AFTER the ANIMAL Predatory Pursuits in Antebellum America By
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AFTER THE ANIMAL Predatory Pursuits in Antebellum America By Antoine Traisnel B.A., Université Lille 3, 2000 M.A., Université Lille 3, 2005 Ph.D. Université Lille 3, 2009 A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Comparative Literature at Brown University. Providence, Rhode Island 2014 © Antoine Traisnel 2014 All rights reserved This dissertation by Antoine Traisnel is accepted in its present form by the Department of Comparative Literature as satisfying the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Date Kevin McLaughlin, Advisor Recommended to the Graduate Council Date Timothy Bewes, Reader Date Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Reader Date Marc Redfield, Reader Approved by the Graduate Council Date Peter M. Weber, Dean of the Graduate School iii VITA Antoine Traisnel (born 1979, Lille, France) received his B.A. (licence) in Foreign Language, Literature and Civilizations (Langues, Literatures, Civilizations Etrangères) in 2000, an M.A. in American Literature and Cinema in 2005, and a Ph.D. in American Literature in 2009 from Université Lille 3. He has published on topics in the fields of American, French and German literature and philosophy, critical theory, cultural studies, and animal studies in such forums as Diacritics, Humanimalia, Presses Universitaires de l’Ecole Normale Supérieure, Sites, Théorie Littérature Epistémologie, Sillages Critiques, The Nathaniel Hawthorne Review, and Revue Française d’Etudes Américaines. His book, Blasted Allegories: Après-Coups Critiques de Nathaniel Hawthorne, is forthcoming from the French press Aux Forges de Vulcain. Starting in July 2013, he is Assistant Professor of Literary and Cultural Theory in the Department of Comparative Literature at Cornell University. iv for anna v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I believe that we never think or write alone, and this is certainly true for this dissertation, for which I have had the chance to be in conversation with many exceptionally generous interlocutors. I am grateful to Kevin McLaughlin for his invaluable mentorship over the past three years. I am doubly thankful to him for previously being on my French dissertation committee as well as supporting my transition from Brown Fulbright scholar to graduate student. I cannot thank Barbara Herrnstein Smith enough for her warmth and rigorous criticality. Her contagious enthusiasm for Nietzsche, brilliant asides and generous sense of humor will influence my scholarship for years to come. I am indebted to Marc Redfield for his careful reading of my work and his precious insights and suggestions. To him I also owe the immense pleasure of discovering Tristram Shandy. Thank you to Tim Bewes, for his expertise on Deleuze, his ability to read what is not yet written (and to spot what has not yet been read) and for his friendship. I also thank my committee for their steadfast support for me over the past year. Thank you to my other cherished mentors and advisors: Mathieu Duplay, Yves Abrioux and especially Karen Newman, for her unflagging support (and for helping me brush up on my Shakespeare). For additional support in and out of the department, I am grateful to Susan Bernstein, Réda Bensmaïa, Bill Keach, Zach Sng, Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg, Arnold Weinstein, and Gerhard Richter. A warm thank you to Carol Wilson-Allen and Charles Auger for their kindness and patience with my special brand of administrative incompetence. I thank my stimulating colleagues and interlocutors in animal studies: Susan McHugh, Matthew Calarco, Nigel Rothfels, Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, and Alain Romestaing. For reading drafts of chapters at different stages of completion, I want to thank Silvia Cernea Clark, Ingrid Diran, Mauro Resmini, Stéphane Vanderhaeghe (always!), and especially Kenneth Haynes for their humbling erudition and their generous contentions. The debt this dissertation owes to my conversations and collaborations with Thangam Ravindranathan cannot adequately be expressed here. I remain thankful for her inexhaustible generosity and her idiosyncratic brilliance. I am most fortunate to have already felt the warm welcome of my new colleagues at Cornell. Thank you to Natalie Melas, Jonathan Culler, Cathy Caruth, and Tracy McNulty for their warmth and professionalism. A special thanks to Tim Murray for giving me the opportunity to benefit from the intellectual community of the Society for the Humanities this past year and to the editors of Diacritics, Laurent Dubreuil and Diane Brown, for publishing a version of my second chapter. I am grateful for the treasured friendships I have made in Ithaca and thank in particular those who have encouraged and supported me this past year: Annie McClanahan, Amanda Jo Goldstein, Tom McEnaney, Alex Livingston, Merike Andre-Barrett, Emily Nacol and Patty Keller. I must also acknowledge the friendship and big-heartedness of Jonathan Mullins. vi Love and thanks to my family and friends in France and in the U.S., especially to my parents, Christian and Catherine and my brother Etienne. A special thank you to my sister Florence for our inspiring intellectual dialogue. Thank you to my favorite false feline, Bogey. Finally, I want to thank my best and dearest reader, Anna. Thank you for never tiring of my water buffaloes, golden eagles and ourang-outangs. Your warm encouragements and countless brilliant insights have inspired me and this project in ways words could never begin to capture. