Literary Dogs

Writers imagine the world from a canine point of view

By D.L. Pughe

If the animal

coming toward us so surely

from another direction

had our kind of consciousness

he’d drag us around in his sway.

But his being is infinite to him

incomprehensible, and without a sense of his condition

pure as his gaze.

And where we see the future

he sees everything and himself in everything

healed and whole

forever.

—Rainer Maria Rilke, “Eighth Elegy,” Duino Elegies

Translated by David Young

Virginia Woolf once described our human senses as apertures, tiny openings that quickly close—their role not to let in the vast sensory experience of the world but to mediate and shut most of it out. For Woolf, the result of this barrage of sensory input would be a cacophony that would pin us to the ground with its intensity. But when she assumed the point of view and voice of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s loyal dog Flush in her book of the same name, Woolf allowed herself to fully imagine the wealth of scents, sights and sounds perceptible by a Cocker Spaniel in the London of her time. Flush is one in a long line of literary works that tries to comprehend the world from a dog’s point of view.

Nearly everyone who has ever lived with a dog has a story to tell; many are told movingly and—given dogs’ short lifespans—almost always end sadly. Those literary works that have become classics over time are characterized by larger views of life expertly drawn, analogies to and questions about our own existence, and styles of writing explored and invented along the way.

A Dog’s Point of View

Recognition of this genre and its wider meaning is a leading part of the new movement in Animal Studies, an exciting addition to curricula on campuses around the world. At many distinguished universities, courses explore the ways dogs have figured in literature and poetry, as well as their lasting historic significance—for example, Howard Bloch, professor of French medieval history at Yale, has found the role of dogs in medieval animal fables to play a key role in understanding the formation of the modern French state.* The discourse between wolf and dog paralleled the relationship between countryside and town, offering insights and expressing anxieties of changing status and of place.

“Animals in Literature,” a course taught by Professor Boria Sax of the State University of Illinois at Springfield, also looks at animals in fable and fairy tale. Sax, a highly regarded author, employs Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales (among other collections) and has students read The Serpent and the Swan: The Animal Bride in Folklore and Literature, his own work on the subject. In “Animals and Human Civilization,” a course that considers issues of race and breed, gender, class, and the political significance of animals, he tackles the darker aspects of animal and human existence. Excerpts from the Bible; the epic of Gilgamesh; the works of Descartes and Montaigne; and his own recent book, Animals in the Third Reich: Pets, Scapegoats and the Holocaust, are also on the reading list.

Berg Publishers’ seven-volume survey, A Cultural History of Animals, conveys the range of subjects being explored by Animal Studies scholars around the world. In an essay included in A Cultural History of Animals in the Age of Empire (vol. 5), edited by Kathleen Kete, Teresa Mangum explores “Narrative Dominion, or, the Animals Write Back? Animal Genres in Literature and the Arts,” a subject she has focused on extensively in the last few years. As noted in “The Near and Far of Dogness” (Bark, Dec. ’07), Mangum, an associate professor at the University of Iowa, offers several courses that feature works about dogs, including “Proseminar in Cinema and Culture: Animal Cinema” and “Literature and Society: Capturing Animals,” which reflect Mangum’s dedication to service-learning and the Iowa City Animal Care and Adoption Center.

Mangum’s overall aim is complicated but compelling: “Our goal in these research projects is to move from theoretical perspectives on the roles animals play as literary and imaginative subjects to investigating how metaphors, representations and associations with animals affect the practical environments in which we interact with animals, shape policies governing animals and even ‘speak’ for animals.”

Breaking New Ground

Mangum is one of a cadre of academics around the world who has taken up these questions in serious research projects and groundbreaking literature courses. Among the books that consistently turn up on the reading lists for these courses is Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee. The South African novelist won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003 for this book, whose protagonist finds solace from the complex problems of racism and violence by working at a dog shelter.** The book raises the issue of human-dog interaction, and the epiphany achieved by this exchange. Coetzee followed Disgrace with his semi-fictional book, The Lives of Animals, which included references to essays by Peter Singer, Marjorie Garber and Barbara Smuts, all of whom are engaged in redefining our understanding of animal psyche.

