Animal Presences: Tussles with Anthropomorphism

Abstract

How close allied are humans and animals.' What are the possibilities of interpretation between them? Can human language encompass animal experience.? Can animals inform our understanding of their natures and our own.? The troubles and the iokes generated from the primary question of kinship between humans and animals have stimulated writers across the centuries. Often in literature animals have stood in for humans: in fables, foxes, geese, and donkeys parade their supposedly human traits: wiliness for the fox, panic for the goose, obstinacy for the donkey (redeemed sometimes in Christian re-workings as lowliness). The interest is certainly not in 'the whole animal' but in the animal as pointer to or satire on human behaviour. Behind such images is the assumption that, when all's said, the human is other than animal, favoured in peculiar ways. In a surprising sonnet, John Donne in the 1620's challenges the animals for their willingness to be subject to man and challenges too the ordering of their subjection:

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