consumer—of ideas, of imagery of women, and of animals—a process that begins with the seductive interpellation on the cover.

Deborah Levy Diary of a Steak, 1st UK edition (London: Book Works, 1997) Design by Herman Lelie.

I was alone and orphaned, in the middle of the Pacific, hanging onto an oar, an adult tiger in front of me, sharks behind me, a storm raging about me. Had I considered my prospects in the light of reason, I surely would have given up and let go of the oar, hoping that I might drown before being eaten. (p. 107).

Martel’s 2002 Booker winner about a boy at sea with a tiger has been a rising publishing tide to sink all other Booker boats. UK publisher Canongate delightedly announced that it had sold its 3,141,593th copy in all editions in February 2013—Ang Lee’s 2012 film tie-in added to the sales garnered by the high production value edition illustrated by Tomislav Torjanac (RRP £40) and the Kindle version (sold at 20p in February 2013). And yet the momentum behind the massive success of the book came in no small part from its early editions, which had perhaps the most recognizable jacket design of any animal novel, with Andy Bridge’s serene painting used for the hardback and paperback across the world. The stylized calm of its deep-blue sea illuminated by a tiger’s warm orange; the ease of that tiger echoed by the peaceful pre-natal positioning of the Indian boy; the peacable sublime confirmed by a guard of dolphins and sea turtles. But, the runaway success of a work that celebrates both the zoo and fiction itself as organizations of a supposed human need for belief (famously confirmed by Barack Obama in a note to Martel after reading the book with his daughter), might give us cause for worry. Do the book (and that cover image) offer anything more than a foetal position of reading in which we can escape the difficulty and fatality of real life with animals?

Yann Martel Life of Pi, [2001], 1st UK edition (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2002) Design by James Hutcheson, cover painting by Andy Bridge.

THE VANISHING COW

Starting from 1934, the covers of The New Yorker began to portray images of melancholy animals looking at the changes occurring in the American landscape at the time, endangering their presence in the modern way of living. The essay chronicles the story of the vanishing animal, a recurring theme of the magazine’s covers from the mid-thirties to the mid-sixties, as a visual counterpart to the advancement of progress and the effects it had on the landscape, as well as on the utopian pastoral ideal that it purported to democratize among the middle class. The thread linking these New Yorker covers therefore offers a modern rendition of an American Paradise Lost, and the artists’ illustrations become what Akira Mizuta Lippit calls ‘virtual shelters for displaced animals.’ Among several popular magazines, The New Yorker was by far the greatest chronicler of this loss, despite its urban focus, or perhaps thanks to it, as it allowed a sense of unbiased detachment and urbane condescendence towards the suburbs and the country. Text by Andrea Vesentini

What man has to do in order to transcend the animal, to transcend the mechanical within himself, and what his unique spirituality leads to, is often anguish. And so, by comparison and despite the model of the machine, the animals seem to him to enjoy a kind of innocence. The animal has been emptied of experience and secrets, and this new invented “innocence” begins to provoke in man a kind of nostalgia. For the first time, animals are placed in a receding past (i).

nce upon a time, there was a cow. If forefront of the picture, giving her back to Ilona Karasz’s illustration (fig. 1) for the the spectators as if they were also part of the Ocover of the May 19, 1934 scene, witnessing the change. A fence issue of The New Yorker could speak in visually separates the spot where the cow still fairy-tale language, this is how it would stands from the unrestrained human begin. A cow overlooks the changes in the development, out of which she is physically American landscape from the top of a hill, exiled. The composition of the image clearly the towering skyscrapers of the polluted city resembles that of the countless adverts that emerging from the horizon, enveloped in a envisioned the proximity of a bright future of cloud of smog, and the hilly countryside evolution and modernization, those utopian pointed with houses, the city sprawling along views where the American man stared in the country road taken over by cars and wonder at the advancement of progress as buses. And yet, the cow observes from a if he were contemplating a diorama at a distance, in the shade of a tree in the very world’s fair (ii). We are not allowed to see the

29 expression on the cow’s face, but we can The Melancholy Cow easily guess it would betray a certain degree of melancholia; Karasz’s clear division of Dramatic changes were not foreign to the spaces gives the scene a nostalgic feel: the American landscape: the pristine nature of grayness of the sky starkly contrasting with the the continent had been exploited from the luminous colors of the large tree and the early days of colonization. Defining Karasz’s cow’s white fur. The winding road ends right cow as a ‘vanishing’ animal intentionally at the cow’s feet. She might still be in the evokes other subjects who were depicted in forefront of the picture, but the world of the process of disappearing in the previous tomorrow is rapidly advancing, pushing her century. The ‘vanishing Indian’ is a leitmotif to the side of the scene, and eventually out often found in nineteenth-century painting, of it. In spite of her positioning in the frame, especially in the Hudson River School the image tells us that the cow belongs to (vii). Like The New Yorker cow, Thomas what Berger calls the “receding past” in the Cole’s Indian at Sunset (fig. 2) nostalgically opening quote. The trope of the contemplates the untamed wilderness of the disappearing animal is by no means an land from above, in the shade of a stately invention of The New Yorker artist: already in tree, another romantic relic of the receding the nineteenth century, American landscape past. The common assumption that the painters portrayed wild creatures retreating to country was to be a “garden of Eden the realm of the mythic wilderness of the restored” for the new American Adam, as continent (iii). However, it was only with the Carolyn Merchant wrote, called for the domination of the machine over nature, marginalization of its original inhabitants, when first the railway and then the car perceived as closer to the animal sphere revolutionized the landscape and turned the than the human (viii). Indians were American man into a nomadic commuter, progressively pushed to the darker corner of that the marginalization of the animal the picture, both historically and figuratively, became truly apparent (iv). The recurring most famously in John Gast’s American theme of the vanishing animal in The New Progress, or Flora Palmer’s lithograph The Yorker covers from the mid-thirties to the Rocky Mountains: Emigrants Crossing the mid-sixties worked as a visual counterpart to Plains, where cows still stand on the side of the advancement of progress and its effects progress, enabling the westward on the landscape and the utopian pastoral advancement of the wagons (ix). But cows ideal that it purported to democratize and Indians were to find themselves on the among the middle class. Although covers same side in the following century. featuring animals, especially cows, were by In August 1942, The New Yorker published no means exclusive to The New Yorker at a short story by Jonathan Harrington, ‘Cow in the time, the magazine was the only one to Quicksand’, in which a group of native use them as a critique of suburban Americans rescue a cow from quicksand expansion, despite or perhaps thanks to its with the help of a white man on a visit to the urban focus that allowed a sense of wild West. Harrington portrays the white unbiased detachment and urbane narrator as an observer, helping in the effort condescendence towards the new but mostly detached from the scene, while developments, as well as the country (v). Its the cow and the Indians share the similar lot cover art still represents an icon of popular of standing on the unsteady ground that culture and, most importantly, an enthralling swallows into oblivion whomever steps on it continuum of powerful commentaries to the (x). As had been the case for the Indians, shifts in American history. As a cultural object, cows were entering what Lippit calls “a state the covers work as a mirror in which for of perpetual vanishing,” their almost a hundred years the middle class has “spectral” presence looming as a nostalgic looked at its own shortcomings, a venue of memento of a lost era in the modern hegemonic self-irony (vi). landscape (xi). Lippit explains this nostalgic attitude toward animals through the Freudian conception of melancholia: humans look at animals as their halves lost in the process of evolution, incapable to retrieve their “primal

Fig.1 Ilona Karasz th Untitled Cover Illustration, The New Yorker, Split, 19 May 1934, p rint, 20.3x27.9 cm © Courtesy of Condé Nast

31 identification” with them (xii). However, the The cow and the deer, respectively signifying melancholia that permeates Karasz’s cover the rural and the wild, faced a common illustration as well, as the ones to follow, destiny before the bulldozer of postwar seems to be different in nature. The animals expansion. Theirs was, in fact, a tale of are not only meant to be looked at changing fortunes. Although the rural melancholically. They look melancholic. In functioned as an instrument of civilization 1957 The New Yorker published a poem by against the wild lands up until the late R. P. Lister pondering on the intrinsic 1800s, The New Yorker turned cows into melancholia of cows: romantic remnants of the vanishing past as the new frontier movement out of the city Man may think several thoughts a day began (xv). Robert F. Berkhofer notes that, in But seldom gives them full attention; nineteenth-century American arts, the His thoughts are mostly colored gray evanescent appearance of the Indian in the And few of them are fit to mention grandiose Western sceneries mirrored the ruins common to many European landscape A cow’s are pure, and colored green— paintings, which kindled a romantic Pleasant, maybe, but rarely jolly— impression of the past. (xvi) Mark David And that is why the rustic scene Spence sees in Cole’s depiction of Indians Is so suffused with melancholy (xiii). an attempt “to arouse a sense of nostalgia and pity in order to give romantic poignancy Why is it so hard for Lister’s and Karasz’s cow to a scene,” portraying them as “a romantic to indulge in jolly thoughts when the bovine poet or a tragic and pensive figure from life seems quite peaceful and carefree? classical antiquity” who witnessed the Cows had historically represented the slow- unspoiled beauty of the American land paced nature of the rural world by virtue of giving in to the march of progress. (xvii) their quiet nature, endurance and sturdy Karasz’s cover shares with Cole’s Indian the presence suggesting the unhurried rhythm same clear-cut division into two spaces, one and steady character of country life, associated with the receding past and the attributes that are not necessarily other with the advancing future, a common melancholy. But once cows are placed trait of The New Yorker covers depicting before a novel background, the scene turns vanishing animals. Most of them reveal a into one of melancholia. romantic taste in the choice of colors, The lost object that Freud deems as dramatic composition and treatment of the necessary to trigger a melancholic state landscape that resonates with the classic appears to be the very landscape that the depiction of the vanishing Indian, the resilient cow is looking at, the disappearing rural and melancholy ruin of history. (xiv) America. The hidden gaze of the cow Karasz’s illustration was only the first of betrays the bittersweet awareness that, as many melancholy cows and animals found the quintessential rural animal, she is also in the covers of The New Yorker in the years soon bound to disappear. This awareness is to follow. Although John Berger couples the quickly interiorized by the viewer, who shares marginalization of the animal in Western the same point of view as the animal. The societies with the advent of capitalism, booming postwar world looks different when between the nineteenth century and the seen through the eyes of the cow. Her twentieth century, the pictures we will see in melancholia becomes the melancholia of these pages challenge this clear-cut the viewer. The human gaze that first expansionism rather than freezing it at a coincided with the animal gaze shifts with historical divide to show how this rupture was the understanding that, by looking at the only one step in a longer process of changing landscape, the animal is in fact America’s dominance over its landscape, interrogating the viewer, who is exposed to from the eradication of the wilderness, to man’s disruptive power. This final self- postwar suburbanization. (xviii) Either in realization brings the viewer to the opposite commuter trains, private cars or space side, that of being the object of the shuttles, the American frontier kept moving vanishing animal’s gaze, the cause of its long after Frederick Jackson Turner declared impending disappearance. it closed in 1893, perpetuating a history of 32

Fig.2 Thomas Cole Indian at Sunset, 1845-1847, Oil on canvas, 36x44 cm, private collection

of expansionism rather than freezing it at a to the forefront was soon to cause another specific point in time. (xix) Taken as a body of disappearance. Although many view images rather than isolated works, this motif suburbanization, and all the changes it in The New Yorker covers thus becomes a entailed in terms of car usage and lifestyle, narrative: Seen one after the other, the still solely as a product of postwar policies, it was scenes are set into motion, telling a visual actually the New Deal reforms that made it story of animals turning from a vanishing into possible. A month after Karasz’s cover, on a vanished object. June 28, and only ten days after the enactment of the Indian Reorganization Act, The Suburban Cow the Congress passed the National Housing Act of 1934, leading to the creation of the The fact that the melancholy animal first Federal Housing Administration that would appeared in 1934 is a peculiar coincidence. simplify the system of mortgage loans and 1934 was the year when the Indian enable the rise of suburbia in the years after Reorganization Act tried to counter the the war. The May 15, 1954 cover (fig. 3) devastating effects of the marginalizing showed that the land once used for policies toward Native Americans, who by pasturing and agriculture was ready to be that time had been confined to Western subdivided for the growing needs of the mythology and inhospitable lands unfit for postwar baby-boom. Where the cows are still agriculture. The same ‘New Deal’ that grazing, a young couple envisions their future attempted to bring the vanished Indian back modernist house, starkly overlapping the rural

Fig.3 Constantin Alajalov Untitled Cover Illustration, The New Yorker, 15 May 1954, print, 20.3x27.9 cm © Courtesy of Condé Nast.

landscape. The suburbs, the highway system

34 that was implemented in 1956, the As the covers show, the restoration unrelenting spread of the automobile, all of and modernization of Eden turned out to be those changes were to recolonize the the ultimate capitulation of Eden as vanishing Eden. nineteenth-century romantics knew it. In fact, Despite its claim to return to the it managed to achieve quite the opposite of pastoral idyll commodified for the masses, the pastoral ideal that it claimed to reinstate the suburban revolution severed America’s after decades of wild urbanism and industrial long-term relationship with the land (xx), growth. The illustration of a 1962 cover by ending the agrarian myth envisaged by Charles E. Martin (fig. 4) celebrates the arrival Thomas Jefferson and other forefathers of of spring by showing the new Eden revisited the nation depicted in Victor Bobritsky’s 1938 through consumer culture (xxvii). A stag and a cover: the cows found in his typical New doe give a skeptical look at the new England village are the only ones that seem shopping mall, dropped in the wild woods to be aware of the train looming in the where they still manage to find shelter from background of the apparently peaceful the invasion of cars and shoppers. Forced scene, once again conveying a sense of behind the bush that once again creates a melancholia (xxi). The inherent contradictions spatial barrier between the realm of men of the suburban model led to the birth of and the endangered wilderness, this ambiguous terminology such as “rural alternative American family stands on the far suburb” (xxii), shedding light on America’s side of the shopping-crazed hoards of clashing need to picture itself both as a rural another familial model, the baby-boom and modern country, a legacy of Jefferson’s family (xxviii). Less bewilderment and greater republicanism lying behind the nostalgic nostalgia is found in the pensive gaze of the portrayal of the progressive suburbanization peasant featured in Perry Barlow’s 1947 of the landscape (xiii). American politics was cover (xxix). The man peers at a new car- moving on, abandoning the rural ideal, save invaded building, presumably another its mentioning in speeches and allegories, to shopping center. His horses are already half spur the nostalgic soul of voters for political out of the picture, and the only boundary purposes. What if this rural world actually between the hayfield and the suburbanized manifested itself during a political rally space is a feeble wooden fence that will though? The attendants of a speech held by eventually come off — most suburbs were in a candidate for the Senate in a 1952 cover fact built on reconverted agricultural lands look quite puzzled when a herd of cows (xxx). shows up at the gathering: references to The thread linking these New pastoralism might work at a theoretical level, Yorker covers therefore offers a modern but the actual presence of cattle is rather rendition of an American Paradise Lost (xxxi), outlandish (xxiv). and the artists’ illustrations become what On the other hand, the wilderness Lippit calls a “virtual shelters for displaced that had been tamed by the end of the animals,” which are being gradually evicted nineteenth century, usually portrayed by the from American everyday life to re-enter it infrequent occurrence of deer in the through popular culture, either Disney films magazine, was to be further marginalized. or The Discovery Channel (xxxii). Even the John Steinbeck’s The Pastures of literature published within the magazine Heaven opens on the chase of an unruly depicted rural life in an elegiac fashion. E.B. deer by a Spanish corporal in 1776 California White’s poem “The Red Cow is Dead,” leading to the casual discovery of an Eden- published in 1946, ironically mourned the like valley, since then called the Pastures of death of a cow in the Isle of Wight (xxxiii). On Heaven (xxv). It closes on the same valley May 4, 1963, the magazine published a nostalgically contemplated as an playful and yet nostalgic elegy of the rural endangered corner of pristine nature by a world by Jon Swan, “A Portable Gallery of bus of tourists, one of whom farsightedly Pastoral Animals,” describing animals almost predicts its imminent subdivisions into as fairytale archetypes and historical building lots — in fact, the book was characters, remnants of a much more published in 1932 when Southern California glorious past where horses fought in war was about to be savagely urbanized (xxvi). instead of being put aside by a tractor (xxxiv).

Fig.4 Charles E. Martin Fig.5 William Steig Untitled Cover Illustration, The New Yorker, 26 May Untitled Cover Illustration, The New Yorker, 26 Aug. 1962, print, 20.3x27.9 cm 1961, print, 20.3x27.9 cm. © Courtesy of Condé Nast. © Courtesy of Condé Nast.

(xxxvii) But the new beast that replaced wartime cover by Peter Arno . horses and cattle for locomotion was the Speeding past the marginalized automobile. Alain’s 1951 cover highlights the wilderness, the cars in De Miskey’s 1959 contrast between the fast-paced cover (fig. 6) are physically severing the modernization and the slowness of the landscape, the highway working as a vanishing past (xxxv). In the rural Southwestern dramatic divider, cutting the woods in half scene, the cows are confronted with the and keeping apart the two melancholy deer speed of the new fetishized animal, they are that look into each other’s eyes wondering physically inapt for the frantic mobility of whether the drivers will ever slow down postwar America. Ten years later, William enough to notice the faint warning sign Steig’s cover (fig. 5) portrays the cows signaling their presence. Little could the carelessly slowing down the road-trip of an powerless deer do against the new driver of affluent couple, whose garish red car does progress. The commuter train speeding not blend with the pastel hues of the country. through the countryside in a 1942 cover by The son of immigrant parents, William Steig Arno is just as well driven by the same fever (xxxviii) devoted most of his career at The New . The busy passengers are too self- Yorker to the depiction of the lower classes, absorbed in the rat race of modern life to and as such his art often addressed the pause their eyes on the rural scenery, where endangerment of this world caused by the the tiny horse is soon to slip away from sight: expansion of the suburban middle class, of this time, what marks the boundary between which the car was the greatest epitome (xxxvi). the fast-advancing future and the receding America’s rush to modernization also past is the window. advanced at the speed of tanks, such as those hampered by a herd of cows grazing in their way, as happened in a famous

Fig.6 Julian de Miskey Untitled Cover Illustration, The New Yorker, 23 May 1959, print, 20.3x27.9 cm © Courtesy of Condé Nast.

Fig.7 Peter Arno Untitled Cover Illustration, The New Yorker, 19 May 1956, print, 20.3x27.9 cm © Courtesy of Condé Nast.

38 The Gazing Cow cinematic animal, the ones found in The New Yorker covers are frozen by the artist’s Increasingly, wild and rural animals found pencil. Paralyzed and mute, their gaze is all themselves on the other side of the that is left for us to look at. In most of the barricade in visual representation. In his illustrations seen so far, the animal is either critique of John Berger’s seminal essay on looking at the man-shaped landscape or animals, Jonathan Burt notes that Berger being looked at by a human observer. A dwells on “the traditional dividing line 1956 cover by Peter Arno (fig. 7) shows three whereby man is a linguistic animal and cows peeking at a cocktail party from animals are not.” In this regard, The New behind a window. Despite the spatial division Yorker illustrations bring to light a divide that of the composition, Arno places the is not so much linguistic, as it is spatial. The spectator on the side of the animal, creating vanishing animal belongs to a landscape a complex set of crossing gazes. First, we that is being usurped by suburban settlers find the gaze of the animals, the uninvited who are always depicted as newcomers onlookers of the action that is taking place and strangers to this space. Even though with indoors; then, the gazes of the affluent the opposite purpose, nineteenth-century attendants of the party who look at each portrayals of the westward movement other without realizing that they are the stemmed from the same split between the object of the animal gaze. However, one of “new man” and the “old landscape” to draw them notices the presence of the animals their celebratory representation of the and gives them a startled look. Such a look, frontier. The New Yorker artists based their a mark of Arno’s art that he compared to the portrayal of the postwar vanishing animal on expression in the face of a person this spatial dichotomy, man and animal photographed unexpectedly, is the look of physically kept apart by walls, hedges and someone who becomes aware of being the windows (xxxix). Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven object of a gaze, exactly as the character in Allows (1955), recounting the love story this illustration is. (xliii) between an upper-class widow and a By gazing at this startled look, viewers gardener whose only wish is to spend the rest find themselves in the ambivalent position of of his life in the wild woods like a novel sharing both the animals’ perspective of Thoreau, ends with the famous scene of a onlookers, given their spatial location, but deer frolicking out of the picture window of also that of the surprised man who finds the man’s newly renovated mill house in the himself being looked at, because they forest (xl). Jane Wyman’s character has finally belong to the human realm. The surprise surrendered to his love, and Rock Hudson found in the man’s face is therefore the has laid his weapons down and converted to surprise of the viewer, who becomes aware a semi-domestic way of life that reconciles of the presence of the vanishing animal and the woods and a nicely decorated house. In of the change in the landscape, because this picture-perfect ending, the deer peers he can finally see it through the eyes of the through the glass, certainly to bless their animal. In Berger’s words, “when he is being union but also to remind us that, once seen by the animal, he is being seen as his domestic life steps in, the call of the wild is surroundings are seen by him.” (xliv) necessarily left out of the hearth (xli). In the The complex structure of Arno’s very last shot, the camera moves away from illustration exemplifies that, by looking at the the two lovers to linger on the melancholy vanishing animal on The New Yorker cover, image of the deer, the sole protagonist of spectators experience “the point of view of the frame shown behind the bars of the the absolute other,” as Derrida calls the window before it walks out of the picture. The animal gaze (xlv). In fact, the 1956 work is End. designed after another cover illustration that Like the image of Jane Wyman Arno drew for a 1942 issue (fig. 8), where an looking at the deer through the windowpane, MP soldier is the outsider left out of the most of The New Yorker covers are window, the uninvited witness of his fellow centered on the idea of gaze, especially soldiers’ happiness. Historically, the Western what Lippit calls “the speechless semiotic of world has come to view the animal as the the animal look.” (xlii) Even more so than the emblem of otherness. A soulless and

Fig. 8 Peter Arno Untitled Cover Illustration, The New Yorker, 28 Feb 1942, print, 20.3x27.9 cm © Courtesy of Condé Nast.

40 reasonless creature, it was always excluded covers, the end of our story. from any greater plan grounded on either Christian or philosophical tradition (xlvi). But the The Ghost Cow melancholy gaze of the vanishing animal is also the gaze of the past being sacrificed on However, the disappearance of the the altar of progress, which still manifests itself vanishing animal as a theme is by no means in the form of spectral alterity: first Indians, the end of animals on The New Yorker then livestock and wildlife. Arno’s image covers. Wildlife became completely absent, evokes Donna Haraway’s description of the save the ordinary moose and reindeer in the animal gaze in the dioramas at the Christmas issues, serving as a mark of American Museum of Natural History: consumerism rather than an expression of wilderness (l). In popular culture, cows Each diorama has at least one entered the preserve of advertising imagery. animal that catches the viewer’s Elsie the Cow, the mascot of Borden Dairy gaze and holds it in communion. Company since 1936, became a leading ... The moment seems fragile, the attraction at the 1964 New York World’s Fair, animals about to disappear, the where a real cow was picked for the role. communion about to break; the Already in 1933, John Thurber wrote a Hall threatens to dissolve into the sardonic account for the magazine on a chaos of the Age of Man. But it mechanical cow designed by Messmore & does not. The gaze holds, and Damon for the Chicago World’s Fair. The the wary animal heals those who piece chronicled in detail the whole will look. ... The glass front of the vanishing process, from when a live cow was diorama forbids the body’s entry, brought in to pose as a model for a clay but the gaze invites his visual copy, a plaster negative and then a papier- penetration. The animal is frozen mâché hollow replica to be filled with real in a moment of supreme life, and milk, a phonograph that mooed and several man is transfixed. ... The specular other mechanisms, to when the cow was commerce between man and slaughtered and replaced by her animal at the interface of two simulacrum (li). On the visual front, the new evolutionary ages is completed cover artists instead focused on the new (xlviii). obsession of the American middle class: the pet. Dogs and cats invaded the covers, Often is an exchange of gazes between a sometimes literally overshadowing their startled man and an animal found in the masters to signal their increasing power in cover illustrations, long before Arno’s work. the dynamics of the American family (fig. 10) Sometimes it happens because men try to (lii). But pets were not just replacing wild and transform nature into a space of leisure, such rural animals in postwar America: they were as swimming or golf, and several physical one of the causes of their disappearance. elements can act as interface, like The A. J. Liebling’s short story “The Mustang (xlix). stonewalls or fences In 1965, Peter Arno Buzzers,” published in the magazine in 1954, drew the last recorded cover of the satirized the decline of the frontier with the vanishing animal in the history of The New chronicle of the hunting of wild horses in a Yorker (fig. 9): a fawn quietly sipping water Nevada reservation to provide for pet food. from the swimming pool of a suburban Cowboys still had a go in the wild lands of house, completely unnoticed by the the West to make sure that all cats and dogs attendants of another cocktail party. A large were fed appropriately, mustang meat hedge shields the animal from sight, acting being cheaper than that of reared horses. as a screen between the glittering colours of “And what will happen when the horses are the party and the dark blue realm of the all gone?” asks a woman moved by the deer, the realm of the water drunk by the melancholy sight of a captive mustang. animal (nature) and that of alcohol in the “Then them cats of yours will have to get back (artifice). In hindsight we might see that used to these ten-cent cows, Ma’am” replies hedge as a curtain falling on the lot of the the cowboy, pointing at the next animal that disappearing animal in the magazine’s was already on the verge of vanishing (liii). 41

Fig.9 Peter Arno Untitled Cover Illustration, The New Yorker, 21 Aug 1965, print, 20.3x27.9 cm © Courtesy of Condé Nast

Fig.10 Mark Ulriksen Untitled Cover Illustration, The New Yorker, 10 Mar 2003, print, 20.3x27.9 cm © Courtesy of Condé Nast

43 Despite wilderness being pushed out of the scene, the idea of pastoralism was harder to let go. William Steig would keep up the tradition of drawing cows in his covers, the last remnant of a past generation. His cows, however, are very different from the ones seen so far: they are now a vanished animal, blankly staring at the spectator from the enclosed space of a barn, or wistfully looking at a singer who is probably reminiscing about the good old days when the country still held a place in the American imagination. Or, they can ironically peep out behind the personification of America proudly holding the Star-Spangled Banner to celebrate Independence Day, a phantasm of the pastoral dreams that guided the signers of the Declaration. These cows have become ghosts. As such, they can also be found in the realm of dreams and fantasy, completely unrelated to historical reality: symbolizing motherhood in a timeless watercolor pasture that is typical of Jenni Oliver’s dreamy style, or gliding over the moon as in a cover by John O’Brien (liv). It should not come as a surprise that Fig.11 William Steig the last cover featuring a cow as of today Untitled Cover Illustration, The New Yorker, 25 Nov (fig. 11) is by William Steig. Coincidentally, it is 2002, print, 20.3x27.9 cm © Courtesy of Condé Nast. also the last cover illustration he drew before dying at age 95, less than a year later, after a career spanning 72 years as an illustrator Bibliography for the magazine. The cover portrays a masquerade ball where all attendants are Berger, John. “Why Look at Animals?” About Looking dressed as figures from a very distant, (London: Writers and Readers Publishing Cooperative, 1980), 1-26. sometimes fantastic past: knights dancing with fairies, angels and queens. In the Berkhofer, Robert F. The White Man's Indian: Images of forefront of this spectral gathering, one the American Indian from Columbus to the Present dancer wears a cow costume, and right (New York, Vintage Books, 1978). behind him we see the Indian, who had long Burt, Jonathan. “John Berger's ‘Why Look at Animals?’: A entered the realm of ghosts and mythology. Close Reading”. Worldviews 9, no. 2 (2005): 203- The vanished cow and the vanished Indian 218. finally meet in this hereafter of popular imagery, dancing their pasts away. And this Derrida, Jacques. The Animal That Therefore I Am, trans. David Wills (New York: Fordham University is, truly, the end of our story. Press, 2008).

