Animals and Other People. Heather Keenleyside

      Introduction

      Animals and Other Figures

      The task of this book is to recover what is most unique and still useful about eighteenth-century approaches to animal life. I do this by focusing on writers who people their poetry, novels, and children’s literature with goats, mules, oxen, and hares; experiment with beastly genres like the fable; write the “lives” of mice as well as men. These writers turn to animals in works that call attention to their own formal devices: extensive poetic personifications, sentimental cross-species conversations, and fables that use speaking animals to teach children that speech is the sole property of human beings. Such devices can seem utterly conventional, having little to do with animals, and lacking significant conceptual or ethical stakes. My aim is to make the contrary case. I argue that the patently figurative animals in eighteenth-century literature have much to contribute to cultural and intellectual debates that are still with us—about the specificity of animals and the nature of species, about persons and their relationship to other sorts of creatures, and about what life is, which lives count, and how we might live together. They do this by making a point that eighteenth-century writers understood better than we: rhetorical conventions make real-world claims.

      The philosophy and literature of the period is full of animal figures, from Hobbes’s Leviathan and Locke’s conversible parrot to Rousseau’s natural man that is or is like an animal; from the “soft fearful People” and “houshold, feathery People” (sheep and chickens) of James Thomson’s nature poetry to the Yahoos and Houyhnhnms of Gulliver’s Travels; from the dogs, cats, goats, and parrots that inhabit Robinson Crusoe’s otherwise solitary island to the talking animals of children’s fiction.¹ These figures are distributed across the long eighteenth century and appear in a range of its favored genres—those that are on the rise, like the novel or the life narrative, and those that are ancient or even antiquated, like the animal fable. As diverse as they are, these works all suggest that we best apprehend the specificity of animal life—including, potentially, our own—by way of conspicuously figurative uses of language, generic literary forms, or recognizable rhetorical conventions. Moreover, all conceive literary form as an engine for incorporating individuals into a species or community, and thus for composing the quasi-figurative, quasi-natural beings that both animals and people are.

      Over the course of this book, I pay considerable attention to the period’s predilection for the rhetorical figure of personification, in poetry and beyond. It is in the eighteenth-century literature and criticism of personification that animals and persons are most pointedly and most curiously brought together, and conceived in distinctly literary terms. Broadly speaking, this book follows the fate of personification as it moves out from the pages of rhetorical treatises and poetry to genres like the novel, the life narrative, and the fable. As one would expect, the figure of personification takes different forms in these diverse genres, appearing at times as a local rhetorical ornament, at others, more capaciously, as the literary and imaginative operation of distributing personhood—and sometimes, as both at once. Take, for example, the following passage from Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, one of the era’s leading thinkers of animal life, also a preeminent theorist of literary style:

      Among the numberless objects with which the surface of this globe is covered and peopled, animals deservedly hold the first rank…. The senses, the figure, and the motions of animals, bestow on them a more extensive connection with surrounding objects than is possessed by vegetables…. It is this number of relations alone which render the animal superior to the vegetable, and the vegetable to the mineral. Man, if we estimate him by his material part alone, is superior to the brute creation only from the number of peculiar relations he enjoys by means of his hand and of his tongue.²

      Like other writers in this book, Buffon identifies animal life above all with a particular sort of agency—that associated with “the senses, figure, and the motions of animals,” and with the human hand and tongue—as well as with the relations it generates. In doing so, he pictures human relations as different in degree rather than in kind from those of other animate beings and so configures the order of nature in conspicuously social terms, as a realm composed of the relations between “the numberless objects with which the surface of this globe is covered and peopled.”³

      My title picks up on the usage of “people” that Buffon’s English translator employs here—a common eighteenth-century usage, very often applied to animals, as both a noun that means inhabitants, group, or tribe, and a verb in the sense of “to populate.” In An Essay on Man, for example, Alexander Pope directs his readers with the wholly familiar call to “‘Learn each small People’s genius, policies, / The Ant’s republic, and the realm of Bees.’” He pictures “the green myriads in the peopled grass,” much as Thomson, in The Seasons, will describe insects that “People the Blaze,”