Aliens and Animals: Notes on Literary Lifeforms After Darwin and Freud A

Aliens and Animals: Notes on Literary Lifeforms After Darwin and Freud A Dissertation SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY Michael Harrison Rowe IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Lois Cucullu December 2019 © Michael Harrison Rowe 2019 Acknowledgements I would not have been able to complete this dissertation—and all of the preliminary work that led up to it over the course of many years—without the support of the University of Minnesota, in particular the support of the faculty and staff of the English Department. I would like to thank in particular Karen Frederickson of the English Graduate Office for her help with all sorts of matters, great and small. I would like to thank my committee, as well: Tony Brown, Lois Cucullu, Leslie Morris, and Jani Scandura. They supported me as teachers, mentors, and finally as colleagues and friends. My gratitude goes to Lois especially, for her help as my advisor. What works well in this dissertation is due to her intellectual guidance and editorial eye. I would also like to acknowledge the support of a close circle of friends and peers in the English Department, especially those who worked with me both in and out of the classroom and those associated with the Theory Reading Group: Wes Burdine, Joe Hughes, Hyeryung Hwang, Andrew Marzoni, Stephen McCulloch, Robb St. Lawrence, and Amanda Taylor. Other friends from the English Department were as essential: Valerie Bherer, Stacey Decker, Dana Meade, Annemarie Lawless, Caitlin McHugh, Michael Phillips, Katie Sisernos, and Bomi Yoon. So many friends from outside academia have supported and encouraged me, but I want in particular to thank Nathan Goldman and Erik Hane, my brothers in revision. I’d like finally to thank my family: Amy, Bill, James, Ali, and Cy. My parents, Amy and Bill, in particular, will likely never understand how much they inspire me; their love and support means everything. My dad has been and will remain one of the greatest intellectual collaborators I have been lucky enough to know. My mom’s love of literature is where this all started, and to this day, James, my brother, is my dear friend and partner in reading. My sister-in-law, Ali, a professor and scholar, with a PhD in English, gets particular credit for a liberating idea about how to organize this dissertation. I found the writing of a dissertation to be exceptionally challenging. There were many times over the last few years when it seemed impossible to complete. Once or twice I even despaired (despair seemed like the right thing to do). When I mustered the energy to finish, in late 2018, I had the support and love of one person without whom I couldn’t have done any of this at all—Giuliana Livingston Pinto. i Table of Contents Introduction: Animal Figures 1 Chapter 1: Drunk Without Drinking, or Life Is Good: Language, Imagination, and Equine Habit in John Barleycorn 14 Chapter 2: Alien Lifeforms: Personality and Singularity in D.H. Lawrence’s St. Mawr 80 Chapter 3: The Accursed Buzz in H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Whisperer in Darkness” 145 Conclusion: We Have Never Been Outside Culture 202 Bibliography 216 ii Introduction: Animal Figures In his longest work, “Apology for Raymond Sebond” (1580), Michel de Montaigne defends—the title really gives it away—the writings of Raymond Sebond, a fifteenth-century Catalan scholar of Christian theology and natural philosophy. Montaigne’s essay expresses a scathing doubt about human reason and knowledge. He casts both as a pittance compared to the power of faith. As he writes, citing a phrase from the Book of Matthew, “The Word of God says that if we had one single drop of faith we would ‘move mountains’,” but men lack such a drop (Montaigne 494). He concludes, It is evident to me that we only willingly carry out those religious duties which flatter our passions. Christians excel at hating enemies. Our zeal works wonders when it strengthens our tendency towards hatred, ambition, avarice, evil- speaking… and rebellion. (495) Humans, according to Montaigne, are not first and foremost thinking beings but passionate creatures. We are fickle, changeable, and faithless. Our hatred, ambition, and avarice motivate us more strongly than any religious feeling. No doubt the religious violence of his own time influenced Montaigne’s point of view, for the sixteenth-century French Wars of Religion saw Catholic mobs massacre Protestant villages and neighborhoods, not to mention open warfare between Huguenot and Catholic armies. Though “Apology” amounts to a defense of Christian faith, it does so by way of questioning the power of human thought and feeling, that is, our capacity to believe— actually believe—in God. Without God, we are nothing. “Let us consider for a while,” Montaigne writes, “Man in isolation—Man with no outside help, armed with no arms but his own and stripped of that grace and knowledge of God in which consist