Animals and Other People: Literary Forms and Living Beings in the Long Eighteenth Century

Animals and Other People

Animals and Other People

Literary Forms and Living Beings in the Long Eighteenth Century

Heather Keenleyside

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS

PHILADELPHIA

Copyright © 2016 University of Pennsylvania Press

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Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress

ISBN 978-0-8122-4857-9

Contents

Introduction. Animals and Other Figures

Chapter 1. The Person: Poetry, Personification, and the Composition of Domestic Society

Chapter 2. The Creature: Domestic Politics and the Novelistic Character

Chapter 3. The Human: Satire and the Naturalization of the Person

Chapter 4. The Animal: The Life Narrative as a Form of Life

Chapter 5. The Child: The Fabulous Animal and the Family Pet

Coda. Growing Human

Notes

Works Cited

Index

Acknowledgments

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, or figure chickens as houshold, feathery People (Su, 250; W, 87).⁴ The OED cites Thomson’s soft fearful People (sheep) as an extended or poetic use of people: "animals, living creatures (applied [chiefly poet. or humourous] to animals personified).⁵ I am interested in this sort of personification precisely because, as John Sitter remarks, just how figurative or realistic some of these usages are is hard to know.⁶ I argue that these usages are at least as realistic as they are figurative—or, that they defy any confident sorting of the realistic from the figurative, and that they are therefore important not only in the poetry of Pope or Thomson, but also in the pages of Buffon’s natural history, and in the prosaic realism of the novel form. When Robinson Crusoe calls his parrot a Person," for example, he makes playful and pointed use of the figure of personification to register something significant about what Poll is—above all, an animate creature, whose capacity to move of his own accord unsettles Crusoe’s sense of living alone in unpeopled territory, in a state of nature that might be clearly sorted from any social realm.⁷

One of the central claims of the book follows from these examples. In many eighteenth-century texts, personification functions less as a figure that enacts the change of things to persons, as Samuel Johnson would have it, than it does as Erasmus Darwin characterizes it at century’s end: as a poetic art that serves to restore … [an] original animality.⁸ Unsurprisingly, the sense that animality needs restoring is a roughly post-Cartesian one, a response to what was widely characterized as the Cartesian assault on animal life. For many of the writers in this book, as for so many of their contemporaries, Descartes stood above all for a philosophical schema that established human uniqueness by identifying animals with things. This schema is encapsulated in a well-known section of the Discourse on the Method that identifies animals and machines and then describes two very certain means of distinguishing a machine from an apparently identical human twin:

The first is that they could never use words, or put together other signs, as we do in order to declare our thoughts to others. For we can certainly conceive of a machine so constructed that it utters words, and even utters words which correspond to bodily actions causing a change in its organs…. But it is not conceivable that such a machine should produce different arrangements of words so as to give an appropriately meaningful answer to whatever is said in its presence, as the dullest of men can do. Secondly, even though such machines might do some things as well as we do them, or perhaps even better, they would inevitably fail in others, which would reveal that they were acting not through understanding but only from the disposition of their organs…. Now in just these two ways we can also know the difference between man and beast.⁹

Citing this passage in isolation—as many others have done, and I do here—does little justice to the complexity even of Descartes’s thesis of the animal-machine.¹⁰ But it does register the astonishing move he makes when he collapses the distinction between speaking and acting into a uniquely human capacity for response or meaningful answer and so denies animals the very attribute for which they are named.¹¹ Identifying animals with machines—which is to say, with organized but essentially inanimate objects, set in motion by an agency not their own—Descartes ejects animals from the realm of acting altogether, not only from deliberative and intentional action but also from what was variously referred to as animation, self-motion, or motivity—the sort of acting that commonly distinguishes animate beings from inanimate things, and that was widely taken to imply some sort of mind or conscious purpose. (Acting from the disposition of their organs, animals are pictured less as self-moving than as moved from without, by a structure of parts common to every member of a species, and the external stimuli that occasions their motion.) Some time ago, Julian Jaynes referred to this as Descartes’s rapier-like attack on the animism of animals—his breathtaking intervention into seventeenth-century debates about the nature of animate motion itself.¹² As Jaynes details, the question of animate motion was so unsettled in the period before Newton that it could be attributed to the cosmos as a whole (as in Tommaso Campanella’s response to Copernicus, "Mundum esse animal, totum sentiens!) or restricted, as in Descartes, to human begins alone.¹³ In a familiar but not trivial sense, Descartes’s rendering inanimate of the animal marks a decisive moment in the constitution of the modern" division of all beings into (human) persons and (nonhuman) things.¹⁴

