Imperial Beast Fables: Animals, Cosmopolitanism, and the British Empire

Abstract

Aesop’s Fables will often pop into the mind as the progenitor of animal tales as a literary genre. Or, if one hears “beast” fable, one might think of the Middle Ages or immediately call to mind the fairy tale of “Beauty and the Beast”—whether in the eighteenth-century European versions of Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve and Jeanne-Marie le Prince de Beaumont or the nineteenth-century version of the Brothers Grimm. Yet history, culture, and this transglobal genre are far more complicated. For instance, in writing The Jungle Books, Rudyard Kipling, born in Bombay, was fully aware of a long tradition of Indian animal fables going back to the Jâtaka tales and the Panchatantra. Moreover, “beast” means not just barbarian, brute, or lower animal but any animal, especially a large or unusual one. Beast fables have everything to do with anthropocentrism, to be sure. Yet they also concern animal lives, languages, and perceptions.Kaori Nagai, in her well-researched Imperial Beast Fables: Animals, Cosmopolitanism, and the British Empire, first stresses the global distribution of animal fables (8) while theorizing freshly about the animal tale in its relationship to the British Empire. She uses the phrase “imperial beast fable” to complicate the simple Eurocentric view and to stress the doubleness of the genre. Inspired by recent work in animal studies and by postcolonialism, her argument focuses on “the strategies of appropriating and silencing non-European animal voices,” a silencing with its “roots in nineteenth-century colonialism and globalization” (11). As an “anthropological machine” (50), the fable could be used by Europeans to choose which animals might speak and which would be silenced; it thus also became a testament to vanished peoples—humans who seemed nonhuman to colonizers.She argues, then, that the beast fable is both “anthropocentric and biocentric” (6). It tells a human story but also an animal story simultaneously—the beast fable double speaks. The function of the genre is not to offer a faithful representation of animal life or of specific animals, but it is to find (and express) “a meeting place” (55) or affiliation between humans and other animals. Importantly, she notes how the fable is associated with rhetorical devices stressing duality, such as irony, metaphor, or allegory. She aims to illustrate in her chapters of analysis how the biocentric interpretation of a fable can destabilize its anthropomorphic hierarchies. While this argument about some of her examples is not entirely new, her scope remains significantly wide.As a scholar of colonial discourses of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Nagai is especially interested in how writers such as Edward Lear, Rudyard Kipling, G. K. Chesterton, and others can both promote and critique the values of the British Empire or superiority of humans at the same time. When the power of empire is presented in such literature, it is also offered for our assessment and questioning. Readers may come to see control as a domination worthy of being resisted mentally, if not physically. Nagai helpfully compares Victorian tales to those coming afterward to provide an example of rethinking and important defamiliarization. For instance, she illustrates how the tales of twentieth-century Japanese author Kobo Abe remake the form to challenge our linguistic superiority and implore the reader to question what a true reality might be when nonhumans are framed and trapped by human words and constructs.The focus in her opening chapters lies in how non-European beast fables played a significant part in the British Empire—from teaching local languages to tracing migratory paths to helping colonizers become naturalists—especially via the close involvement with India. She thus temporally extends work done by Ros Ballaster and Srinivas Aravamudan, who have established the importance of non-Western tales as intercultural and interspecies models in the eighteenth century. In her second chapter, with reference to Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Books and Joel Chandler Harris’s African American Uncle Remus tales, Nagai illustrates how the animal fable became a building block of empire as well as a mythic retelling of the American history of slavery. In doing so, she stresses connections between Kipling and Harris: that each Jungle Book features an “American” story—showing a transatlantic linkage—and that both Kipling and Harris rely on frame narratives, both referencing the Arabian Nights. Offering theories of the beast fable, she later connects Darwin’s tree of life to the evolution of languages, showing how narratives of similarity between animals and humans were shaped by narratives of difference between humans and animals.One of the chief merits of her study lies in her research and wide reading. The book serves, therefore, as a wonderful resource for others. In a few pages we encounter not only Max Müller and Charles Darwin, but also Jakob Grimm, Vinciane Despret and Bruno Latour, Giorgio Agamben, Ernst Haeckel, and Johann Herder (49–50). Key animal studies critics appear, from Harriet Ritvo to Ann Colley to Kalpana Seshadni, Jacques Derrida, and Donna Harraway, alongside major Victorian scholars such as J. Hillis Miller and Gillian Beer. The diversity of critics, theoretical perspectives, and relevant disciplines (from anthropology to linguistics) is equaled by tales supporting the transglobal approach. This merit also carries a drawback, however. So many sources are quoted or referenced in each chapter that it is sometimes difficult with these multiple points of view (along with their own implied arguments) to locate the emphasis and the development of Nagai’s own argument, as well as the connections between the chapters. More background for contextualization would strengthen the argument, especially at moments when Nagai describes how the animal fable reinvented itself—as children’s literature, as natural history, and as evidence in scientific debates about human/nonhuman.However, Nagai’s reading and research lead to original comparisons and claims, which readers may wish to pursue further. Language itself, of course, remains key to the beast fable. Her sixth chapter, on animal alphabets, explaining the centrality of alphabets to the modern beast fable, characterizes the genre as a “scene of reading” (158). Because literacy is important for the modern child and citizen, so many tales feature a piper who pipes to animals—stimulating the animation of animals through and as letters of the alphabet. Here her comparison between Edward Lear and the Brazilian writer Machado de Assis holds special interest. While Lear’s nonsense alphabets celebrate networks of animals and nonanimals, de Assis’s offers an alternative animal alphabet (and a critique of vivisection) in “Alexandrian Tale” (1883), a story about rats who refuse to be part of human syntax and death. Like de Assis’s rats, Lear’s animals don’t follow human rules, resisting the Victorian habit of classifying specimens—another scientific “advancement” leading to their death.Given the beast fable’s paternalism and the patriarchal wielding of power in empire, one is left wondering about the relationship of women to the genre and their role as characters in beast fables. Do women write beast fables? Are there other women storytellers like Scheherazade? Kipling’s Limmershin the Winter Wren storyteller, for instance, is a he. Despite the many texts mentioned, one misses how the beast fable might compare or contrast to Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty or Angela Carter’s later uses of wolves in The Bloody Chamber. Are there more women characters of importance like Balkis in Kipling’s “The Butterfly that Stamped”? How do mothers function as characters in beast fables when we tend to focus on wolf-boys? If the beast fable remains a medium of political analysis and communication on behalf of the politically powerless, as Annabel Patterson suggests, at what point do female animals do more than sing lullabies or teach their young survival tactics? In moving beyond beast fables as allegories of imperialism, Nagai supports other critics. With her numerous references and examples, she suggests how much more work there is to be done in a fascinating field of study.