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS FOREWORD 2 Afterlives: Life and Death in Captivation 2 Hereafter 2 INTRODUCTION 13 The Ends of Hunting and the Lures of Capture in Nineteenth-Century America 13 From Hunt to Capture 13 Easy Targets 16 The Rule of Capture 20 A Better Mousetrap 23 Capture as a Representational Mode 28 Accounting the Whale 30 Intolerable Allegories (Or, the Whale) 36 CHAPTER ONE 44 Entrapments: Chasing the Open in James Fenimore Cooper’s The Prairie 44 Land Speculations: (Pur)chasing The Open 44 Persistence of Vision 50 The Dis-Appearance of Animals 57 The Trapper 65 Conclusion: The Ends of Hunting 78 CHAPTER TWO 81 Huntology: Ontological Pursuits in the Still Lives of John James Audubon 81 War of the Species 81 The Execution of the Subject 86 Ontological Pursuits 96 Conclusion: Ergo Sum 107 CHAPTER THREE 111 Cryptoanimality: The Illegible Animal in Edgar Allan Poe’s Urban Fiction 111 Cityscapes 111 The Urban Wanderer 113 Off the Map 117 Zoon Ex Machina 120 The Morgue 128 Cryptozoon 131 So That No Eye Could Detect Any Thing Suspicious 137 Anaseme (Tieret) 144 OuRang-OuTang 152 Conclusion: Ecce Animot 156 AFTERWORD 161 Case In Point: Cuvier, Hawthorne, Darwin 161 On Point 161 Of Sirens and Men 164 Lusus Naturae 167 Pointillism 172 viii LIST OF FIGURES INTRODUCTION Fig. 1. Patent for an improved animal trap. April 1870. 24 Fig. 2. The Photographic Amateur, 2nd Edition, J. Traill Taylor, Scovill Mfg. Co. pub. (New York, NY), 1883, 2nd Ed. about 1885, p. 22 28 CHAPTER ONE Fig. 1. Map of the territories purchased from France in 1803. 46 Fig. 2. Thaumatropes c. 1825 63 Fig. 3. Thomas Cole, illustration of The Prairie 70 Fig. 4. Tonnelle: entry for “perdrix,” Chomel’s dictionnaire économique, 1732. Mille plateaux (528) 74 Fig. 5. Hunting and capture regimes chart. 77 CHAPTER TWO Fig. 1. “Golden Eagle (Aquila chrysaetos)” by John James Audubon, Watercolor, pastel, graphite and selective glazing, 38 x 25 1/2 inches; Collection of the New-York Historical Society, 183 87 Fig. 2. “Delirium” by Walton Ford, Watercolor, gouache, pencil and ink on paper, 151.4 x 101.9 cm (59 5/8 x 40 1/8 in.), 2004. 88 Figs. 3 & 4. “Bonaparte franchissant le Grand-Saint-Bernard” by Jacques-Louis David, Oil on canvas, 259 × 221 cm (102 × 87 in), 1800 beside “Golden Eagle (Aquila chrysaetos)” by John James Audubon. 90 Fig. 5. Still from documentary John James Audubon: Drawn from Nature (2007). Artist Walton Ford demonstrates Audubon’s technique of “posing” the dead animal on a grid in order to draw it. The cage-like grid will then be obliterated by the landscape painted over it. 94 Fig. 6. Audubon vs. Ford paintings comparison table. 95 CHAPTER THREE Fig. 1. Orion, attributed to Reverend Richard Rouse Bloxam. 156 Part a set of the constellation cards Urania’s Mirror, published in London c. 1825 156 AFTERWORD Fig. 1. Sirenis Lacertinae. From Cuvier’s 1807 “Recherche anatomique sur les reptiles regardés encore comme douteux par les naturalistes.” 169 Fig. 2. “Human Ear. Modeled and drawn by Thomas Woolner. a. The projecting point.” 172 Charles Darwin’s The Descent of Man (2004 32). 172 Fig. 3. “Foetus of an Orang. Exact copy of a photograph, showing the form of the ear at this early age.” Charles Darwin’s The Descent of Man (2004 33). 172 ix As yet, however, the sperm whale, scientific or poetic, lives not complete in any literature. Far above all other hunted whales, his is an unwritten life. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; Or, the Whale (1992 147) Foreword | 1 Foreword AFTERLIVES LIFE AND DEATH IN CAPTIVATION The hunter has been turned into a butterfly. Franz Kafka, “Hunter Gracchus” (1974 131) When. .a vanessa or sphinx moth (which I should have been able to overtake easily) made a fool of me through its hesitations, vacillations, and delays, I would gladly have been dissolved into light and air, merely in order to approach my prey unnoticed and be able to subdue it. And so close to fulfillment was this desire of mine, that every quiver or palpitation of the wings I burned for grazed me with its puff or ripple. Between us, now, the old law of the hunt took hold: the more I strove to conform, in all the fibers of my being, to the animal – the more butterfly-like I became in my heart and soul – the more this butterfly itself, in everything it did, took on the color of human volition; and in the end, it was as if its capture was the price I had to pay to regain my human existence [endlich war es, als ob sein Fang der Preis sei, um den einzig ich meines Menschendaseins wieder habhaft werden könne].