This move may have been decisive, but it was met by considerable and often complicated dissent. John Locke frames his massively influential Essay Concerning Human Understanding, for example, as an extended reply to Descartes, contesting the Cartesian commitment to innate ideas in particular, and more broadly, calling into question key aspects of Descartes’s account of both human and animal cognition. They must needs have a penetrating sight, Locke quips, who can certainly see, that I think, when I cannot perceive it my self, and when I declare, that I do not; and yet can see, that Dogs or Elephants do not think, when they give all the demonstration of it imaginable, except only telling us, that they do so.¹⁵ In part, Locke is resisting Descartes’s collapse of demonstration into declaration (of action into speech), by insisting that animals demonstrate mind as certainly as we do—though how certainly we do this is, for Locke, a real question. Locke is also and perhaps more basically resisting Descartes’s claim that I am essentially and substantively something that exists in and as thought—resisting, specifically, the implication that I always think, despite my own sense that sometimes I do not (as in sleep, or lapses in consciousness, or simply when my mind is empty). But the terms of Locke’s objection—that I am in the best position to know whether and when I think—are themselves drawn from Descartes’s own logic, from the roughly Cartesian insistence on the epistemological priority of the first person. Locke thus registers his disagreement with and debt to Descartes in one and the same moment, a moment that seeks to reconfigure the interrelationship of Descartes’s twin figures of the animal-machine and the cogito.

Locke’s quasi-Cartesian objection to Descartes begins to indicate what it meant to restore animality in this moment, and ultimately, why personification plays a role in this restoration. Most basically, Locke shows that while Descartes’s rapier-like attack on animism in animals met with considerable resistance in eighteenth-century Britain, his sense of the epistemological and ontological primacy of the individual person—and of the first person in particular—was far more widely shared. This is not news. At least since Ian Watt, the literary and intellectual culture of eighteenth-century Britain has been characterized according to a narrative of modernization and rising individualism that begins with Descartes, a narrative that has been much disputed and revised, but that remains influential.¹⁶ What I want to emphasize here is the close relation between the originary figure of this familiar narrative, Descartes’s I, and the animal-machine. Indeed, in the context of the Discourse, the animal-machine emerges at least in part to contain a possibility the cogito generates: the possibility that I might be alone in the universe, that there exist no other beings like me. Descartes’s claims about animals—in particular, the claim that even animals that produce articulate sounds or skillful actions cannot show that they are thinking what they are saying (or doing)—largely serve to define human beings differently: securing other people from doubt by way of their capacity to transform thought into something we can, as Locke puts it, certainly see (115).

Unconvinced by the Cartesian account of animals but compelled by Descartes’s sense of the primacy of first personhood, writers like Locke are left to grapple differently with the epistemological and ontological questions of other people that Descartes’s animal-machine in part serves to address—questions about the relationship between the individual and the species, the first person and some larger kind or collective. This, finally, is what restoring animality means in this period, and in this book. It means restoring our own animality, in the sense either of a species identity that could shore up the newly unsettled relationship between myself and humankind, or of the more capacious and creaturely identity that inheres in the relation between the first person and the living body (a form of identity I share with other human beings, and perhaps with other animals). Restoring our animality in this way also means restoring animality as such: restoring animality as a unique form of being and relation, a mode of agency and generality in which it is difficult to distinguish between moving and being moved, individual and species. Understood as part of this restorative effort, the works on which I focus in this book are not especially troubled by the skeptical prospect of my being alone in the universe, uncertain that the sounds I hear or the movements I see either declare or demonstrate mind. Instead, they repeatedly raise the inverse possibility: that among the numberless objects with which the globe is covered, animals may not simply be one sort of object among others—they might, instead, be people like me.

The possibility that animals are people like me is one that eighteenth-century writers repeatedly register by way of the figure of personification. In this tradition, personification is not anthropomorphism, at least as anthropomorphism is understood by Barbara Johnson (glossing Paul de Man)—as a comparison, one of whose terms is treated as a given (as epistemologically resolved).¹⁷ Unlike anthropomorphism, eighteenth-century personification does not naturalize the human being by "treat[ing] as known the properties of the human."¹⁸ At the same time, to adapt Johnson’s formulation slightly, eighteenth-century personification does treat as known the properties of the person. The constitutive attributes of personhood are routinely identified in eighteenth-century texts: speech, action, and the social relations that both enable and result from speaking and acting. But there is much that remains epistemologically unresolved. What counts as evidence of speech, action, or sociality? Who or what might bear such attributes, or participate in such relations? The sort of knowing that would resolve such questions is itself an uncertain and contingent activity that takes place in the context of other people, in response to the movements of others. Personification, in this tradition, is a figure that registers the sort of quasi-natural, quasi-figurative creatures that all animate beings are.

