Animal Subjects: Literature, Zoology, and British Modernism, by Caroline Hovanec

Abstract

In one of the great essays on literature and science, Stephen Jay Gould (2002: 51) suggests that Vladimir Nabokov’s rare abilities in both fiction and entomology stemmed from his knack for observation, which revealed “deep similarities in intellectual procedure between the arts and sciences.” Henry James’s (1972: 35) advice to would-be writers—“be one of the people on whom nothing is lost”—would thus apply as well to biologists. This attentiveness was obvious to Julian Huxley, biologist brother of Aldous, who extols the scientific value of observation in “Bird-Watching and Biological Science” (1916). Observation, he argues, involves more than perceiving and recording data: it cuts to the heart of scientific inquiry: “Those who wish to penetrate into those arcana and mysteries of science where the beginnings of Consciousness are being shaped and added to Life cannot do better than observe the behavior of a single species of wild bird or mammal, and, having observed, try to understand” (1916: 148).Huxley makes this grand claim in the context of an enduring mystery: the problem of animal minds. That animals think and feel is uncontroversial today, but a century ago it was provocative to proclaim a “conviction that birds have a mind of the same general nature as ours, though of course more rudimentary: if they are automata, then so are we” (144). The argument was not new—it was a cornerstone of Darwin’s Descent of Man (1871) and The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1876)—but it would gain sustained scientific attention only in the early twentieth century. Then, as now, animal subjectivity raised serious methodological difficulties: how can empirical science claim to know anything about mental phenomena, which are only indirectly observable? So elusive are these phenomena that the Behaviorist school of psychology ignored them. To claim “that there is any such thing as mental life,” wrote John Broadus Watson (1925: 180) in Behaviorism, was to indulge in a “fiction.” Not that literature had an easier time with animal minds. Writers of literature faced remarkably similar challenges—epistemic, ethical, and representational—as writers of science. And literature and science both remain unable, in any verifiable way, to answer Thomas Nagel’s “What Is It like to Be a Bat?” (1974).Such questions arose with particular force in the early twentieth century, argues Caroline Hovanec in Animal Subjects, due to a specific alignment of biology, psychology, and literary aesthetics. Exploring this alignment, her enlightening book posits animal subjectivity as a crucial “third term” (17) in the study of science and literature in early-twentieth- century British culture. Scientific and literary writers alike were confronted with the possibility of minds that are literally (evolutionarily) related to ours, yet entirely alien in their ways of perceiving and responding to the world. This scientific and literary overlap is not merely incidental, argues Hovanec. Animal subjectivity was in the early twentieth century an inevitable corollary of evolutionary theory and post-Darwinian psychology. For literary writers, negotiating the problem fairly and realistically thus involved participating in the study, if not the methods, of biology—what Hovanec calls “a literary experimentation and innovation in conjunction with, not opposed to, modern science” (116). Meanwhile, the mysteries of animal minds forced biologists to engage imaginatively with their subjects as thinking and feeling beings and to develop scientifically defensible ways of doing what poets and novelists do: inferring mental states from observable behavior, often through perspectival and narrational maneuvers much like those used by literary modernists. The inaccessibility of animal subjectivity “drove” writers to “the very limits of literary and scientific representation” (3); scientists “turn[ed] to the methods of fiction and poetry to better explore animal subjectivity, while the literary writers found themselves adopting the observational techniques of science” (5). Readers unfamiliar with contemporary biology may be surprised to learn how open biologists were in the early modernist era to the relativistic notion of Umwelten, “the phenomenological worlds of animals” (21), and many will thrill to learn that biologists recognized how one’s sensory apparatus determines the realities of one’s own world. And certainly many will be moved to wonder, “What does biology tell us about modernism?”Animal Subjects is concerned with the professional as well as amateur practice of natural history, an age-old field of study whose method rests on the act of observation. Though early twentieth-century biology is often