by M. O. Grenby
This paradox of signification, hovering between life and death, haunting us, can be traced back to earliest times, when we represented animals using their own blood as paint, their pelts as brushes; and it was to continue in the very materiality of book production, from the sheet of horn that protects the printed text in the hornbook to the animal hide that is made into vellum pages and leather binding, to animal glue, quill pens and so on. Death and the Symbolic are thus ineluctably tied, pointing finally to what Freud saw as the strange appeal of the uncanny, where the inanimate suddenly comes to life, or vice versa.
In the eighteenth century there was a particular vogue for such ‘it-narratives’, which told the life histories of both animate and inanimate things, as though ultimately there were no difference. Mary Ann Kilner wrote The Adventures of a Whipping-Top (1784) about a boy’s toy which deteriorates from new, as many of these objects do, first becoming a dog’s plaything before ending its days in a river, there to compose the very memoirs that are to be magically dispatched, via the river’s current, to a publisher. Most of the personified objects are also commodities (rather than found objects), as one might expect at a time when property was first being produced in quantity (including children’s books, toys and games). And, indeed, many of the animals described were also property, the popularity of pet-keeping then increasing. So, at the very time that capitalism was expanding, the children’s book market was working hard to define and gender the ‘proper’ and ‘propertied’ child, showing children not only how to deport themselves, but how to play, and what to play with. Publishing sought to separate out a proper children’s reading matter, too – moving away from the lower-class chapbooks, and the more distinctly adult-oriented it-narratives – and, finally, to gender the books more overtly.
But having things define us has a double edge. Not only do these objects suggest a more pagan universe, raising problems for orthodox religion, but, by having objects and animals talk, they also seem to undermine the very rationality of the Enlightenment. And while seeking to establish the sovereignty of the individual (objects being separated out and given voices), these works simultaneously undermine it; for not only is individualism parodied (it is seen as excessive if everything has it: ‘It thinks, therefore it is’), but, in the process, the owners of the objects also become more replaceable, expendable and, as ‘propertied classes’, dependent on property for their being. Commodity fetishism rules, in Karl Marx’s terms, with objects concealing human labour and agency within them. Interestingly Marx sometimes uses fairy tale terms in Das Kapital to depict this very process: ‘Mister Capital and Mistress Land carry on their goblin tricks as social characters and at the same time as mere things’, creating ‘an enchanted, perverted, topsy-turvy world’.11 And it is precisely these topsy-turvy novels, where the objects write back, that often ‘spill the beans’ about their origins. If people are defined by their possessions, small wonder that these objects seem possessed.
A modern work in this tradition is John Lasseter’s computer-generated animated film Toy Story (2000), its very title suggesting that it is about the toy equivalent of Everyman. It captures the central contradiction of capitalism: that consumption must be never-ending, with the new displacing the old, until such time as the old becomes ‘retro’, and can again be repackaged as the new. In this case, it is the cowboy, Woody, whose very name suggests a more folksy, pioneering spirit, threatened by new technology in the metallic-plastic form of the astronaut Buzz Lightyear. Apart from Buzz, the toys are aware – just like the it-narrators – that they are mass-produced. Moreover, being retro toys partly justifies their stereotyping as predominantly male, ‘white’ and with clear gender demarcation. The only person who threatens this world is Sid, a child who dismembers and makes mutant, Hieronymus Bosch-like assemblages from his toys. Clearly, he represents a threat – not just to the toys, but to the whole American dream. He is less defined by his toys than the other children, actually ‘playing with’ them – that is, imaginatively reworking them, rather than accepting the manufacturers’ orthodoxy – and is thus less dependent on their products (although Sid’s mutant toys were, inevitably, themselves made into merchandise). But as a result, Sid is presented as less child-like (indeed, like Fine’s adults, he wants ‘to look at the clockwork inside’) – until, that is, he is turned back into a child by those very toys telling him how to behave.