By focusing on the poetic art of restor[ing] … animality, I hope to recover a post-Cartesian moment that is not simply, or even chiefly, one of modern consolidation and triumphal human exceptionalism, but one that is marked by its own animal turn. Consider the opening of Denis Diderot and Louis Jean-Marie Daubenton’s 1751 Encyclopédie entry on Animal: "What is the animal? Here is one of those questions by which one is all the more embarrassed, the more philosophy and knowledge of natural history one has."¹⁹ Diderot and Daubenton are remarkably frank about the insufficiency of philosophical and natural-historical knowledge in apprehending animal life. Their self-consciousness about this insufficiency points toward an extraordinary aspect of the eighteenth-century animal turn: the conviction that if we are not to be embarrassed by the question of the animal, we need literary as well as scientific forms of knowledge. This is a point to which eighteenth-century writers repeatedly call attention. The protocols of empirical observation cannot tell us what the animal is (or who or what is an animal), because the constitutive attribute of animal life—animate motion—is not something we can certainly see. To apprehend motion as self-motion—as meaningful answer or a demonstration of mind—the evidence of the senses alone will not serve. This is why patently figurative animals like Crusoe’s Poll or Thomson’s houshold feathery People are so central to any effort to restore animality. In an important sense, animals really are rhetorical figures, as well as living beings. Indeed, they are rhetorical figures because they are living beings.

Animals and Other People elaborates this crucial insight about animal life, so important to eighteenth-century writers and worth recovering more widely in our own. When we apprehend animals (including humans), we are never in the territory of strictly literal description, relying solely on the evidence of our senses. Any description of animals involves what we might call personification—if we understand personification not as a rhetorical ornament that could be stripped away, but as a fundamental part of our descriptive and conceptual repertoire.²⁰ It is a figure of words and of thought that is essential to apprehending certain kinds of beings, to distinguishing them from things.

Motions Discourse

I shall not ask Jean Jacques Rousseau

If Birds confabulate or no,

’Tis clear that they were always able

To hold discourse at least in fable

—William Cowper, Pairing Time Anticipated: A Fable²¹

At this point, I want to begin to specify some of the claims I have been making about animal life, animate motion, and literary figuration by looking at the case of William Cowper, and his experiments with animal fable in particular. In its original publication, the opening lines of Cowper’s poem Pairing Time Anticipated: A Fable directed readers to a note, perhaps Cowper’s, perhaps his editor’s, that sends up the whimsical speculations of this Philosopher.²² The poem and note refer to Rousseau’s well-known caution against the use of fables in early education—a section of Emile that begins by imagining the puzzlement of a child reading La Fontaine: Foxes speak, then? … the same language as crows?²³ Over the past two and a half centuries, Rousseau’s remarks on fable have generated their own considerable puzzlement, and readers continue to debate precisely how he understands the fable form, and the problems it poses for young readers. By contrast, the opening lines of Cowper’s fable have not seemed to call for much comment. The original annotation offers a straightforward gloss of the poem’s apparently straightforward point: to the philosopher who argues that all fables which ascribe reason and speech to animals should be withheld from children, Cowper retorts, what child was ever deceived by them, or can be, against the evidence of his senses?²⁴ Perhaps a whimsical and speculative philosopher understands so little about literary conventions as to interpret by the letter / A story of a Cock and Bull (6–7). A poet, like a child, knows better. Cowper’s birds can speak, as animals in fable have always been able to do, because they are not animals but vehicles for human beings or human meanings.

Poems like Cowper’s Pairing Time can appear to offer little to readers interested in the lives of animals, for the simple reason that Cowper seems to articulate: the figures of fable have nothing to do with actual animals. For many scholars of the recent animal turn, the literary and philosophical culture of Cowper’s era is especially guilty of generating fabulous animals—including the most fabulous creature of all, the generic figure of the Animal that functions, as Jacques Derrida puts it, to corral … a large number of living beings within a single concept.²⁵ On this view, the eighteenth century—under the auspices of Cartesianism, the Enlightenment, or modernity—invents generic and fabulous animal figures at the same time and by the same logic that it occludes or oppresses living nonhuman beings. The proliferation of generic and figurative animals in this moment is a symptom of the violent disappearance of actual animals from the real world, or at least from the realm of meaningful ethical consideration. This is a view I argue against throughout the book, but one that is widely held by scholars of the current animal turn, who regard animal figures with suspicion, worrying that the yoke of human symbolic service renders animals in themselves invisible.²⁶