characterized as the beginning of the age of experimental embryology, physiology, and laboratory genetics, Hovanec focuses on the emergence of other biological subfields that rely on what Christina Alt (2010: 53) calls an “observational approach to the study of nature.” Like Alt’s Virginia Woolf and the Study of Nature, Hovanec’s book foregrounds the act of observation, whose inevitable limitations and blind spots necessitate ethical and empathetic imagining as the governing principle behind the struggle of both biology and literature to imagine animal minds. Yet it goes far beyond the primarily descriptive nature of Alt’s study. Hovanec breaks new ground by connecting the “observational approach” to contemporaneous research in the biological sciences. The scientists at the heart of the book—seminal but hardly legendary figures like Conwy Lloyd Morgan, Charles Elton, J. B. S. Haldane, and others— displace the system builders, Darwin and Freud, who preside over so much scholarship on modernism and biology. Some will balk at the near-absence of Freud, yet, as Hovanec rightly insists, Freud had almost nothing to say about animals, which he saw mainly as “embodiments of [human] sex and violence,” not as “conscious subjects, perceiving and responding with intention to the things in their world” (12).In biology, as in literature, there is no single way to deal with the representational difficulties posed by animal minds. Thus Animal Subjects is organized along a spectrum of scientific and literary responses to these difficulties. The spectrum runs from the objective or “thin description” (32) to the subjective or “thick description” of animal minds. At one extreme the writers and scientists covered in the book limited their inferences to the bare minimum, reporting only observable behaviors and actions, while at the other they embraced empathetic identification and even mind-reading. This proves a logical and ultimately satisfying structure for the book, though it requires some readerly patience and faith; for example, in the early chapters, I sometimes wondered when we would get to the promised topic of animal minds. Animal Subjects delivers, but it takes a few chapters for the overall pattern of Hovanec’s argument to emerge.Especially remote from the book’s main concerns, at least initially, is the first chapter, “H. G. Wells, Charles Elton, and the Struggle for Existence,” which focuses on questions of where to situate animals vis-à- vis humans in a post-Darwinian world. The chapter is an enjoyable study of Wells’s lesser-known short fiction, in which invasive animals threaten human dominance and survival. Wells used invasions by ants, spiders, and prehistoric birds to challenge British imperialism, particularly in its efforts to control nature and indigenous human populations. Paired with the discussion of Wells is a discussion of the pioneering ecologist Charles Sutherland Elton, who, witnessing the damage caused by introduced and invasive species, became increasingly skeptical about using biological knowledge to manage (or meddle with) ecosystems in the service of colonial administration. The chapter offers a welcome reminder of Wells’s fin-de-siècle stories, persuasively relating their scientific themes to his equivocations about British and human exceptionalism. It beautifully situates the stories in the context of biology’s role in colonial management and links their anticolonial energies to ecology’s own evolution as a science devoted to the management of nature but increasingly attuned to the hubris of that endeavor.Animal Subjects hits its stride in chapter 2, “Aldous Huxley, Henry Eliot Howard, and the Observational Ethic.” Huxley is the most biologically savvy of modernists, but scholars tend to privilege his outrageous animal similes, used to demean human characters, over his more sober representations of actual animals. Huxley’s externalized animal descriptions, argues Hovanec, mark a particular ethical stance vis- à-vis animal minds: “To recognize animal subjectivity is not necessarily to represent it directly” (78). Not speaking for animals may be the most ethically and scientifically responsible way to acknowledge their invisible interiority. Contemporary biologists concerned with developing a legitimate science of animal behavior (ethology) used a similar form of “thin description” limited to observable actions as “a way of deferring, without denying, claims about animals’ subjective experience” (79). This ethical and epistemological stance parallels the rise of ethology and other biological subfields that study animals noninvasively, by observing them in their natural environments. Hovanec presents thin description as a way to avoid colonizing or misrepresenting animal minds, just as ethology favored “a noninvasive, observational