A Defense of Anthropomorphism: Comparing Coetzee and Gowdy

Abstract

A comparison of Coetzee's Disgrace and Gowdy's The White Bone reveals that while it is possible to generate sympathy for animal being while resisting describing animal sentience in human terms, can be a valuable and sophisticated strategy for depicting animal minds. ********** The gulf that separates Man Friday from Batouala may be paralleled by the gulf that will separate Kipling's wolves from their literary descendants two hundred years hence, and we shall have animals who are neither symbolic, nor little men disguised, nor as four-legged tables moving, nor as painted scraps of paper that fly. It is one of the ways where science may enlarge the novel, by giving it fresh subject matter. --EM. Forster, Aspects of the Novel The representation of animal consciousness in literature raises moral and epistemological issues, many of which revolve around the problems posed by anthropomorphism, the projection of the characteristics of human subjectivity onto animal sentience and behaviour. Animals are a nearly continual presence in most of our lives, and yet we feel ourselves severely restricted in our ability to know and understand them. It is thus natural that writers would include them as subjects in literature, but that they are at the same time wary of creating something unreal in developing animals as characters. Not representing animals at all robs them of their subjectivity and the influence they actually have on our lives. At the other extreme, casting them as fully developed and seemingly human characters robs them of their difference from us and among one another. This is not a new dilemma and it is not isolated to literature. The OED notes that the original meaning of the word anthropomorphism refers to the error of casting God in human form, and it is not until the general development of biology as a science that the term has come to identify the danger and error of casting the lower animals in human form--especially of ascribing to them consciousness, emotion, and intelligence. Animals have, of course, been humanized, inspirited, or deified since the very beginning of art (as cave paintings attest), so the contemporary interdiction against assuming aspects of mind and consciousness down (or across) species is especially striking, especially since Darwin himself assumed significant similarities between human and animal consciousness in his 1872 publication, Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. This resistance to has held remarkable power especially within the field of ethology (the study of animal behaviour) until only the past decade or so, reaching its ascendancy in a mid-twentieth-century behaviourism that assumed that all animal behaviour could be explained without any reference to consciousness or even individuality (de Waal 54-61). The sentimentality and the sympathetic imagination involved with perceiving animals as intentional, emotional, intelligent, and even self-conscious have long been regarded by science has embarrassing errors. Indeed, has historically been connected with forms of embarrassment. Traditional animal fables embarrassed readers by revealing obvious human failures; such also signals embarrassment for overt symbolism. Contemporary forms of are frequently taken to suggest a lack of seriousness. It is what children do, or what we do for children. Talking animals are now primarily the realm of Disney, of easy sentiment and willed escape from the affairs of humans, or even of a barely suppressed misanthropy. In literature, as Ursula Le Guin rightly notes in the introduction to her collection of stories about talking animals, has largely been relegated to writing for children, which is itself relegated to the realm of the un-serious (9). Our embarrassment signals that there is something suspect about taking animals seriously. …