For scholars who share this view, one of the central tasks of literary animal studies is to liberate animals from the confines of Enlightenment figuration and abstraction—to bring animals into view in our literary and cultural histories by recognizing that they are already there, not as figures for human beings or ideas, but as subjects in their own right. In Laurie Shannon’s elegant shorthand, borrowed in part from Claude Lévi-Strauss, the turn from figurative animals to the real thing requires that we move from thinking with animals to thinking about them.²⁷ Animals may be good to think [with], as Lévi-Strauss put it, good figures for human arrangements, and good tools for human thought. But being good to think with has never been very good for animals. For such scholars, the literary liberation of the animal involves recognizing that literal reading [is] a proper part of the critical repertoire—a means of freeing animals from the confines of fable or the corralling of the general singular, to exist in all their particular and material reality.²⁸ In The Accommodated Animal, Shannon shows the considerable rewards of such an approach, demonstrating persuasively that for many early modern writers the terms and conditions of human sovereignty over real animals operate as an example of tyranny—not just an emblem for it.²⁹ In this book, though, I am interested in writers like Cowper, for whom being an emblem is not necessarily opposed to being an example, nor always qualified by just.³⁰

It is difficult to see how we could recuperate a poem like Cowper’s Pairing Time by reading literally; certainly the literal reading that Shannon calls for is not the sort of reading by the letter for which Cowper ridicules Rousseau, a mistaking of fabulous figures for descriptions of actual animals. Indeed, recuperating a poem like Pairing Time has not seemed especially worthwhile to scholars interested in animals, who take the figurative logic of fable to fix attention necessarily and exclusively on human beings. Over the course of this book, I argue that this assumption misunderstands the logic of literary forms like fable, as well as that of living beings. For writers like Cowper, manifestly fabulous animal figures do not abstract from actual animal lives, or dematerialize their stakeholdership or participation in our common world.³¹ Instead, such figures are crucial to distinguishing animals from things, as uniquely animate and species creatures.

It would be somewhat surprising if Cowper’s animal fable were wholly indifferent to the lives of actual animals, because elsewhere in his life and work, Cowper paid considerable attention to all kinds of living creatures. In his own day, he was well known for keeping a remarkable range of domestic animals: by one count, his household included three hares, five rabbits, two guinea pigs, two dogs, and no less than twenty-two birds (a magpie, a jay, a starling, a linnet, two goldfinches, and sixteen pigeons).³² Cowper wrote movingly, humorously, and in considerable detail about his pets and those of his friends in his letters and journals, periodical essays, epitaphs, and major long poem, The Task. Many of his animal fables were themselves prompted by reallife incidents involving familiar animals, first recorded in his correspondence and then worked up into verse. And in much of his work, he takes evident care to chronicle the particular preferences and material exigencies of animal lives and activities—as in his Epitaph on a Hare, which details the favorite pastimes and foods of Cowper’s pet Tiny: On twigs of hawthorn he regaled, / On pippins’ russet peel / And, when his juicy salads fail’d, / Sliced carrots pleased him well (17–20).

Readers interested in the lives of animals might be inclined to turn away from a fable like Pairing Time, then, and toward this sort of creaturely tribute to Tiny. Or, they might look to a poem like The Dog and the Water-Lily: No Fable, which explicitly repudiates the conventions of fable to recount an incident that occurs during a walk by a river. Cowper’s spaniel, Beau, looks on as Cowper stops to admire a water lily, which he tries and fails to reach. Returning to the same spot a while later, Beau jumps into the water and retrieves the flower, setting it down at the poet’s feet. Poems like The Dog and the Water-Lily often earn Cowper a place in a literary-historical story about the modernization of the animal fable, which charts a shift from conventional, generic, and abstract figures (of Cowper’s Pairing Time, say) to increasingly naturalistic, particularized, and sympathetic depictions of living or life-like animals (like Beau).³³ This narrative of the modernization-qua-naturalization of fable contributes to a larger historical narrative about the eighteenth century and animal life—one that emphasizes sensibility and the rise of ideals of kindness with and toward living things, as well as the emergence of a utilitarian ethics that potentially extends moral standing to any individual (human or nonhuman) capable of pleasure and pain.

