Making an Ass of Yourself in Narrative

Through close readings of literary asses in Sterne, Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Clare, this chapter argues that the development of sympathetic animal representation is marked by an ambivalence emblematized by the figure of the donkey. The chapter outlines the donkey’s ambiguous cultural status, discussing narratives from two different traditions: the Judeo-Christian tradition in which the meek ass is revered for its lowliness, and the classical tradition in which it is scorned. The biblical story of Balaam’s ass, in which the ass speaks against her master’s cruelty, is interpreted literally in the eighteenth century as teaching compassion to animals. In Apuleius’ ancient novel The Golden Ass the narrator, transformed into an ass, is a low, lustful, stupid beast. Both narratives influence the eighteenth-century donkey representations discussed here. The writers’ tonal complexities are traced to the fear that to sympathize with animals is to be transformed, like Apuleius’ narrator, into an ass.

Introduction

This chapter places nonhuman animals at the centre of the age of revolution, outlining the naturalistic and sympathetic perspectives on animal life underpinning emergent animal rights discourses. Firstly it shows how eighteenth-century natural history influenced a shift from symbolic to literal animal representation. Secondly it argues that David Hume’s and Adam Smith’s philosophies of sympathy each encouraged anthropomorphism in animal representation, Hume’s by blurring the distinction between rationality and animality, Smith’s by opening up the possibility of imaginative projection into nonhuman experiences. Thirdly, it traces the radicalization of the idea of natural rights, showing how the concept of human rights was locked in a complex and fraught relationship with that of animal rights. Human demands for rights entailed claims to a fully human rationality distinct from animality, but the concept of universal natural rights for man and woman was extended beyond the human.

Types of “Animalist” Focalization in Bulgarian Literature

Proceeding from the belief that in a world shaped by violent anthropodomination literature takes important part in the substitution of real nonhuman animals with their false cultural duplicates, the paper offers examples of Bulgarian literary works about nonhuman animals and tries to examine the different angles of focalization in them. In Bulgarian literary history there is a (disputed) tradition of differentiating a certain literary branch called “animalist fiction” or “animalist literature”, distinguished predominantly on thematic basis (stories about nonhuman animals), and considered classical realistic literature for adults (or rather for all ages), not literature for children. Such works include a variety of focalization types: from extreme anthropocentrism, through pseudoanimalist focalization, up to claimed “objectivism”. All these types show that escaping anthropocentrism and achieving real nonhuman animal representation seems impossible, so the inevitable anthropocentrism should at least try to be honest. Bulgarian classical realist “animalist” fiction testifies that “animalist” focalization can never be purely nonhuman, inasmuch as literary narrative always originates from the human imagination, gets expressed through a human language, and is experienced by human perception. Focalization always includes the human, but in the best cases it can resist violent anthropodomination by being empathic for the good of the nonhuman animals.

Animals in Graphic Narrative

Animal representation in graphic narrative has figured in many of the medium’s important developments and anchored one of its most popular genres, funny-animal comics. Since the modern emergence of the form sometime around the end of the nineteenth century, major figures such a Richard Outcault, Winsor McCay, George Herriman, Edwina Dumm, Carl Barks, Robert Crumb, and Jim Woodring have made extensive use of the animal figure, in both highly and minimally anthropomorphized forms. As argued by John Berger, David Herman, and other scholars, the animal’s lack of human speech renders it vulnerable to a brand of representational colonialism whereby its in-itself existence is emptied in favor of other symbolic, metaphorical, or ideological functions. Many works since the 1980s by Grant Morrison, Steven Murphy and Michael Zulli, and Nicole Georges have striven for less anthropomorphized depictions, in a bid to address the ethics involved in representing the animal subject.