At the Heart of the Home

Abstract

s The Heart of a Dog When we try and contemplate who it is that we think we are in the world history has an important role to play.It can alert us to what we have lost; can point up how we have come to think what we think; and can remind us that what we think now will, inevitably, change -will be succeeded by other models, also temporary, also trying to make meaning out of who it is that we think we are.In these terms, the history of the human is not simply a history of progress from a "bad" model of who we are (Aristotle's sense of the human as special and separate from all animals; Aquinas's sense of the human as the only center of the moral universe, for example) to a "good" one in which our relationship with and location in the natural world is more fully acknowledged.Rather, we should perhaps also view the place of our species as a shifting one in which processes of what could be termed humanning, unhumanning, and rehumanning are constantly taking place.Darwin's work is, of course, one key way in which the human of modernity finds itself unhumanned and rehumanned.Evolutionary theory removes the boundaries between species -indeed, makes a concept of species almost irrelevant: "I believe that animals have descended from at most only four or five progenitors" (454 and 452) Darwin wrote in The Origin of Species, thus rendering untenable "the belief that species were immutable productions" (on paleoanthropological struggles to define the human see Mordsley).But even as it removes a previously unmoveable barrier between the human and the chimpanzee (see Fudge 2000), Darwin's theory also places the human at the top of the evolutionary ladder: it is, after all, homo sapiens who is capable, at the end of The Origin of Species, of contemplating the "entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth."It is only humanity, for Darwin, which can assess the "grandeur in this view of life" (459).In this essay I will show how this history of humanning, unhumanning, and rehumanning gets played out in one early twentieth-century literary text.I will make the case that in Mikhail Bulgakov's The Heart of a Dog, a text that has been most often read as a political allegory, we can begin to see what it might mean to discover that the human is, after all, an empty category: a verb rather than a noun.The immediate context of this novella is the early twentieth-century political upheaval in Russia, but I want to argue that we should also regard contemporary scientific ideas about and uses of animals as significant.As such, my main argument is that reading The Heart of a Dog can remind us that we have, perhaps, never been as human as we

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