Faulkner, William. “Delta Autumn,” Go Down, Moses (New York: Vintage, 1991), 317-348.

Freud, Sigmund. “Mourning and Melancholia,” On Murder, Mourning and Melancholia, trans. Shaun Whiteside (London: Penguin Books, 2005), 203-218

Gemünden, Gerd. Framed Visions: Popular Culture, Americanization, and the Contemporary German and Austrian Imagination (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998).

44 Haraway, Donna. Primate Visions: Gender, Race and Swan, Jon. “A Portable Gallery of Pastoral Animals.” The Nature in the World of Modern Science (New York, New Yorker (4 May 1963): 44. London: Routledge, 1989). Thurber, James, Charles Cooke (unsigned). “Talk of the Harrington, Jonathan. “Cow in Quicksand”. The New Town: the Cow.” The New Yorker (11 Feb. 1933): Yorker (22 Aug. 1942): 46-50. 12-13.

Hofstadter, Richard. The Age of Reform (New York: Topliss, Iain. The Comic Worlds of Peter Arno, William Vintage, 1960). Steig, Charles Addams, and Saul Steinberg (Baltimore, London: The John Hopkins Jackson, Kenneth T. Crabgrass Frontier: The University Press, 2005). Suburbanization of the United States (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987). Turner, Frederick Jackson. “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” Rereading Frederick Kuzniar, Alice. Melancholia’s Dog. Chicago, London: Jackson Turner: ‘The Significance of the Frontier in The University of Chicago Press, 2006. American History” and Other Essays. Ed. John Mack Faragher. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998. Liebling, A. J. “The Mustang Buzzers.” The New 31-60. Yorker (3-10 Apr. 1954): 35-50, 81-91. White, E.B. “The Red Cow is Dead.” The New Yorker (1 Lippit, Akira Mizuta. Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric Jun. 1946): 30. of Wildlife (Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press, 2000). Wilson, Alexander. The Culture of Nature: North American Landscape from Disney to the Exxon Lister, R. P. “The Patterned Fields.” The New Yorker (14 Valdez (Toronto: Between the Lines, 1991). Sep. 1957): 133. Worster, Donald. The Wealth of Nature: Environmental Marx, Leo, The Machine in the Garden: Technology History and the Ecological Imagination (New York: and the Pastoral Idea in America (Oxford, New Oxford University Press, 1993). York: Oxford University Press, 2000). Endnotes Marchand, Roland. Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920-1940 (Berkeley, (i). Berger, John. “Why Look at Animals?” in About Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, Looking, London, Writers and Readers Publishing 1985). Cooperative, 1980, 10.

Merchant, Carolyn. American Environmental History: (ii). Marchand highlights that, in the language of an Introduction (New York: Columbia University advertising, the visual cliché of characters “gazing off Press, 2007). into the distance with their backs turned directly or obliquely toward the reader” symbolized that “they Merchant, Carolyn. Reinventing Eden: The Fate of were looking into the future.” In fact, he links this visual Nature in Western Culture (New York, London: trope with “the hallowed image of the American Routledge, 2003). frontiersman, first glimpsing the westward course of the empire from the apex of a mountain pass.” Marchand, Mullin, Molly H. “Mirrors and Windows: Sociocultural Roland. Advertising the American Dream: Making Way Studies of Human-Animal Relationships,” Annual for Modernity, 1920-1940, Berkeley, University of review of Anthropology 28 (1999): 201-224. California Press, 1985, 255.

Ritvo, Harriet. “The Animal Connection,” The Boundaries (iii). Berger, “Why Look at Animals?,” 15. of Humanity: Humans, Animals, Machines, ed. James J. Sheehan et al. (Berkeley, Los Angeles, (iv). Berger, “Why Look at Animals?,” 10-11. Oxford: University of California Press, 1991), 68-84. (v). A good example of cows appearing in another All That Heaven Allows. Dir. by Douglas Sirk. Universal magazine cover is the herd giving a disgruntled look at International Pictures, The Criterion Collection, 2001. a surveyor in Amos Sewell’s Untitled Cover Illustration, The Saturday Evening Post (28 Jul. 1956). However, Spence, Mark David. Dispossessing the Wilderness: Sewell’s cover is an exception in the history of The Indian Removal and the Making of National Parks. Saturday Evening Post, which tended to still idealize the (New York, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1999). agrarian myth, especially Norman Rockwell’s famous cover illustrations, perhaps because of its Midwestern Steinbeck, John. The Pastures of Heaven (London: origin. Penguin Books, 1995). (vi). As Topliss highlights, the New Yorker “offers itself as a Stoll, Steven. “Farm Against Forest.” American site of peculiar richness for an exploration of the Wilderness: a New History. Ed. Michael Lewis. contradictory, sometimes rebellious self-aware and (Oxford, New York, Oxford University Press, 2007): 55- inner history of the middle-class subject.” And its ability 72. to promote, but also sharply criticize the idiosyncrasies 45 of a highly influential portion of the society turns it into (xxi). Victor Bobritsky, Untitled Cover Illustration, The New an “almost embarrassingly hegemonic document.” Yorker (28 May 1938). Topliss, Iain. The Comic Worlds of Peter Arno, William Steig, Charles Addams, and Saul Steinberg, Baltimore, (xxii). Wilson, The Culture of Nature, 202. London, The John Hopkins University Press, 2005, 5-6. (xxiii). Hofstadter is the first to call this trope of America’s (vii). Merchant, Carolyn. American Environmental self-representation “the agrarian myth,” and traces its History: an Introduction, New York, Columbia University roots in the country’s early agricultural origins. “The Press, 2007, 80. more rapidly the farmers’ sons moved into the towns,” he points out, “the more nostalgic the whole culture (viii). Merchant, Carolyn. Reinventing Eden: The Fate of became about its rural past.” Hofstadter, Richard. The Nature in Western Culture, New York, London, Age of Reform, New York, Vintage, 1960, 24. Leo Marx Routledge, 2003, 149; Worster, Donald. The Wealth of notes that “the soft veil of nostalgia that hangs over our Nature: Environmental History and the Ecological urbanized landscape is largely a vestige of the once Imagination, New York, Oxford University Press, 1993, 9. dominant image of an undefiled, green republic, a quiet land of forests, villages, and farms dedicated to (ix). John Gast, American Progress, 1872, oil on canvas, the pursuit of happiness.” Marx, Leo. The Machine in Museum of the American West, Autry National Center; the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Idea in Flora Palmer, The Rocky Mountains: Emigrants Crossing America, Oxford, New York, Oxford University Press, the Plains, 1866, color lithograph, Currier & Ives. 2000, 6.

(x). Harrington, Jonathan. “Cow in Quicksand.” The New (xxiv). Leonard Dove, Untitled Cover Illustration, The New Yorker, 22 Aug. 1942, 46-50. Yorker (23 Aug. 1952).

(xi). Lippit, Akira Mizuta. Electric Animal: Toward a (xxv). Steinbeck, John. The Pastures of Heaven, London, Rhetoric of Wildlife, Minneapolis, London, University of Penguin Books, 1995, 3-4. Minnesota Press, 2000, 1. (xxvi). Steinbeck, The Pastures of Heaven, 199-200. (xii). Lippit, Electric Animal, 18. (xxvii). Carolyn Merchant reads the shopping mall as (xiii). Lister, R. P. “The Patterned Fields,” The New Yorker, “the modern version of the Garden of Eden,” where 14 Sep. 1957, 133. architectural elements try to recreate a sense of outdoors and pastoral nature in the enclosed, indoor (xiv). Freud, Sigmund. “Mourning and Melancholia,” On environment. Merchant, Reinventing Eden, 167-168. Murder, Mourning and Melancholia, trans. Shaun Whiteside, London, Penguin Books, 2005, 205. (xxviii). According to Mullin, wild animals are now perceived as “a refuge from consumer capitalism,” (xv). Steven Stoll chronicles the clash between the rural deriving perhaps from consumer’s culture need for and the wild in the American frontier in “Farm Against atonement to relieve the sense of responsibility for their Forest,” American Wilderness: A New History, ed. marginalization and extinction. Mullin, Molly H. “Mirrors Michael Lewis, Oxford, New York, Oxford University Press, and Windows: Sociocultural Studies of Human-Animal 2007, 55-72. Relationships,” Annual Review of Anthropology 28, 1999, 216. (xvi). Berkhofer, Robert F. The White Man's Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the (xxix). Perry Barlow, Untitled Cover Illustration, The New Present, New York, Vintage Books, 1978, 86-87. Yorker (17 May 1947).

(xvii). Spence, Mark David. Dispossessing the (xxx). Jackson, Kenneth T. Crabgrass Frontier: The Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of National Suburbanization of the Unites States, New York, Oxford, Parks, New York, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1999, Oxford University Press, 1987, 239. 12. (xxxi). Merchant points out that “for many Americans, (xviii). For a critique of John Berger’s too definite humanity’s loss of the perfect Garden of Eden is approach to chronology in the recount of the among the most powerful of all stories.” Merchant, marginalization of the animal, see Burt, Jonathan. Reinventing Eden, 3. “John Berger's ‘Why Look at Animals?:’ A Close Reading,” Worldviews 9, no. 2, 2005, 203-218. (xxxii). Lippit, Electric Animal, 187.

(xix). Turner, Frederick Jackson. “The Significance of the (xxxiii). White, E.B. “The Red Cow is Dead,” The New Frontier in American History,” Rereading Frederick Yorker, 1 Jun. 1946, 30. Jackson Turner: “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” and Other Essays, ed. John Mack (xxxiv). Swan, Jon. “A Portable Gallery of Pastoral Faragher, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1998, 31- Animals,” The New Yorker, 4 May 1963, 44. 60. (xx). Wilson, Alexander. The Culture of Nature: North (xxxv). Alain (Daniel Brustlein), Untitled Cover Illustration, American Landscape from Disney to the Exxon Valdez, The New Yorker (27 Jan. 1951). Toronto, Between the Lines, 1991, 14.

46 (xxxvi). Topliss calls him “the artist of the New Deal” to however, it is anthropomorphized (as in Disney’s films) point out the difference between him and other or turned into a symbol devoid of its animal nature (as illustrators who favored the portrayal of the New York the Christmas reindeer, or the Easter bunny). Lippit, upper-class milieu; Steig’s perspective, however, Electric Animal, 184-185. comes “from a lower-class viewpoint.” Topliss, Comic Worlds, 75, 83. li. James Thurber, Charles Cooke (unsigned), “Talk of the Town: the Cow,” The New Yorker, 11 Feb. 1933, 12- (xxxvii). Peter Arno, Untitled Cover Illustration, The New 13. Yorker (20 Sep. 1941). lii. A good example is Mark Ulriksen’s Untitled Cover (xxxviii). Peter Arno, Untitled Cover Illustration, The New Illustration, The New Yorker 10 Mar, 2003. The rise of Yorker (21 Sep. 1940). pets parallels the disappearance of the wild and rural animal, according to Berger, as a memento of the (xl). The melancholia stemming from lack of past lifestyle when men were used to living outdoors, in communication between man and animal has been close contact with nature. Berger, “Why Look at addressed countless times in the scholarly debate, Animals?,” 12. As such, it stems from the same especially by Alice Kuzniar who devotes most of her Freudian melancholia. They are also a way in which book to this split. Kuzniar, Alice. Melancholia’s Dog, consumer culture adapts wildness to conspicuous Chicago, London, The University of Chicago Press, consumption: in Mullin’s words, “pets are commodities 2006. As much as the linguistic barrier inevitably lies at that many people use, like other consumer goods, as the heart of human-animal relationship, an excessive a means of constructing identities.” Mullin, “Mirrors and focus on it can limit our scope in addressing other Windows,” 215-216. important issues. This becomes evident especially in visual representation, where space is often a much liii. Liebling, A. J. “The Mustang Buzzers,” The New Yorker, more relevant object of analysis than speech. 10 Apr. 1954, 91.

(xli). Sirk, Douglas, dir., All That Heaven Allows (Universal liv. The cited covers are William Steig, Untitled Cover International Pictures, 1955). Illustration, The New Yorker (15 Sep. 1975); William Steig, Untitled Cover Illustration, The New Yorker (13 Aug. (xlii). Although Gemünden suggests that “the fact that 1984); William Steig, Untitled Cover Illustration, The New the last close-up belongs to the animal and not the Yorker (3 Jul. 1978); Jenni Oliver, Untitled Cover characters also celebrates the triumph of nature and Illustration, The New Yorker (10 Aug. 1987); John O’Brien, the natural over a society that inflicted grief upon its Untitled Cover Illustration, The New Yorker (21 Nov. lovers,” one cannot ignore the presence of the large 1988). picture window as a dividing device. Gemünden, Gerd. Framed Visions: Popular Culture, Americanization, and the Contemporary German and Austrian Imagination, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1998, 105.

(xliii). Lippit, Electric Animal, 197.

(xliv). Topliss, Comic Worlds, 36.

(xlv). Berger, “Why Look at Animals?,” 3.

(xlvi). Derrida, Jacques. The Animal That Therefore I Am, trans. David Wills, New York, Fordham University Press, 2008, 11.

(xlvii). Ritvo, Harriet. “The Animal Connection,” The Boundaries of Humanity: Humans, Animals, Machines, ed. James J. Sheehan et al., Berkeley, Los Angeles, Andrea Vesentini is a PhD candidate in Humanities and Oxford, University of California Press, 68. Cultural Studies at the London Consortium (Birkbeck, University of London), where he is exploring interior (xlviii). Haraway, Donna. Primate Visions: Gender, Race spaces in postwar American suburbia and their and Nature in the World of Modern Science, New York, interaction with the outdoors, from car interiors to London, Routledge, 1989, 30. single-family houses and shopping malls. His project brings together architecture, film and visual culture as (xlix). See for example William Cotton, Untitled Cover a way to write a cultural history of the suburbs from Illustration, The New Yorker (10 Jul. 1943); Perry Barlow, within. He received his BA in American Literature and Untitled Cover Illustration, The New Yorker (11 Jun. Culture and MA in English and American Studies from 1955); William Steig, Untitled Cover Illustration, The New the Ca' Foscari University of Venice, and also studied at Yorker (25 Jul. 1953). the Sapienza University of Rome, Georgia State University and the City College of the City University of l. As Lippit explains, the vanishing of the animal is New York. He writes as a film critic and worked at the paralleled by its appropriation by reproductive media: 2011 Venice Art Biennale curated by Bice Curiger.

ILLUSTRATING THE

FUR TRADE

IN BOY’S OWN

ADVENTURE FICTION

The second half of the nineteenth century witnessed a remarkable proliferation of writing for young male readers. Boy’s-own fiction, as it came to be known, routinely featured a daring protagonist journeying

through foreign lands in the service of the crown. Consequently, such texts are notable for their intimacy

with the material practices of empire, representing and stimulating exploration, conquest and rule.

Depictions of wild and savage beasts are a prominent part of the genre’s undoubtedly successful formula.

Animals operate as metonyms for the exotic lands to be conquered and as antagonists in the hero’s struggle for self-assertion. As the adventurer emerges victorious, the narrative gaze is drawn unerringly to the wounded animal’s body in endlessly re-imagined scenarios of victimhood relentless in their schadenfreude. Animal suffering seems an integral part of both the politics and the pleasure of these texts in an era that, paradoxically, also saw significant attempts to legislate against cruelty to animals. Text by John Miller

ineteenth-century art was often drawn oil, horses for transport, et cetera), so many to the last moments of an animal’s of the period’s imaginative products N life. Perhaps most famously, Sir Edwin circulated around the vulnerability of Landseer in a long career of painting animals. This convergence of the economic animals returned a number of times to the and the aesthetic is perhaps nowhere more subject of imminent death. The Hunting of apparent than in the acquisition, processing Chevy Chase (1825-26), for instance, and representation of fur, a topic that displays a snarling throng of dogs and flourished with particular energy in an wounded deer in the picture’s ideologically central, but now little regarded foreground. The Stag at Bay (1846), component of nineteenth-century cultural meanwhile, focuses on the plight of a single production, one that routinely focussed in on victim, as two dogs appear poised to end its the coup-de-grâce that brought the struggle. Animal suffering was an alluring afflicted animal into capitalist productivity. artistic theme that highlights the extension of The Scottish adventure novelist R. M. anthropocentric violence across aesthetic Ballantyne opens the account of his early life and material discourses. Just as the as a clerk in Northern Canada, Hudson Bay: development of nineteenth-century or Everyday Life in the Wilds of North commodity culture pivoted on the America (1848) with a striking analogy for availability of animal bodies (whales for the anticipated unfamiliarity of his destination

48 to his British readers: to the “semiotic currency of animal signs and the carnal traffic in animal Reader, – I take for granted substances” (original italics).[ii] Ballantyne’s that you are tolerably well beavers exist at exactly this cusp. Animals in acquainted with the different this paradigm are not just bodies to be modes of life and travelling traded, but parts of a wider cultural peculiar to European nations. I imaginary that utilises the image as much as also presume that you know the flesh. something of the inhabitants of The Canadian fur trade represents the East; and, it may be, a good one of the most far-reaching, systematic deal of the Americas in general. and intensive endeavours to commodify But I suspect – at least I would animal bodies, for the most part for fain hope – that you have only consumption in European markets. a vague and indefinite Ballantyne’s employers, the Hudson Bay knowledge of life in those wild, Company (HBC), founded by royal charter in uncivilised regions of the the seventeenth century to engage in trade northern continent of America and to ‘promote Discovery’, were an that surround the shores of organisation of vast influence, enjoying a Hudson Bay. I would fain hope commercial monopoly over an immense this, I say, that I may have the tract of land: “all the country watered by satisfaction … of showing you rivers flowing into Hudson Bay,” as Ballantyne that there is a body of civilised explained.[iii] With their extensive network of men who move, and breathe trading posts providing the central point of […] and spend their lives in a contact between European settlers and quarter of the globe as totally Canadian First Nations, the HBC formed the different, in most respects, from front line of British colonial interests and the part you inhabit, as a played a significant role in the foundation of beaver, roaming among the the Dominion of Canada in 1867. As such, ponds and marshes of his native the fur trade has come to represent what home, is from that sagacious Shukin describes as the “primal scene” of animal when converted into a Canadian national identity “in which Native fashionable hat.[i] trappers, French coureurs de bois, and English traders collaboratively trafficked in animal capital.”[iv] In nineteenth-century Britain’s difference from the “uncivilised Britain, Ballantyne’s brand of boy’s-own regions of the northern continent of America” adventure fiction was among the most in which Ballantyne would remain for six years prominent sources of a popular conception can be thought of, he suggests, in terms of of the fur trade in which it appears invested beavers. Either “roaming among the ponds with masculine virility and a Romantic and marshes of his native home,” or aesthetic of wilderness, comprising a multi- “converted into a fashionable hat,” the layered signification of animal images that beaver operates as a sign of nationhood; its aims towards a patriotic spectacle of freewheeling life or commodified body national self-identification and a glorification revealing the relative developmental status of the challenges of Empire. of Canada and Britain. The wild animal is the Hudson Bay was Ballantyne’s first sign of the great, unharnessed spaces of the book in a career that encompassed over north; the hat a sign of civility and eighty published works, a great many of metropolitan sophistication. Ballantyne’s which were premised on the same metonymy encapsulates the entanglement investment in geographical distance he of the figurative and the literal in the outlines in the opening paragraph quoted deployment of animal bodies in the above. The allure of the far-flung quarters of mechanisms of capital. Animals provide the the globe saw Ballantyne’s youthful heroes market with both a raw material and a romping around the South Pacific in his1857 symbolic repertoire. As Nicole Shukin argues, breakthrough novel The Coral Island; the global capitalism has developed in relation 1861 sequel The Gorilla Hunters took them

Fig.1 Matt B Hewerdine I Made a Cut at the Bear’s Head in R. M. Ballantyne, The Big Otter: A Tale of the Great Nor’West, London, Nisbet, n.d. 50

to the largely uncharted forests of West- to Emigrate and An Emigrant Voyager’s Central Africa. Other of Ballantyne’s Manual. His opening address to those adventurous destinations included departing Britain for new lives overseas in the Madagascar, Krakatoa, Algeria, the Sudan latter text offers a precise summary of the and the Andes. For Ballantyne, the exotic agenda of his, and Ballantyne’s fiction: was a lucrative business. The insatiable Victorian appetite for stories of the more If […] you attend strictly to the remote corners of the Empire allowed him to orders of those placed in rise out of the troubled family financial authority over you […] – if you circumstances that had seen him parcelled live as a Christian should live […] off to Canada to make his own living as a – if you do your best to improve sixteen year old, to become in time the most your mind, to listen to the popular boys’ author of his generation, religious instruction which is rivalled only perhaps by G. A. Henty. afforded to you, to keep Although Ballantyne never himself returned to yourselves thoroughly occupied Canada after his first youthful sojourn, it […], not only will the voyage be recurs several times as the setting for his the happiest time of your barn-storming tales. The Young Fur existence, but it will be the most Traders (1856) was the first of Ballantyne’s valuable and important.[v] fictional fur trade narratives; Away in the Wilderness (1863), The Pioneers (1872) Kingston blends discourses of national utility and Fort Desolation (1873) show his (what is “most valuable and important”) with Canadian interests enduring through his an insistence on personal qualities (self- remarkably prolific heyday; The Big improvement, deference, piety) into a Otter (1887) sees him returning to the territory model of patriotism and decency that would of Hudson Bay in his final novels. The be reiterated in many hundreds of boy’s-own premise of these stories remains remarkably novels, and in the features of the Religious consistent: the young British hero struggling Tract Society’s Boy’s-Own Paper which, through the wilderness, beset by perils, but founded in 1879, gave the genre its name. undaunted in the service of his country. Fur trade adventures, then, aim to Ballantyne was not alone in finding encourage and educate their readers into the fur trade an irresistible opportunity for contributing productively towards this most adventure writing. W. H. G. Kingston was profitable colonial enterprise. You too, the another popular boy’s writer who contributed reader is interpellated, may hitch on your extensively to the dissemination of the HBC’s snow shoes and do your duty by Queen and work to Britain’s young readers. The London- country. born Kingston was the brother of the Illustration was an important facet of celebrated Canadian professor of these texts, operating as the visual hit to draw meteorology, George Kingston, whom he the reader in, while adding an extra layer of visited while on honeymoon in 1853. Like drama to the unfolding events. There is a Ballantyne, he frequently returned to certain instability and unreliability to the Canada as the setting for his books; first in illustrations of Ballantyne’s and, to a lesser the travelogue Western Wanderings (1856) extent, Kingston’s novels. Numerous editions and later in a number of novels, of the most popular stories were produced, including Snow Shoes and Canoes (1876) often with images by professional illustrators and The Frontier Fort (1879). The remarkable who lacked first-hand knowledge of the success of Ballantyne and Kingston relied settings, at times with some eccentric results. greatly on the deliberate educational For the most part, though, illustrations to fur purposes their writing revealed. These are trade adventures generally return to a fairly texts about responsibility, nation, God and limited range of stereotyped images, which good behaviour. In Kingston’s case, the nonetheless provide a significant insight into ideological texture of his fiction is the ideological direction of this textual form, complemented by his involvement in Britain and the semiotic currency of the fur trade in with what we might now call colonial Victorian popular culture. No consideration marketing, resulting in his 1850 guides How of the fur trade can proceed very far, of 51

Fig.2 Artist unknown Deer-Spearing in the Far North,in R. M. Ballantyne, The Young52 Fur Traders, London, Nelson, 1901, 1856

course, without thinking seriously about region.”[viii] Work, then, is transfigured into a animals, and about one animal in particular: quest as Max begins his journey north; the beaver, most significant, as bureaucratic labour in Ballantyne’s writing Ballantyne’s Hudson Bay reveals, for the use functions as the starting point of adventure. of its fur in the hats that were the headwear Harry Somerville, the hero of The Young Fur of choice in Europe for centuries. Indeed, as Traders bemoans “being condemned to his Harold Innis points out in his seminal history desk, instead of realizing his fond dreams of of The Fur Trade in Canada, it is “impossible bear-hunting and deer stalking in the woods to understand the characteristic and prairies.”[ix] The text, of course, gives him developments […] of Canadian history exactly what he (and presumably the reader) without some knowledge of its [the beaver’s] wants: action, danger, excitement, all of life and habits.”[vi] which emerge from a far spicier brand of Despite the historical prominence of animal contact than the administration of beavers in the development of the fur trade, the trade in trapped beavers or otters. however, Ballantyne and Kingston, and their By far the most commonly illustrators are far more interested in other reproduced illustrative subject in fur trade species. One reason for this may be the adventures is the heroic encounter with the dramatic decline in the popularity of beaver savage animal antagonist, usually a bear. hats in the mid to late nineteenth century The illustration of such thrilling episodes that makes the beaver a less commercially invariably poses the aggressing beast on its desirable animal than it previously was. As hind legs, looming towards the counter- Ballantyne puts it, apparently unconscious of attacking hero. In The Big Otter (figure 1), the irony, “Beaver, in days of yore, was the Max finds himself set upon by a black bear staple fur of the country; but alas! the silk hat with his gun unwisely left lying some distance has given it its death-blow, and the star of away on a bank. Characteristically, the the beaver has now probably set illustration catches the moment with the forever.”[vii] In fact, the rise of the silk hat may hero’s fate still undecided, his hatchet drawn well have rescued the beaver from extinction from his belt in a desperate attempt to save after populations in many areas had his skin. Max reports that “I rushed at the bear collapsed. Rather than its death blow, silk and made a cut at its head with all the force was the beaver’s salvation. Another, more that lay in my arm.” The bear fights back, significant factor, however, in the scarcity of knocking the weapon from Max’s hand “with beavers and of other species commonly such violence that it flew over the treetops,” used for fur, such as martens and otters, in leaving Ballantyne’s hero “helpless – at the Kingston’s and Ballantyne’s texts (The Big creature’s mercy!” until a half English, half Otter refers to a First Nations chief of that First Nations girl Waboose saves the name rather than to an animal) is a day.[x] The illustration’s setting of the scene in disinclination to represent the animal as a forest clearing constructs a gladiatorial commodity. For all the conservative ambience, as if the fight between man and investment of fur trade adventures in animal were taking place more formally in a economic utility and normative subjectivity, ring, rather than haphazardly in the work (for fairly obvious reasons) is neglected wilderness. Max’s hand-to-hand combat with as a narrative topic, except when it can be the bear imagines the animal merely as the translated into a particular brand of extrovert adversary, the obstacle over which he must heroism. Consequently, a common structural triumph to secure his ongoing participation in device to kick start the adventure is the Ballantyne’s grand, imperial narrative. With summons whereby the hero is called upon victory assured, the text makes no mention by a senior HBC officer to leave his home in of the bear’s carcass, or the potential value the wilderness to travel to a yet more distant of its fur. The bear’s role is simply to test the region to advance the company’s hero. interests. The Big Otter, for example, sees the Less immediately perilous forms of hero Max executing “an extravagant violence also routinely drew the attention of pirouette,” overjoyed to be appointed illustrators. A 1901 edition of The Young Fur “second in command of an expedition to Traders shows Harry at the prow of an establish a new trading post in a little-known “Indian’s canoe” preparing to kill a deer that

