Animal Characters. Bruce Thomas Boehrer
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natural entities—looks very much like a first step in the direction of sentimental anthropomorphism. In this respect, to allow that animals are more like us than like stones seems to entail a rich panoply of cultural silliness, ranging from pet cemeteries to childish fantasies about talking pigs. Indeed, when considered from the standpoint of the pathetic fallacy, animals appear particularly noxious. They are, as it were, the thin end of the wedge.
Humanity, Modernity, Character
Ruskin's work brings pressure to bear on the notion of modernity, which he considers especially susceptible to the silliness at the heart of the pathetic fallacy. The following pages, by contrast, focus on animal character in the early modern period, for it is the span from about 1400 to about 1700 that witnesses the birth of the intellectual dispensation Ruskin takes for granted. At heart, one could describe the present book as a set of interrelated zooliterary histories, or perhaps less pretentiously, as a series of character studies of early modern animals. It concentrates on animal character, in turn, because I consider this crucial to the development of notions of literary character in general. My underlying argument here is simple: that the problem of literary character may best be understood from the standpoint of animal studies, as an instance of broader philosophical and scientific problems in theorizing the human-animal divide.
That the concept of literary character is a problem—or at least entails problems—I take as axiomatic. It was certainly so for L. C. Knights when, in 1933, he published his classic essay “How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?”2 A brief for New Critical formalism, Knights's article also mounts an attack on the methods of character analysis that dominated earlier critical practice as exemplified by the study of Shakespeare: “The habit of regarding Shakespeare's persons as ‘friends for life,’ or, maybe, ‘deceased acquaintances,’ is responsible for most of the vagaries that serve as Shakespeare criticism…. It is responsible for all the irrelevant moral and realistic canons that have been applied to Shakespeare's plays, for the sentimentalizing of his heroes (Coleridge and Goethe on Hamlet) and his heroines. And the loss is incalculable” (30). Knights's critique has produced a kind of queasy ambivalence in more recent literary criticism, which remains attached to the notion of character without really wanting to be; as Elizabeth Fowler summarized matters in 2003, “Literary scholarship…speaks of characters as if they were real people and, just as frequently, warns us that they are not” (5). The resulting dilemma receives fine comic expression at the hands of David Lodge, an author with credentials both as a theorist and as a writer of fiction. In the 1988 academic novel Nice Work, Lodge's narrator is awkwardly obliged to introduce a character who “doesn’t herself believe in the concept of ‘character’”—one “Robyn Penrose, Temporary Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Rummidge” (21). Penrose's objections to the concept—that is, “that ‘character’ is a bourgeois myth, an illusion created to reinforce the ideology of capitalism,” obscuring the crucial insight that “[t]here are no selves, only production, and we produce our ‘selves’ in language” (21–22)—attest to the role of Marxist and postmodernist theory in assailing the legitimacy of character as a literary construct.
However, the Marxist-postmodernist critique of literary character did not develop in a vacuum; it runs parallel to a broader assault on the category of the human. This broader line of argument is typified by the poststructuralist tradition in current animal-studies theory, which objects to the Benthamite and Kantian schools of animal-rights philosophy, represented by Peter Singer and Tom Regan respectively, on the grounds that these seek to protect non-human animals by extending to them a notion of human rights (or in Singer's case, human ethical subjectivity) that is intellectually untenable.3 Thus, Derrida refuses “to assign, interpret, or project” meaning onto the animal other (this being, I take it, the impulse of traditional animal-rights theory) while likewise resisting the Cartesian reflex to “suspend…one's compassion and…depriv[e] the animal of every power of manifestation” (387). Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari replace the notion of being with one of becoming, located in “an objective zone of indetermination or uncertainty…‘that makes it impossible to say where the boundary between the human and animal lies’” (273). Giorgio Agamben, arguing that “[i]n our culture, the decisive political conflict…is that between the animality and the humanity of man,” concludes that “what is decisive here is only the ‘between,’ the interval…between the two terms, their immediate constellation in a non-coincidence” (80, 83; my italics). Each of these positions assumes that to ground political or ethical action on notions of the human is to perpetuate the very inequities that politics and ethics are intended to remedy; hence the deconstruction of the human emerges as a philosophical imperative.
There can be no doubt that literary criticism's discomfort with the concept of character is related to this growing theoretical impulse to deconstruct the human-animal divide. After all, if a given philosophical category (the human) proves defective, it follows that the category's major literary manifestation (character) should share in its inadequacies. In what follows, I argue that the notion of character develops in English writing as an early effort to evade this very philosophical crisis: as a means of manufacturing and perpetuating the distinction between people and animals.
This is not how the turn to character and character criticism has usually been understood. Knights explains it in classic New Critical fashion, as a failure of linguistic engagement—in the case of Shakespeare scholars, “an inability to appreciate the Elizabethan idiom and a consequent inability to discuss Shakespeare's plays as poetry” (26). Lodge's Robyn Penrose, for her part, follows the Brechtian aperçu that literary illusionism aims to transform audiences into “the passive consumer[s] of a finished, unchangeable art-object offered to them as ‘real’” (Eagleton 64); thus, for her, “the rise of the novel (the literary genre of ‘character’ par excellence) in the eighteenth century coincided with the rise of capitalism” and its endless search for pliable markets (21). For scholars following Ian Watt, the rise of literary character derives from the eighteenth-century tendency to “pa[y] greater attention to the particular individual than had been common before” (Watt 18), a tendency deriving from the philosophical skepticism of figures such as Descartes, Locke, and Hume. While these narratives trace the ascendancy of literary character to different historical events (the development of new language practices, the birth of capitalism, the rise of scientific empiricism), they agree by locating it in the eighteenth century and identifying the novel as its exemplary genre.
Still, if one takes at face value the eighteenth-century passion for Shakespeare as a creator of characters, it challenges both the chronological focus on the eighteenth century and the generic focus on prose fiction. In any case, as Fowler's recent work with Chaucer has shown, it is patently silly to suppose that pre-Enlightenment authors had no literary characters, if one defines these simply—in Fowler's preferred way—as “social persons” (27). Moreover, even the term “character,” as applied to the “description, delineation, or detailed report of a person's qualities” (Oxford English Dictionary [hereafter OED], s.v. “character,” sb. 14), predates the eighteenth century. The OED's earliest recorded instance of this usage comes from James Howell's Letters of 1645, but even this is unfairly belated; with the publication of Joseph Hall's Theophrastan Characters in 1608, the English already possessed a fully formed literary exemplar of the definition. Indeed, Theophrastus's works play a central role in establishing the noun “character” as an English literary term, and in the process they reveal the word's embeddedness in an ancient tradition of philosophical meditation on the nature of human identity.
Theophrastus is best remembered for treatises in the fields we would now call biology and psychology.4 These works span the disciplinary divide—between “the representation of nonhumans” and “the representation of citizens” (Latour 28)—that Bruno Latour identifies with modernity's “separation of natural and political powers” (13). In this regard, they preserve the cross-disciplinary focus of Theophrastus's master, Aristotle, whom he succeeded in 322 b.c.e. as head of the Peripatetic school in Athens. Indeed, if readers of Theophrastus have detected a “botanical” impulse in his Characters (Boyce 5), that is because Theophrastus was working squarely within an Aristotelian tradition in which “[t]he methodical treatment of poiesis in the Poetics is similar to the orderly