This account of changing attitudes toward the lives of animals is an important story, which has been well and variously told by historians Keith Thomas and Ingrid Tague, philosopher Peter Singer, and literary critics and historians like David Perkins, Christine Kenyon-Jones, Kathryn Shevelow, and others.³⁴ It is also a specifically British story, which rightly reminds us that the eighteenth century was a more heterogeneous and in some respects more salutary era for animals than accounts of a human-exceptionalist Enlightenment would suggest. It is not, however, the story of this book. For this historical narrative of cultural, intellectual, and affective transformation very often shares a basic and common logic with the kind of Enlightenment critique it counters. It too understands thinking about (and caring for) the material participation of actual and individual animals to be fundamentally opposed to thinking with abstract rhetorical figures, always and only about human concerns.³⁵ Animals and Other People argues that this opposition occludes much of what is most promising about eighteenth-century approaches to animal life.

In doing so, this book builds on recent work in eighteenth-century studies, which has emerged in recent years as a particularly rich field for work at the intersection of literary and animal studies. For some time, eighteenth-century scholars have been generating exciting work on the way that particular literary forms think both with and about animals—by Frank Palmeri on fable, Anne Milne on laboring-class women’s poetry, Tess Cosslett on children’s fiction, and Markman Ellis and Laura Brown on the it-narrative—without quite arguing for the necessary role of literary form and figure in apprehending the lives of animals, and our obligations to them.³⁶ Tobias Menely’s recent The Animal Claim makes this case more explicitly, as it charts the prehistory of animal rights legislation in the poetry of sensibility. Menely’s argument rests on a nuanced and beautifully rendered account of the capacity of figurative language to translate creaturely voice into human language, and so to bring animal claims before a human public. Menely contrasts this sort of figurative and passionate poetic language with a more deleterious sort of figuration: the figurative power to give life to abstractions (especially, abstractions like human and animal). Following Giorgio Agamben, Menely associates this figurative power with sovereign violence: figure follows force, as he puts it.³⁷ Menely’s approach brilliantly illuminates the poems of creaturely advocacy on which he focuses, like Christopher Smart’s Jubilate Agno, James Thomson’s The Seasons, and Cowper’s The Task.³⁸ It is an approach perfectly suited to a literary tradition of sensibility that, as Richard Nash writes elsewhere (quoting Menely), turns away from the long-standing conventions of animal fable to read … animals as ‘somatically legible subjects’ rather than as undifferentiated representatives of an animal class.³⁹

What to do, though, with a writer like Cowper, who writes the sort of creaturely verse that translates the expressive joy of animals and also animal fables, poems conspicuously organized around abstractions and animal species, and less clearly meant to reform community by address[ing] us on the level of affect and association?⁴⁰ My sense is that Cowper is quite interested in the role that conceptual abstractions and generic figures might play in the reformation of community—in writing poetry that makes us think with animals, as well as feel with them.⁴¹ Certainly, the opposition between actual individual animals and generic rhetorical figures does little to account for much of Cowper’s animal poetry, even for a putatively naturalistic poem like The Dog and the Water-Lily. Cowper’s subtitle may insist that this is No Fable, and the poem might begin from an actual incident between a man and his dog—truly a little dog, this dog, as Derrida might say.⁴² But this dog is always also The Dog of the title; it is at once a particular animal and a figure for the species in general. So too, its proper name, Beau, designates a particular living dog and an abstract or typical figure (the incarnation of beauty, or a stock epithet for a canine companion). Throughout the poem, Cowper pictures this/the dog as an actual animal, doing what dogs do—running in the reeds, chasing swallows, puzzling … his puppy brains. Despite its real life origins and its lifelike central character, however, The Dog and the Water-Lily is very much a fable, its narrative set in service of a final moral lesson meant to mortify the pride / Of Man’s superior breed: myself I will enjoin / Awake at Duty’s call, / To show a Love as prompt as thine, / To Him who gives me all (39–44). Finally, Cowper’s Beau is at once a subject in his own right and an emblem or figure—for Cowper himself, for the Christian subject before God, for the allegorical virtues of duty and love. This is a poem about animals (and about a particular animal, Cowper’s pet Beau); it is also a poem about all kinds of abstract and fabulous beings (the Dog, the animal, the human, the Christian, Love).⁴³

Poems like The Dog and the Water-Lily are more interested in the traffic than the distinction between literal and figurative, individual and general, material and abstract—in literature and also in everyday life. So too, and perhaps especially, is a poem like Pairing Time Anticipated, with its narrative of an assembly of birds debating whether to mate out of season, on a warm winter’s day. It may seem—and Cowper’s rejoinder to Rousseau would seem to confirm—that the animal narrative of this apparently conventional fable is merely a means to a wholly human moral: Chuse not alone a proper mate, / But proper time to marry (64–65). From the start, however, Cowper’s Pairing Time urges us to reconsider the genre of fable and 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