In achieving this, the toys explicitly contravene the convention that they should not speak when humans are around, suggesting that the toys are animated only when children are not playing with them. In Winnie-the-Pooh (1926) this notion is explicit, Christopher Robin having to be inducted into the imaginative world of his toys. Being told about Pooh’s first adventure, and of how ‘the first person he thought of was Christopher Robin’, Christopher Robin interrupts to ask ‘“Was that me?” . . . hardly daring to believe it.’ ‘“That was you”’, he is told.12 Outside the stories, Pooh is simply something to be bumped up and down stairs on his head. Of course, this is yet another example of adults seeking to control children’s literature, to have children play in particular ways, and providing them with suitable scripts. Sid, too, is an adult creation but, while his behaviour is shown as unacceptable, it unavoidably opens a space of contention.
To recap: we have seen the double-edged nature of language. In many ways we are imprisoned by it, made to see the world in certain ways: humans as superior to animals, for instance, with the latter divided into such categories as ‘pets’, ‘vermin’ and ‘food’ – distinctions which often necessitate re-labellings: ‘pork’ not ‘pig’, ‘sardine’ not ‘brisling’. But perhaps the most invisible term of all is ‘animal’ itself. Despite the fact that we are included in this term, we tend to forget it. This chapter should really have been referring to ‘nonhuman animals’ throughout. Yet most books about animals – children’s or adults’ – do not feature humans, even though they belong to the primate section. Not all of us are Creationists, but much of the time we act as though Darwin had never existed.
That the Symbolic order operates in favour of a particular version of ‘man’ – white, middle-class and, almost ‘naturally’, male – is also crucial. Those further from this norm are more likely to be seen as less than human and, thereby, as linked with animals in some way – children being a prime example. But as we have also seen, this creates problems, in that the more marginalised a group, the less transparent the world’s categories become. It has been argued that meat-eating is particularly associated with patriarchy, being championed foremost by the ruling class (who, at one time in England, protected their meat on pain of death or transportation). It is therefore of note that many of the more heterodox texts I have discussed have been by women (Trimmer, the Taylors, Kilner, Sewell, Fine) – and that it is women who were particularly active in pushing for the more humane treatment of animals. So, although animals will never be able to fight their own cause (as with children too), the way we represent them in children’s books warrants attention – especially the way that some authors and illustrators have deliberately sought to derail our standard and, perhaps, unthinking responses.
The first way involves challenging traditional Cartesian notions of a separate, sovereign ego. It recognises that no-one really has such autonomy, initiating actions ex nihilo, which then have their desired effects. Rather, we are all seen to be locked into a variety of networks and institutions that either help to empower or hinder us. Agency is therefore dispersed. We have to work together – as recognised by the welded-together wind-up toy protagonists in Russell Hoban’s classic The Mouse and His Child (1967). Disability Studies provides a useful model here, where, rather than seeing an individual as disabled, it is the whole community or society that is ultimately responsible, either enabling or disabling (ramps and lifts versus steps and stairs and so on).
The ideas behind this notion of an inveterate connectedness come from various sources. Donna Haraway, for example, is a primatologist who credits her primates
with co-authoring her work. Bruno Latour similarly claims that ‘things do not exist without being full of people’, a remark that echoes Erica Fudge’s claim that ‘There is no human without an animal present.’ For Latour, modernity has artificially separated out the inanimate from the animate.13
In terms of children’s literature, recognising such connectedness would entail looking at animal books from a new perspective; for example, by asking what circumstances made possible the adventures of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s pioneering family in the Little House books (1932–43): their links with the Native Americans, with the environment, with developments in technology. It would also involve trying to create new narratives which, in the terms of Chaos Theory, seek to show what happens in Tokyo when a butterfly flaps its wings in New York. Jeremy Rifkin provides an informative template, writing about ‘How the West was Lost’: ‘Behind the facade of frontier heroism and cowboy bravado, of civilizing forces and homespun values, lies a quite different tale: a saga of ecocide and genocide, of forced enclosures of land and people, and the expropriation of an entire subcontinent for the exclusive benefit of a privileged few.’14 Here he is speaking about the cattle industry, imposing its monoculture in the beginnings of what we might now term ‘McDonaldisation’.