53 had taken to the water (figure 2). Again, the into the throat of the lynx.[xiii] illustration shows the weapon poised before the blow is struck, deferring the outcome until The illustration of this “savage combat” (figure its revelation in the text. Rather than implying 3) shows the lifeless hare beneath the central a chariness of the gruesome impacts of the action of the entangled adversaries with hunter’s spear, this pictorial suspension David, a face among the trees looking intensifies the moment’s schadenfreude, calmly on. While the illustration figures David building up to the narrative climax: as the passive observer of nature’s violence, the text quickly brings him into a more active Leaning backwards a little, so as position as he first kills the lynx with a “well- to give additional force to the directed blow on its back,” and next stuns blow, he struck the spear deep the eagle before hastily administering into the animal’s back. With a the coup-de-grâce: “As it might quickly convulsive struggle, it ceased to come to, I immediately drew my knife and swim, its head slowly sank, and, in severed the head from the body.”[xiv] David’s another second, it lay dead upon appearance in the background of the the water.[xi] illustration hints at his imminent involvement in the bloody scene and naturalises his While the deer’s body is immediately ensuing aggression as he participates in the identified here as a “good stock o’ already ongoing battle of predator and prey meat,”[xii] it is not primarily use value that of which he is at first only a bystander. It is the informs the illustration’s relationship to its animals’ violence that invites him in. animal subject. Rather, the intent gaze of the The illustrator’s attention here to the hero on his prey communicates a presumed snow on the twigs surrounding the hero pleasure in violence, apparent in the indicates the importance of landscape macabre relish of the prose that is a aesthetics to such images: it is not just the consistent ingredient of Ballantyne’s writing. animal’s presence in itself, but its location in One of the most prominent strategies of such a wider setting that constitutes its visual representations, therefore, is to blur the appeal. Particularly, images of the Romantic boundary between labour and sport. The sublime play a significant role in the opposition Charley laments between the representation of animals in fur trade desk and the hunt is sidelined as the novel adventures. This theme is also not insists on the violent pleasures attendant on unconnected with violence. As Max in the fur trader’s life. Ballantyne’s The Big Otter follows the tracks Aggression, also, significantly is seen of a bear, he finds himself with his to exceed the activities of the hero. companion Lumley “on the summit of a Kingston’s Snow Shoes and rising ground which was scantily clothed with Canoes exemplifies a common trope of trees, and from the top we could see the adventure fiction when the hero, David, is region all round like a map spread at our separated from his companions by a snow feet.”[xv] Hunting makes the picturesque storm on a journey north to supply the HBC world of the great Nor’ West available to the station at Fort Ross. David witnesses the adventurer; animals appear as an element dramatic sight of a lynx stalking a hare, but of the Romantic mise-en-scène that the death of the “terror-stricken” animal is emerges as a powerful part of these texts’ only the start of the excitement as an eagle attraction. Another version of the lake- then swoops down onto the lynx: hunting deer scene from Ballantyne’s The Young Fur Traders that appears in Kingston’s The lynx, watching every 1874 nonfictional The Western World (tellingly movement as it saw the bird subtitled Picturesque Sketches in North and coming made a tremendous South America) frames the deadly encounter leap, trying to seize it by the with, in this case, an elk with a cliff face rising neck, but the eagle striking its gigantically behind the hunter (figure 4). antagonist’s body with its talons Place, therefore, is a central part of the threw it on its back, and again boy’s-own aesthetic of violence against attempted to plunge its beak animals, emphasising the 54

Fig.3 Artist Unknown A Savage Combat From the Result of Which I Profit, in W. H. 55G. Kingston, Snow Shoes and Canoes, or the Early Days of a Fur-Trader in the Hudson’s Bay Territory (London Samspon, Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, 1887,1876

the author traverses leads ineluctably to the animal’s gaze as the bear’s being encapsulates grandeur, immensity and the majestic as a sign of ecological flourishing and of human vulnerability within it. Another illustration from Kingston’s Western World (figure 5) makes a similar, if rather more understated, use of the animal as emblem of the sublime. A herd of caribou peaceably graze the foreground, but the image’s interest hinges not just on the animals themselves but on their relationship to the mountains rising behind them, the ample habitat that provides the fur trade with such fruitful territory.

Illustrations of fur trade adventures, then, convey a far from straightforward

relationship between material and aesthetic practices. For the fur trade to appear as an

enticing opportunity for Ballantyne’s and Kingston’s young readers, the central commercial rationale of the animal-as- commodity needs to be transfigured into images that see the animal as more than

just its fur: as the hero’s antagonist, as a Fig.4 Artist Unknown metonym for the wild North, as an aspect of Lake Hunting, in W. H. G. Kingston, The Western World. Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in the sublime. It is this consistent aesthetic North and South America, London, Nelson 1874 investment in animal life that ironically makes

such a powerful case, in the logic of adventure fiction, for the animal’s death. Fur trade narratives cast the capitalist as hero, hero’s containment in the primal arena of and signify his endeavours as a part, rather the North which constructs his hunting than an interruption of the natural order of exploits as part of his engagement with the the wilderness. Violence is elevated from an much larger force of the Canadian economic to an ontological imperative: wilderness. trapping and trading in the wilderness Importantly, the appreciation of such represents a raw masculine energy that savage landscapes does not always lead affirms widespread notions of British Imperial the narrative to a violent culmination. A destiny. A key function of illustration in this purple patch of prose in Hudson Bay sees context is to intensify the narrative pleasure Ballantyne and companions canoeing up of violence that supports this ideological the Winnipeg river, through “every variety of agenda. Pausing the action in the moment wild and woodland scenery,” “sloping groves before the blow is struck situates the reader of graceful trees” and “immense cliffs and in that suspended instant, anticipating the precipitous banks of the grandest and most time when they might bring their own arm to majestic aspect,” springing over a “mist- the enterprise, finishing the beast on their shrouded cliff” and “boiling madly onwards.” own account. “As if to enhance the romantic wildness of the scene,” Ballantyne concludes, “upon rounding a point we came suddenly upon a large black bear […] He gazed at us in surprise for a moment.”[xvi] Here the animal’s presence operates as the clinching image in Ballantyne’s evocation of a certain poetic atmosphere. The Coleridgean landscape

Fig. 5 Artist Unknown

Reindeers and Cariboos, in W. H. G. Kingston, The Western World. Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North and South America, London, Nelson, 1874

References (x). Ballantyne, The Big Otter, p. 151.

(i). R. M. Ballantyne, Hudson Bay, or Everyday Life in the (xi). Ballantyne, The Young Fur Traders, p. 354. Wilds of North America (London: Nelson, 1902 [1848]), p. 2. (xii). Ibid., p. 354.

(ii). Nicole Shukin, Animal Capital: Rendering Life in (xiii). W. H. G. Kingston, Snow Shoes and Canoes, or Biopolitical Times (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota the Early Days of a Fur-Trader in the Hudson’s Bay Press, 2009), p. 4. Territory (London: Samspon, Low, Marston, Searle &

Rivington, 1887 [1876]), p. 23. (iii). Ballantyne. Hudson Bay, p. 23.

(xiv). Kingston, Show Shoes and Canoes, p. 24. (iv). Shukin, Animal Capital, p. 4.

(xv). Ballantyne, The Big Otter, p. 147. (v). W. H. G. Kingston, Emigrant Voyager’s

Manual (London: Trelawney Saunders, 1850), pp 3–4. (xvi). Ballantyne, Hudson Bay, p. 138.

(vi). Harold A. Innes, The Fur Trade in Canada: An Introduction to Canadian Economic History (Toronto:

University of Toronto Press, 1956), p.3 John Miller is a lecturer in nineteenth-century literature at the University of Sheffield having previously worked at (vii). Ballantyne, Hudson Bay, p. 28. the Universities of Glasgow, Edinburgh, East Anglia and Northern British Columbia. His first monograph Empire (viii). R. M. Ballantyne, The Big Otter: A Tale of the Great and the Animal Body (Anthem, 2012) explores the Nor’West (London: Nisbet, n.d.), p. 72. representation of exotic animals in Victorian and Edwardian adventure fiction. He is currently working on

the co-authored volume Walrus for the Reaktion Animal (ix). R. M. Ballantyne, The Young Fur Traders (London: series and on his second monograph, Fur: A Literary Nelson, 1901 [1856]), p. 218. History.

A VISIT FROM THE

DOOM SQUAD

This essay looks at texts that describe two war-ravaged zoos—the Warsaw Zoo that was all but destroyed in 1939 by extensive Nazi bombing, and the Baghdad Zoo that was damaged by American air strikes and then looted during the beginning of the Second Iraq War in 2003. The fate of both zoos demonstrates that as war disrupts cultural and material environments, it often disrupts the traditional visual tropes that are associated with these environments. The Warsaw Zoo in Diane Ackerman’s The

Zookeeper’s Wife (2007) and the Baghdad Zoo in Lawrence Anthony’s Babylon’s Ark (2007) both take on biblical resonance and become transformed from secular public spaces into sites overlaid with religious importance. In varying degrees, they assume the biblical identities of both Noah’s Ark and

Isaiah’s messianic vision. Not surprisingly, the kinds of photographs included in the books about these zoos reflect their newly acquired biblical aura. These photos also bring to mind the iconic religious paintings of these biblical subjects by the nineteenth-century American Quaker folk artist, Edward Hicks. In concert with Ackerman’s and Anthony’s textual accounts, these sets of images complicate our notions of the power of the zoo as both an aesthetic and material environment in an unstable world. Full title: A Visit From the Doom Squad: How War Transforms Ways of Seeing Zoos Text by June Dwyer

And the Lord said to Noah, Come thou and all thy house into the ark, for thee I have seen righteous before me in this generation. Of every clean beast thou shalt take to thee by sevens, the male and his female: and of beasts that are not clean, by two, the male and his female. Of fowls also of the air by sevens, the male and the female; to keep seed upon the face of all the earth.

--Genesis 7: 1, God’s directive to Noah (King James Bible)

The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and

the calf and the young lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them.

And the cow and the bear shall feed; their young ones shall lie down together; and

the lion shall eat straw like the ox.

--Isaiah 11: 6-7, the “messianic vision” (King James Bible)

58 zoo is primarily a place for looking, but are coping. Not surprisingly, the kinds of what happens to the commonplace photographs included in the books about A constructs of zoo visuality when it is these zoos reflect their newly acquired damaged in wartime? In this essay I will be biblical aura, conjuring up both Noah’s Ark looking at texts that describe two war- and Isaiah’s messianic vision. These photos ravaged zoos—the Warsaw Zoo, which was also bring to mind iconic religious paintings all but destroyed in 1939 by extensive Nazi of these biblical subjects by the nineteenth- bombing, and the Baghdad Zoo, which was century American painter, Edward Hicks, damaged by American air strikes and then enabling us to view his art in ways we might looted during the beginning of the Second not have before. In concert with Ackerman’s Iraq War in 2003. The fate of both zoos and Anthony’s textual accounts, these sets of demonstrates that as war disrupts cultural images complicate our notions of the power and material environments, it often disrupts of the zoo as both an aesthetic and material the traditional visual tropes that are environment in an unstable world. associated with these environments. Once I am well aware that my approach bombs fall and a zoo is damaged or minimizes the post-colonial rhetorics of destroyed, the secular cultural vision of that animal captivity that have been in vogue for zoo as a place of conservation, education the last thirty years.[i] And while I am certainly and amusement gives way to something willing to acknowledge the imperial mindset more primal and archetypal. The Warsaw behind the founding of so many zoos Zoo in Diane Ackerman’s The Zookeeper’s around the world, my aim here is to suggest Wife (2007) and the Baghdad Zoo in that the Żabińskis and Lawrence Anthony (as Lawrence Anthony’s Babylon’s Ark (2007), well as many of the visitors to their zoos) were which in peacetime were pleasant cultural motivated by a very different sensibility. gathering places, take on biblical resonance Indeed, in their deep respect and their in war, transformed from secular public thoughtful care for captive animals, they spaces into sites overlaid with religious come across as distinctly (and for the most importance. part, unconsciously) anti-imperial. Their In varying degrees, the two zoos I am attitude is why, despite the differences in discussing assume the biblical identities of history, culture and time frame, I find the both Noah’s Ark and Isaiah’s messianic vision. paintings of Edward Hicks appropriate Ackerman’s biography of Antonina Żabiński companion pieces to their stories. For Hicks, and her husband Jan, the director of the as a Quaker preacher and folk artist, also Warsaw Zoo, chronicles their attempt to posed an alternative vision to the recover Edenic concord and safety in the imperialistic thrust of nineteenth-century midst of a hellish occupation. Anthony’s America’s western expansion. Essentially I am account of the ‘rescue’ of the Baghdad Zoo suggesting that although the formation of recounts the whirlwind salvage operation of many zoos was inflected by imperialism, the gathering in escaped and stolen animals. I reception and the maintenance of these do not pretend to suggest that the texts zoos was generally much more preoccupied about these two zoos represent all the with day-to-day issues of generating human possible ways that war transforms the ways interest and assuring animal welfare. To put we see zoos. Nevertheless, these visions of it even more simply, the visitors wanted to war-torn zoos do seem emblematic. By see the animals and the proprietors wanted discussing the disruption of traditional to take care of them. scientific and aesthetic tropes of animal order, the two stories ask readers to think not Zoo Visuality in Peacetime only about the collateral costs of war, but Before looking at what happens to these two also about how we imagine animals in particular zoos in wartime, it is important to nature and culture. think about the peacetime zoo. Zoos have To help process the written accounts always been places for looking, and not just of these disruptive events, readers naturally casual looking, but rather guided and turn to visual media. We welcome photos manipulated observation. From their that accompany the texts as aids to help us beginnings in the late eighteenth century, imagine what has occurred and how people

Fig.1 Edward Hicks Noah'sThe Peaceable Ark (1846) Kingdom Philadelphia (c1834) Museum by Edward of Art. Hicks (1780-1849). National Gallery of Art in Washington DC.

public zoos in Europe and then in North provided a more pleasant aesthetic America have been places of artifice and experience for zoo visitors and a more art. As Nigel Rothfels observes, “zoos are not natural and spacious environment for the the world as it is, and the animals in them animals (Rothfels 482-84). By the 1970s are not as they are but as we, or at least the many zoos were converting to this model of designers of zoos, want them to be” (482). display (Hancocks 138 ff). The zoo inhabitants are always sited and If we think of zoo viewing in terms of framed. The cages that contained the genres borrowed from the visual arts, we animals in the early Western zoos were might say that animal exhibits have been usually unadorned and unappealing, even transformed from portraits to landscapes. when the buildings that housed them and That is to say, in the cages of early zoos, the grounds that surrounded them were visitors saw individuals or small groups in beautiful and elaborate. The novel idea of confined spaces behind glass or framed by bringing the attractive external landscape bars. The more recent habitat structures, in into the cage was introduced at Carl contrast, allow animals to be observed in Hagenbeck’s Tierpark near Hamburg in the opened-up, more natural surroundings, early 1900’s.[ii] In so doing, Hagenbeck complete with trees, grass, streams and 60 ponds. Grubby and unattractive though the enculturated nature of the zoo. The scientific early cages often were, they still felt like ordering and the artistic framing disintegrate, portraits—framing and displaying wild too fragile to withstand the force of tanks animals whose character is conveyed and bombs. Everyday human constructs are through a claustrophobic visuality. The suddenly overlaid with a religious newer enclosures are more aesthetically significance. In The Zookeeper’s Wife, Diane pleasing, but, as in so many landscape Ackerman describes the aftermath of the paintings, the fauna are often dwarfed or Warsaw bombings where the city’s residents partially hidden by the flora. While caged witnessed “a biblical hallucination unfolding animals satisfy our desire to inspect an as the zoo emptied into Warsaw’s streets” animal’s appearance and to see up close (62). Here, the familiar cultural construct of what it really looks like, the experience organized animal life has become sometimes feels invasive. As with some incoherent. In its place is a disorderly portraiture, the visual encounter carries the exodus: “Seals waddled along the banks of taint of violation: we have taken advantage the Vistula, camels and llamas wandered of the setting to pry into the individual’s down alleyways, hooves skidding over privacy. In contrast, we may see less of any cobblestone, ostriches and antelopes trotted given animal in a modern habitat setting, beside foxes and wolves, anteaters called but we feel better about the “naturalness” of out hatchee, hatchee as they scuttled over the encounter and about the way we view it. bricks” (62). At the Baghdad Zoo, because Although the visual and emotional Lawrence Anthony’s story begins two weeks experiences differ in the old-style and in the after the attack, most of the animals are more modern zoo, the controlling human dead or dying, but the sense of biblical sensibility is still evident in both. Going to a chaos—or what he refers to as “the zoo remains an aesthetically regulated apocalyptic scenario”(12)—is similar. Amidst cultural experience. the rubble and corpses, the suffering of the Along with the aesthetic framing of surviving animals is so intense that the author animals at zoos is the scientific ordering of feels that he has passed through “the portals them, which is also expressed through the to Hades” (25). What is striking in both visual. With the science, as with the accounts is that the cultural value of the zoo aesthetics, there are two general options: is immediately elevated into a religious animals may be grouped taxonomically—as register. It is not simply the destruction of in, for example, a Reptile House—or in an innocent animal life that affects the ecosystem—such as the Bronx Zoo’s onlookers and rescuers. It is what these “Madagascar” habitat. Whether strictly animals conjure up—elemental human relegated to specific structures, or placed in relationships overlaid with the human urge to larger habitats, the animals are grouped with order and understand creation. The zoo is others that are like them or that live near no longer a simple cultural commons, but them. Through both artistic and scientific rather the emblem of the precious and visualization, then, zoos suggest to their fragile God-given world that war threatens. visitors that nature is ordered and orderly. The Damaged Zoo: Warsaw Furthermore, although zoos have both predators and prey animals, visitors do not Before the war, the Warsaw Zoo was a witness the messiness and the ugliness of cultural and scientific center, a place which killing. We often see penguins being fed fish artists visited regularly and where a great and tigers chomping on chunks of meat, but deal of scientific observation took place. their meals have been killed for them. Thus, “We had many partners,” says Antonina the human framing of the animal kingdom Żabiński, “universities in Poland and abroad, through caging and taxonomic visualization the Polish Health Department, and even the renders the zoo both an understandable and Academy of Fine Arts” (35). But what made a safe place. What we see at the zoo is the zoo so special (and prepared it for its animal life manipulated, enculturated and wartime role) was its interplay between non-violent. humans and animals, and the assumption of Wars—whether they be popular kinship between the two. As Ackerman puts uprisings or imperial expansions--disrupt the

61 it, Antonina “felt convinced that people Instead they were co-inhabitants, living with needed to connect more with their animal animals in the house and on the grounds, nature, but also that ‘animals long for human and helping with their care. According to company, reach out for human attention’“ Ackerman, (34). Between 1929, when Jan Żabiński took as a way to transcend over as head of the zoo, and 1939, when it suffering and stay sane, was bombed, he and his family easily Antonina [filled] the villa with intermingled with the animal inhabitants. In the innocent distractions of their villa on the zoo premises, Jan and muskrat, hare, rooster, dogs, Antonina’s young son Ryszard (nicknamed eagle, hamster, cats, and Ryś—meaning lynx) was brought up in a baby foxes, which drew “mixed family of den-mates.” Along with people into a timeless natural traditional cats and dogs, he shared his world both habitual and home at various times with orphaned or sick novel. Paying attention to the zoo babies, among them “a lion kitten, wolf villa’s unique ecosystem and cub, monkey toddler, and eagle chick” (24). routines, they could rest Jan was followed on his daily bicycle rounds awhile as the needs and of the zoo by a large elk named Adam. His rhythms of different species long-term dream was to create a “mirage of mingled. (166) primal truce” at his zoo where, through careful engineering and strategically placed Although Antonina generally resisted referring moats, “natural enemies could share to the zoo and its inhabitants in biblical enclosures without conflict” (30). While this terms, favoring instead secular expressions never happened, Antonina always thought like “a small autonomous state” (42) and of the zoo as “our animal republic…a small “Captain Nemo’s submarine” (208), those autonomous state….an island cut off from around her felt the need to imbue the the rest of the world” (42). In other words, enterprise with religious importance. One both in terms of its present reality and its survivor simply stated, “The Zabinskis’ home dreamed-of future, the Warsaw Zoo aspired was Noah’s Ark …with so many people and to become if not a secular utopia, then at animals hidden there” (310). Ackerman least a peaceful political entity. herself at one point calls the embattled villa Then the war came. Despite the “a small Eden, complete with garden, deaths of many animals, the destruction of animals, and a motherly bread-maker” (119). dozens of structures, and the disruption of Even Jan’s alias in the Polish resistance—St. normal routines, the Żabińskis labored with Francis—lends a religious aura to the remarkable success to foster a place of wartime zoo and to those associated with it. safety and relative tranquility at their The photographs in Ackerman’s book damaged zoo. Antonina’s notion of the reflect and amplify the Żabińskis’ continuous reciprocal existence between humans and effort to counter the Nazi strategy of animals played out in ways she had never destruction and division. Although there are considered, as the zoo became a way three images of buildings (a hunting lodge, station for fleeing Jews and members of the the Żabińskis’ villa and the zoo’s Pheasant Polish Underground. Some stayed in the villa, House), not one of them bears any evidence but many hid in the cages. A secret of having been bombed. Likewise, there are underground passage led from the Pheasant no images of dead or badly wounded House to the villa, and refugees were also animals, but instead several photographs of smuggled in through the Lion’s House. horses, hyenas, and bears in open habitats, Sometimes as many as fifty people would be often with their young offspring. The only living in empty cages (115). Although each obviously caged animal is a cartoon self- was given an animal alias, Antonina always portrait of Jan in prison camp where the lines referred to them as “Guests.” This dual on the paper form bars. Of the sixteen black nomenclature captures the essence of and white images, eleven of them show wartime life at the Warsaw Zoo. The refugees either humans with their children, animals were not reduced to animals living in cages, with their young, or mixed groups of humans nor allowed to see themselves as Nazi prey. caring for young animals. One page strikingly

Fig.2 Edward Hicks The Peaceable Kingdom (c1834) by Edward Hicks (1780-1849). National Gallery of Art in Washington DC.

juxtaposes a photo of Jan cradling his baby distance, there is always one carnivore son in his arms with a photo of his young whose gaze directly engages the painting’s daughter Teresa holding a baby badger in spectator. Whether sitting, lying down or the very same position. standing, these carnivores exude calm. Their Studying these images, a modern- wide eyes seem to ask, “Why are you day American observer easily makes the surprised to see us in such company? This visual transition to Edward Hicks’s “Peaceable could happen.” If these paintings seem an Kingdom” paintings, which display the same idealistic fantasy to most onlookers, they take easy familiarity between humans and on a different aura for those who have read animals (see fig. 1). Hicks (1780-1849) was The Zookeeper’s Wife and studied its an American Quaker folk artist who painted accompanying photographs. dozens of studies of Isaiah’s messianic vision, The Damaged Zoo: Baghdad some of which contained a small background image of William Penn signing a The unlikely messianic calm at the center of treaty with the local Indians. All of the studies the Warsaw Zoo in The Zookeeper’s Wife show carnivores, herbivores and children in seems worlds away from the welter of activity peaceful co-existence. While the chronicled in Lawrence Anthony’s Babylon’s traditionally non-violent children and Ark. In a sense, the two environments herbivores look at one another or off into the suggest alternative, but equally useful

63 strategies for civilians whose lives have been Noah did not question God’s behavior, disrupted by war. One can either seek to re- neither did Anthony criticize American policy. create the normalcy of the everyday, or one He simply went to work. can spring into action and try to rescue what Because the rescues entailed mostly is in danger of being lost. As the title of large animals—a good many of them Anthony’s book suggests, he adopts the latter predators and all of them traumatized— strategy. Babylon’s Ark is a fast-paced story bringing them back to the zoo was always a of outreach and activity, with Anthony as its spectacle. TV crews, reporters, and self-appointed Noah, cajoling whatever photographers often followed Anthony’s authorities are willing to help him on his group to document their raids and rescue mission. Just days after the American repossession forays. And because of security barrage of Baghdad, Anthony, a white South problems, Humvees and American soldiers, African conservationist and proprietor of the under the much-praised leadership of Thula Thula Game Reserve in Zululand, was Captain William Sumner, also regularly on his way to try to salvage what remained accompanied the captured animals back of the Baghdad Zoo.[iii] He arrived in mid- to the zoo. Without planning to do so, March of 2003 and catalyzed support from Anthony and his team enlisted visual US soldiers and diplomats, Iraqi zoo workers spectacle to broadcast their mission. At one and vets, and various international animal point, he recounts an operation, which rescue organizations. On July 19, 2003, a turned into “an impromptu parade of honor:” very carefully guarded and much diminished Baghdad Zoo re-opened. The ark metaphor Eventually our convoy left, is a particularly apt one here because the looking like Noah’s Ark on wheels animals that the team gathered in were as it meandered through the housed in a rebuilt zoo that was able to stay city. . . . Even though camels afloat in the center of a city still very much at are a common sight in Iraq, no war. When Anthony left for good in early one could have claimed to September of 2003, no one was willing to have previously seen one extend the ark metaphor and complete the standing imperviously next to a story by saying that the animals and their mounted machine gun in the human keepers had reached their Ararat. back of a Humvee. Nevertheless, the gathering-in phase was seen as a remarkable—and religiously People stopped and inflected—first step.[iv] stared, and then laughter and clapping spontaneously erupted Anthony’s story, then, is about as children pointed excitedly to rounding up escaped and dangerous wild the pelican and the vultures and animals from war-ravaged, dangerous waved at the soldiers. Fathers places. Unlike the Warsaw Zoo, where the lifted sons onto their shoulders. . . predators were all shot as a safety measure . It was a magnificent sight, the directly after the Nazi bombings (Ackerman first time I had seen such joy on 53), many of the wild cats and bears Baghdad’s streets. (142) survived to take center stage in the Baghdad Zoo’s story. Whether secured in their damaged cages, or reclaimed from black Seeing such “parades” firsthand, as well as marketers and from other private zoos, the the photographic documentation of them, sick, starving predators served as a reminder crystallized the importance of the zoo and of the violence and predation that is part of engrained the Noah’s Ark metaphor into the both animal and human nature. If the sensibilities of both local and Western animals were dangerous, so were the audiences. humans living in occupied Baghdad. The The photographs on the dust jacket explosion of violence was as much the story of Babylon’s Ark, as well as the images inside of God’s wrath in the time of Noah as it was the book, reinforce the biblical aura that the the story of the prodigious American operation appropriated. Providing a modern- bombing of Baghdad in 2003. And, just as day visualization of Noah’s activities, these