Mangum uses Coetzee’s works to initiate discussions with students actively involved with animals at the Iowa City Animal Care and Adoption Center. Part of the discussion involves the ways these theoretical impressions fit with the very real experience of shelter dogs. One student made interesting connections between the homeless humans who live under the bridge not too far from the Iowa shelter and the homelessness of the dogs in the shelter itself. This was contrasted with the “voice of the dog of the street” explored in Paul Auster’s novel, Timbuktu, and John Berger’s book, King. In an effort to dissect the emotional impact of seeing abandoned dogs in need of homes, another student made a film about the shelter.

Susan McHugh, who teaches at the University of New England, also specializes in courses on theories of animal literature and culture and is widely published in the field. The author of the beautifully illustrated Dog, published by Reaktion Books in 2004, McHugh explores the “cult” of the dog as it has developed over time, from the earliest myths and the evolution of dogs as domestic pets, to the roles they play in work, entertainment and science. “Animals, Literature and Culture,” McHugh’s course at UNE, deconstructs the idea of animals as symbolic of the human condition. In her emphasis on stories of dogs, she looks at how they are seen as gods, pets, food or pests, depending on the culture and the time. Like Donna Haraway (noted theorist in the History of Consciousness program at UC Santa Cruz) and Teresa Mangum, she is interested in how “species boundaries” intersect with historical constructions of gender, race, class, sex and ethnicity.

In her course, “Animal Subjects,” at California College of the Arts in Oakland, Calif., Kari Weil focused on several literary works that helped students rethink life through the eyes of animals. John Berger’s essay, “Why Look at Animals?” in his book About Looking, and Gilles Deleuze’s “The Body, the Meat and the Spirit: Becoming Animal” laid out some of the theoretical questions, as did Hélène Cixous’s “Shared at Dawn.” And, as many others have done, Weil had students read Virginia Woolf’s Flush along with Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poem, “To Flush, My Dog.” Weil also incorporates Kafka’s Metamorphosis to help students further refine their own points of view, and quotes Rilke’s “Eighth Elegy” from his Duino Elegies for the light it shines on creatures different from ourselves. (Weil, who now teaches at Wesleyan University, hopes to offer an expanded version of the course there later this year.)

Core Reading

Almost everyone who teaches in Animal Studies employs Harriet Ritvo’s book, The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age, which examines how British attitudes toward animals began to shift more than a century ago. Ritvo, a noted MIT professor and author of many books on animals as subjects, also teaches “People and Other Animals,” a course that includes a dense reading list of scientific, literary and popular works. Among the canine-oriented works, she includes Konrad Lorenz’s Man Meets Dog, Mark Mastromarino’s “Teaching Old Dogs New Tricks” and Daniel Todes’ Pavlov’s Physiology Factory.

Another syllabus standard is Nigel Rothfels’ Representing Animals, a collection of essays by prominent writers in the field, drawn from the landmark conference of the same name held at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee in 2000. With essays by Erica Fudge, Teresa Mangum and Andrew C. Isenberg (Rothfels’ co-organizer for the “Representing Animals” conference), the anthology considers “ways animals have been imagined within discrete historical settings.” Garry Marvin, in his essay “Unspeakability, Inedibility and the Structures of Pursuit in the English Foxhunt,” deals with the hotly contested subject of dogs and their “employ” in age-old British countryside traditions. In “Bitches from Brazil: Cloning and Owning Dogs through the Missyplicity Project,” Susan McHugh examines how a dearly loved, departed family pet—Missy, a spayed mixed-breed—has been transformed into a cyberpunk spectacle of corporate genetics labs.

Erica Fudge, a reader in literary and cultural studies at Middlesex University in the UK, is also the founder of the British Animal Studies Network (BASN). A key international organization, BASN is instrumental in establishing how classes in Animal Studies are taught; with h-animal—the Animal Studies section of the Humanities Network (h-net)—BASN plays a key role in helping scholars communicate with one another. Fudge’s reading list for her course, “Representing Animals in Fiction, 1899 to the Present,” is a heady one, ranging from the work of theorists (Terry Eagleton and Tony Bennett) and philosophers (Friedrich Nietzsche and Thomas Nagel) to popular literature (Jack London’s The Call of the Wild), classics (Woolf’s Flush) and more complicated foreign works (Mikhail Bulgakov’s 1925 The Heart of A Dog). Fudge also uses many of her essays and her highly regarded book, Perceiving Animals: Humans and Beasts in Early Modern English Culture, as source material.