One book that does strike me as achieving this enlarged perspective, in a totally novel way, is Chris Raschka’s Arlene Sardine (1998), a picture book about ‘a happy little brisling’, ‘born in a fjord’, that wants to be part of the food industry: to become a sardine, or dead fish. In the second half of the book, having been caught by fishermen, she ‘swam around in the net for three days and three nights and did not eat anything, so her stomach would be empty. There is a word for this. The word is thronging.’ Raschka’s quiet emphasis on the shift in meaning of this term, from the original ‘crowded together’ to ‘starving’, exposes the ways in which humans attempt to disguise the processes by which they turn animals into food. But Raschka is relentlessly candid: ‘Here’, his story continues, ‘on the deck of the fishing boat, Arlene died’. From then on her eyes are closed, as she is sorted, salted, smoked, canned in oil, sealed hermetically (‘with no air inside’) and cooked. Arlene’s dream – and the subject of the whole book – is the very nightmare that is usually erased from children’s stories. Anthropomorphism is given a subtle shift here: clearly the notion of Arlene having an ambition, a quest, is common in humanised animal stories, but the nature of her ambition then alienates us – although, on reflection, this is exactly our anthropocentric desire: that there be tins of sardines on supermarket shelves. Yet again, in making this desire so blatant, and so readily ascribing it to a fish, we become aware of the limits of our anthropocentrism, and Arlene remains inscrutable, and ‘other’. In animating Arlene, then, there is no attempt to escape the fact that she is also de-animated, the Word inescapably involving the murder of the Thing in that a sardine, by definition, always is and always was a dead fish.15
Although I have chosen Arlene because it shows this sense of connectedness and dispersed agency (how an individual fish is connected to the food industry), it also works by shifting our perspective. Arlene, then, has a precursor in the leg of mutton in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass (1871) to which Alice is introduced. After it ‘got up in the dish and made a little bow’, Alice finds it impossible to eat, because, the Red Queen says, ‘it isn’t etiquette to cut any one you’ve been introduced to’ (wittily punning on ‘cut’).16
This second tactic is ‘defamiliarisation’, derailing our more predictable (Symbolic) responses and thus helping us experience a sense of otherness – just what we find when the Real of an animal intrudes (through its sound, smell, touch, bite or look). Often this confounding of categories occurs only fleetingly in a text, when the anthropomorphism is suddenly undercut. Beatrix Potter is adept at this, although her work is sometimes dismissed for its simple anthropomorphism. However, it is precisely the switch from a cosy anthropomorphism to a more brutal, Darwinian universe that makes it so effective. In The Tale of Mr Jeremy Fisher (1906), for instance, it occurs with the sudden appearance of the predatory trout; or in The Tale of Peter Rabbit (1901) the threat presented by Mr McGregor shifts our perspective from Peter as civilised boy to Peter as garden pest or food source. In Pierre Macherey’s terms, these scenes exhibit moments where the ideology of a text does not quite cohere. Even in a work as anthropomorphic as Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows there are instances. For example, in the very first chapter, when Otter has just appeared, we read the following:
‘Did I ever tell you that good story about Toad and the lock-keeper? It happened this way. Toad. . .’
An errant May-fly swerved unsteadily athwart the current in the intoxicated fashion affected by young bloods of May-flies seeing life. A swirl of water and a ‘cloop!’ and the May-fly was visible no more.
Neither was the Otter.
The Mole looked down. The voice was still in his ears, but the turf whereon he had sprawled was clearly vacant. Not an Otter to be seen, as far as the distant horizon.
But again there was a streak of bubbles on the surface of the river.