64 images make no attempt to minimize the fourteen-year-old tiger called Malooh. When reality that Baghdad is a violent place. Not the tiger bit off the soldier’s finger and surprisingly, the book’s editors included, mauled his arm, the soldier’s companion among the photographs of the animals, a shot the caged animal, who bled to death shot of a destroyed building. And even during the night.[v] The violent behavior of though the frightened and war-battered both the wild animal and the undisciplined animals are saved and cared for, they are soldiers reinforces the instability of the (with one exception) all pictured in their situation and the fragility of the rescue effort. enclosures. Unlike the Warsaw Zoo photos, Anthony was livid that his “favorite animal,” the selection of Baghdad photos does not the one who had caused him much worry suggest that a peaceful space has been and given him much solace, was dead. He created. Here soldiers share frames with remembers that civilians. Carnivores (the bears and the big cats) are caged, and herbivores (Saddam’s [in Baghdad when] I mused horses) are pictured running or restrained by alone on the futility of halters. The photos recapitulate the everything, I often found him mentality of not just the Second Iraq War, but looking at me and I took of most every war: enemies exist and must comfort from his presence. He be killed, and then the victims must be was our most stressed animal, rescued, sometimes forcibly. No part of the just fur and rib cage when we landscape is considered safe; rather, it is arrived, and we fought long alive with potentially dangerous predators— and hard for his life. We both human and non-human – who must be nurtured him daily. We contained. searched the streets of The inclusion of two photos of zoo Baghdad to find donkeys to bears in Babylon’s Ark strongly reinforces this feed him, and we lugged message. The first image is a close-up taken water from the canals to slake of a bear named Saedi in her enclosure, with his thirst. . . . Now he was its walls just barely visible. The caption reads, dead. Shot by drunken cretins “Saedi, the bear who killed three looters.” who put their hands in the Anthony can describe her this way because cage of a wild animal. (234- his Noah’s Ark operation succeeded in safely 35) re-confining her. To make sure readers understand this visual message, the photo directly across the page from Saedi shows But Anthony then considers his successes in another bear (dubbed Last Man Standing) in order to blunt the emotional impact of the a temporary transport cage being lowered senseless loss of the tiger. He puts the from a truck onto the grounds of the episode in some perspective, observing that Baghdad Zoo. Obviously, the looters that the “beautiful tiger’s death was our only Saedi killed are nowhere in evidence in her casualty. . . . [and] not one other animal had photo, but the Noah-like humans who have died. Against the odds, we saved them all. rescued Last Man Standing form an The tiger had been the first fatality, but not important part of his arrival photo. The two through any fault of the Babylon’s Ark team.” photos suggest that this is a story not only of (235) Here, then, Anthony emphasizes his rescue but also of safe confinement; in role as Noah, a man who does his best amid Baghdad, Noah and his team are important, a swirl of violent forces over which he has but so is the ark. little control. At the end of Babylon’s Ark, as a Reinforcing the story of the traumatic coda and a cautionary tale, Anthony relates loss of Malooh is the inclusion of a beautiful another much more distressing episode of color photograph of a tiger as the last of the both human and animal predation. Shortly book’s twelve images. However, unlike the after his return to South Africa, Anthony is told other photographs, this one is not a casual via telephone that on the previous evening a snapshot, but rather an idealized portrait. It drunken US soldier had put his hand into the is clearly not Malooh, but it conjures up cage of the zoo’s most prized animal, a Malooh and asks viewers to step into a

65 relationship with him and, like Anthony, “to Conclusion find him looking at [us].” (234) The caption I have been arguing that during peacetime, simply reads, “The Tiger,” but it seems to zoos invite secular aesthetic and scientific have been included to fix an indelible engagement, but when threatened by war, presence in the minds of those viewing it. they become overlaid with religious Dignified, calm, and fiercely beautiful, the meaning. These biblically-inflected visions, big cat stares directly into the eyes of the however, should not be read too narrowly. spectator. Neither pet nor predator, this tiger They did not—at least in Warsaw and is instead a fellow creature, whose gaze Baghdad—signal a reawakening of religious seeks our engagement and recognition. It is faith. Instead they became reference the same gaze found on the faces of so points, meeting three pressing needs of the many of the big felines in Edward Hicks’s survivors and rescuers. First, they allowed the Peaceable Kingdom paintings. But more zoos to sit at one remove from the power importantly, for purposes of Anthony’s book, it struggles that roiled around them. The is also the same direct expression on the biblical framing of animal life allowed those face of the lion in Hicks’s 1846 painting of affected by political turmoil to recalibrate Noah’s Ark, which now hangs in the their lives through age-old images of rescue Philadelphia Museum of Art (see fig. 2). (Noah’s Ark) and reverie (the messianic The Noah’s Ark canvas is dominated vision). Another crucial outcome enabled by by menacing black storm clouds, which the biblical framing was to provide survivors cover the upper third of the painting, and and rescuers with material visions that also by the massive ark that looms large in allowed for the possibility of salvage and the center-right area. Two small, shadowy reconstruction. Because the two bible stories human figures oversee the animals, who were such familiar topics in both art and march in pairs toward the enclosure that will literature, they quite literally provided also be their refuge. But the key figure in the alternate environments for survivors to canvas, not because of his bulk, but inhabit. And finally, these biblical events because of his gaze, is the lion in the center stressed the importance of kinship and foreground. Like the tiger in the final photo stewardship among all creatures in a world of Babylon’s Ark, he bears a mesmerizing, torn apart by factionalism. Not only did they but calm expression, staring directly out at provide an alternate environment, they the spectator, his gaze impossible to avert. provided an alternate worldview as well. The lion waiting in line in Hicks’s painting and the final photograph in Babylon’s Ark each seem to ask onlookers to consider their own Notes connection to Noah’s actions (and, by extension, to the Peaceable Kingdom). The (i). See for example, critical views by Acampora, “Zoos wildness of the animals is suppressed, but not and Eyes: Contesting Captivity and Seeking Successor erased. The gaze of these big cats seeks our Practices” and Malamud, Reading Zoos: Representations of Animals and Captivity. For a more understanding and engagement. They have positive view of the good zoos can do, see Hancocks, already gained the good will and respect of A Different Nature. their rescuers; now it is the spectators who are being summoned to enter into the belief (ii). Hagenbeck’s was the first public zoo in the West to that some kind of truce can exist in this use such habitat enclosures. However, David Hancocks notes that the sixteenth-century Mogul violent world. Noah’s Ark is an enclosure, as emperor of India, Akbar the Great, established several is a zoo. Cages and caring stewardship zoological parks with “spacious enclosures and cages” cannot possibly replicate the Peaceable that were open to the public and whose mission was to Kingdom, but in both Babylon’s Ark and “instill love and respect for wildlife” (15).

Hicks’s Noah’s Ark painting, they aspire (iii). Anthony died of a heart attack in early March of toward it. 2012, a great loss to the global animal conservation community.

(iv). According to a Reuters report from November 2009, the zoo had by then accumulated more than 1,000 animals, and was attracting millions of visitors annually. The news service added as a caveat that

66 the numbers could not be verified, but clearly the population of animals and the number of visitors had increased dramatically.

(V). Rajiv Joseph centers on this episode in his 2010 play Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo.

Bibliography

Acampora, Ralph. “Zoos and Eyes: Contesting Captivity and Seeking Successor Practices,” Society and Animals 13:1 (2005): 69-88. Web.

Ackerman, Diane. The Zookeeper’s Wife. New York: Norton, 2007. Print.

Anthony, Lawrence with Graham Spence. Babylon’s Ark: The Incredible Wartime Rescue of the Baghdad Zoo. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2007. Print.

Hancocks, David. A Different Nature. Berkeley: U of California Press, 2001. Print.

Joseph, Rajiv. Gruesome Playground Injuries; Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo; Animals out of Paper: Three Plays. Berkeley CA: Soft Skull P, 2010. Print.

Malamud, Randy. Reading Zoos: Representations of Animals and Captivity. New York: New York U Press, 1998. Print.

Reuters. “Baghdad’s Once Ravaged Zoo Comes Back to Life,” 19 November 2009. Web.

Rothfels, Nigel. “Zoos, the Academy, and Captivity,” PMLA 124:2 (March 2009): 480-86. Print.

June Dwyer is Professor Emerita of English at Manhattan College. She writes about animals in literature and about urban ecology. Her most recent articles appear in ISLE, South Atlantic Review, MELUS, Modern Language Studies and in the forthcoming collection Race and Real Estate (OUP).

THE ARCHIPELAGO OF

OLD AGE AND

CHILDHOOD

The Floating Islands book began with a vast collection of small drawings, made by my father, Udo Sellbach, towards the end of his life. The drawings show a child in a row boat, surrounded by a floating archipelago inhabited by an alternate evolution of insects, birds and beasts. I wrote a story in response to this strange natural world. In the process, childhood and old age, began crossing over, opening up a creaturely realm at the edges of human time and space.

Full title: The Archipelago of Old Age and Childhood: Creaturely Life in the Floating Islands

Readers can get view selections from The Floating Islands at http://thewordsoundandpicturecompany.com/ . Text by Undine Sellbach

do was a visual artist who immigrated insects, sea creatures and islands that float. to Australia from Germany in the There were thousands of these pictures, U 1950’s. By the time he began making dotted around the house and accumulating the pictures of the Floating Islands he was in in the drawings of his studio. Sometimes, in his seventies. Like many old people, he only the corner of the picture - beneath a drifting had a limited quota of energy, and this he isle of bugs, or mice or bones - it was spent navigating a very private world, possible to make out a small child in a adapting to the decline of his heart, legs, rowboat. This boy is a long way away from lungs, eyes, ears, fingers, feet and toes. In home, he told us, he has travelled across the physical terms, old age for Udo took place in sea and over the horizon. a very specific habitat, a handful of rooms. Faced with this extraordinary volume Each day he would plot a course between of rarely seen drawings, Udo, myself and bed and bathroom, kitchen and studio, composer Mikelangelo came up with the upstairs and downstairs; from TV, to window, idea of making a book, with a story and to drawing pen to paper, and to bed again. music recording, responding to the images. To make his way through life, he needed a Through this project we hoped to open this highly localised know-how, to learn and hidden body of work to the art world, and relearn how to be in an ever-constricting reach new audiences in the fields of music, environment. literature and performance. But it is not the Remarkably, from within this life of journey of these drawings into the public confined spaces and restricted mobility, he realm that I will focus on here, rather the made a vast body of work that charted, world inside the book, and the process of its almost in encyclopaedic fashion, an making. alternative evolution of mammals, birds, At the outset The Floating Islands had 68

Fig.1 Udo Sellbach

The Floating Islands, published by The Word Sound & Picture Company, 2007 © Undine Sellbach

two powerful sources, the vast collection of build a chronology and a narrative for the pre-drawn images, and the figure of Udo pictures. Every island Udo drew seemed a himself, transmogrified through his drawings, universe it itself, but collected together, the from an old man into a young boy. From the drawings did not make a coherent map. point of view of constructing the book, my Rather, to borrow words from Wittgenstein, challenge as writer and co-designer was to the pictures are “sketches of landscapes

Fig.2 Udo Sellbach Fig.3 Udo Sellbach The Floating Islands, published by The Word Sound The Floating Islands, published by The Word Sound & & Picture Company, 2007 © Undine Sellbach Picture Company, 2007 © Undine Sellbach

which were made in the course of… long But instead of simply charting the movement and involved journeyings,” so that sometimes from one bookend of human life back to the “the same or almost the same points were… other, the old man becomes a child in The approached afresh from different directions, Floating Islands book and, in doing so, learns and new sketches made.” (i) My job was to how to move in a realm which is other than find a way to traverse these drawings without human; or rather to navigate the very edges a map, to create a sense of journey from of his human world. the arrangement of text and image. Returned to a state of boyhood, Udo In the opening passages of the book, discovers he is equipped for adventure with Udo, the hero, is carried by a mysterious keen eyesight, energised limbs and a set of Beast over the horizon to the world of the strong pointy teeth. But for all his new energy, Floating Islands, and in the course of his the boy Udo is not well equipped to navigate journey, he grows backwards, from an old the shifting world around him. No matter how man into a young boy. No longer confined hard he rows, he cannot reach the island by old age, the child Udo sets out to explore. ahead. And when he stops to put down But the floating archipelago unfolding before anchor, the archipelago converges towards him is hard to navigate and he must learn him and he is almost crushed. Although he and relearn its shifting logic. eventually devises a back-to-front rowing At first, the vitality and adventure of technique that helps him navigate, he never childhood and the confinement and reaches the shore. He is condemned to peer dilapidation of old age seem like contrasting at the world at a distance, like an old man, states, but in the course of the story they looking out his window at the world below. begin to cross over. In the fairytale genre this Removed from the midst of things, shift is a familiar trope. Old age is often cast and lonely in his solitude, the child Udo as a second childhood, a time when vivid gradually develops an attention to detail, a memories return, and the whirl of adult new way of looking, moving and thinking. At responsibilities and aspirations can give way first, the islands floating by seem like barren to adventure and whimsy. The decline of the rocks, but after a while, as his eyes adjust to body frees up the transportive potential of their surface, “to the particular relations of the imagination. line and space, dark, light and shade,” he

Fig.3 Udo Sellbach The Floating Islands, published by The Word Sound & Picture Company, 2007 © Undine Sellbach comes to distinguish “a magnificent were oddly familiar, others made compendium of life.” (28) no sense at all, even when magnified through the lens of his From the vantage of his little boat telescope (30). Without reaching Udo was struck by the compelling the shore, Udo is unable to properly rituals before him. Sealed off from meet the animals, birds and insects the outside world, the creatures that live on the islands or appeared to be the products of an understand their ways of life. alternative evolution. Some scenes

Fig.4 Udo Sellbach Fig.5 Udo Sellbach The Floating Islands, published by The Word The Floating Islands, published by The Word Sound & Picture Company, 2007 © Undine Sound & Picture Company, 2007 © Undine Sellbach Sellbach

Viewed from a distance the creatures exhibit What are the islands made from? What certain familiar traits - hunger, mourning, propells their movement? Could they be companionship, anger, passion, confusion, alive? A close look at the drawings shows ambivalence, loneliness, joy, boredom, that the islands are conglomerates of rubble, disgust. But the boy Udo is ill equipped to wreckage and bone. The child navigates his read these traits as part of their greater way through the floating remnants of a past weave of life. Nevertheless, the scenes he history. Reshaped by the forces of wind, rain, witnesses affect him deeply. Between the sea and volcanic activity, these compelling boy and these floating island worlds, there fragments are doubly strange. Like develops a strange side by side-ness, a hieroglyphs, they have lost their meaningful proximity that cannot be fully place in human life, but not their power of comprehended, leaving him with a “residue address. As the boy Udo travels, the world of unnameable emotions.” (30) unfolds about him like a script of signs and Considered in the context of Udo symbols he cannot fully comprehend. Sellbach’s career as a visual artist, the The drifting ruins, reclaimed by the drawings in The Floating Islands book are a processes of the natural world, might be respite from the majority of his abstract and understood as part of what Walter Benjamin figurative works depicting scenes of war and has called Naturgeschichte - Natural History. catastrophe. These images of destruction As Eric Santner writes, Benjamin’s term refers had their source in his experiences as a “not to the fact that nature also has a history young German solider in World War II. (iii) But in but to the fact that the artefacts of human the fairytale world of The Floating Islands, history tend to acquire an aspect of mute, something different emerges, not a natural being at the point where they begin harmonious state of nature but a sense of to lose their place in a viable form of life.” ecological forces at the edge of human Read as a product of Natural history and meaning. Historical forces, The Floating Islands can be As the book unfolds, the materiality of seen as belonging as much to a post-history the archipelago itself becomes pressing. as a pre-history. The artist Udo Sellbach’s own

Fig.7 Udo Sellbach The Floating Islands, published by The Word Sound & Picture Company, 2007 © Undine Sellbach

way of putting it was to propose archipelago rhythms of natural history,” and the “struggle drifts at a time before the past and after the for new meaning” becomes most palpable. future. Santner uses the term creaturely life, (v) to describe this dimension of human But in The Floating Islands world, one existence where “the materiality of human cannot be certain that the drifting ruins and artifacts and habituations pulsate with bones are artifacts from a wholly human

73 task of moving, making and enduring entailed a universe of effort. His practical knowledge of this effort, his capacity to see the most ordinary details of existence as both universe and fragment, informed the art he made towards the end of his life. Here childhood folds over into old age in a further way. Like many old creatures at the age of death – humans and animals – Udo was faced with the task of finding a path through life afresh, with a changing body and environment. In absence of any fixed orientation, he charted a course where the remnants of one life became the universe of another, and where the world as a whole often appeared only in pieces. (vi) I believe that the book we built from Udo’s pictures explores something of these secret movements – between old age and childhood; detail and overview; adventure Fig.8 Udo Sellbach and stillness; animal and human life. The Floating Islands, published by The Word Sound & Picture Company, 2007 © Undine Sellbach Notes

(i). Ludwig Wittgenstein, “Preface,” Philosophical past, nor that the rich and contested Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (Oxford: meanings emerging at the fault line Blackwell Publishers, 1958). between natural and historical forces speak (ii). Although Udo does meet a strange fish, and they back only to our human existence. As the attempts to conduct a conversation together. floating rubble is colonized by an array birds, insects, mammals and fish, the boy Udo (iii). The idea that The Floating Islands world was in glimpses both their sense of home and their some way outside of human life and history was important to us when we were compiling the book. The confusion and astrangement. It is this fifty odd images selected for the book were chosen uncanny dimension at work in the lives of from a much larger body of work, which depicted the other non-human creatures, that strikes the Floating Islands at various points of their evolution, boy as part familiar, part strange, and including a time when the islands are overrun by a colony of warring apes, a time when dog-like animals activates his own sense of a creaturely imprisoned catlike animals in cages, and a time when existence. the seas of the archipelago were colonized by large In a world where child and animals sailing ships. After much deliberation, these seem beset by enigmatic symbols, and extraordinary pictures were put aside for a further natural forces are shifting, navigation volume. inevitably involves a certain degree of (iv). Eric L. Santner, On Creaturely Life, (Chicago: disorientation. Like the storybook Udo, Udo University of Chicago Press, 2006), 16, and Walter the artist and old man grappled with a Benjamin, The Origins of German Tragic Drama, trans, material world whose dimensions were John Osborne (London: 1977). changing. While The Floating Islands can be (v). Santner, xx, xv. read as part of Natural History, in Benjamin’s sense, where human and non-human forces (vi) In Philosophical Investigations, Ludwig Wittgenstein intermingle and exchange qualities, the speaks of this in terms of: subspecies aterneai: seeing book is also a personal history, or rather a a fragment with the world as its background. history told from the edge of a human life. Dr Undine Sellbach is a philosopher, writer and performer, based at the School of Philosophy, University of Tasmania, Australia. Her publications explore the Old age for my father involved an imagination in relation to notions of life, gender, animality, ethics and the unconscious. Her current collaborative project on the entomological imagination, exodus from public life, into a very private, draws on stories and performances about insects and children in order to rethink limited physical space. Even the most basic the relation between ethical and instinctual life. [email protected]

THE CAGED ANIMAL:

THE AVANT-GARDE ARTIST

IN MANETTE SALOMON

From Eugène Delacroix’s majestic lions to Rosa Bonheur’s roaring tigers, animals occupied a privileged place in nineteenth century French art. However, these imagined representations of animals did not reflect the tragic reality of caged animals in the urban sphere. This study is a posthumanistic consideration of Manette

Salomon (1867), a French novel about art written by Edmond and Jules de Goncourt. The novel depicts the menagerie of the Jardin des Plantes in Paris as a natural paradise where artists are able to experience a profound connection with animals. However, this interaction between artists and animals takes place within the framework of an urban zoo. The novel proposes that animals inspire artistic creativity and that the modern avant-garde artist is himself like a caged animal, whose revolutionary vision is bound by societal constraints. Interweaving historical documentation of the Jardin des Plantes, literary and artistic critiques and contemporary animal theory, I illustrate the ways in which the traditionally separated contexts of avant-garde aesthetics and natural history became intricately interrelated in the figure of the artist-animal in nineteenth- century France. I claim that the ambivalent image of the caged artist-animal is a significant trope of modernity, which offers new insight into the contemporary field of animal studies. Text by Claire Nettleton

anette Salomon (1867), a French society, gather from popular science novel by Edmond and Jules de reviews, the writings of Georges-Louis Leclerc M Goncourt, concludes with de Buffon, and their own encounters with Anatole Bazoche, a struggling bohemian contemporary painters to formulate their artist who identifies with the animal world, aesthetic theories. In Manette finding tranquility and security as a Salomon, which announces the genre of zookeeper in the Jardin des Plantes. At the literary impressionism, the authors imagine end of his first day on the job, Anatole locks that the avant-garde artist is biologically a tiger in its cage “enclosing the sun and the closer to an animal than traditional artists. ferocious beasts in the cages of the This relationship is an ambivalent one. On menagerie where the red lions walk in the one hand, the avant-gardist may have more flame of the hour.”[i] This image is central to creative insight than the traditional artist. On the novel, for it suggests the need to both the other, this creative freedom impedes contain and preserve nature within the urban him from assimilating into society. Manette menagerie, as well as within art and Salomon constructs the narrative that the literature. The Goncourt brothers, chroniclers innovative artist in the mid-nineteenth of every aspect of nineteenth century century is like an animal in the menagerie of

Fig.1 Unknown Artists at the Jardin des Plantes in L'Illustration, 7 August 1902

the Jardin des Plantes. The Jardin was account the scientific climate of Europe in founded in 1793, when the revolutionary the second half of the nineteenth century, government moved the king's private particularly after the publication of collection of animals to a public botanical Darwin's The Origin of Species, and the garden in Paris. The artist is portrayed as an paintings that depict animals as sources of exotic creature which functions differently aesthetic freedom. Similarly, several from other human beings, but whose nineteenth century French novels and freedom is caged within a social institution. poems that depict both artists and animals This artistic novel serves an analogous role to as its subjects, from Grandville’s La vie the urban zoo, for it creates the illusion of privée et publique des animaux (1840- harmony with beautiful, untainted nature 1842) to Octave Mirbeau’s Dans le within a modern urban setting. The depiction ciel (1892-1893), in many ways suggest that of the vanguard artist as a caged animal animals inspire creative breakthroughs. thus constitutes a significant trope of modernity that expresses the longing for Contemporary Views of the Visual, creative liberation within the confines of Literary Animal society. This study impacts the fields of In recent years, animal theorists have nineteenth century literature, art and animal produced groundbreaking research concer- studies, while also challenging the ning the intersection of animals, literature assumption found in criticism of the novel and the visual. As John Berger claims, that Manette Salomon portrays animals as nineteenth century capitalistic society began inferior, mimetic copies of human beings. to experience a sense of rupture between Such an assumption does not take into the human and the animal worlds. [ii] The

76 urban menagerie and botanical gardens beings in tremendous pain and knew that were means for modern city-dwellers to they meant, “My God! I suffer so!”[vi] One experience a connection to flora and fauna artist watches with a palette in his hand. The that they could no longer encounter in daily novel emphasizes the beauty of this fragile, life. From the beginning of the industrial dying creature whose suffering parallels that revolution to today, animal art has served a of mankind. Quite different from the other similar purpose as the zoological park idealized representations of animals in the because it makes animals visible once novel, this scene may incite empathy as well again. Both art and zoos are means of as awareness of the realities of animal conserving the images of animals as they suffering and death. disappear. Similarly, as Akira Lippit argues Manette Salomon’s inclusion of a particularly in the context of cinema, monkey as a character in the novel who modern animals dwell in a “state experiences the same emotions, of perpetual vanishing” and yet still linger in connections and tragic death as any the “world undead.”[iii] human character exemplifies the In his discussion of the visual possibilities of fiction to explore the value of representation of caged animals within non-human life. In Animal Stories, Susan literature, Randy Malamud claims that zoos McHugh examines the developments of provide incredible insight into literary animal agency in fictional examples humanity’s “interpreted world” of animals, of cross-species companionship. “By which is anthropocentric and hegemonic to proposing that social life shared across the very core.[iv] While zoos claim to be species may be the measure of literary edifying cultural institutions akin to museums, representations, these discussions, Malamud argues that they actually threaten deliberately presented in fictional form, our cultural sensibilities. Zoos attempt to attempt to shift the terms of representation convince human beings of their superiority away from human subjectivity.”[vii] McHugh and have little regard for the rights and spotlights the ways in which fictional needs of the animals.[v] The Goncourt representations of animals allow us to brothers’ depiction of the artist zookeeper consider the interconnectedness between in Manette Salomon differs dramatically humans and other forms of life. Visual and from Malamud’s interpretation of Franz literary animals also allow us to consider the Kafka’s caged artist in The Hunger social ramifications of changing Artist. According to Malamud, the artist is perceptions of animals.[viii] Similarly, despondent and culturally impotent in his I propose a posthumanistic consideration cage, which the critic argues parallels the of Manette Salomon by illustrating the ways conditions of caged animals in zoos (127). In in which the traditionally separated contexts contrast, the Goncourts espouse the of avant-garde aesthetics and natural conservationist claim that “caging” or history became intricately interrelated in the situating animals (as well as artists) within an figure of the artist-animal in nineteenth- institutional framework is a way of protecting century France. Critical readings of the them from harm and thus paradoxically novel should challenge its idealized providing them with more freedom. representation of the menagerie as a Although Anat Pick disavows the celestial Eden, which attempts to mask its belief that zoos serve to protect animals, her role as an urban institution that has little understanding of vulnerability as a basis of regard for animal welfare. both radical aesthetics and ethics may be However, Manette Salomon should also be useful in interpreting Manette Salomon. regarded as revolutionary in that it considers While the Goncourts often disdain, dismiss artistic beauty outside of the narrow human and mock marginalized figures, they also, at sphere and illustrates the creative potential times, regard animals with incredible of animals. compassion. For example, the novel details In the novel, a group of artists, the agonizing death of Vermillon, Anatole’s including Anatole Bazoche and his friend pet monkey, whose small body experiences Naz de Coriolis, often frequent the Jardin painful shakes and whose fists convulse. The des Plantes to paint the animals in its artists relate these movements to human menagerie. Based on Alexandre Pouthier, a

