Genre Maketh Dog?

Abstract

In The New Biography, Virginia Woolf notes that there is a paradox inherent to the genre of biography, i. e. that of »truth« and »personality«. »[P]ersonality«, she argues further, can only be truly conveyed through aesthetic selection and manipulation of the facts of a life, through fiction. Animal biography challenges both of these categories: what is a true dog character and how close can an author come to a life-like depiction of it? Virginia Woolf’s Flush: A Biography (1933) as well as the earliest English example of animal biography, Francis Coventry’s The History of Pompey the Little or The Life and Adventures of a Lap Dog (1751), are, in their own way, concerned with this issue. Influenced by their generic predecessors, the texts explore the narratological possibilities which an animal biography can offer, from satirical purposes to aesthetic objectives, from mere functionalisation to sentient animals. Woolf is essentially affected by contemporary discussions of biography and the challenges imposed by creating a dog »personality«. This is fundamental for the depiction of Flush as having an individual (anthropomorphised) character, rather than being depicted as a mere, and changeable type. Pompey the Little, in contrast, serves as a mostly silent and apparently objective observer of society, who, by watching and imitating his masters’ manners, offers eighteenth-century society a ruthlessly unembellished look into the mirror. Consequently, his animal character is, for satirical purposes, reduced to a mere type rather than a complex, not to mention »truth[ful]«, depiction of a nonhuman character. In this paper, we argue that genre expectations interact with two further aspects, i.e. literary history and historical as well as philosophical developments, and all three decisively influence how the two texts understand and relate human as well as non-human experience.