At the Limits of Species: D.H. Lawrence’s Critical Anthropomorphism in “Fish”

Abstract

A more empathic inclusion of non-human beings within our human universe can improve the conditions of coexistence between humans and non-humans. In this regard, the effort to understand the lives of non-human agents participates in the development of ecological consciousness. Lawrence could play a role here, through the remarkable quality of what he writes about non-human animals. In “Fish,” he manages to offer a poetic rendering of the sensitive existence of fish, doing so in an astonishing way. But the same poem also points to the impossibility of adequately describing life forms as remote from our conditions of living as is the case for fish. Lawrence seems to be admitting to the impossibility of what, at the same time, the poem is performing, in a manner that is surprisingly effective. This “contradiction” can be regarded as a model of “critical anthropomorphism,” accounting for both proximity and distance, anthropomorphism and dehumanization, offering to the reader the poem as both an enterprise in perspective-taking and an awareness of its limits. A conclusion to be drawn could be that the most appropriate relation towards non-human agents would be the merging of two quite different components: both an effort to understand and a skepticism about the very possibility of any true understanding of what non-humans really are.