77 marginal artist who painted animals and who The Monkey Artist knew the authors, Anatole demonstrates great artistic potential, but lacks the drive or Anatole seems to be particularly connected the discipline to execute it and instead acts to animals due to his marginal behavior, comical and silly. A parasite, Anatole feeds comedic temperament and his lack of off of the relationship between Coriolis and academic motivation. Langibout, the artist's his model-muse turned wife, Manette teacher calls Anatole a “little animal” and Salomon. In Bohemian Paris, Jerrold Seigel tells him, “Little pig, you don't work”.[xiv] The labeled the novel “anti-Bohemian and anti- Goncourt brothers describe Anatole as being Semitic.”[ix] He argues that the Goncourt born with “the malice of a monkey,” who as brothers have expressed a particularly hostile a child had jumped around like a toad and attitude towards bohemians, believing that yelled “Voila! The Revolution is they contributed to the decay of the starting!”[xv] Lacking diligence and established bourgeois order.[x] While the seriousness, Anatole exhibits monkey-like Goncourts are conservative, they also behavior, and he is unable to accomplish champion creative artists of their time and much more than creating mischief. On the mock the established practices of the École other hand, Anatole’s disregard for social des Beaux-Arts. constraints could make him a revolutionary However, the authors' anti-Semitic figure, whose free spirit adds creative energy and colonialist prejudices found within the to the otherwise dull artists’ studio. novel reveal the simultaneous attraction to, Anatole’s very close relationship with yet fear of, the foreign or exotic. In her post- his pet monkey Vermillon reinforces the colonial critique of the novel, Marie Lathers artist’s connection to animals. “It seemed focuses on the ways in which the characters that the monkey felt linked to this boy, whose in the book have been “naturalized” and nature was so similar, so supple, so elastic, “domesticated,” similar to foreign animals with such a mobile physiognomy: he found that were brought into France and put on in him a bit of his own race; it was a man, public display.[xi] One of the focuses of this but almost a man of his own particular study is the way in which the family.”[xvi] Anatole is almost a monkey-man: novel, as a prime example of French artistic one who fits within both the categories of literature, artificially constructs the concept humans and animals. This concept was of the “natural,” and “natural vision” in popular in the scientific climate of the time. particular, through the creation of the myth The novel was written five years after the of the artist-animal. French translation of Darwin's Origin of the “Natural” can be defined as “that Species and was influenced by Buffon, the which belongs to nature, that which is not director of the Jardin des Plantes and the the product of human practice.” [xii] This Muséum national d’histoire naturelle from definition is, of course, problematic because 1739 to 1788. Although Buffon believed that it assumes that humans are separate from apes did not have a soul like humans, he nature and humans’ creations are discussed the remarkable physical similarities unnatural. In the novel, the artist functions as between humans and monkeys, describing an intermediary between the natural and the the orangutan as having a body more similar urban worlds. He observes animals at the to man than other apes.[xvii] Jardin des Plantes and other environments As the two spend time together, and “reports” the animals’ physical Anatole adopts the monkey-like characteristics and behavior to an urbane characteristics and behaviors of Vermillon. public. The artist’s role as a reporter or an “The two friends faded into each other. If observer parallels the Goncourt brothers’ own Vermillon made Anatole more monkey-like, role in the nineteenth-century society.[xiii] The Anatole made Vermillon more artistic. Next Goncourt brothers provide detailed to him, Vermillon developed a taste for descriptions of contemporary figures. painting.”[xviii] The chiasmus in this passage, However, they tend to naturalize these as well as the expression “faded into figures and depict them in terms of each,” suggest a symbiotic relationship animals. between the artist and his monkey. The Goncourts admired Alexandre-Gabriel

Fig.2 Jean-Siméon Chardin The Monkey Painter, Around 1739-1740

Decamps’ paintings of monkeys performing rage.[xx] Lathers,xLouis Cabanès[xxi] and R.B. human activities, particularly The Monkey Grant, read this scene between the painter Painter (1833).[xix] During Vermillon’s own and the monkey as a parody or shallow artistic exploration, the monkey eats tubes of imitation of the naturalist artist who seeks to paint, and he rips up sheets of paper in copy nature. Vermillon’s destruction

Fig.3 Alexander Gabriel Descamps The Monkey Painter, 1833

also indicates the artistic limitations of bourgeois. Anatole describes a bourgeois animals. However, it is also necessary to man as an animal from Province whose “fur consider the historical importance of the is black clothing.”[xxiii] Realist novelist Honoré animal in scientific and cultural thought at de Balzac writes that society resembles this time, which sought to bridge the gap nature, asking, “For does not society make between humans and other species, man, according to the conditions in which particularly in the arts. “All of a sudden, in the he lives and acts, into as many different men art studio, bonded, tied, one species in a as there are species in zoology?”[xxiv] As this flying race between man and beast, a quote suggests, Realist literature attempts to stampede, an uproar, cries, laughs, jumps, a naturalize nineteenth century society, furious fight.”[xxii] While Vermillon and Anatole arguing that people can be placed in are two separate individuals of two different zoological categorizations. This focus on the species who both laugh and cry, they connection between humans and animals is combine in a tornado-like flurry to become also a reaction to the urbanization of Paris one species. However, it is in the artist’s and the decline of nature at this time. The studio, through the artificial lens of painting, role of the creative writer or artist in mid that this union between man and animal nineteenth-century Paris seems to be to takes place. bridge the gap between the urban and the In the novel, virtually every subset of natural. society is classified in terms of animals, Thus, the novel’s focus on “nature,” regardless of whether bohemian or whether it be through green, urban spaces,

80 such as the Jardin des Plantes, through the Fountainebleu forest outside of Paris, or through animal-like characters, such as Anatole, Manette, or the Barbizon artist Crescent, creates a sort of release valve from daily, urban life, which becomes a source of creative inspiration. The authors construct the narrative that the Jardin des Plantes, in particular, is a “divine land.”[xxv] In contrast, according to most historical documentation, the animals in the garden’s menagerie were actually kept in enclosed spaces in dirty, miserable conditions.[xxvi] Most of the animals were kept behind metal bars with nothing but dirt inside their small cages. They were deprived of vegetation and some huddled under used hospital blankets to keep warm.[xxvii] Paradoxically, both the Goncourt brothers and artists, such as Eugène Delacroix and Henri Rousseau, create the illusion that the animals in the Jardin des Plantes thrive in a lush, natural environment Fig.4 Edgard Degas that is separate from urban Paris. However, The Cafe Concert (The Song of the Dog), 1875-1877 the fact that animals lived in cages and slept under hospital blankets reinforces the Jardin’s status as a civil institution such as a jail or a hospital. Thus, the artistic obsession traits with other animal species and with animals was part of an urban reinforced it with scientific evidence. The aesthetic. In naturalizing the urbane, the Fitzwilliam Museum of Cambridge University's novel justifies and reinforces the emerging Endless Forms exhibition in 2009 has brought urban and industrial society of mid the impact of Darwin on the Impressionists to nineteenth-century Europe, and its colonial public attention. The exhibition showcases and hegemonic structure. On one artists such as Paul Cezanne, who looked at hand, Manette Salomon expresses fossil formations to paint Rocks (1867-70) nostalgia for a mythical Eden-like space in and Edgar Degas, who read which humans and animals lived in Darwin’s Expression of the Emotions in harmony. On the other hand, the novel is an Animals and painted animal-like features expression of modernity and is perhaps a onto human subjects.[xxviii] precursor to modern art. Edmond de Goncourt had certainly read Darwin in the 1870's and 1880's, and in Science, Art and Literature Intertwine his novel La Faustin (1882), the character Lillette is a translator of Darwin. However, in The biological sciences inspired both literary the literary sphere of the 1860’s, there is no and artistic works at this time. This canon of evidence to suggest that Darwin directly literature includes the works of the Goncourt influenced Manette Salomon. Instead, the brothers, Balzac’s La Comédie novel is based on the writers' own humaine (1830-1845), and Zola’s Rougon understanding of Buffon as well as popular Macquart series (1871-1893), which science. Scholars have noted the authors' corresponded with the French translation of misreading of Buffon in their works. For Darwin's The Origin of Species (1862) example, the Goncourt brothers described and The Expressions of Emotions in Humans Vermillion, the pet Rhésus monkey and Animals (1877). The recent publication in Manette Salomon, as the same monkey of Darwin’s theory of evolution strengthened that Buffon had called a the belief that humans shared common Memnon.[xxix] However, Lathers points out

81 contemplating the mysteries of the world. Popular science paralleled the young artists who had sought their independence from the Académie.[xxxiii] Like avant-garde art, science fiction was a means of subverting established beliefs and ideas. Science fiction writers such as Jules Verne often took a fictionalized, fantastical interpretation to scientific theories that were being disseminated throughout the country. Manette Salomon is an amalgamation of personal interpretations of scientific theories that suggest man's biological connection to animals, independent of societal constraints.

Aesthetic Philosophy and Literary Criticism

Manette Salomon contains the fantasy of a naïve return to a mythical primitive existence. At the same time, this fantasy is presented as an integral part of modern life. The Goncourt brothers believe that the artist has an extremely developed sensitivity, which could Fig.5 Henri Hildibrand be similar to that of an animal.[xxxiv] The Illustration for Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the perceived connection between animals and Sea, 1877 © Archives Larbor artists seems to stem from the idea that creativity relies on sensational or intuitive that the Rhésus is not the same thing as the drives rather than rational or intellectual Memnon.[xxx] The Goncourt brothers do not faculties. In his reading of Manette Salomon, directly follow Buffon’s ideas to the letter. Crouzet argues that modern art claims to Instead, the authors incorporate their own stem from a “dis-intellectualized eye,” which personal understanding of Buffon’s ideas in a attempts to display a true perception that is nineteenth-century literary and artistic uncorrupted by technical artifice or acquired context. knowledge of how an object ought to The Goncourt brothers had little look.[xxxv] The myth of the creative artist as scientific background.[xxxi] As the authors naïve or innocent is found in the art critic were not scientists, biological findings served John Ruskin’s influential book The Elements as a basis for developing a pseudo-scientific of Drawing (1856-1857), from which ideas explanation for artistic creativity while also circulated throughout Western Europe. Arthur sparking the authors' literary imagination. At Danto points out that Ruskin seeks to reject this time in France, the phenomena of previous conceptions, schools and models in popular science and science fiction his work and instead portray a sense of exploded. “Between the end of the 17th and “ocular innocence.”[xxxvi] the 19th-centuries, what would later be called The artist in Manette Salomon is science fiction begins to take shape as an both naïve and urbane. For example in the autonomous fictional domain as concerns its novel, Chassignol, an artist, describes Coriolis materials, themes and narrative formats has being “a sensory machine.... he who has derived from the varying sort of merveilleux, eyes! How! He has his time before him, and utopias, imaginary voyages and texts of he doesn't see it! No, he doesn't see it, that scientific popularization.”[xxxii] animal!”[xxxvii] While such sensitivity enables During a time of industrial progress the artist to see artistically (“he who has and scientific development, fiction became eyes”), it also prevents him from achieving a vehicle for imagining utopian spaces and self-awareness (“he doesn't see it!”). In this

82 passage, the artist could be conceived as a modern, city life. The novel opens with a purely sentient being that is both animal-like guide giving a tour of the Jardin des Plantes. and machine-like. This paradoxical image The Goncourts describe this space: “Between characterizes a particular aesthetic of mid the tips of green trees, where the curtain of nineteenth century France. As Walter pines opened a little, the fragments of the Benjamin points out, during the construction big city extended as far as the eye could of iron and glass arcades in the city of Paris, see.”(3)[xli] This quotation highlights both the “a primitive contrivance formed—on artificial and natural landscape of the Jardin analogy with the machine—from the des Plantes. The green pine trees mask the materials of psychology, this mechanism modern city of Paris like a curtain (rideau). made of men, produces the land of milk The imagery of a curtain suggests that the and honey, the primeval wish- Jardin des Plantes is almost like a theatrical symbol.”[xxxviii] This quotation indicates that set that hides the backstage of the venue. Fourier’s industrial utopia satisfies a type of The pine curtain allows the visitor to partially human wish fulfillment or urge for a primal lose his or her view of the city in favor of a nature. Thus, the artist and the architect of more “natural” perspective. This garden mid nineteenth-century Paris are creates the myth that an artist painting in the embodiments of both the primal and the Jardin des Plantes would lose his or her modern. cultural conditioning and view the world from While Manette Salomon obviously a more naïve understanding.[xlii] At the same differs from visual works of art, the novel was time, the viewer is still able to see the city. written in an Impressionistic style. However, The text itself undermines the myth of nature the novel is set from 1840 to 1860, before as separate from the urban, revealing that the Impressionist movement. One could the Jardin des Plantes is an artificial argue, as Crouzet does, that the Goncourt construction. brothers anticipated the Impressionist As ecological scholar Timothy movement before it existed, incorporating Morton writes, suburban nature, such as city the key elements of Impressionist art in their or national parks and backyards, vacillates literary tableau.[xxxix] This novel depicts between appearing natural and artificial. On outdoor spaces that were written sur scène, one hand, parks and campsites rely on such as the Jardin des Plantes, and modern conveniences such as running water and subjects, such as the bohemian, Anatole. In trashcans to function. On the other hand, the novel, the authors emphasize the according to Morton, these spaces contain external qualities of objects such as color so many visual clues to suggest that they are and shape and their placement in relation to “natural” that they become “super-natural” or other objects. The authors also describe the “hyper-real.” He writes, “We flip like a way in which changes in light alter the lenticular photo from artificial nature to physical appearance of objects and natural artifice.”[xliii] Although Morton is people. Some nineteenth-century reviewers, discussing suburban nature in the twenty-first such as Alphonse Duchesne, applauded the century, Manette Salomon certainly novel for its artistic descriptions that contains these notions of “artificial nature” resembled paintings.[xl] Because the novel is and “natural artifice.” As previously an example of literary impressionism that mentioned, the Goncourt brothers can be attempts to graphically describe the visual seen as the fathers of Impressionist writing, arts, the text itself demonstrates its own and they write as if they were painting. For artifice. The novel is at once a Naturalist work example, Alphonse Duchesne wrote and an Impressionist work, meaning that it of Manette Salomon, in 1867, that the uses painterly techniques to construct the authors do not write, but “paint.”[xliv] The myth of a primal nature. detailed visual descriptions in the novel contribute to its realism. Nineteenth century The Jardin des Plantes: the Artistic criticism of Manette Salomon has either Gateway criticized or lauded its hyper-realism and likeness to painting. For example, Albert Wolff The novel describes the Jardin des Plantes in dismissed the novel in his article in Le terms of an idyllic escape from the chaos of Figaro on November 26th, 1867, for being

83 of the scene. Finally, the cloud that covers Paris masks the view of the city, just as the work itself attempts to mask (“obscuring” and “covered”) signs of urbanity, although it is continuously present in the text. During this period, the Jardin des Plantes was the center for both artistic and scientific development. Many artists such as Eugène Delacroix, Rosa Bonheur, Edouard Manet and Henri Rousseau painted animals in the park’s menagerie. The novel describes this garden as not only a foundation for the avant-garde artistic movement, but also as the very heart of the city of Paris itself. One of the governmental purposes of the Jardin des Plantes was to create a menagerie that would be a beautiful, “living painting” of natural history to edify the public.[xlvii] The comparison to a painting indicates that the menagerie is an artificial aesthetic construction that has little regard for the quality of life of the animals within it. In addition to being a popular meeting place for promenades and family visits to the menagerie, the Jardin des Plantes was a Fig.6 place where scientific knowledge, such as Statue of Buffon at Jardin des Plantes new findings concerning animal behavior, hybridization and comparative anatomy was too “realistic,” and thus lacking imagination disseminated.[xlviii] Public lectures on or intrigue. Wolff argued that the characters evolution and the ability to observe animals were “copies of reality.”[xlv] However, in captivity made people aware of their Duchenese applauded the novel because physiological relationship to animals. The of its painterly qualities. Because the novel is prominence of the Jardin in the novel self-conscious that it is a work of art, the indicates that an understanding of animals authors’ descriptions of “nature” (or the Jardin may be an essential foundation for the des Plantes) use clear indications that they artistic process of this time. After all, because are artificial constructions. animals were absent in urban spaces, it was Although the book presents the the role of art, literature and zoological parks myth of artistic naïveté, the use of to disseminate their images. Impressionistic writing makes the reader One of the purposes of the Jardin is aware of its own artifice. For example, the to provide the urbane artist with access to authors describe the Jardin des Plantes, particular plant and animal life that he or she “Further along, at the last line of the horizon, would normally not be able to view in Paris. a hill where the eye guessed a kind of In turn, this experience would enable the obscuring of houses, the stages of a cliff in artist to better depict the “natural” world. sea fog vaguely appeared. Above that, a According to the Notice on the Degree of cloud amassed over all of Paris. It was a Utility of The Natural History Museum heavy, dark purple haze.”[xlvi] The first clue of Thermidor in 1792, the menagerie seeks that the Goncourt brothers allude to to reshape the role of the artist, as a “faithful paintings in their written description is the copier” of nature in contrast to an artist who word “line,” as if to indicate that the horizon is would “dishonor” his work by depicting an artificial, painted line. “Vaguely” could animals according to previous artistic suggest the vague, nebulous imagery of representations.[xlix] This myth is similar to that Impressionism. The mention of the color of the Goncourt brothers. For example, the “purple” also points out the aesthetic quality authors write of Anatole that “[h]e spent

84 days studying animals at the Jardin des Plantes. He reported their voice and their song.”[l] This artist’s ability to study and imitate the sounds of animals illustrates the myth that he is able to communicate with the natural world. As Marie Lathers suggests, the Jardin des Plantes becomes a natural atelier where painters are able to portray their experience with nature.[li] The word “reported” in Manette Salomon indicates that the artist functions as a reporter. He may enter into the animal world and then report back his findings to a human public. Thus, for the authors, the Jardin is a microcosm of the human species, which is animal-like in nature. It is fitting that Manette Salomon begins and ends near the menagerie inside the Jardin des Plantes. The Jardin, like other similar institutions in Europe, was a meeting place for people to interact Fig.7 with other living creatures and to recall “The New Feline Rotunda in the Jardin des “notions of a primitive yearning stamped Plantes,” Illustrated Supplement of the Petit Journal. 31 onto the human psyche early in our March, 1895 evolution.”[lii] Similarly,Xin ManetteXSalomon, the artist Coriolis feels the need to spend of knowledge, history or societal time “in the healthy, calm air of vegetation. expectations. The animal in him needed to be in green This passage reinforces the spaces. Also he was pleased to be in this nineteenth-century quest for an “absolute space that was so dead to all the noises of original state” of being during which one the capital.”[liii] “The animal in him” reinforces would experience a sense of the narrative that within the artist, as well as interconnectednessXandXwholeness.[lvi] How perhaps within all humans, is an animalistic, ever, as previously mentioned, Anatole “primitive yearning” for green spaces. achieves oneness with nature by becoming At the end of the Goncourt brothers’ a zookeeper: “Enclosing the sun and the novel, Anatole lives in an apartment next to ferocious beasts in the cages of the the Jardin des Plantes, which is described as menagerie where the red lions walk in the an idyllic, natural paradise. “He abandons flame of the hour, where the tiger that himself to all these things. He forgets himself, passes back and forth seems at each time he loses himself in seeing, hearing and to take onto the stripes of his coat one of the aspiring.”[liv] Nature becomes for Anatole a stripes of his bars.”[lvii] This passage could be sort of tabula rasa where all previous read as: the stripes on the tiger correspond knowledge is effaced. The book ends with to the stripes on the cage, indicating that the the sentence, “In the middle of this universe status of the animal is analogous to a of familiar and trustworthy animals, as if prisoner. This tragic image reflects the returning to a divine land, the former treatment of animals in the nineteenth bohemian relived the joys of Eden, and he century. This passage is one of the only times felt rising inside of him, in an almost celestial that the novel mentions that animals were in manner, something like the felicity of the first cages in the menagerie. The artistic man in front of virgin nature.”[lv] The novel representation of caged animals is rare in constructs the fantasy that the entrance of the nineteenth century, perhaps because the Jardin des Plantes becomes a portal to society preferred to imagine them as free Eden, a spiritual haven where the artist instead of in deplorable states of experiences the happiness that Adam must confinement.[lviii] have felt, unburdened by the heavy weight According to the Illustrated

85 Supplement of the Petit Journal on March live on his own. When he stays with Coriolis 31st, 1895, titled: “The New Feline Rotunda in and Manette, “Manette [makes] Anatole the Jardin des Plantes,” the cages for lions return to his humble place in the house, to and tigers in the late nineteenth- the inferiority and parasitism of his century were cramped and contributed to position.”[lxii] Anatole is like a domestic animals’ unhappiness and illness (103).[lix] It is animal that functions as a parasite off of his perplexing why a nineteenth-century public, owners and is forced to “stay in his place” which was so fascinated by the similarities and be treated as an inferior. His status is between humans and animals, would keep similar to the status of animals in modern them in such wretched conditions that the cities that usually cannot survive on their own animals would become ill. Perhaps accord without being kept as pets in homes menageries are a means of confining, or as prisoners in zoos. controlling and dominating the non-human Anatole finally is able to become self- world. Although, in some ways, the Biblical supporting through his career as a and Buffonian conception that man should zookeeper at the end of the novel. have dominion over animals began to shift Interestingly, according to an article in in the mid nineteenth-century, the institution the Petit Journal on the new lion cage in the of the menagerie reveals the cruel Jardin des Plantes, the zookeeper is a mistreatment of animals at this time. defender of animals who does not see them On the other hand, the fictional tiger as inferior to human beings. “As the brave in Manette Salomon is mobile inside his zookeeper said, ‘[t]hey are animals like cage. He is able to “pass back and forth” in us.’”[lxiii] Both Seigel and Champeau note the spite of his confinement. The constraint of irony in that by giving up a bohemian lifestyle the cage could even protect the tiger from for a governmental job, while Anatole is able harm. According to Nigel Rothfels, animal to achieve a harmony with nature in an theorist, zoological historians argue that idyllic paradise.[lxiv] This idea might suggest nineteenth and twentieth century zoos differ that any artist who desires to be connected from the menageries of the past because to nature must have the financial means to their aim was to educate, edify and support himself. He or she must in some way entertain the public and conserve animals be still part of civilization. The novel affirms rather than illustrate imperial the artist’s mythical affinity with animals. power.[lx] Modern zoos employ the myth that Conversely, at the end of the novel, Anatole they are actually beneficial to both the is connected to animals in his role as a public and the animals. Zoos claim to zookeeper in a menagerie who locks protect and to preserve species of animals animals in cages. As previously mentioned, that are disappearing in great numbers due the Jardin des Plantes seems to be an to human induced environmental intermediary between the natural world and destruction. “The animals are otherwise modern civilization. As a zookeeper, the happy here because they are no longer modern artist is able to experience the free. [...] One can conserve them for longer, “great animal joy”[lxv] and still exercise and it is a pleasure to see them leap and human domination over animals. In contrast, exhibit their own attitudes.”[lxi] there are many instances throughout the In this sense, while the urban novel where the avant-garde artist seeks to environment destroys animals and plants, it liberate his or her own perception from social also employs institutions to nurture and conditioning. Perhaps one could think of protect them. The animal is only able to exist Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s idea, in modern, urban society if it accepts the expressed in Kafka’s metamorphosis, that constraint of the zoo. Similarly, the marginal becoming animal is a means of fleeing artist, who is depicted as close to an animal, oppression, even if it takes place in a requires certain societal constraints in order cage.[lxvi] Although Anatole is confined to to survive in the modern world. During his life being a part of civil society with his as a bohemian artist, Anatole is described as governmental job and his only exposure to a parasite several times in the novel. He animals through bars, he is still, in some must live off of other people and stay in his sense, liberated. He becomes in touch with friends’ houses because he cannot afford to his “animal essence,” which is an integral

Fig.8 Eugène Delacroix A Young Tiger Playing with its Mother, 1830-1831

part of the human condition itself. a bit present in everything that flies, in For Deleuze and Guattari, the everything that crawls, in everything that animal signifies a creative line of escape runs.”[lxviii] This ending is a depiction of from the constraints and institutions of Anatole’s sense of oneness with his society.[lxvii] This process may even occur environment; he becomes a part of nature. within a cage or within the shackles of Anatole feels as if he metamorphoses into a human civilization because “becoming tree and then later into different types of animal” indicates a transformation during animals. The repetition of the word which a person perceives differently from the “everything” (tout) emphasizes the sensation rest of human society even if he still exists of oneness because the animals are not within that society. This transformation is a individuated. creative one, allowing for the possibility of In addition to the fantasy of a return novel, artistic breakthroughs. This study has to wholeness, the text also reveals the already mentioned the myth of the creative freedom of Anatole to “innocent eye,” that the artist sees in a naïve, metamorphose into other creatures and animalistic manner. The final scene in the objects. As Deleuze and Guattari write, novel presents Anatole’s entire body as “Everything that is in the animal is being infused with nature, where all of life metamorphosis.”.[lxix] Anatole’s lack of fixed around him penetrates his very being. “He let identity and his affiliation with animals gives himself melt into it and stayed wading in its him infinite creative potential to shift and to stream. A delicious sensation comes upon transform. According to Deleuzian thought, him like ancient metamorphoses that plant the possibility of metamorphosis is linked to men in the Earth and make them grow novel and revolutionary art that no longer branches for arms. He glides into the upholds social rules or normative surrounding beings. It seems to him that he is constructions (Bouaniche 21).[lxx] However,

87 because Anatole only finds this freedom the Jardin des Plantes. The nineteenth inside the institution of the Jardin des Plantes, century witnessed an incredible interest in he is both bound and liberated by social animals and a profound appreciation for norms and codes. animal beauty that still exists today. One can The novel constructs the myth of an only hope that this aesthetic admiration for idealized nature and the narrative that the animals will eventually translate to a concern avant-gardist is closer to nature and animals for their wellbeing and rights. than other people. This is perhaps because the artist can paint his or her imagination of Notes and References the natural world even if it is in decline. Manette Salomon thus certainly (i). I have included my own translations from the emphasizes the quality of “artificial nature” original French.“enfermant le soleil et les féroces dans ses cages, la ménagere où le roux des lions marche and “natural artifice.” In its attempt to bridge dans la flamme de l'heure.” Edmond and Jules de the gap between the urbanized and the Goncourt. Manette Salomon. Gallimard, 1996, p. natural world, the novel naturalizes many of 547. the horrors of modern civilization, such as the mistreatment and cruelty of animals in the (ii). John Berger. About Looking. New York: Vintage Jardin des Plantes and the society’s Books, 1980. colonialist attitudes that seek to assimilate all that is foreign or marginal. Because of these (iii). Akira Lippit. Electric Animal: Toward Rhetoric of Wildlife. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, societal pressures and conventions, the 2000, p. 1. modern artist is perhaps akin to a “caged animal” in the Jardin des Plantes. His (iv). Randy Malamud. Reading Zoos Representations livelihood and survival is dependent upon of Animals in Captivity. New York. New adopting the mores and practices of his York University Press, 1998, p. 2. society, yet his imagined affinity with animals and nature makes him open and receptive (v). (Malamud 2-7). to the creative forces of the universe. (vi). (Goncourt 122). Manette Salomon is thus truly an ambivalent text. As Malamud argues, the (vii). Susan McHugh. Animal Stories: Narrating across critical reader must resist being seduced by SpeciesxLines. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota descriptions of the menagerie as an Edenic Press, 2000, p. 2. space or a natural utopia. The novel champions the conservationist claim that (viii). (McHugh 3). zoos are spaces to protect fragile creatures that would otherwise perish in modern cities. (ix). Jerrold Seigel. Bohemian Paris Baltimore: John However, as Pick writes, zoos, as gloomy Hopkins, 1999, p.180. institutions that imprison animals, play a role (x). (Seigel, 172). in their eventual disappearance.[lxxi] At the same time, Manette Salomon should also (xi). Marie Lathers. “Models, Monkeys and be recognized as a groundbreaking novel in Naturalism.” Bodies of Art. French Literary Realism and the field of posthumanistic studies. The novel the Artist’s Model. Lincoln: University of Nebraska, is a literary narrative that attempts to explain 2001. some of the most remarkable art in human history in terms of biological processes, (xii). “Qui appartient à la nature; qui n'est pas le produit d'une pratique humaine.” Trésor de la langue which are shared by both humans and francaise informatisé. http://atilf.atilf.fr/. animals. As McHugh asserts, the field of animal studies “pushes the limits of (xiii). James Fitzmaurice-Kelly. “Preface.” Renée exclusively human ways of Mauperin. London: Vizetelly & Co., 1988, xxviii. being.”[lxxii] Manette Salomon denies the assumption that artistic creativity is a uniquely (xiv). “un petit animal” (Goncourt 149), and “petit human process. Despite the horrors of the cochon, vous ne travaillez pas” (Goncourt 119). menagerie, it is difficult not to revel in the sublime beauty of Baryne’s lions, Delacroix’s (xv). “Il était né avec les malices de singe. Enfant, lorsqu’on le ramenait au collège, il prenait tout à coup tigers or Rousseau’s monkeys, all painted at sa course à toutes jambes et se mettait à crier de 88 toutes les forces de crapaud, ‘V’là la révolution qui (xxx). (Lathers 56). commence'” (Goncourt 103). (xxxi). Roger Bozetto and Arther Evans. “Intercultural (xvi). “Il semblait que le singe se sentait comme Interplay: science Fiction in France in The United rapproché par un voisinage de nature de ce garçon si States (As Viewed from the French Shore).” Science souple, si élastique, à la physionomie si mobile; il Fiction Studies 17.1 (1990): 1-24, p. 3. retrouvait en lui en peu sa race; c’était bien un homme, mais presque un homme de sa (xxxii). (Bozzetto 3). famille” (Goncourt 230). (xxxiii). Crosland, Maurice. “Popular Science and the (xvii). Butler, Samel. Evolution, Old and New: Or, The Arts: Challenges to Cultural Authority in France Under Theories of Buffon, 1879, p. 176. the Second Empire.” The British Journal for the History http://archive.org/details/evolutionoldand01butlgoog of Science 34.4 (2001): 301-322, p. 315.

