Animals and Other People. Heather Keenleyside
classification system.39 To my mind, though, Thomson apes taxonomic conventions in ways that confound rather than shore up distinctions between human and nonhuman beings. He calls sheep “soft fearful People” and chickens “houshold feathery People” just as he calls Greeks “lively People” and Romans “mighty People” (Su, 378; W, 87, 448, 498). He writes of “the Tulip-Race” in the same terms as he does of the “human Race” (Sp, 539; A, 1021); he refers to “the finny Race” of fish and the “soaring Race” of birds as well as to the “boisterous Race” and “Thrice happy Race” of Laplanders, and to “the toiling Race” or “the never-resting Race” of men (Sp, 395, 753; W, 836, 881; Su, 36, 726). He describes “the busy Nations” of bees and “the tuneful Nations” of birds just as he does “the guilty Nations” of humans (Sp, 510, 594; Su, 1711). “Human” is not the stable term in Thomson’s system of periphrastic personifications. If sheep and bees and flowers are personified in these phrases, so too are human beings.40
Thomson does not use periphrasis to construct a Linnaean table of fixed and essential differences. Instead, he develops a system that seeks to replace natural-historical classification with his own taxonomical operation, using personification to define all kinds of beings as people—a term of relation rather than being, of sociality rather than individual essence. In this, the system created by Thomson’s periphrastic personifications comes closer to the classification systems Claude Lévi-Strauss describes in The Savage Mind. The “people” constituted by Thomson’s periphrases function as “species” do for Lévi-Strauss, to motor a perpetual movement between universalization and particularization, a movement in which species and individuals are not opposed, but terms that follow on one another.41 Lévi-Strauss describes this dynamic, which he calls the totemic operator: “It can be seen that the species admits first empirical realizations: Seal species, Bear species, Eagle species. Each includes a series of individuals … : seals, bears, eagles. Each animal can be analysed into parts: head, neck, feet, etc. These can be regrouped first within each species (seals’ heads, seals’ necks, seals’ feet) and then together by types of parts: all heads, all necks…. A final regrouping restores the model of the individual in his regained entirety.”42 In the totemic operation that Lévi-Strauss outlines, species are logically prior to individuals (as “people” are to “persons,” in Thomson’s terms): “the detotalization of the concept of a species into particular species, of each species into its individual members, and of each of these individuals into organs and parts of the body … issue into a retotalization of the concrete parts into abstract parts and of the abstract parts into a conceptualized individual.”43 In such a system, moreover, the individual is not the unit of maximum difference or particularity, but a relational term that resolves difference into equivalence.44 Heads, necks, and feet create individuals that are like every other, because they are composed of like parts.
I have invoked Lévi-Strauss because his account of the totemic operation provides a helpful model for what goes on in The Seasons—a poem that begins with all kinds of “people,” and then composes individual persons out of the parts and the actions of their composite bodies. In The Seasons, the body part that appears most often is the eye. Readers have tended to identify the myriad “eyes” in Thomson’s poem (eighty-one, on Cohen’s count) as Barrell does, with the eye of a poet-speaker.45 For readers like Barrell, this eye is the primary instrument by which the poet tries to subdue a recalcitrant landscape, surveying objects and features from a distance and composing them into an alien and abstract form. Yet while some of Thomson’s “eyes” are identified as the speaker’s (“my searching Eye” [A, 785]), many are clearly attached to other human figures: “the conscious Eye” of Britannia’s daughters; the “downcast Eye” of Musidora; the “sad Eye” of the Russian exile (Su, 1594, 1280; W, 802). Others are explicitly not human: the “glancing Eye” of a dove, the “stedfast Eye” of a horse, the “deploring Eye” of cattle (Sp, 788; Su 510, 1125); or the “Eye” of Scotland, the “sacred Eye” of Day, the “kindling Eye” of Time, or the “ever-waking Eye” that is Providence (A, 932; Su, 916, 1520; W, 1020). Finally, most of Thomson’s eyes are oddly detached from either human or nonhuman beings. Thus when Thomson describes the pleasures of the shade to an eye and ear and heart, his repeated use of the definite article rather than a possessive adjective reminds readers of all the bodies that could be made up of such parts: “The Heart beats glad; the fresh-expanded Eye / And Ear resume their Watch; the Sinews knit; / And Life shoots swift thro’ all the lighten’d Limbs” (Su, 477–79). Like these different parts, the eye that sees a coming storm or struggles in the dark could belong to any body: “’Tis listening fear, and dumb Amazement all: / When to the startled Eye the sudden Glance / Appears far South, eruptive thro’ the Cloud”; “A faint erroneous Ray, / Glanc’d from th’ imperfect Surfaces of Things, / Flings half an Image on the straining Eye” (Su, 1128–30, 1687–89).46 Thomson’s eyes do not impose human form on a hostile and alien nature, abandoning concrete particularity by assigning natural creatures and objects to preconceived classes. Instead, they link concrete and abstract by claiming equivalence between these many different eyes, and between the individual doves, horses, and humans that see through them. In this, Thomson’s poem again resembles Lévi-Strauss’s totemic system: first, using periphrasis to compose all kinds of people; then, decomposing people into parts, into eyes and ears and hearts; and finally, recomposing those parts on a different plane, into persons.
Person is not a term that appears in The Seasons, and this absence sets Thomson apart from the terms of Barrell’s critique, as well as from Kantian ideas of dignity, autonomy, or freedom. Like Barrell, Thomson uses personification to claim value for nonhuman nature, but he proceeds by way of “people,” a term above all for the kind of relation that Thomson calls “social.” The individual person, for Thomson, is not the foundation but the effect of relation; in The Seasons, to borrow and invert Barrell’s formulation, beings “retain to some extent their individuality” not although but because they are “organized within a formal pattern.” Working outside of familiar models of being and relation, Thomson’s poem generates remarkable conceptual as well as ethical possibilities. For his peculiar effort to compose all sorts of people into one great social whole takes the animal rather than the human being as its foundational term. And it understands the animal less as a type of being than as a mode of relation and of motion—the animation that is everywhere the method and aim of Thomson’s poetics.
Animation and the Composition of Domestic Society
In Thomson, I have been arguing, form is not something imposed on hostile individuals, whether human or animal. It is what enables individuals to come into being, as effects of the animation Thomson associates with animals and other people. This means that the persons precipitated from Thomson’s system of peoples are composed not only of corresponding body parts, but also of the motions and emotions of those parts: deploring, gazing, loving, demanding, musing. Such actions and affections link Thomson’s periphrasis to the more common form of personification described by Kames, Beattie, Blair, and Priestley: the figure of animation that ascribes sensibility, voluntary motion, life, action, affection, sympathy, or perception to “things inanimate,” an ever shrinking category in Thomson’s nature. Animation is the most pervasive type of personification that appears throughout The Seasons, and it is also the most fugitive—very often difficult to pin down, or to confidently distinguish from straightforward natural description.47 At times, Thomson clearly signals the ascription of action or affection as ascription: in the summer heat, “Streams look languid from afar” and “seem / To hurl into the Covert of the Grove” (Su, 448–50). Thomson similarly distinguishes the responses of different creatures to an approaching rain shower:
Th’ uncurling Floods, diffus’d
In glassy Breadth, seem thro’ delusive Lapse
Forgetful of their Course. ’Tis Silence all,
And pleasing Expectation. Herds and Flocks
Drop the dry Sprig, and mute-imploring eye
The falling Verdure. Hush’d in short Suspense,
The