approach” over “the vivisectionist’s gaze” (102). More provocatively Hovanec, following Heather Love, considers thin description a precondition for conducting thick description in new, more responsible ways: “We might see ethological thin description . . . not as a way of foreclosing animals’ interior experiences, but as a way of building the empirical basis for them” (105). In this context, Hovanec might have given more consideration to Huxley’s outspoken hatred of behaviorism, which similarly strove for externalized description. But the chapter is a welcome reminder that there is more to modernist technique than those, such as free indirect discourse and other renditions of consciousness, that we commonly associate with the “inward turn.” Aside from helping to put Aldous Huxley more firmly on today’s scholarly map, Hovanec’s account of the starlings in Antic Hay in relation to Edmund Selous’s Thought-Transference (or What?) in Birds (1931) does what literature and science studies should do but only rarely does: amaze the reader with the science while expanding the meaning and beauty of the literature.In the third and final chapters, in which Hovanec addresses the inaccessible realms of animal language, emotion, and phenomenology, Animals Subjects really comes together. Chapter 3, “Romantic Ethologies,” chronicles surprising affinities between the “empathetic epistemology” (128) ofJulian Huxley and D. H. Lawrence. Both figures, Hovanec argues, were profoundly committed to intuitive connections with animal psychology, and both subscribed to the idea that animals participate in play and engage in sex and love out of exuberance and pleasure. We expect as much of Lawrence, who could describe howso slowly the great hot elephant heartsgrow full of desire,and the great beasts mate in secret at last,hiding their fire. (quoted on p. 135)This is not the expected idiom of science, however, so the chapter’s main contribution is in its attention to Julian Huxley, a biologist who was evidently as willing as the poet to ascribe thoughts and emotions to his animal subjects. Far from the stereotype of the scientist as a dry reductionist, the Huxley who studied courtship rituals in crested grebes and speculated about their reproductive politics openly and defiantly wrote about animals as thinking, feeling subjects. Hovanec is careful to insist that he did so not through mere sentiment but, rather, in keeping with a deliberate philosophy of science; for Huxley “not only is empathizing with animals a legitimate scientific method, it is in his view more scientific than trying to explain animal behaviors physiologically” (126). Returning to the concerns of the second chapter, Hovanec concludes that the concomitant undeniability and unknowability of animal subjectivity make any attempt to describe it an imaginative and ethical act. The intellectual and ethical risks of seeking familiarity with the otherness of animals have their own scientific and aesthetic payoffs: for “what could be stranger than what is familiar?” as Timothy Morton (2010: 41) wonders in The Ecological Thought before adding that “far from erasing strangeness, intimacy heightens it.”This conclusion sets the stage for the final and best chapter of the book, “Bloomsbury’s Comparative Psychology.” It is through the empiricist tradition of comparative psychology—“a modernist [scientific] discipline, aligned with modernist literary themes such as a plurality of perspectives, an exploration of consciousness, and a desire to denaturalize our own point of view” (162)—that Animal Subjects clinches its case for profound connections between animal subjectivity, biology, and modernist aesthetics. Beginning with von Uexküll’s notion of Umwelt, the chapter demonstrates how philosophers, biologists, and fiction writers were exploring, in remarkably similar ways, how different beings with different sensory faculties create their different realities. As Conwy Lloyd Morgan put it in 1891, “It is not merely that the same world is differently mirrored in different minds, but that they are two different worlds . . . .