(xviii). “Les deux amis avaient déteint l’un sur l’autre. Si (xxxiv). (Champeau, 57). Vermillon avait donné le singe à Anatole, Anatole avait donné de l’artiste à Vermillon. Vermillon avait (xxxv). (Crouzet 53). contracté, à côté de lui, le goût de la peinture”

(xxxvi). Arthur C Danto. “Animals as Art (Goncourt 229). Historians.” Beyond the Brillo Box: The Visual Arts in Post- Historical Perspective. University of California Press, (xix). (Champeau 228). 1998, p. 21.

(xx). (Goncourt 237). (xxxvii). “Coriolis qui a ça, un tempérament qui est doué, lui qui est quelqu’un, un nerveux, un sensitif... (xxi). Cabanès, Jean-Louis. “Manette Salomon: Copie une machine à sensations… lui qui a des yeux! et polyphonie.” Voix de l’écrivain : mélanges offerts à Comment ! Il a son temps devant lui, et il ne le voit Guy Sagnes. Toulouse: Presses Universitaires du Mirail, pas ! Non, il ne voit pas ! Cet animal-là!” (Goncourt 1996, p. 35. Fasquelle edition 322).

(xxii). Tout à coup, dans l’atelier, des bonds, des (xxxviii). Walter Benjamin (trans. Howard Eiland and élancements, une espèce de course volante entre Kevin McLaughlin). “Paris: Capital of the Nineteenth- l’homme et bête, un bousclement, un culbutis, un Century.” The Arcades Project. Cambridge: Belknap tapage, des cris, des rires, des sauts, une lutte Press, 2003, p. 5. furieuse…” (Goncourt 229). (xxxix). (Crouzet 31). (xxiii). “Cet animal vient de Province, son pelage est un habit noir” (Goncourt 172). (xl). (Goncourt 558).

(xxiv). “Je vis que, sous ce rapport, la Société (xli). “Entre les pointes des arbres verts, là où s’ouvrait ressemblait à la Nature. La Société ne fait-elle pas de un peu le rideau des pins, des morceaux de la grande l’homme, suivant les milieux où son action se déploie, ville s’étendait à perte de vue” (Goncourt. Fasquelle autant d’hommes différents qu’il y a de variétés en Edition 3). zoologie?” Honoré de Balzac. Œuvres complètes de H. de Balzac: Un épisode sous la terreur. Calmann (xlii). “Confiez-moi votre œil… Je n’en abuserai pas! Lévy, 1892, p. 2. Approchez, Mesdames et messieurs! Je vais vous faire voir ce que vous allez voir!” (Goncourt 83). (xxv). (Goncourt 447). (xliii). Morton, Timothy. “All the corners of the (xxvi). Francis Morris et al. Henri Rousseau: Jungles in buildings.” Ecology without Nature. 15 May, 2009. Paris. New York: Abrams, 2006. .

(xxvii). Nancy Ireson. Interpreting Rousseau. London : (xliv). “Vous n’écrivez pas. Écrire! À quoi bon? Vous Tate, 2005, p. 52. faites mieux. Vous peinez” (Goncourt 557).

(xxviii). “Darwin and the Impressionists.” Endless (xlv). (Goncourt, 556). Forms: Darwin, Natural Science and the Visual Arts. (xlvi). “Plus loin, à la dernière ligne de l’horizon, une colline où l’œil devinait une sorte d’enfouissement de (xxix). “Vermillon était un macaque Rhésus, maisons, figurait vaguement les étages d’une falaise le macaque appelé Memnon par Buffon” (Goncourt dans un brouillard de mer. Là-dessus pesait un grand 231).

89 nuage amassé sur tout le bout de Paris qu’il couvrait, (lx). Rothfels, Nigel. Savages and Beasts: The Birth of une nuée lourde, d’un violet sombre” (Goncourt 81). the Modern Zoo. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 2002, p. 38. (xlvii). “une menagerie qui serait un tableau vivant d’histoire naturelle.” Luc Vezin. Les Artistes au Jardin (lxi). “Les animaux y vivent sinon heureux puisqu’ils ne des Plantes. Paris: Herscher, 1990, p. 46. sont plus libres, (...) on peut les conserver plus longtemps et c’est un plaisir de les voir s’élancer, (xlviii). Yves. Laissus. “Le Muséum national d'Histoire prendre les attitudes qui sont les propres” (Petit naturelle et l'animal.” Beauté Animale. Réunion des Journal 103). musées nationaux, 2012, p. 170. (lxii). “Manette faisait redescendre Anatole à l’humble (xlix). (Vezin 46). place qu’il avait dans la maison, à l’infériorité et au parasitisme de sa position” (Goncourt 436). (l). “Des journées qu’il passait au Jardin des Plantes à (lxiii). “Comme disait un brave gardien, ce sont des bêtes comme nous” (Petit Journal 103). étudier les animaux, il rapportait leur voix, leur chant” (Goncourt 105). (lxiv). “Par son emploi de Jardin des Plantes accède une sorte d’Eden, retrouve un Paradis perdu…” (li). (Lathers, 147). Stephanie Champeau. La notion d’artiste chez les Goncourt. Paris: Champion, 2000, pg. 48. (lii). Steven Spotte. Zoos in Post Modernism. Cranbury: Associated U. Press. 2006, p. 13. (lxv). (Goncourt 547).

(liii). “dans l’air sain et calmant de la vie végétative. La (lxvi). “Nous disons que, pour Kafka, l’essence animale bête, chez lui, avait besoin de se mettre au vert. Aussi est l’issue, la ligne de fuite, même sur place ou dans la eut-il plaisir à se sentir dans cet endroit si bien mort à cage” Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Kafka pour tous les bruits d’une capitale” (Goncourt, Fasquelle une littérature mineure. Paris: Les éditions de minuit. edition 237). 1975, p. 35.

(liv). “Il s’abandonne à toutes ces choses, Il s’oublie, il (lxvii) “C’est une ligne de fuite créatrice” (Deleuze and se perdre à voir, à écouter, et à aspirer” (Goncourt Guattari 65). 547).

(lxviii) “Ce qui est autour de lui le pénètre par tous les (lv). “Au milieu de cet univers d’animaux familiers et pores et la Nature l’embrassant par tous le sens, il se confiants comme sur une terre divine encore, l’ancien laisse couler en elle, et reste à s’y tremper. Une bohème revit des joies d’Eden et il s’élève en lui, sensation délicieuse lui vient en monte le long de lui presque célestement, comme un peu de la félicité du comme en ces métamorphoses antiques qui premier homme en face de la nature vierge” replantaient l’homme dans la Terre, en lui faisant (Goncourt 547). pousser des branches aux jambes. Il glisse dans les êtres qui sont là. Il lui semble qu’il est un peu dans tout (lvi). Michel Crouzet. “Préface.” Manette ce qui vole, dans tout ce qui croit, dans tout ce qui Salomon. Paris: Gallimard, 1996, p. 50. court” (Goncourt 547).

(lvii). “Anatole a devant lui la ménagerie enfermant le (lxix). “Tout dans l’animal est métamorphose” (Deleuze soleil et les féroces dans les cages la ménagerie où le and Guattari 64). roux des lions marche dans la flamme de l’heure, où le tigre qui passe et repasse semble emporter chaque (lxx). “ne passe plus par les codes sociaux et les fois sur les raies de sa robe les raies de ses barreaux” constructions normatives.”Arnaud Bouaniche. Gilles (Goncourt 545). Deleuze, une introduction. Paris: Pocket-La Découverte, 2007, p. 21. (lviii). La représentation d’animaux dans leurs cages est assez rare au dix-neuvième siècle; on préfère les (lxxi). (Pick 104). imaginer en liberté” (Vezin 54).

(lxxii). (Mchugh 7). (lix). “où les malheureuses bêtes tournent ahuries et malades dans une boîte insuffisante où elles se Claire Nettleton is a Visiting Assistant Professor of French Studies at cognent à tous les coins.” “La nouvelle rotonde des Scripps College, a member of the Claremont Colleges in California. fauves au Jardin des plantes.” Le Petit Journal Dr. Nettleton is currently teaching an advanced course titled "From Mermaids to Catwomen: Animal Transformations in French Literature and Culture." She has also taught courses on animals in modern and supplément illustré. 31 March, 1895, p. 103. contemporary art history at the University of Paris 10. She earned her PhD in French from the University of Southern California in 2010 after successfully defending her dissertation “Primal Perception: The Artist as Animal in Nineteenth-Century France.”

ENGENDERING EMPATHY

FOR NONHUMAN

SUFFERING

Animal activists have challenged commercial dog breeding operations in a number of ways. Writing to state legislators, publishing articles in newspapers, picketing at the sites of breeding facilities, and keeping blogs and websites with pictures of and articles about animal misery are among the most common tactics. These strategies have had success in raising awareness about the inhumane treatment of dogs in these facilities. While we support these efforts, we want to introduce another way to oppose puppy mills: the graphic narrative. We contend that visual narratives or comics are an effective means by which to generate empathy and compassion for the suffering of nonhuman animals. We have created a narrative that addresses the problems puppies born and raised in breeding facilities face when they enter their new homes. Because we believe that puppy mills cause physical and emotional harm to the dogs that are raised within their walls and encourage the objectification and commodification of living beings, our hope is that this narrative will be useful as one tool among others to undermine the exploitative practices of animal breeding operations. In this paper, we introduce selections from our graphic narrative, share some of the challenges we faced in creating the story, and explain how such a narrative not only can raise awareness about the damaging effects of commercial breeding operations on the life of dogs and their human companions, but also how it can stimulate action that will address nonhuman animal exploitation and suffering. Full title: Engendering Empathy for Nonhuman Suffering: Using Graphic Narratives to Raise Awareness about Commercial Dog Breeding Operations Text by Scott Hurley I mages Daniel Bruins

he American Society for the Prevention Nebraska, Kansas, and Iowa being the seven of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) defines a states that have the largest numbers; T puppy mill as “a large-scale commercial Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Pennsylvania dog breeding operation where profit is given make up the rest (prisonersofgreed.org). In priority over the well-being of the dogs” these operations animals are produced (aspca.org). In the United States, there are without concern for their genetic quality; that 2,000 - 3,000 commercial dog breeding is, dogs are bred despite having genetic operations registered with the United States attributes that produce poor temperaments, Department of Agriculture (aspca.org). Any congenital diseases, and physical person that has at least three breeding abnormalities. Puppy mills are also notorious females and sells puppies to pet stores or for keeping dogs in squalid surroundings and brokers is required to have a license. treating them poorly. Even in the cleanest However, many of these facilities operate facilities, breeding animals do not receive illegally so the number of puppy mills selling the necessary physical and mental dogs exceeds the above estimates stimulation required for a flourishing life, and (aspca.org). The highest concentration of puppies are not properly socialized with commercial dog breeding operations can humans during key developmental periods be found in the Midwest, with Missouri, in their lives (aspca.org). Puppy mills then 91 contribute to animal suffering and produce and propagandistic. It is commonplace dogs that are potentially dangerous to among opponents of puppy mills to people. describe these places as dirty, dingy, and rundown. While there are a number of There are numerous ways that facilities like this (see Bradley 37-45), we activists challenge commercial dog recognize that many commercial dog breeding operations. Writing to state breeding operations are clean and well- legislators, publishing articles in newspapers, managed. However, puppies reared without picketing at the sites of breeding facilities, proper socialization and in confined quarters and keeping blogs and websites with still develop difficulties that cause them pictures of and articles about animal misery physical and emotional harm. That is to say, are among the most common tactics. These whether puppy mill dogs are kept in clean or strategies have had success in raising dirty conditions, fed properly or starved, they awareness about the inhumane treatment of still are likely to suffer problems with fear, dogs in puppy mills and underscoring the aggression, and anxiety. necessity for regulatory legislation that reflects an understanding of the needs of Why Graphic Narratives? animals bred to be companions. While we support these efforts, we want to introduce We argue that addressing the problems another way to oppose the operation of associated with puppy mills in a graphic puppy mills: the graphic narrative. We argue narrative format will allow readers to more that graphic narratives are an effective completely understand what life is like for means by which to generate empathy and nonhuman animals raised in commercial compassion for the suffering of nonhuman breeding facilities. The comic aspect of the animals. For now, we are focusing on puppy visual narrative, we believe, will help people mills and have created a graphic narrative engender empathy for our puppy (and, by that addresses the problems puppies born extension, puppy mill dogs) and identify with and raised in breeding facilities face when her as a living being—a “subject-of-a-life,” to they enter their new homes. Because we borrow animal rights philosopher Tom believe that puppy mills cause physical and Regan’s terminology (243-248) – and not emotional harm to the dogs that are raised regard her merely as an object, thing, or within their walls and encourage the commodity. Since the deleterious effects of objectification and commodification of living puppy mills on dogs are not fully expressed beings, our hope is that this narrative will be until after they are brought home, we felt useful as one tool among others to that the narrative form would be particularly undermine the exploitative practices of conducive to describing what happens to these operations. In this paper, we will the puppy as she acclimates to her new introduce selections from our graphic family. For example, conveying the puppy’s narrative, share some of the challenges we problem with resource guarding requires a faced in creating the story, and explain how number of frames that show the puppy such a narrative not only can raise guarding a toy and what happens when a awareness about the damaging effects of human family member tries to take that toy commercial breeding operations on the life away. Single page illustrations like those of dogs and their human companions, but found in the work of artist and animal rights also how it can stimulate action that will activist Sue Coe (e.g. see her Dead address nonhuman animal exploitation and Meat or Sheep of Fools), in our opinion, suffering.[i] would not adequately communicate the In Appendix II, we have included two difficulties experienced by the dog and the chapters from the narrative: one on resource humans facing this situation. Thus, we felt guarding and another on the difficulties of that visual representations that told an on- acclimating a puppy mill dog to a leash in going story about a puppy’s life would be far new places. In our narrative, we do not focus more effective in instructing people about on the squalid conditions that characterize the issue. life in some puppy mills because we want to Furthermore, we felt that the graphic avoid having it dismissed as sensationalist narrative genre would serve our didactic

92 goals. To reiterate, our narrative illustrates the traits, qualities, and behaviors” that influence adverse effects on a puppy’s physical health the way they respond to their environments. and temperament that derive from being On the other hand, we want audience raised in a typical commercial dog breeding members to deeply sympathize with our operation and the problems that this poor puppy’s suffering. The comic form, as we health and temperament can cause for explain in detail below, allows people to people who take these dogs into their identify and empathize with characters in homes. Some of the effects that it highlights ways that are not possible with real life include resource guarding, aggression, fear drawings or photographs. of human and canine contact, anxiety about new places and experiences, difficulty A Comment on Anthropomorphism in house training, and reoccurring illness. These are serious issues which we represent As we produced the story line of this realistically in the narrative. By doing so, we narrative, we tried very hard to avoid avoid a “children’s book feel” to our work. On anthropomorphizing the nonhuman the other hand, the comic form, rather than characters. We believe that such life-like drawings, prevents our narrative from anthropomorphism is a type of exploitation, becoming merely an encyclopedia of dog a means by which humans appropriate behavior. Our objective, then, is for our nonhuman animals for their own purposes. audience to relate to the puppy in the story, For instance, people often use their canine but not become overly sentimental about and feline companions to satisfy their her. In his article “Animals Stories, Natural emotional desires; they refer to dogs and Histories and Creaturely Wonders in Narrative cats as their children and often expect them Mini-Zines,” Andy Yang points out that to provide the kind of emotional support and comics have the ability to describe animals understanding that they need from other realistically, while at the same time allowing humans (e.g. comforting them when they readers to understand them and connect are sad or depressed). This practice is with them in new and unique ways. problematic because it does not recognize, Commenting on the short scientific comic and therefore does not respect, the very real mini-zines about animals that the Small differences between human and nonhuman Science Collective produces, he writes: animals. Dogs are marvelous, wonderful living beings because they are dogs, not Animals are not because they are humans with four legs. anthropomorphized so much Moreover, anthropomorphic language can as they are personified as a be used to disguise a living being’s pain and means to highlight their unique suffering. Animal rights activist and scholar, traits, qualities, and behaviors. . Karen Davis, discussing animal research in . the purpose in this is to create her article “Procrustean Solutions to Animal a conceptual bridge for Identity and Welfare Problems,” argues that “. conceiving the complexities of . .in vivisection. . . the victim is also what animals are, in contrast to involuntarily made to appear as an aspect what we typically or simply of the victimizer’s identity, as when scientists presume them to be (76). call animals used in vivisection experiments ‘partners’ and ‘collaborators’ in the quest for The comic form in these mini-zines remains knowledge” (44). In these cases, the very real true to the goals of scientific (realistic) suffering that nonhuman animals experience illustration, but at the same time is able to in scientific research is masked by language “communicate the possibility of what the that suggests they are colleagues in these organism’s behaviors, actions, and (perhaps pursuits — that they choose to undergo even in some sense) personality are in terms these painful experiments to aid the of how it relates to other species” (78). researcher in his/her search for “truth.” Similarly, we want our audience to recognize When we regard dogs as humans that our puppy is a dog that reacts to (human children or otherwise), we erase their situations as a dog would if she were raised canine identities, instead applying to them in a puppy mill context. Dogs have “unique human characteristics and desires—

attributes that are completely irrelevant to puppy’s emotions. Dogs often their health and well-being. In other words, if communicate what they desire or need we think or act as if they are four-legged through body language and vocal human beings, we run the risk of ignoring (or, intonation. Humans can understand these perhaps more accurately, not even physical cues and what they mean because recognizing) their needs as canines. The act they express the same kinds of emotions in of shaping dogs’ dispositions in the image of homologous ways. For example, a person our own, then, is a kind of vivisection—a knows that a dog has experienced pain dissection, manipulation, and when he cries out after stepping on a sharp reconfiguration of their natures according to object because humans also cry out when our emotional and physical needs and feeling pain like this. Similarly, human beings goals. As Karen Davis puts it, “[o]ur use can recognize emotional states like anger in becomes their [the animal’s] ontology—‘this nonhuman animals from their faces. The is what they are’—and their teleology—‘this is psychologist Paul Ekman, through his what they were made for’” (45). This is a pioneering work on facial expressions and speciesist practice that directly leads to emotion across cultures, has written that exploitation. When we anthropomorphize, we nonhuman animals, especially primates, diminish, demean, and oppress nonhuman express certain emotions in their faces in animals. In our narrative, to discourage this ways similar to humans (34); and biologist kind of anthropomorphizing, we do not have Marc Bekoff, in his book The Emotional Lives the puppy speak or act like a human being; of Animals, suggests that this is true of dogs instead, we express her thoughts through and other animals as well (53-55). single word expressions and body language: For instance, both humans and In this frame, we convey the puppy’s belief canines express anger with furrowed brow, that the toy belongs to her through facial the baring of teeth in an “offensive pucker” expressions and with the single word, “mine.” (lips forward, mouth open), tension in the The reason we use words here at all is to cheek area, and wrinkles on the bridge of facilitate the reader’s understanding of the the human nose and the canine rostrum. puppy’s emotional state. That is, the word Humans can easily recognize this emotion in merely suggests an emotion. However, words dogs because it manifests somatically in are not the only way we want to indicate the ways analogous to their own. Moreover, puppy’s feelings; we also rely on body many species indicate fear, satisfaction, and language. In fact, we could have avoided even grief through body language and words altogether and focused only on facial behavior that humans easily interpret. Bekoff expressions and body posture to convey the describes individuals from a number of

different species that “remove themselves acclaimed essayist Susan Sontag in her On from their social group, sulk. . .stop eating, Photography, photographs are “pieces of and even die. . .” when mourning the loss of the world, miniatures of reality that anyone a companion (7). From these examples, we can make or acquire” (4). We see (or at least learn that the emotional lives of humans we think we see) clearly and distinctly in share much in common with those of photographs things as they are, an nonhuman animals—a fact confirmed by unmediated vision of reality and truth. In work in evolutionary biology that has photographic images we can easily and demonstrated the physiological, quickly distinguish the strangers from the anatomical, and genetic continuity between people we know; the details of their faces human and nonhuman animals. and bodies plainly differentiate them from In our story, we expect our readers to our own faces and bodies and those of the empathize with and understand the puppy’s people we recognize. Such differentiation suffering as well as recognize the fear and can interfere with our ability to identify or anger expressed in her face. Only in this way empathize fully with these strangers. Thus, will they feel sympathy for her plight and when we see pictures of the suffering of develop the resolve to address the problems unfamiliar human or nonhuman animals, we associated with puppy mills. The challenge may feel concern, revulsion, or even horror, for us, though, is to tell this puppy’s story but we do not completely identify or without making her human, while at the empathize with their pain because we have same time having her pain and misery no relationship with them. If we cannot become palpable to our readers. So in the empathize with them, then we are far less following example we want readers to not likely to respond in ways that would alleviate only see the puppy’s distress in her face, but their suffering. also to feel it: If they can feel it, they can In graphic narratives and comic empathize with it. books, however, we are not getting an unmediated, objective view of truth – quite IV. Graphic Narratives and Empathy the contrary. The drawings in comics can convey an emotional truth that pushes the Cartoon figures in graphic narratives have reader beyond the intellect and reason. the ability to generate empathy and Commenting on Maus and Persepolis, understanding for the suffering experienced scholar Ann Cvetkovich argues that by exploited and oppressed individuals in “Spiegelman’s famous cats and mice and ways that are perhaps not possible with Satrapi’s stylized black-and-white forms photographs or film. According to the reconfigure the relation between the visual

and the truthful, demonstrating in visual form Thus, drawn images more quickly than the testimony’s power to provide forms of truth written word engender empathy (as well as that are emotional rather than factual” (114). other emotions) in readers. Moreover, The comic genre, then, can engender an cartoon characters, containing less detail in affective response in the reader more their faces and bodies, have a much efficiently than photographs or even words generalized appearance. Such an alone can. Most importantly, it facilitates the appearance allows readers to easily identify ability of the reader to experience sympathy with the drawn character because it for the character, and thereby, generate potentially resembles people they know. In empathy for his/her predicament. fact, the more a cartoon image of a living Comics can do this because the being is simplified and abstracted from its drawings are simplified and abstracted realistic form, the more individuals it can be configurations of the reality they represent. said to look like. Scott McCloud calls this the There is evidence from neuroscientific studies “universality of the cartoon image” (31). We of emotions — particularly those of anger can feel concern for the suffering of a and empathy — that emotional reactions to particular character in a graphic narrative or facial expressions precede the intellectual comic because we might see someone we processing of them (Keen 135). This is true care about in its image. Thus, in Alison even for simple line drawings: Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, we can feel the emotional pain of the young Even simplified line drawings of Bechdel when her father ignores her pleas facial expressions activate the for attention (4) because we see our own ‘quick and dirty’ subcortical children, siblings, nieces, or cousins in her bases of emotions that are place. In these cartoon drawings of our main followed by slightly slower character nervously and fearfully trying to pull cognitive responses routed by out of her leash, we want our audience the neocortex. In comics and members to recognize their own animal graphic narratives, illustrations companions in her. of faces and bodily postures We hope that they will empathize with may capitalize on the the puppy’s emotional suffering and wish to availability of visual coding for alleviate it because they would not want their human emotions, eliciting own companions to experience suffering in readers’ feelings before they a like way. even read the accompanying More significantly, though, the text (135). simplified and abstracted form of the

cartoon figure allows the reader to see The narrative provides the context by which him/herself in it; that is, to more fully identify the reader can identify with the puppy’s with it. McCloud explains that when we irritation and distress and gain information interact with another person, we pay about the circumstances behind her attention to the features of that person’s suffering. appearance — we see his/her face and body in vivid detail just like we would when The Problem of Sentimentality looking at a photograph. However, at the same time, we keep in our minds a It is in addressing the issue of sentimentality generalized image of our own face, an that perhaps our narrative invites further image that is like a sketch — more cartoon- comparison with the work of artist and like than realistic. We do not see the details animal rights activist Sue Coe. In Dead of our face like we do when looking at the Meat, Coe’s drawings emphasize the ways face of someone else (35-46). It is because that the mechanisms of agribusiness — we have this simplified version of our face particularly the abattoir — and the (and body) in our minds that we can see economic and political circumstances that ourselves in the simplified face (and body) of support them dehumanize workers and the cartoon figure. When we look into the devalue nonhuman animals. In other face of the character, we see our own words, Dead Meat underscores the injustice face—we see ourselves. McCloud states that inherent, not only in the US meat production “[t]he cartoon is a vacuum into which our industry, but also in the social and political identity and awareness are pulled…an status quo that is willing to overlook human empty shell that we inhabit which enables us and nonhuman suffering so that the desire to travel in another realm. We don’t just for meat and profit can be satisfied. Coe is observe the cartoon, we become it” (36). clearly critical of this system, and in fact While McCloud suggests that this is makes no apologies for her animal rights particularly true when we look at a human agenda. Her work is stark and unsettling — it character in a graphic narrative, we would intentionally challenges society’s ignorance argue that the same principle works even if about meat production and seeks to give the image is that of a nonhuman animal. In activists the “impetus to increase their desire, our graphic narrative, then, the reader is the desire for social change” (Contemporary able to see him/herself in the irate puppy Art 14). Steve Baker points out, however, that and therefore can identify with her frustration Coe’s work “constantly risk[s] being drawn and anger as she is cornered and guards close to a stylistic sentimentality in order to what she thinks belongs to her: express the artist’s moral and political

outrage” (The Postmodern Animal 178). sympathy and empathy surely fall. Perhaps According to Baker, sentimentality (meaning more than Coe, however, we have to be a lack of seriousness, not a decrying of particularly concerned about the charge of emotional themes) goes hand in hand with stylistic sentimentality. After all, we are moralizing (176-178). Nevertheless, Coe’s creating a comic about a puppy who is work seems to express moral concerns intended to be a companion (pet). In his without degenerating into sentimental book The Others: How Animals Made Us kitsch; Dead Meat and Sheep of Fools are Human, Paul Shepard describes the stylistically serious, and also inspire moral “sentimentality” associated with pets when outrage. he links pet dogs and cats to children’s toys. While our narrative specifically He argues that the love a child feels for his describes the effects of puppy mill stuffed animals is transferred to pet dogs and conditions on the life of animals born and cats: reared within them, we also intend that our Act IV is the transfer of this work contributes to the deconstruction of affection from effigies to dogs exploitative systems that treat nonhuman and cats. As the toys had been animals as objects or commodities. We wish pets, the pets became toys. to highlight the consumer’s complicity in the Even ‘wild’ animal manikins, viability of commercial dog breeding such as stuffed bears and lions, operations and appeal to their moral are little people in the sensibilities by demonstrating the ways that imagination, who participate in dogs and the canine-human relationship are household society…. (144). adversely affected by these facilities. Thus, similar to Coe, we hope that our work points Pets, by virtue of being “toy-like,” are easily out injustices as well as inspires action — not reduced to sentimental representations in so much for the activist, though the activist is art. For this reason, Baker points out that a corollary audience — but for the average many artists and philosophers avoid writing person who wishes to bring a dog into his/her about or portraying pets in their work for fear life. Moreover, when we explicitly emphasize that they will be faulted for overt the importance of engendering empathy in sentimentality (The Postmodern Animal 175). our audience, we reveal our solidarity with In our attempts to call attention to the feminist care ethic philosophers and scholars problems with puppy mills, we cannot avoid like Josephine Donovan and Carol Adams depicting dogs. However, we believe that (see their edited volume entitled The we escape sentimentality by representing Feminist Care Tradition in Animal Ethics) who the puppy as a real dog—not as a human strongly argue for the philosophical and being. Our puppy is not toy-like, not a stuffed theoretical legitimacy of emotion and animal character, but rather a dog that feels sentiment, moral categories under which fears, anxieties, and stress in realistic ways,

