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its use of animal figures. He begins by announcing the poem’s generic affiliation in its title (“Pairing Time Anticipated: A Fable”) and then echoes this twice in its first four lines (“Birds confabulate … at least in fable”). In these disarmingly simple opening lines, Cowper reminds readers of the common etymology of fable and speech (fable, confabulate, from fabulari, to talk or discourse) and points toward a rather startling proposition: that confabulation, or speech, somehow depends on fabulation.44 In part, this is simply to note that Cowper calls attention to the fundamental move of fable: fables enact, at the level of form, the coming to speech (humanity, politics, reason) of the animal.45 Cowper goes on to thematize this move—the move from the state of nature into society, so familiar from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century theorists of social contract—in the narrative of his poem, staging the birds’ marriage debate between two opposing figures. The first is an elder and rational Bulfinch counseling caution and prudence—an emblem of human reason and public discourse who, having “Entreated … / A moment’s liberty to speak; / And silence publicly enjoin’d, / Deliver’d briefly … his mind” (19–22). He is pitted against (and at the assembly, bested by) a creature of animal appetite and motion—a young and impulsive female finch determined to “marry, without more ado,” and who says so with a “tongue [that] knew no control” (36, 26). In the dispute between these figures, Cowper seems to stage at the level of content the same contest that the fable enacts at the level of form—between humanity (reason, publicity, masculinity, social contract, articulate speech) and animality (appetite, privacy, femininity, the state of nature, animal motion).
Described in this way, Cowper’s fable begins to seem a literary approximation of what Agamben calls the “anthropological machine of humanism,” in which the animal comes into being as an excluded and privative term, the internal exception that defines the human by what it is not.46 But this characterization does not exhaust the point Cowper makes when he lingers over the connection between the genre of fable and its signal convention of animal speech. Crucially, it leaves out one speaker altogether—the addressee of the marriage proposal delivered by the female finch’s uncontrolled tongue: “‘I marry, without more ado, / My dear Dick Red-cap, what say you?’” (36–37). This is what Dick Red-cap says in response:
Dick heard, and tweedling, ogling, bridling,
Turning short round, strutting and sideling,
Attested, glad, his approbation,
Of an immediate conjugation. (38–41)
Dick Red-cap’s “tweedling, ogling, bridling, / Turning …, strutting and sideling” cuts across the oppositions between humanity and animality, society and nature, speech and animal motion. On the one hand, Dick’s speech is described in the conspicuously humanist vocabulary of social contract—his motions are a sign of consent, functioning to “attest … his approbation” to marriage, and to society more generally. On the other hand, and unlike the quoted speech of the elder Bulfinch and his female interlocutor, Dick’s “speech” is composed wholly of animal motions. This is perhaps Cowper’s spin on Michel de Montaigne’s remark about the significance of animal movement: “their motions discourse.”47 But this sort of naturalistic animal discourse sits oddly inside fable, a genre in which animals speak directly in words, by way of the explicitly figurative conventions of the form.
By including Dick’s discursive motions inside the genre of fable, as one variety of the articulate speech of fabulous animals, Cowper blurs the line between animal vehicle and human tenor, as well as between literal description and rhetorical figuration. In doing so, he raises a number of questions that are central to this book. Do Dick Red-cap’s meaningful animal motions indicate that the fable—and the human society for which it clearly stands—might somehow accommodate actual animals? If animal motions can serve to attest approbation—if animal motions constitute a mode of discourse—could animals be parties to social contract, rather than simply figures for human participation? (Hobbes, among others, raises this question explicitly and answers clearly in the negative.)48 Finally, before and alongside such questions—about whether animal motions might count as speech, and what it means if they do—are others, perhaps more basic still. Do birds really ogle? Are Dick’s strutting, ogling, and sideling actually animal motions at all? Are Dick’s discursive motions not further evidence of the straightforwardly figurative nature of fabulous animals—evidence that there really are no animals in this poem, but only people?
In literary terms, these last questions are crucial. When Cowper pictures animals performing conspicuously human activities—Dick Red-cap ogling, Beau puzzling his puppy brains, or Tiny regaling hawthorn—he enters the curiously complex rhetorical and philosophical territory of personification, in the eighteenth-century sense I have begun to outline. In doing so, Cowper complicates his own admonition to Rousseau, that “the evidence of his senses” is sufficient to distinguish rhetorical figures from actual animals, or to divide creatures with reason and speech (persons) from those without (animals). Cowper would seem to counter Rousseau’s objections to fable (“Foxes speak, then? … the same language as crows?”) with common sense. Animals cannot really speak, Cowper seems to say to Rousseau, just look or listen to an actual animal. But what do we see when we look at an animal? Montaigne thought we saw (or ought to see) “discourse.” Descartes insisted that we see a complex machine, a coordinated set of movements indistinguishable, to the senses, from the movements of an automaton, an inanimate object set in motion from without. Cowper never does describe what ogling that “attests approbation” looks like—nor even what it looks like, more simply, to ogle. What is the visible or perceptible difference, we might wonder, between ogling and looking, or between strutting and, say, hopping or walking? For that matter, what is the visible difference between Cowper’s Tiny eating oats and straw and Jacques de Vaucason’s famous automaton, “The Digesting Duck,” “eating” grains (and then “eliminating” feces)? Intuitively, the animal motions of Vaucason’s digesting and defecating duck would seem figurative in a way that Tiny’s are not—an intuition registered by my use of scare quotes in describing them. But in the wake of the Cartesian animal-machine, automata like the defecating duck captured the cultural imagination precisely because such intuitions were called into doubt.49
In poems like “Pairing Time Anticipated,” Cowper registers the insight that hovers between Montaigne and Descartes: that animal life, as such, is not evident to the senses, because one cannot strictly see animate motion any more than one can strictly see reason or speech in humans. (This is what Cowper is getting at with the opening quip that confabulation—or simply, speech—depends on fable.) Some types of activities, and so some types of beings, are apprehended as and by way of figuration. Without the sort of generic and species figures we associate with literary forms like fable (the Dog, the Bird, the Hare), there are no dogs puzzling or birds strutting or hares regaling or even, simply, eating. There is no Beau pursuing swallows, or Tiny enjoying his straw. There are no animals but only objects among others. Philosopher Michael Thompson makes the same point in a different context and idiom, using “life form” where I have used “generic and species figure”: “take away the life form and we have a pile of electrochemical connections; put it back in and we have hunger and pain and breathing and walking.”50 Cowper might put the point this way: take away the life form, the generic and species figure, and we have a succession of sounds and movement; put it back in and we have speaking and suffering and strutting and eating. In other words, Cowper does not picture the animal as a natural category before figuration—the raw stuff out of which human persons are made and into which they might ultimately resolve. Instead, he helps us to see that animals are made, much as persons are—or better, that animals, like persons, are at once given and made, both living beings and rhetorical figures.51
To put things this way is, finally, to link Cowper’s fables back to Lévi-Strauss’s remark that animals are good to think with. For with this phrase, Lévi-Strauss makes a point familiar to eighteenth-century writers like Cowper. Animals are good to think with, Lévi-Strauss argues, because they embody a peculiar sort of logic, in which neither literal and figurative, nor individual and species, are straightforward oppositions: “An animal, for all it is something concrete and individual, nevertheless stands forth as essentially a quality, essentially