A closer examination of the ways that we, as humans, differ from other creatures, and the culturally embedded prejudices we unconsciously harbor, is the force behind the Animal Studies movement. Steadily gaining importance over the last 20 or so years, its growth in many ways parallels the way feminism became a subject—and Women’s Studies a department—which went on to influence the theoretical underpinnings of nearly every other field.

The wealth of literature previously seen as sentimental for having animals as characters is being rethought with all our senses open to a new and better understanding of creatures who are different from ourselves. And in the middle of it all (of course!), our faithful canine friends in literature are happily receiving serious attention.

*“The Wolf in the Dog: Animal Fables and State Formation,” Differences 15:69–83.

**See Michael Gorra’s review in the New York Times (11/28/1999).

D.L. Pughe divides her time between Iowa City, Iowa, and Berkeley, Calif., in the company of her husband, Jon Winet, and Mister E. Dog. Her essays have appeared in books by MIT Press, University of Minnesota Press, and Thames and Hudson, as well as in Nest and Five Fingers Review. Part One of this article, “The Near and Far of Dogness,” appeared in the Dec. ’07 issue of Bark.

Recommended Reading

Paul Auster, Timbuktu, A Novel

Bark Editors, Dog Is My Co-Pilot: Great Writers on the World’s Oldest Friendship

John Berger, “Why Look at Animals?” in About Looking

R. Howard Bloch, “The Wolf in the Dog: Animal Fables and State Formation” in Differences 15

Mikhail Bulgakov, The Heart of a Dog, translated by Michael Glenny

Jonathan Burt, Animals in Film

J.M. Coetzee, The Lives of Animals

Ferris Cook, Bark: Selected Poems about Dogs

Adrian Franklin, Animals and Modern Cultures: A Sociology of Human-Animal Relations in Modernity

Laurie Adams Frost, “Pets and Lovers: The Human-Companion Animal Bond in Contemporary Literary Prose” in Journal of Popular Culture 25:1

Erica Fudge, Perceiving Animals: Humans and Beasts in Early Modern English Culture

Roy Fuller (ed.), Fellow Mortals: An Anthology of Animal Verse

Marjorie Garber, Dog Love

A. R. Gurney, Sylvia

Amy Hempel and Jim Shepard (eds.), Unleashed: Poems by Writers’ Dogs

Ted Hughes, Collected Animal Poems

Christine Kenyon-Jones, Kindred Brutes: Animals in Romantic-Period Writing

Katherine Kete, The Beast in the Boudoir: Petkeeping in Nineteenth-Century Paris

Eric Knight, Lassie Come-Home

Jean De La Fontaine, Jean-Noël Rochut and C.J. Moore, The Fables of La Fontaine

Andrew Lang (ed.), The Animal Story Book

Susan McHugh, Dog

Gail F. Melson, Why the Wild Things Are: Animals in the Lives of Children

John Muir, Stickeen: The Story of a Dog (1909). Reprinted 2006

Harriet Ritvo, The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age

Nigel Rothfels (ed.), Representing Animals

Boria Sax, Animals in the Third Reich: Pets, Scapegoats and the Holocaust, and The Serpent and the Swan: The Animal Bride in Folklore and Literature

Jeanne Schinto, The Literary Dog: Great Contemporary Dog Stories

Jean-Claude Schmitt, The Holy Greyhound: Guinefort, Healer of Children since the Thirteenth Century

Marian Scholtmeijer, Animal Victims in Modern Fiction: From Sanctity to Sacrifice

James Serpell, In the Company of Animals: A Study of Human-Animal Relationships

Kenneth Shapiro and Marion W. Copeland, “Toward a Critical Theory of Animal Issues in Fiction” in Society and Animals 13:4

Erica Sheen, “101 and Counting: Dalmations in Film and Advertising,” in Worldviews, 9:2

Marc Shell, “The Family Pet” in Representations 15

Cary Wolfe, Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory

Virginia Woolf, Flush

Websites of Interest

Anthrozoös (A multidisciplinary journal of the interactions of people and animals)
http://www.bergpublishers.com/JournalsHomepage/Anthrozoös/tabid/519/Default.aspx

British Animal Studies Network (BASN)

H-Animal (Animal Studies branch of H-Net, Humanities Network)

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