98 typical of dogs who have undergone similar advantage of allowing the reader to experiences. It is hard to be childishly completely identify with the character and sentimental when depicting the very real thereby with the animal subject. In fact, the sufferings of an animal reared in traumatic graphic narrative is perhaps the ideal form circumstances. for expressing the interconnectedness of human and nonhuman animals—the Conclusion “evolutionary kinship” that exists between species. We believe that the graphic narrative, as a The comic form of the animal, then, genre, can be a very useful method for can enable readers to recognize that the raising awareness of nonhuman exploitation very nature of human existence is intimately and inspiring action against it. As long as the tied to that of other species. Even more, it narrative avoids overt anthropomorphism can help them experience their own and sentimentality, it can convey accurate existential “equivalence” with other animals. information about animal suffering while Commenting on the animated film Brother encouraging an appropriate emotional Bear, animation scholar Paul Wells writes: connection between the reader and the character, and ultimately the human and In this [story]. . .the mythic the nonhuman. Moreover, it can weaken the infrastructure has enabled a hard and fast distinctions that humans make genuinely surprising ending in between themselves and other animals. In the sense that Kenai [the main his article “Animal Subjects of the Graphic character], in not returning to Narrative,” Michael Cheney argues that human form, renounces “comics routinely problematize the human difference and opposition by blurring the ontological boundary between humankind and animal between humans and animals. . .” (133). This and accepts the ‘psychic boundary distinguishes humans from identity’ or ‘mystical participation’ nonhumans, privileging the former over the with the animal, here made latter by objectifying the animal — turning literal and authentic by the the animal into the disempowered other. animated form, and achieves a Comics, according to Lisa Brown (by way of model of assimilation that Steve Baker), have the ability to upset this proves the essential sameness of hierarchical scheme which insists on human living creatures in the primal superiority by turning the animal’s gaze back order, now lost to the on to the human (5). In viewing the comic contemporary world (47). image of the animal, then, the reader in that moment realizes that she and the animal--in We would argue that the graphic narrative our case the puppy (and possibly the puppy genre (along with animated film) is a format mill dogs that she represents)—are freed in which the existential boundaries between from the power hierarchies that typically human and nonhuman animals is generally characterize human-nonhuman animal taken for granted in human societies interactions. collapse, leading to the recognition (and Because of their ability to generate possibly an experience) of the empathy, comics can also engender, within interconnectedness of human and the reader, the condition that Karen Davis nonhuman life. In this way, they have the has called empathic anthropomorphism “in potential to undermine the hegemonic which a person’s vicarious perceptions and discourse that assumes the human as the emotions are rooted in the realities of pivotal figure in the human-animal (human- evolutionary kinship with other animal canine) relationship and thereby upset the species, in a spirit of good will toward them” assumption that the human is at the center (47). As we have shown, cartoon images in of all experience.[ii] We hope that our graphic narratives and comics can clearly graphic narrative will allow our readers to convey pain and suffering through the achieve what Wells refers to as a kind of drawing of body language and facial “psychic identity” with the puppy in our expressions. However, they have the added narrative — one that will help the reader see,

99 think, and feel from the perspective of the being bad images, they have so far been puppy mill dog, and in this way encourage less effective than desired, and the crafting an empathy that will move them to action. of simple, elegant imagery has proven more difficult than I expected. APPENDIX 1 In addition to aesthetic refinements, I spent a good deal of time developing A Statement by the Artist methods for the production of graphic narratives in a time-based, animation-like While my previous experience with illustration, format. In this format the image is presented graphic design, comic books, and as part of an environment in motion, and animation created a basis of knowledge on exists as a moment in linear time. This which this project was built, the habits medium potentially allows for a deeper level developed over the years also proved to be of immersion as it creates a final work that is a personal challenge. My tendency to make watched, listened to, and read images that behave more like a window into simultaneously. Unfortunately, there is almost a three-dimensional world than a two- no way for works made in such a format to dimensional iconographic image had the be translated to print or digital display without effect of creating what is known in visual losing a great deal of its original power. In communications as a “high barrier of entry.” addition to this, the process of animation is The barrier of entry is the point at which a prohibitively time-intensive, greatly increasing reader is able to easily digest the images production time. Therefore, I abandoned shown to them. The barrier is usually tied to this approach for this project. the level of visual complexity in the image and whether the audience’s attention is My Research drawn to the image itself, or the story of which it acts a part. The visual research for this project began Comics or cartoons with a low barrier with the observation of various dogs and a of entry, such as Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, study of the canine skeletal system in order utilize simple, elegant images that function to achieve a better understanding of how as symbols to be read, weaving themselves these animals are constructed, how they into the larger narrative in the same way that move, and how they can be abstracted words do. As single images they have while still retaining their recognizable qualities. minimal value or impact, but when used in a The process of character and aesthetic narrative format, they become tools for design is still being explored in order to arrive storytelling. Low barrier images are more at a more effective, coherent, and visually effective at drawing attention to complex or pleasing stylization. Character design begins abstract issues as they work to convey with the creation of a unique and easily complex ideas without being overly recognizable silhouette of the character, complicated themselves. This makes low which allows the reader to immediately barrier images ideal for narratives that take identify which characters are which in any place in the real world and focus on abstract given panel without needing it explained to commentary. them. The current iteration of this visual Graphic narratives with high barriers aesthetic resembles the futurist movement of of entry, such as Alan Moore’s Watchmen the early 1900’s, which attempts to depict (1995) and V for Vendetta (2008), and Ari motion via a series of geometric, stylized Folman’s Waltz with Bashir (2009), have much shapes. These shapes represent the figures more complex image construction. High and environment. Color is then added in barrier works tend to focus on the narrative order to create a sense of mood, or to on an image-by-image basis with a higher create a visual contrast with the characters, density of visual cues per image. These drawing the eye toward them in order to images are often used to create a sense of convey the message of the narrative. realness or immersion in an imaginary To start the actual drawing of this setting. My work up until this point has almost comic, I selected a behavioral or health exclusively dealt with such imagery, and my issue systemic to puppy mill dogs that working habits show it. While not necessarily sparked a persistent, engaging image (such 100 as a dog pulling anxiously into a leash), and 6. Flatting of the Figures and Shapes. used that issue as the basis for a brief This helps define the figures and narrative. Scott Hurley, a professional dog shapes for later use. trainer, and I identified these issues together and then chose the ones that would be the 7. Color. This stage adds detailed color most compelling to address in a comic to the background and the flat color format. to the figures.

The Design Process 8. Value Gradients. This helps to create Here I outline the steps used for making a a sense of depth and three- comic: dimensionality to the figures. It helps to convey the illusion of reality by 1. Panel Sketches. This portion of the mimicking how real figures interact narrative is where the comic is first with light. laid onto the paper. The artist visualizes the story as though it were an imaginary film and jots down APPENDIX 2 notes on the visual appearance of In Appendix II, which follows on the next key scenes and moments. page we have included two chapters from the narrative: one on resource guarding and 2. Page Thumbnails. These are drawings another on the difficulties of acclimating a that are usually no bigger than a puppy mill dog to a leash in new places. person’s thumb, and are used to plan out how a page is going to be constructed, how panels are to be placed in relation to each other, and how the eye tracks through the whole of the composition. Having a thumbnail drawing of the page gives an artist a plan for the final version of it. The issues of design and layout should be addressed by this point, and all the artist needs to worry about now is the execution of the full page.

3. Pencil Drawings. This is the transitional point between the planning and execution stage of making the comic. The page is drawn out in its full size, using the panel sketches and page thumbnails as reference.

4. Inking/Heavy Penciling. This finalizes the line, which helps to define the subjects of the drawing for the audience, and is the final stage before the comic is scanned into a computer, and the digital finish process begins.

5. Digital Finish. This is the final process of the comic page, and serves to add color, value, and texture to the image.

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Notes Ekman, Paul. “Facial Expressions of Emotion: New Findings, New Questions.” Psychological Science 3.1 (1992): pp. 34-38. (i). In the interest of full disclosure, Professor Scott Hurley is a Board member of the Humane Society of Keen, Suzanne. “Fast Tracks to Narrative Empathy: Northeast Iowa (HSNEI), an organization that promotes Anthropomorphism and Dehumanization in Graphic the humane treatment of all nonhuman animals by Narratives.” SubStance 40.1 (2011): 135-155. rescuing, caring for, and finding adoptive homes for animals who are unwanted, fostering respect for McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible nonhuman animal life, promoting humane education, Art. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, Inc., 1994. and condemning commercial animal breeding operations. He is also a professional dog trainer. Artist McHugh, Susan. Animal Stories: Narrating across Daniel Bruins has worked as an intern for HSNEI. Since Species Lines. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota HSNEI has endorsed this project, we intend our graphic Press, 2011. narrative to appear on its website when the project is completed. Prisoners of Greed. “Puppy Mills—A National Disgrace.”

Prisoners of Greed: Puppymills Breed Misery. (ii). Here it is worth examining Cary Wolfe’s critique of http://www.prisonersofgreed.org/Commercial-kennel- Sue Coe’s work in his What is Posthumanism? as being facts.html Web. 26 June 2012. a kind of “humanist posthumanism” (166-167), as well as Susan McHugh’s discussion of Coe’s use of and Regan, Tom. The Case for Animal Rights. Berkeley and simultaneous discomfort with the Holocaust metaphor Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004. as complicating Wolfe’s critique (See McHugh 176-177 and 252 n. 55) Shepard, Paul. The Others: How Animals Made Us Human. Washington, DC: Island Press, 1997. References Sontag, Susan. On Photography. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977. American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, “Puppy Mill FAQ,” ASPCA: We Are Their Voice. Wells, Paul. The Animated Bestiary: Animals, Cartoons, http://www.aspca.org/fight-animal-cruelty/puppy- and Culture. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2009. mills/puppy-mill-faq, Web. 26 June 2012.

Wolf, Cary. What is Posthumanism? Minneapolis: Baker, Steve. The Postmodern Animal. London: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. Reaktion Books, 2000.

Yang, Andy. “Animal Stories, Natural Histories and Bechdel, Alison. Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. Creaturely Wonders in Narrative Mini-Zines.” Antennae: Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2007. The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture 16 (2011): 3-6.

Web. 15 December 2012. Bekoff, Marc. The Emotional Lives of Animals: A

Leading Scientist Explores Animal Joy, Sorrow, and

Empathy—and Why they Matter. Novato: New World Library, 2008.

Bradley, Carol. Saving Gracie: How One Dog Escaped the Shadowy World of American Puppy Mills. Hoboken: Scott Hurley is Visiting Assistant Professor of Religion and Wiley Publishing, Inc., 2010. Paideia at Luther College, Asia Representative for the Institute of Critical Animal Studies (ICAS), Board member of the Humane Society of Northeast Iowa, and a professional dog Brown, Lisa. “An Introduction to the Illustrated Animal.” trainer. He teaches courses on religion, ethics, and animal Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture 16 rights and is a scholar of East and South Asian religions whose (2011): 3-6. Web. 15 December 2012. research interests include the intersection of oppressions, human-nonhuman animal relations, and the application of “Contemporary Art and Animal Rights.” Considering Buddhist and Hindu religious concepts to animal liberation Animals: Contemporary Studies in Human-Animals issues. Some of his projects include creating a graphic Relations. Ed. Carol Freeman, Elizabeth Leane, and narrative that focuses on the problems of puppy mills, writing Yvette Watt. an article entitled “A Buddhist Response to the Exploitation of Nonhuman Animals in Capitalist Cultures,” and contributing

an entry to Lexikon der Mensch/Tiere-Beziehungen on Burlington: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2011. 13-28. Buddhism and nonhuman animals.

Cvetkovich, Ann. “Drawing the Archive in Alison Daniel Bruins has been drawing comics off and on for nine Bechdel’s Fun Home.” Women Studies Quarterly. 36.1/2 years. He is pursuing a career in visual communication, which (2008): 111-128. Web. 26 June 2012. includes comics, illustration, graphic design, and animation. He has worked on graphic communications for a Davis, Karen. “Procrustean Solutions to Animal Identity number of nonprofits, including logo designs for a Virginia Senate political caucus, a comic book for the Humane and Welfare Problems.” Critical Theory and Animal Society of North East Iowa, and has previously taught a Liberation. Ed. John Sanbonmatsu. New York: Rowman comic-making class at the ArtHaus in Decorah, IA. Dan is a & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2011. 35-53. current student at Luther College.

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THE ANTI-IMPERIALIST

AMERICAN LITERARY

ANIMAL: ENVISIONING

EMPATHY

As animal imagery can highlight trends and tendencies in ourselves and in others that we might ignore otherwise, its use can denaturalize in- and out-group compartmentalization, especially in times of national division. By showing how animal-related arguments and representations function in anti-imperialist American literature from the period surrounding the Philippine Revolution, this article explores the machinations of empathetic tactics in anti-imperialist literature, using Ernest Howard Crosby and Dan Beard’s Captain Jinks, Hero (1902) as its central text. Using animal-centric illustrations and connecting their rhetoric to that of their fellow-activists, animal advocates allowed anti-imperialists to polarize positive and negative feelings across lines of empathy, rather than nation, and push back against the tide of visual culture supporting imperial action.

Text by Katherine E. Bishop

nimals have long been popular sentiments “in popular culture and the components of moral tales and were popular imagination” (1 p.5). According to A featured regularly in nineteenth- W.J.T Mitchell, “animals stand for all forms of century American literature as metaphorized social otherness: race, class, and gender are character valences, plot catalysts, stand-ins frequently figured in images of subhuman for human racial hierarchies, and markers of brutishness, bestial appetite, and the author’s in-group’s supremacy. Even mechanical servility” (2 p.333); Michael today, stereotype matrices entangle animals Chaney finds animals in comics to represent and mark them with manufactured traits “a ludic cipher of otherness. Its [an animal’s] dictating which animals are “good,” “bad,” appearance almost always accompanies and “food.” “Good” animals, such as “loyal” the strategic and parodic veiling of the dogs and “noble” horses serve as heroes, human" (3 p.130). In addition to serving as while “bad” animals, such as animal metaphors, or animetaphors, that “kleptomaniacal” rats or “sneaky” weasels evoke certain associations, animals can also usually represent negative figures. Because provide a means to get “around the culture’s of what Steve Baker labels their “symbolic naturalization of itself” and can be a “kind of availability,” animals frequently serve as chink in the culture’s armour,” Baker asserts (4 malleable canvases for human traits and p.8). Imagining animals can allow a

110 reflected gaze, one which picks up trends resistance: anti-militarism and anti- and tendencies in ourselves and in others imperialism. I argue Crosby and Beard use that we might ignore otherwise. Thus, the visual realm to unmask expansionists and considering the deployment of their rhetoric as barbaric by utilizing animetaphors and animal imagery is useful unsympathetic zoomorphism to gain the for understanding in- and out-group emotional empathy of readers for anti- compartmentalization, including that imperialist arguments. Together, Crosby’s text created by nationally divisive issues, such as and Beard’s paratexts meditate constructions annexation and territorial expansion. of racial, cultural, and national identities and Using Ernest Howard Crosby and Dan complicities. Specifically, Beard’s illustrations Beard’s Captain Jinks, Hero (1902), the work in tandem with the anti-imperialist and most notable American anti-imperialist novel anti-militaristic themes in Crosby’s Captain of the period, as my focal example (5), I will Jinks, Hero to magnify the tensions and show the machinations of animal-related anxieties pertaining to national identity as arguments and representations in anti- extraterritorial expansion affected it. imperialist rhetoric in the period surrounding In cartoons representing U.S. relations the Philippine-American War (1898-1902), with demographics affected by territorial particularly those resting heavily on in- and expansion, artists frequently depicted out-group divagations so key to indigenous peoples and regions with expansionists' rhetoric, tactics which hide exaggerated and often grotesque features people and politics “in plain sight.” The which marked them as objects of ridicule, as book’s illustrations work counter to the animals, or as children needing care. majority of animal-centric imagery related to Conversely, Uncle Sam, or other stand-ins in expansion produced in the United States at for the United States, was usually portrayed the end of the nineteenth and beginning of as a light-skinned, fit, more realistically the twentieth century, in that they deploy featured paternalistic father. One example animetaphors to counter rather than that uses both pedomorphism and support arguments for expansion. Animals animalization is an 1898 cartoon by the artist aren't central to the text-based narrative Bart (Charles Lewis Bartholomew), featuring of Captain Jinks, but play prominently in the the United States as a fully-grown eagle and illustrations, serving as a bridging mechanism the outlying territories (labeled “Philippines,” between the readers and the anti-imperialist “Hawaii,” “Cuba,” and “Porto Rico” [sic]) as movement, as well as a distancing eaglets. The implicit message is that the mechanism between the readers and the territories-as-eaglets will grow their pin expansionists. feathers and fledge — eventually —but that Like scholars Laura Wexler (6) and for now they are dependent on the largess Amy Kaplan (7), whose work has considered of the United States, here shown as their the role of photography and film parent eagle (9 see fig.1). The stereotype of respectively, in conjunction with the rise and nobility associated with eagles is conferred violence of the American empire, David to the annexed regions through their Brody examines the role of consumable adoptive paternity: an association with such visual culture to colonial efforts at the end of a positively valenced animal was usual for the nineteenth century. He argues caricatures of contested areas. More often, in Visualizing American Empire that during people from annexed territories (or the this time “different visual mediums furthered territories themselves) were animorphed empire while concomitantly fostering a similarly to African Americans of the same space where debates about empire could period: typical animal metaphors employed take place” (8 p.2). Following these scholars, in their caricature in American media I contend that the expanded space of ranged from “flighty” birds to “jabbering” discussion provided in visual culture also monkeys, overwhelmingly disparaging extended room for viewpoints such as portrayals but rarely connoting the sort of Crosby and Beard’s that spoke against danger, evil, or malice used in World War II American expansion and empire. My study, propaganda posters.[i] Animorphing of this however, peers at the representation of kind allowed readers to “forget” the human empire in popular culture from angles of component of the elided governments,

111

Fig.1 Charles Lewis Bartholomew Cluck! Cluck! Cluck! cartoon. 28 May 1898. Cartoons of the Spanish-American War: By Bart With Dates of Important Events from the Minneapolis Journal. Minneapolis, Journal Printing Company, 1899, n.p.

people, and long histories of annexed lands, of the popular American self-conception of associating the caricatured people with a being a country of “liberators,” simplistic, reductive, and usually somewhat “democratizers,” and “righteous leaders” negative animalistic stereotype instead. By exceptional in their destiny to spread across the same token, pedomorphing and saturate certain areas on the North representatives of contested areas allowed American continent and beyond; however, mainstream American readers to ignore the there were exceptions to this exceptionalism. logic of geological time as well as the Captain Jinks, Hero, like most anti- histories and civilizations of nations like Cuba, imperialist productions from this period rarely Hawaii, and the Philippines, legacies which used zoomorphed non-human animals as ironically predated the United States as a direct corollaries to represent people from nation, in favor of “forgetting” such issues contested spaces — perhaps because the abroad. This selective amnesia and purportedly inferior status of groups like perspectival filtering facilitated the circulation Filipinos and Cubans were already rampantly

112 employed by annexationalists to confer the organized class in animal drawing in the “inadvisability” of their self-rule, a major world” (12 p. 380), taking for the first time the justification for annexation. Instead, Crosby animal as a subject in its own right; as his and Beard’s collaboration combined 1905 essay “The Meat Fetish” indicates, rhetorical strategies from growing social Crosby’s strong beliefs in universal movements such as anti-imperialism, animal humanitarianism extended to animals (13). In protection, and humanism to show that “The Meat Fetish,” Crosby denounces the though the annexed and colonized areas production and consumption of meat as that the Unites States had taken on had cruel, unhealthy, and unnecessary, a theory been construed through expansionists’ propagated since at least 1701 by Dr. propaganda as non-places with less Cheyne, a British physician (14). than/lesser human inhabitants, such Vegetarianism had become a household depictions were as socially constructed as term in 1847 when the first Vegetarian stereotyped traits of animals. Countering Society formed, Kathryn Shevelow reports expansionists’ paternalistic and often race- (15). Crosby’s essay comprises half of the based arguments for “benevolent pamphlet named for his text; “The Meat assimilation" during the period surrounding Fetish” is followed by “On Vegetarianism” by the Philippine-American War, such anti- Élisée Reclus, the esteemed French imperialist propaganda negated dominant geographer, writer, and anarchist whose stereotypes of native peoples as more ideas are often considered to anticipate “bestial” or subhuman than their would-be later animal rights and social ecology colonizers, using animal metaphors to turn movements (16).[ii] the tables on expansionists and defamiliarize Written nearly twenty-five years after their audience from the zoomorphed the world’s first national animal protection expansionist target, revealing the law passed, and nearly fifty after acts “ to contradictions and inhumanity Crosby and prevent malicious and wanton Cruelty to Beard argued were at the heart of the Animals” were first introduced in national annexation debates. These connections forums (17 p. 234), the pamphlet The Meat echo Anti-Imperialist League member Mark Fetish was born into a world increasingly Twain’s quip in Following the Equator (1897) articulate upon the connections between that “there are many humorous things in the animal and human treatment. In his essay, world; among them the white man’s notion Reclus focuses on his personal that he is less savage than the other transformation into a vegetarian, as well as savages” (10 p.189). the way meat eating promotes deceit and Zoomorphing expansionists, or war. He writes that humans denounce metaphorizing them as animals, served to animals in order to avoid consuming represent the inhumanity of humankind in its anything considered too like themselves: dealings with one another, and was not “animals sacrificed to man’s appetite have uncommon to the anti-imperialist been systematically and methodically made movement, as Mark Twain’s long- hideous, shapeless, and debased in unpublished short story “The Victims,” and intelligence and moral worth” (18 p.25). The Henry Blake Fuller's privately published short anarchist geographer connects meat eating pamphlet against President McKinley and to larger issues such as war, stating that “it is the annexationalists, The New Flag: Satires, not a digression to mention the horrors of war show. “The Victims,” written in the style and in connection with the massacre of cattle cadence of a folk tale, ends with the punch and carnivorous banquets. The diet of line that, for all the shocking, yet formulaic individuals corresponds closely to their and repetitive violence of the animal manners. Blood demands blood” (19 p.28). kingdom, only humans give nothing in the Thus, Reclus argues that eating meat exchange of life for life, instead trading in requires a mental distance from one’s food, death and slavery to “extend” their “noble a process which facilitates distancing oneself civilization” (11 p. 144). from other humans to the point of seeing Both Crosby and Beard were known them, like animals, as less than oneself. for their work with animals: Beard, a Many of the precepts Crosby and Reclus renowned naturalist, offered “the first touch upon in their pamphlet — with the

113 exception of a plant-based diet — crop up general items on cart horses, docked tails, in Captain Jinks, Hero. Particularly notable and so on. Several pieces featured quite are the connections between the treatment graphic descriptions of horses dying in war of animals and humans, as well as in the from civilians and celebrities alike in order to construction of a hierarchy of “humanness” arouse public sympathies and promote and worth for the convenience of those in action against abusive treatment of horses in power. battle. Clara Barton's Civil War-era diatribe The pairing of an anarchist (Reclus) against cruelty to horses in war was and an aristocrat (Crosby) was less unusual frequently reprinted during the Spanish- than it may appear: advocacy work drew American and Philippine-American Wars disparate figures together constantly during through World War I in journals such this period. For example, a number of as Zoöphily and the Journal of the radical activists agreed with Henry Salt that American Veterinary Medical Association: animals’ conditions were analogous to that she writes, “I have often said...that among of enslaved peoples and therefore the shocking and heart-rendering scenes of abominable (20). Diane Beers argues in For the battlefield the screams of the wounded the Prevention of Cruelty (2006) that the horses lingered more painfully in my ears, if abolitionists’ fight against exploitation and possible, than the moans of the wounded oppression based on a belief in biological men" (23 p.64). Such quotations override inferiority strongly influenced the animal the typically human-dominated visual and advocacy movement (21). The anti- sonic imaginary of the battlefield and draw imperialist movement also found common the animalian components to the ground with animal advocates; they shared foreground. Clearly, horses were fighting the powerful members including Ernest Howard Spanish-American and Philippine-American Crosby and Mark Twain, used elements of Wars in more than one way: they were used animal advocacy rhetoric to further their as transportation by soldiers and as purveyors cause, and leant heavily on the increasing of empathy and sympathy in propaganda interest in animal welfare to enhance the such as Barton’s letter and novels efficacy of their crusade against imperialist like Captain Jinks, Hero. expansion. The Spanish-American and Philippine- Anti-vivisection and animal advocacy American Wars, which officially ran from work was especially popular at the end of 1898-1902 (though hostilities continued until the nineteenth century, and attention to how 1913 in the Philippines), heralded a turn in animals were treated was increasingly in the United States history toward becoming an public eye.[iii] In addition to protests over imperial world power. While the United States transport conditions for animals, using initially refused to intervene in Cuba’s wars for feathers and fur for fashion accessories, and independence, much to Cuban the meat-packing industry, concern for the revolutionary José Martí’s displeasure, it had plight of horses, particularly in wartime, was been looking to become involved with Cuba rather mainstream. For example, Clara, for decades. In 1854, President Franklin daughter of the anti-imperialist and anti- Pierce approved the Olmstead Act, later vivisectionist Mark Twain, was proud of her blocked by Northern factions disinterested in blue Society for the Protection of Animals extending the realm of slavery, which (SPCA) card which enabled her to make threatened Spain with war if they refused to citizen’s arrests of sorts for observed sell Cuba to the United States. The majority of mistreatment of animals, even those for expanding the United States internationally. And in the Journal of through annexation believed expanding the Zoöphily from 1898 - 1900 alone, there were nation territorially beyond its continental at least ten articles on the treatment of borders was part of the God-granted, horses and mules during war, twelve if one manifest destiny of the United States. Doing counts the movement to incorporate Anna so would allow missionaries, doctors, and Sewell’s Black Beauty into Cuban schools, a other U.S. human rights activists greater book Beers calls the animal advocacy access to people they believed required movement’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (22), and at their help. Further, it would increase markets least thirty articles on horses, counting for political ideologies, goods, and religious