The Rat hummed a tune, and the Mole recollected that animal-etiquette forbade any sort of comment on the sudden disappearance of one’s friends at any moment, for any reason or no reason whatever.
This reminder of the reality of animal life (contrasted with their own luncheon-basket of ‘coldtonguecoldhamcoldbeefpickledgherkinssaladfrenchrollscresssandwichespottedmeatgingerbeerlemonadesodawater’) is particularly poignant as Mole has himself been described as just such an errant, intoxicated young blood seeing life, bursting out of his burrow ‘in the joy of living and the delight of spring’.17
A more powerful and disarming example is provided by Anthony Browne’s Gorilla (1983), a story in which a gorilla is deliberately anthropomorphised (or a human ‘zoomorphised’, we might say) to show, metaphorically, what is lacking in Hannah’s cold, workaholic father. But Browne then sets up some barriers to any would-be cosiness with the caged beasts he depicts deliberately separated from the rest of the book in a single page opening, I think, in order that readers might not be distracted by the animal-human (or animal-landscape, animal-artwork) hybrids elsewhere. Hannah, we are told, ‘thought they were beautiful. But sad.’18 And they are profoundly moving. The orangutan (fig. 15), being so small, is less likely to hold our attention at first. Instead, we are drawn to another cage (fig. 14), mesmerised by the chimpanzee’s huge, liquid eyes, looking directly at us (the whites looking almost like tears forming). It seems not only to hold our gaze but to solicit it – though, as was said before, it is a gaze that is not quite human, despite the fact that it fixes us. Akira Mizuta Lippit quotes Walter Benjamin’s famous statement about a successful work of art having an ‘aura’, our ‘investing it with the capacity to return our gaze’. As Lippit says elsewhere:
The look that [animals] reflect back to us reminds us that in them we encounter something alien . . . though it may be difficult to see past the layers of apparent familiarity. Animals may not participate in the world of human speech, but the muteness that shrouds their senses always accompanies us in the realm of our language . . . unless we refuse to look at all, the muteness of an animal also imposes a moment of muteness on us.19
In the picture of the chimp, this notion is abetted by the thumb (that important, evolutionary, opposable thumb) over its mouth, showing that it is speechless, and with that pun intact; in other words, it is speechless because it is unable to comprehend its plight. However, the position of the hand also alludes to statues like Rodin’s Le Penseur: it appears to be a thoughtful beast, as though it might just have something to say – to us, who are, after all, fellow anthropoids.
Figure 15. Anthony Browne, Gorilla. London: Julia MacRae, 1983. (Double-page spread with fig.14.)
We might then return to the orang-utan, and give it more attention. After the relatively generous space given to the chimp, it appears to be even more confined,
especially as the bars of its cage segment it into nine pieces, and the shadows of these bars also seem to mark its face, suggesting scarification perhaps, or the tracks of dried-up tears. The long downturn of the mouth is emphasised by being juxtaposed with those all-too-uniform bars, as though its whole face were collapsing. But most mysterious are the eyes, looking out at us from what seems an immense depth. Interestingly, the eyeline of the animals matches, so that, when the book is shut, the two caged beasts can contemplate each other, which might also make us see a parallel. For, from the beasts’ point of view, we too are only seen through bars, and might be caged in ways we don’t realise – caged in by a speciesist ideology, by the prison-house of language. The fact that the bars of the chimp’s cage are represented by white space seems to be linked to this. We might at first think it a shame that these break up this picture, but this is what I think Browne wants: for us to know we are at a zoo. Also, representing the bars in this blank way draws more attention to the fact that we don’t actually see the animal clearly; the white gaps make it explicit that this is just a representation of an animal: something that is not actually there; that does, indeed, haunt us, oscillating between presence and absence as it fades to white. Finally, the gaps suggest that this is something more than mere spectacle: ‘beautiful’, as Hannah’s first thought is, but sad.