[We] construct the world that we see” (quoted on p. 167). Hovanec’s readings of Morgan, Julian Huxley, J. B. S. Haldane, and especially Bertrand Russell, with his insistence that “mental life is, at its heart, nothing more than sensations and their echoes” (172), reveal the modernism inherent in at least some biological sciences of the period. In addition to exploring Huxley’s and Haldane’s thought experiments about “philosophical animals” (173), the chapter builds on Ann Banfield’s The Phantom Table (2000) by relating Woolf’s experiments with animal perspectives to Russell’s underexamined debts to comparative psychology. Woolf participates in this scientific tradition “as she explores the epistemological possibilities of imagining animal perspectives” (187). Indeed, Woolf extends that tradition as only imaginative literature can: experimental fiction addresses the same questions as empirical science but ventures where empiricism cannot legitimately go—into the Umwelt of animals. Thus Woolf’s animal-focalized fiction, including “Kew Gardens” and Flush, negotiates “the challenges and possibilities that arise when the empiricist self aims to move beyond direct experience and apprehend the revelatory strangeness of animal worlds” (162). It is now commonplace to acknowledge Woolf’s respect for biologists, notably Darwin and T H. Huxley (grandfather of Julian and Aldous Huxley); rarely do we witness such a persuasive demonstration that this respect extended deep into her artistic vision and practice.The book’s conclusion presents portraits of four animals— tardigrades, octopuses, mantis shrimps, and whales—that fascinate twenty-first-century biologists and thus highlight the continued relevance of animal subjectivity as a philosophical and methodological problem. The question is far from merely academic, Hovanec insists: in the age of mass extinction, we need a renewed commitment to “the limits, and the necessity, of empathic epistemology” (162)—the very limits that modernists both literary and scientific explored a hundred years ago. Hence one of the critical but also ethical strengths of Animals Subjects is its focus on science in an empirical rather than theoretical mood. This keeps it well grounded in the act of engaging with animals, as opposed to theorizing the animal. Derrida (2006: 26) may insist that animals are “existences that rebel against any concept,” but he is liable, like so many others, to lapse into philosophical abstractions about them. Writing in prose peppered with colloquialisms that fails to belie the seriousness of her attention to the nuances of literary and scientific descriptions of animals, Hovanec avoids this trap. Her extensive review of modernist animal studies in the introduction, aptly called “Real Toads, Imaginary Gardens,” is impressive for skirting the allegorical, metaphorical, and Romantic tendencies that come with the critical territory. I have no doubt that Hovanec succeeds in doing so largely because she accepts, along with a few notable figures such as Stacy Alaimo (2010: 30), that “zoological science might fill a gap” in animal studies. Like Donna Haraway, Hovanec challenges animal theorists to reconsider the (usually implicit) assumption that scientists hold a reductionist, instrumentalist view of animals, arguing that even when this is true, biologists also care for and exhibit genuine curiosity and open-mindedness toward their animal subjects.So much scholarship in literature and science studies doesn’t really earn that “and.” Hovanec’s book, by contrast, truly deals with literature and science, treating zoology on the same level of analysis as poetry and fiction about animals. Science is not just a source of frameworks or metaphors with which to read literature; it is an equivalent and complementary source of insight. While it is not unique for “reading scientific texts as literature” (17), the book is remarkable for doing so while taking science on its own terms. Like Gillian Beer, Hovanec evidently respects and loves science, demonstrating a stimulating curiosity and excitement about the objects of scientific inquiry. Like Beer, Hovanec reminds us that interdisciplinarity is not just a buzzword or a license to go poaching blindfolded in other fields, but a bridge. The nearly equal time she grants to the literary and the scientific may occasion grumbling by literary scholars, who may find some of its readings of poetry and fiction cursory compared to its attention to obscure scientific texts. Such are the essential challenges of truly interdisciplinary work, and Animal Subjects meets them with insight and unusual clarity. By exploring a problem that bridges biology and literature, Hovanec demonstrates that the concerns we associate with literary modernism—new perspectives and plots and an embrace of uncertainties—place them in collaboration rather than in opposition to the sciences. In doing so she delivers a stinging rebuke to the persistent myth of antiscience modernism and reminds us that if the observational work of the close reader, like that of the poet and storyteller and naturalist, involves both seeing and creating our world, it also trains us in the art of respecting and valuing that world in its complex otherness. As the inimitable Gould puts it: “Science and literature . . . gain their union on the most palpable territory of concrete things, and on the value we attribute to accuracy, even in smallest details, as a guide and an anchor for our lives, our loves, and our senses of worth” (47).