114 beliefs, as well as place the United States in American War to be promulgated as a line with other world powers: as Kristin conflict if not for the liberation of the Filipino Hoganson puts it, as “even tiny Belgium had people, as they desired, then for their own overseas colonies, it appears that a kind of good: the U.S., as a nation of stalwart men, empire envy underlay” some pro- one argument ran, would serve as better expansionist beliefs (24 p.10). Representing stewards of the Filipino people than they those who were for imperialist expansion and themselves, or the “effeminate” Spanish, annexation, John Quincy Adams stated that could (26). the annexation of Cuba was crucial to the As no one rationale motivated Union’s future (25). The mysterious explosion expansionists, anti-imperialists also drew of the Maine in 1898 gave the U.S. the together in their common cause for various impetus some were looking for to join the reasons: some believed that territorial Cubans in their decades-long fight for expansion, particularly against the will of the independence against the Spanish. The would-be governed, as was the case in the successful end of the Spanish-American War Philippines, was against the founding and the resultant Treaty of Paris, which principles and constitution of the United granted the U.S. the former Spanish territories States. Finding that the United States meant of the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Guam, to have a heavy hand in the rule of Cubans propelled the U.S. toward another skirmish and Filipinos, not liberate them from external half a world away in the Philippines. Many, rule as many had originally believed, a like General Emilio Aguinaldo of the number of once staunch supporters of U.S. Philippines, took exception to U.S. claims of intervention, Mark Twain included, turned sovereignty over the land, desiring vehemently against the Philippine-American independence instead, and so began the War. Atrocities such as waterboarding natives Philippine-American War, also known as the and soldiers’ treatment of women, too, Philippine War of Independence. detracted support from U.S. involvement in Both sides, pro- and anti-imperialist, the former Spanish colonies. believed their path provided the best Race was another lynchpin for many prospects for the nations in question. anti-imperialists — including noted Anxieties about an American present and proponents of white supremacy Thomas future out of sync with an idealistic American Dixon and Senator Tillman of South Carolina. past were endemic to both sides. Many anti- They believed that further involvement with imperialists valued independence from peoples of color would burden the United colonialism and touted the consent of the States financially and racially, diluting the governed as a basis of government, while a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant hegemony and number of expansionists believed that by the privileges they enjoyed because of it. taking over lands like Cuba, they could They asked several questions: Would the reinvigorate their halcyon past and kindle its citizens of annexed nations become full U.S. tenets anew abroad. The late nineteenth citizens? What kinds of rights would they have century American wars pitted an American and what kind of access to the contingent “us” against an extranational “other,” and the United States would they be given? And how battles waged caused internal anxiety about would these changes affect the status quo who “we” were becoming and who “we” stateside? were allowed to be. On the other end of the race-based The press by and large followed the anti-imperialist spectrum, still others believed American majority’s fervor for the war; that the effective colonization of people of Randolph Hearst defended newspapers’ color abroad would have detrimental effects “yellow journalism,” famously naming the domestically. How could the United States Spanish-American War the “people’s war” purport to spread liberty abroad when civil and arguing that his papers reflected, not rights were denied to so many of their led, public opinion. War was seen as a way citizens at home, those of the latter group to reinvigorate masculinity, while salving the asked. “Can the nation which can hardly be nation’s lingering Civil War wounds and said to have done justice to its 7 millions of spreading freedom, democracy, and black citizens at home, do justice to 10 Christianity. It was common for the Philippine- millions of black, yellow, and brown men

115 6,000 miles away?” asked the Economist in depicted contemporary figures such as Jay November of 1898, as Susan K. Harris reports Gould, the railroad baron, that Beard had (27 p. 138). Roger Bresnahan writes that Kelly trouble finding work for a time after its Miller, a scholar at Howard University, echoed publication. On the boycott, Beard wrote to this sentiment in “The Effect of Imperialism Cyril Clemens on 28 April 1936, “You know, Upon the Negro Race,” arguing that Mark Twain once said that I not only supporting American expansion was illustrated the stories, but I illustrated the tantamount to participating “in the rape of thoughts of the author when he was writing Filipino liberty which promised to open blacks the story, and that may be where the shoe up to new indignities and institute under the pinched” (31 p. 179). As with his previous American flag a new slavery” (28 p. 13). work, it was roundly noted that Beard’s President of both the American Anti- charged illustrations got at the heart Imperialist League and the New York Anti- of Captain Jinks, Hero in some ways more Imperialist League, author Ernest Howard effectively than the novel proper itself. A Crosby was resolutely opposed to expansion representative comment from a review of and military intervention on a number of the novel published in The Advocate of counts. A fervid disciple of Leo Tolstoy, Henry Peace in 1902 states, “the story is illustrated George, and William Lloyd Garrison, Crosby by Dan Beard, whose cartoons are even gave up a lucrative judgeship in Egypt and more intensely satirical than Mr. Crosby’s retired to the country, attempting to farm. A writing. Some of them are droll, some firm believer in pacifism, the value of labor, painful, some sickening, some awe-inspiring, and non-resistance, he was amazed, some awakening shame and indignation, — Bresnahan writes, “at the colossal but all true to the conditions which they presumption of a country which intended to portray” (32 p. 80). Aside from its tendency ‘civilize’ other peoples while it allowed its own toward the political, Beard’s art is noted for its citizens to be lynched” (29 p.41). He intricacy: many of his pieces bear hatch represented those beliefs in his work with the marks, shading, fine details, and veers anti-imperialist leagues, as a member of the toward a kinetic, narrative style (33). American Peace Society, and in various As Harris reports, Captain Jinks, writings, letters to editors, and public Hero was “the best-known work of anti- speeches. Captain Jinks, Hero, in fact, grew imperialist fiction of its day,” and its biting out of an address Crosby presented at a depiction of General Funston, a major player meeting of the American Peace Society in in the Spanish-American War who used Boston, entitled “The Absurdities of tactics largely agreed to be nefariously Militarism,” in which he suggested that “some underhanded even in times of war, likely humorist might do a great service to the spurred Crosby’s friend Mark Twain to write world by a satirical work on war, as Cervantes his own satiric “Defense of General Funston” had done in the case of knight-errantry” (30 (1902) (34 p. 120). Widely reviewed in forums p.80). Following prompts to take on the task such as anarchist Emma Goldman’s Mother himself, Crosby wrote Captain Jinks, Hero, Earth, The New York Times, the International which he considered his best work, in only six Socialist Review, and the Advocate of weeks. Other works include several volumes Peace (Twain began but never published a on social reformers Tolstoy and Garrison review of the book), the novel “aroused and Swords and Ploughshares (1902), a every important newspaper in the country, book of anti-imperialist poetry also published and thousands of lines of discussion were by Funk and Wagnalls. printed. Mark Twain rallied to the support of Best remembered for his role in the Mr. Crosby himself, and, in his inimitable way, development of the Boy Scouts of America threw a vein of humor into the controversy,” and his work with Boys’ Life, Daniel Carter according to an anonymous writer for Beard was a naturalist, writer, artist, and great the Missionary Review of the World (35 friend to Mark Twain with whom he worked on n.p.).[iv] many occasions. Their most famous, or Captain Jinks, Hero tells the story of infamous, collaboration, A Connecticut one man, Sam Jinks, and his transformation Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889), from nature lover to war aficionado after contained illustrations that so scathingly receiving toy soldiers when a child. It is, in

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Fig.2 Ernest Howard Crosby Captain Jinks, Hero, illus. Daniel Carter Beard, Funk and Wagnalls, p. 310, 1902.

short, the story of his fall from humanity to exceptionalism so firmly entrenched in many object, from participant to pawn, from man of the novels, songs, cartoons, to toy soldier. Jinks travels from his farm to advertisements, and other media extant at the military academy East Point to the the end of the nineteenth century. “Cubapines” (Crosby’s portmanteau of Cuba Introducing a chapter entitled “The War and the Philippines), becoming a war hero Lord,” one such inhabited initial depicts thanks to nepotism and media manipulation encroaching foreign powers in the Philippines before he realizes that he could not kill his as wolves scavenging on human babies, fiancée if called to and thus is not a perfect, playing on the negative constructs of wolves mindless soldier, a realization which drives as big, bad, and evil which predominate him mad. culturally — but turning the tables so that the The “natural order” of manifest destiny “liberators,” not the native peoples, are and power hierarchies frequently touted in aligned with the negatively connoted popular pro-expansionist texts is disrupted animetaphor (36 see fig. 2). In the in Captain Jinks, Hero, particularly in its background of the vignette, predatory chapter-heading inhabited initials. They American capitalists have set up shops, the provide a space for a secondary narrative fore and backgrounds tied symbolically and which challenges the bases of American linked spatially through the large, industrialist

117 “A” running through the image. Moreover, Jinks is imbued with negative human the wolf mirrors the "A," the thick line of the characteristics, which distance his readers right-most stroke of the letter is repeated in from the allegorical expansionists, Dan Beard the wolf's body, the cross line of the "A" in its uses horses, traditionally positively valenced legs, and the flesh dangling from the wolf's animals, to awaken in his readers a sense of mouth to the body below mimics the narrow, justice, as well as a recognition of the final leftward stroke. Invectives against disjuncture between the idealization of U.S. annexationalist greed coalesce in this liberators in action and in actuality. In a image, creating an alphabet of gore farrago of war, religion, and patriotism, Beard between the wolf and the storefronts. Beard’s pictures a soldier gleefully stabbing a drawing style plays up to these stereotypes of kneeling old man who has one hand flung wolves, using sharp lines and deep shadows out: before the soldier’s horse, an old man to make them look unsavory, dangerous, waves a flag for mercy (37 see fig. 3). One mean — and the babies that the wolves doubts he will receive it. The overwhelming feast on appear round, simple, and light- theme of Christianity overhangs the scene, saturated; they graphically mirror the skulls satirizing the hypocrisy of imperial war near the wolf's hind legs. This parallel reminds rationalized by Christian ideals.[v] One feels the reader that the militant for the horse, a puppet-perpetrator amidst capitalist/expansionist wolf’s tendency to rely the chaos. One also feels through the on stereotypes to dehumanize and horse, sharing its focalized expression of pedomorph those outside his in-group brings dismay and pity as the soldier’s next victim’s devastation to everyone involved. eyes meet the equine’s. Like the horse, The wolf image serves to overshadow Beard’s silently complicit audience is positive characterizations of annexation with indirectly perpetuating such atrocities, the a concrete, negative, and memorable vision image implies. that is hard to shake. In this illustration, the As Crosby and Reclus’ Meat devoured victims, representing the cultural Fetish pamphlet and periodicals such as consumption of negative caricatures, are the Journal of Zoöphily suggest, issues such clearly the sympathetic figures — however, as animal protection and the treatment of the aim of this illustration seems to be not to animals were increasingly important to a engender sympathy but revulsion, to cause growing number of Americans; such popular the readers not feel with capitalists qua topics might then have rendered even more wolves but though their national effective images in anti-imperialist literature neocolonialist interests as the wolves, and which draw upon aspects of these guiltily so. These anthropomorphized wolves, discussions to protest imperial aggression. like most of the creatures and narratives in For instance, with his readers primed by the the inhabited initials, do not directly appear fervor surrounding the treatment of horses in Crosby’s text. Instead, they are the wolf in during war, Beard’s depiction of Captain sheep’s clothing in Crosby’s readers’ own Jinks’ superior officer in the Cubapines, a yards, own hearts, their own commercial corrupt and corpulent American general, complicity and capitalistic ventures, their whose weight, incompetence, and sloth are own industrialized and expanding notions of jokes in the text, is more effectively “civilization.” That the wolves literally weren’t transformed into a figure who is less sentient bothering with sheeps’ clothing suggests their and sympathetic than the screaming horse sense of entitlement from the top of the food he crushes to ride it, oblivious as he is to its chain, as it were. In addition to eliciting pain as he seeks to save himself the effort of sympathy, if not empathy and disgust, locomotion (38 see fig. 4). The general is illustrations like this one serve to draw to the pictured in the far background, a bare fore uncomfortable truths like the outline that is notable both for its cartoonish commercial interests undergirding “civilizing style and for the narrative it provides for the missions,” often limned over in foregrounded horse. The central horse, annexationalist propaganda, which satires, screaming, steaming, and dripping with such as Captain Jinks, criticize for leaving sweat, catches the viewer’s eye from the out. near middle of the image; its shattering hoof Just as the pictured wolf in Captain and anguish rendered realistically to elicit a

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Fig.3 Ernest Howard Crosby Captain Jinks, Hero, illus. Daniel Carter Beard, Funk and Wagnalls, between pp. 266-67, 1902.

sympathetic response. Looking away, you other animals was already a by-word for see a mirrored image which might have human ills in many overlapping activist been funny in another context—the slapstick circles would have increased the efficacy of humor of a grotesque and exaggerated such images. human figure was and is popular, after all. In such ways, animals become a Few of Crosby’s readers would have means of communicating Beard and questioned the paired horse and rider motif, Crosby's theme of the dehumanization of they would likely even have appreciated the war. “Good” animals, like horses, were humor of the buffoonish background employed to ensure readers’ sympathies, image—until seeing the harm done by the still, the illustrated sympathetic and thoughtless figure to the horse, his unsympathetic animals alike push Crosby obliviousness drawn as cruel rather than and Beard’s readers to feel against such ridiculous. That the treatment of horses and pro-expansionist figures. Rather than siding

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Fig.4 Ernest Howard Crosby Captain Jinks, Hero, illus. Daniel Carter Beard, Funk and Wagnalls, p. 151, 1902.

with the rider, the reader sides with, and feels paternalistic and “benevolent” rationales for for the horse. In doing so, the reader annexation are faulty. The people the questions the rider’s moral supremacy, expansionists would rule, these images despite the rider’s likely connection to the suggest, would be better off without such reader’s social in-group across at least a few “masters.” If figures like the general mistreat parameters such as sex, nation, or class. “good” and “noble” animals like the horse so Negative characters like the general egregiously, what claims do they have to become associated by extension with the govern people, particularly people that they slavering wolves who represent other facets tend to caricature as “ignoble” or “inferior” of expansionism — so even his buffoonish animals in popular culture? obliviousness takes on an air of Moreover, these zoomorphic maliciousness as the novel progresses. illustrations work to band together a Clearly, such rhetoric implies, the readership who is drawn together through

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Fig.5 Ernest Howard Crosby Captain Jinks, Hero, illus. Daniel Carter Beard, Funk and Wagnalls, between pp. 395-96, 1902.

shared humanity — in contrast with the less- group (39). The text’s visual satire creates a than-human figures in the text, such as the window of opportunity for the reader to reject general — thus paving the way for Crosby’s self-identifying with the targeted satire to function without the crossed beams expansionists, and thus diminishes feelings of of intergroup, or bound, empathy muddying cognitive dissonance arising from the up its social critique. Suzanne Keen theorizes negation of American exceptionalism, that some types of empathy are “bound” to manifest destiny, and superiority in the text. certain group memberships through in-group By using animal imagery, anti-imperialists like connections, like flags, which represent that Crosby and Beard unharnessed their

121 audience’s bound empathy to expansionists Philippine-American War, or a strong anti- and allowed them to join the author and imperialist movement, continued. Though artist in ridiculing the wolfish American organized anti-imperialist work did continue annexationalists, activating their associations until shortly after the end of the First World with “good” animals (and the satirists) War, its magnetic core lost its pull once the instead. short-lived Philippine-American War ended. The end of Captain Jinks, With the official end of the war went the Hero leaves the now-mad Captain in an intensity surrounding the annexation asylum faced by a triumvirate of mice (40 debates. Further, Ernest Howard Crosby, a see fig.5). The label “harmless” attached to major force within the movement, died Jinks is how his doctors and friends describe suddenly of pneumonia in 1907. Future acts him, but it has an ironic valence that casts a by the U.S. drew some ire, but nothing that shadow over his renewed toy soldier play matched the fire, or the interconnection of and dreams of war, leading the reader to advocacy movements, of the American ask how “harmless” are war games, really, Anti-Imperialist League under Crosby’s even for those for whom the game seems presidency. rigged. Is “benevolent assimilation” so benevolent? Faced with Jinks’ end, Crosby Endnotes and Beard’s readers must ask themselves if it is actually better to side with mice or men in [i] Even in the jingoism-light Spanish American War times of war and imperialism. Like many of centric novel by Civil and Spanish war hero Charles King, Found in the Philippines: The Story of a Woman’s Beard’s illustrations, such a question is not Letters (1899), the natives of Manila are described as born directly of the text, but from the “little brown men” (41 p. 285) who “fled jabbering to juxtaposition of the text and Beard’s the river side” (42 p.271) at the slightest hint of trouble. interpretive images which create, in some King compares this (rather sensible) wartime reaction to ways, a secondary narrative, a polyvocal the soldiers he valorizes: “Foreign residents took matters more coolly than did the Asiatic; German phlegm, palimpsest which discloses perspectives English impassibility and Yankee devil-may-carishness commonly elided in the massively pro-war preventing a panic” (43 p.272). environment of the day. Nowhere in the text does Crosby discuss wolves, screaming [ii] Peter Marshall deems Reclus the “Geographer of Liberty” in Demanding the Impossible: A History of horses, mice, or any of the other animals Anarchism (44). which appear in its pages, but through Beard’s illustrations, the silent and silenced [iii] Tensions were so strong that the scientific others in the scene rise up, both community pathologized animal-empathizers and sympathetically and empathetically. Instead, anti-vivisectionists, diagnosing them with the now defunct “disease” zoophil-psychosis, and called Beard makes Crosby’s critique at once thwarting their efforts “a professional, a moral, and a immediately visible while chiming in with his Christian duty” (45 p.36): out of the ether of defensive own, slightly tweaked argument, thereby rhetoric, zoophil-psychosis, a psychological diagnosis bringing a second voice to the fray, denoting “incurable insanity,” “delusional convictions,” expanding the representation of the and obsessive affection for animals was born (46 pp.281-82). Popularized by Charles Loomis Dana, the empowered anti-imperialists. It is with them, “dean” of American neurologists, zoophil-psychosis rather than with any of the largely remained in the vivisectionists’ arsenal until the close of unsympathetic pro-expansionist characters, World War I, often coupled with condescending, that a most comfortable alliance can be sympathetic phrases but no further explanation, denoting its common parlance. Zoophil-psychosis felt, and it is through the animals that the emerged from the 1890s’ heyday of neurasthenia, or reader sees a break in the nigh-universal “brain strain”-related disorders, and though it was not expansionist rhetoric, discomfiting though an official diagnosis until 1909, its tenets had been that revelation may be. bandied about in conjunction with hysteria for years, Though Captain Jinks, Hero was often in conjunction with women, the majority of members in “Zoöphily” societies. widely read in activist circles, it is unknown how effective its tactics for facilitating the [iv] Captain Jinks, Hero has been republished several polarization of feelings across lines of times. In 1969 it was included in a series of 39 empathy rather than nation and for fostering American novels “originally published between 1836 and 1917, which exposed and castigated social revolutionary crossings across activist lines abuses, propagandized, and offered utopian or were – or would have been had the

122 revolutionary solutions to the miseries of society” (xiv). Shevelow, K. For the Love of Animals: The Rise of published by Gregg Press (47 p.749). It the Animal Protection Movement, New York, Henry Holt Was, again, revitalized in 1986 in The Anti-Imperialist and Company, 2008, p.164. Reader: A Documentary History of Anti-Imperialism in the United States, a two-volume anthology edited by (xv). Ibid., 284. Philip Sheldon Foner and Richard C. Winchester (48). (xvi). Reclus, É. “On Vegetarianism,” The Meat Fetish: [v] Susan K. Harris’s 2011 God’s Arbiters: Americans Two Essays on Vegetarianism, London, A.C. Fifield, and the Philippines, 1898-1902 covers the role of 1905, pp. 23-32. Protestant religious rhetoric in the construction of American identity and in the debates surrounding the (xvii). Shevelow, K. op. cit., 234. Philippine annexation debates. (xviii). Reclus, É. op. cit., 25. References (xix). Ibid., 28. (i). Baker, S. Picturing the Beast: Animals, Identity, and Representation, 1993, Champaign, University of Illinois (xx). Beers, D. L. For the Prevention of Cruelty: The Press, 2001, p.5. History and Legacy of Animal Rights Activism in the United States, Athens, OH, Swallow Press, 2006, p. 26 (ii). Mitchell. W.J.T. Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representations, Chicago, University of Chicago (xix). Ibid., pp. 24-26. Press, 1995, p. 333. (xxii). Ibid., p. 26. (iii).Chaney, M. "Animal Subjects of the Graphic Novel," College Literature, 2000, 38.3, pp. 129-49. (xxiii). Schwartzkopf, O. "The Changed Status of the 4. Horse in War," Journal of the American Veterinary (iv). Baker, S. op. cit., 8. Medical Association, 1916, 49, pp. 59-70. 5. (v). Crosby, E. H. Captain Jinks, Hero, Illus. Daniel (xxiv). Hoganson, K. L. Fighting for American Manhood: Carter Beard, New York, Funk and Wagnalls, 1902. How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars, New Haven, Yale UP, (vi). Wexler, L. Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an 1998, p.10. Age of U.S. Imperialism, Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2000. (xxv). Schoultz, L. Beneath the United States: A History of U.S. Policy toward Latin America, Cambridge, Harvard (vii). Kaplan, A. The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of University Press, 1998, p. 58. U.S. Culture, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2002. 8. (xxvi). Hoganson, K. L. op. cit., p. 11. (viii). Brody, D. Visualizing American Empire: Orientalism and Imperialism in the Philippines, University of Chicago (xxvii). Harris, S. K. God’s Arbiters: Americans and the Press, 2010, p. 2. Philippines, 1898-1902, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2011, p. 138. (ix). Bartholomew, C. L. "Cluck! Cluck! Cluck!" Cartoon, 28 May 1898, Cartoons of the Spanish-American War: (xxviii). Bresnahan, R. J. In Time of Hesitation: American By Bart With Dates of Important Events from the Anti-Imperialists and the Philippine-American War. Minneapolis Journal. Minneapolis, Journal Printing Quezon City, Philippines, New Day Publishers, 1981, p. Company, 1899, n.p. 13.

(x). Twain, M. Following the Equator: A Journey Around (xxix). Ibid., 41. the World, Hartford, American Publishing Company, 1897, p. 189. (xxx). Rev. of Captain Jinks, Hero by Ernest Howard Crosby, Advocate of Peace, 1902, 64.4, p.80. (xi). Twain, M. “The Victims,” Mark Twain’s Book of Animals, Fishkin, S. F. (ed.) Berkeley, University of (xxxi). Inge, T. “Mark Twain and Dan Beard’s California Press, 2010, pp. 141-44. Collaborative Connecticut Yankee,” Author-ity and Textuality: Current Views of Collaborative Writing, (xii). “Beard, Daniel Carter.” The Encyclopedia Leonard, J. S. et al. (eds.), pp. 169-227. Americana: A Library of Universal Knowledge, Vol. 3, New York, The Encyclopedia Americana Corporation, (xxxii). Rev. of Captain Jinks, Hero by Ernest Howard 1918, p. 380. Crosby, op. cit., p. 80. (xxxiii). Bishop, K. E. “Illustrating Mark Twain: Daniel (xiii). Crosby, E. “The Meat Fetish,” The Meat Fetish: Two Carter Beard and His Influences,” Mark Twain Annual, Essays on Vegetarianism, London, A.C. Fifield, 1905, 2012, 10.1, pp. 109-115. pp. 5-22. 34. (xxxiv). Harris, S. K. op. cit., pp. 120-21 .

123 35. (xxxv). “Literary Notes,” Missionary Review of the World, 1907, 30.2, n.p.

36. (xxxvi). Crosby, E. H. Captain Jinks, Hero, op. cit., 310.

37. (xxxvii). Crosby, E. H. Captain Jinks, Hero, op. cit., between pp. 266 and 267. 38. (xxxviii). Ibid., p. 151.

39. (xxxix) Keen, S. "Empathic Hardy: Bounded, Ambassadorial, and Broadcast Strategies of Narrative Empathy," Poetics Today, 2011, 32.2, pp. 349-89. 40. (l). Crosby, E. H. Captain Jinks, Hero, op. cit., between pp. 395-96.

41. (li). King, C. Found in the Philippines: The Story of a Woman's Letters, 1899, New York, Grosset, 1901. 42. (lii). Ibid., 271.

43. (liii). Ibid., 272. 44. (liv). Marshall, P. Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism, 1992, Oakland, PM Press, 2010. 45. (lv). Keen, W.W. "Early Days of Anti- Vivisection." Science, 1927, 65.1672, pp. 35-36.

46. (lvi). Buettinger, C. "Antivivisection and the Charge of Zoophil-Psychosis in the Early Twentieth Century," Historian, 1993, 55.2, pp. 277-88. 47. (lvii). “Muckraker,” American Library Association Bulletin, 1969, 63.6, p. 749. 48. (lviii). Foner, P. S. & Winchester, R. C. (eds.) The Anti- Imperialist Reader: A Documentary History of Anti- Imperialism in the United States, Vol. 2., New York, Holmes and Meier, 1986, pp. 267-394.

Katherine E. Bishop is a doctoral candidate in the Department of English at the University of Iowa, where she specializes in nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature, book history, and formalism. She is currently completing her dissertation, "War in the Margins: Illustrating Anti-Imperialism in American Culture" and has recently published on illustrator Daniel Carter Beard in the Mark Twain Annual.

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VOLUMES FROM AN IMAGINED

INTELLECTUAL HISTORY OF

ANIMALS, ARCHITECTURE AND MAN

JULIAN MONTAGUE

Julian Montague’s series of faux books are part of a larger project called Secondary Occupants/Collected & Observed. The project consists of a series of installations, photographs and small mixed-media projects considering the relationship between animals and architecture. At the center of the work is an unnamed fictional author/investigator that appears to be obsessed with the way that animals occupy architectural structures. The books are meant to be the reading material of this character. Collectively titled Volumes from an Imagined th Intellectual History of Animals, Architecture and Man, they suggest an alternate version the mid-20 century in which a great deal of thought was given to the scientific, social, economic, and psychological issues raised by the presence of animals (particularly spiders and other invertebrates) in architectural spaces. The books appear to lend intellectual support to the efforts of the investigator, or at least clues to his thinking.

This portfolio features a selection of images from Volumes from an Imagined Intellectual History of Animals, 2010 -12, digital pigment prints, worn library books.

Julian Montague is an artist and graphic designer that uses language, drawing, photography, installation and other media to explore the peripheral features of our environment. He is best known for a long term art project dedicated to developing a system of classification for stray shopping carts. The project was published as a book, The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification (Abrams) in 2006. His most recent project is Secondary Occupants Collected & Observed , a long-term multidisciplinary investigation of the intersection of animals (particularly invertebrates) and architecture. He has exhibited widely in the United States. His work has received attention from Art in America, Frieze, The New York Times, Vogue Italia, BBC World Service, and others. He has work in the collections of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, The Norton Museum of Art, Martin Z. Margulies and The Progressive Insurance Company. Montague lives and works in Buffalo, New York, he is represented by Black & White Gallery in Brooklyn.

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Issue twenty-five will be st online on the 21136 of June 2013