ENGL 320 British Literary Traditions

Borders and Boundaries:

Human/AnimalSept 24

The philosopher Jacques Derrida with

his cat

Animal Studies

• whatever our special characteristics, humans, even those we encounter in history, are not separate from nature. (Fudge)

• [new] work [in animal studies] is moving away from an earlier form of history which focussed on human ideas about and attitudes towards animals in which animals were mere blank pages onto which humans wrote meaning: in which they were passive, unthinking presences in the active and thoughtful lives of humans .... Instead [recent] work emerges from a tradition which traces the many ways in which humans construct and are constructed by animals in the past. (Fudge)

Questions• Are the cats in the two poems “mere

blank pages onto which humans write meaning”?

• Is there any sense in which the human subjects of the poems

“are constructed by

animals”?

The Scholar and His Cat. [Pangur Bán]Anonymous Irish monk. 8th-9th centuries.

The poem was found in the margins of a manuscript in the Monastery of St Paul, Carinthia, Austria.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AtBWVP1jXkc

Messe [ocus] Pangur bán,cechtar nathar fria saindán;bíth a menma-sam fri seilgg,mu menma céin im saincheirdd

Caraim-se fós, ferr cach clú,oc mu lebrán léir ingnu;ní foirmtech frimm Pangur bán,caraid cesin a maccdán.

I and white Pangur practice each of us his special art: his mind is set on hunting, my mind on my special craft.

I love (it is better than fame) to be quiet beside my book, diligently pursuing knowledge. White Pangur does not envy me: he loves his childish craft.

When the two of us (this tale never wearies us) are alone together in our house, we have something to which we may apply our skill, an endless sport.

William Blake.From his illustrations to

an edition of Thomas Gray’s poems.

Water-color. 1797.

Horace Walpole,

English writer and politician (1717 –1797).Thomas Gray wrote his Ode at Walpole’s request. One of his cats,

Selima, had drowned in a goldfish bowl.

Thomas Gray, “Ode on the Death of a Favorite Cat, Drowned in a Tub of Goldfishes” (1747/1748)

‘Twas on a lofty vase’s side,Where China’s gayest art had dyedThe azure flowers that blow;Demurest of the tabby kind,The pensive Selima reclin’d,Gazed on the lake below. Her conscious tail her joy declared;The fair round face, the snowy beard,The velvet of her paws,Her coat, that with the tortoise vies,Her ears of jet, and emerald eyes,She saw, and purred applause.

Gray’s Ode• Mock-elegiac/mock-heroic: disproportion of diction

to subject• Ode: a type of lyrical verse, “an elaborately

structured poem praising or glorifying an event or individual”

• Cat as woman? “men’s anxieties about the progress of Britain as a trading empire are systematically rewritten as narratives of women’s lust and depravity” (Kaul 229).

Derrida’s Cat

my cat, the cat that looks at me in my bedroom or bathroom, … does not appear … to represent, like an ambassador, the immense symbolic responsibility with which our culture has always charged the feline race, … from Baudelaire to Rilke, … and many others. If I say “it is a real cat” that sees me naked, this is in order to mark its unsubstitutable singularity. When it responds in its name … it doesn’t do so as the exemplar of a species called “cat,” even less so of an “animal” genus or kingdom. It … comes to me as this irreplaceable living being that one day enters my space, into this place where it can encounter me, see me, even see me naked. Nothing can ever rob me of the certainty that what we have here is an existence that refuses to be conceptualized [rebelle a tout concept]. (Derrida 9)

Can we fit these two cat poems into a history of the human/animal distinction?

[T]he idea of the animal that we have inherited from the Enlightenment and thinkers such as Descartes and Kant is better seen as marking a brief period (if the formative one for our prevailing intellectual, political, and juridical institutions) bookended by a pre- and

posthumanism that think

the human/animal distinction

quite otherwise. (Wolfe 564)

[H]istory without animals is unthinkable. The new sub-discipline [of animal studies] is very different to the histories in which animals were merely blank pages onto which humans wrote their own perceptions …. This new history is a history in which we are being asked to look at the ways in which animals and humans no longer exist in separate realms; in which nature and culture coincide; and in which we recognize the ways in which animals, not just humans, have shaped the past. (Fudge)

References• Derrida, Jacques. The Animal That Therefore I Am.

New York: Fordham UP, 2008.• Fudge, Erica. “The History of Animals.” H-Animal. H-

Net, 25 May 2006. Web. 24 Sept. 2012.• Kaul, Suvir. “Why Selima Drowns: Thomas Gray and

the Domestication of the Imperial Ideal.” PMLA 105.2 (1990): 223-232.

• Wolfe, Cary. “Human, All Too Human: ‘Animal Studies’ and the Humanities.” PMLA 124.2 (2009): 564-575.

• Online journal Humanimalia: http://www.depauw.edu/humanimalia/index.html.