his dignity, his power and the very ground of his being” (Montaigne 502). Beholding the figure, he has 1 thus envisioned, Montaigne finds it ludicrous. He wonders if it is “possible to imagine anything more laughable than that this pitiful, wretched creature—who is not even master of himself, [sic] but exposed to shocks on every side—should call himself Master and Emperor of a universe” (502). Without God, human beings do not merely lack dignity and power. They barely exist. If they are fickle, changeable, and faithless, their feelings and their passions guide them. They lack control even over their thoughts. Montaigne would perhaps share Nietzsche’s skeptical idea, expressed in Beyond Good and Evil (1886), that “a thought comes when ‘it’ wants, not when ‘I’ want” (47). Montaigne’s solution to the problem of faithless humanity is a bestialization of humankind. To make human beings faithful and wise, Montaigne implies, they must be dealt with like animals. As he puts it, Do you want a man who is sane, moderate, firmly based and reliable? Then array him in darkness, sluggishness and heaviness. To teach us to be wise, make us stupid like beasts; to guide us, you must blind us. (548) It is beyond the scope of this introduction to assess the shrewd and ironic argumentation of “Apology for Raymond Sebond,” but Montaigne is perfectly serious here. The solution that makes humans “sane, moderate, firmly based, and reliable” is freedom from fickle and compulsive passions. Darkness, sluggishness, and heaviness could arrest the urgency of our whims. Ignorance and forgetting could defend us against the “blows and outrages of Fortune,” which leaves humans with debilitating pain and sorrow (Montaigne 550). Montaigne does not say so, but it keeps with his thinking that stupidity could even defend us against thought itself—since thought is not an act of rational control but another passion. Thought represents a passivity that leaves us open to whatever thinking comes to mind, right or wrong. Not human beings but beasts, Montaigne implies, are capable of 2 wisdom. They have the darkness, sluggishness, and heaviness required to be sane and faithful. As with Montaigne, so with the writers that are the subject of this dissertation: Jack London, D.H. Lawrence, H.P. Lovecraft, and, in the conclusion, Djuna Barnes. Each of these writers considers the difference that non-human behavior, appearance, feeling, and intention makes when it is held up for comparison with the behaviors, appearances, feelings, and intentions that constitute human life. Considered for comparative purposes, nonhuman animals serve as a model for human beings and admonish us. In the literary cases presented in the chapters that follow this introduction, nonhuman lives offer differing lens to see changed conceptions of being human. Readers can perceive correctives to the frailties of humankind in the deluded horse from Jack London’s John Barleycorn, in Lawrence’s singular horse, the eponymous stallion from his novella, St. Mawr, and in the alien power of Lovecraft’s teasingly un-representable monsters in “The Whisperer in Darkness.” In his essay, “Language, Power, and the Training of Horses,” the philosopher and horse trainer Paul Patton muses on the philosophical writings of another trainer, Vicki Hearne, whose work has also been the subject of ecofeminist and theorist Donna Haraway’s scholarship. Like Hearne, Patton meditates on the meaning and responsibility of the animal-trainer relationship. He suggests that in the shadow of Nietzsche’s and then Foucault’s analyses of power—"all human social relations are power relations” is Patton’s summary of their philosophical work—the question of ethical relationships becomes perplexing, for “power relations are relations of inequality” (Patton 95). But 3 Hearne’s position in Adam’s Task is that “[t]he better trained a dog is—which is to say, the greater his ‘vocabulary’—the more mutual trust there is, the more dog and human can rely on each other to behave responsibly” (Hearne 21). Training represents a relationship of unequal power but creates conditions for both increased communication and increased responsibility. Training creates trust and fosters intimacy. Patton puts the same thought in terms of political theory: “[W]hat we learn from the disciplines of animal training is that hierarchical forms of society between unequals are by no means incompatible with ethical relations and obligations towards other beings” (Patton 95). Hearne and Patton exhibit a peculiar form of realism. They accept inequality of power as a feature of a world in which we must become more just and create better conditions for justice. Their argument is not so distant from Montaigne’s. In the case of Hearne, Patton, and Montaigne, though only Montaigne’s language suggests punishment and the power of Catholic faith, responsibility requires discipline, instruction, and obedience as much as, or rather more than, freedom.

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