Literary Animals

Abstract

Literary Animals Thomas C. Marshall (bio) Animal Perception and Literary Language Donald Wesling Palgrave MacMillan https://www.palgrave.com/gp 327 Pages; Cloth, $86.75 Why conflate these two: "animal perception" and "literary language"? Literary language has been a province of "humanism" for several centuries. The rise of the bourgeoisie pulled humanism into place as a stepping stone and a foundation stone. Donald Wesling shows that an alternate was hovering in the wings all along. Calling it "animalism" may be slightly reductive, but this book asserts believably that "animal perception" is at the root of much literary language—more intrinsically and basically than humanist concerns. Wesling presents many specific literary cases as evidence, following up on his earlier insightful studies of William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Muir, and others. His work on Mikhaïl Bakhtin feeds this book, too. Philosophers like Jacques Derrida and cultural critics like Brian Massumi are recruited to take humanist thinking beyond itself. Wesling's moves take us "back" to the animal basis of our lives and forward to a new "post-humanism" that has actually been going on for a couple hundred years "underground." The traditional aesthetic emphasizes the personal end of perception. Wesling's detailed argument opens the possibility of putting the personal in its place as part of the "animal." He belabors some small points, but his larger argument is strong and progressive. This is a book to embrace and to follow into further study. It is a gift to all who might like to ground and expand the study of perception, thinking, writing, and reading. It gives us many things to work with to further our studies, not simply convincing or answering or otherwise closing any question but leading us to mindfulness of the roots and fruits of questioning in how we are what we are—humans among animals. Early in the book, Dr. Wesling states his task as trying "to uncover, then explain how the animal perception of the humAnimal gets into writing that is formally and intellectually dense." He states his argument there, too: "that evolution has set up all language as a vehicle of and for animalist perception." In the first chapter, there is a grand claim for trying "to turn around the Western tradition of thinking about animals." That's a biggie, but the effective trick used is to display many ways that an alternate track or tack is already clearly in place in Lucretius or Montaigne or Shakespeare and visible all around them. This is a study of "perception-into-writing." Animal Perception joins the work of several philosophers who have put our embodiment at the heart of their thinking. Maurice Merleau-Ponty is [End Page 22] employed to focus our attention on how our attention follows patterns of basic corporeal perception, and how this has a basis itself in "animal perception." The word "animalist" becomes a term for those from Lucretius to Temple Grandin who have worked with such awareness. Derrida's surprising later work on the "animal" and the "beast" is engaged to poke holes in the old "we are the animal with language" division of the world. Bakhtin is brought in to emphasize the dialogical aspect of literary language, often crossing such divides. Even more from each of these thinkers might have been effectively used to show how the animal crops up again within the enclave of the language using species, but each is used to demonstrate a good point. The elaborately detailed readings of animalist thinkers and literary writers basing their work in perception may not be everyone's cup of tea, but among them are gems of analysis and appreciation. Neither objectivity nor subjectivity, science nor humanism, is given the upper hand in showing how "concepts are perception-derived." John Muir's mix of "Christianity and Mountaneity" exemplifies one kind of cross-over. Alice Notley's phantasmagoria in The Descent of Alette (1992) is used to display another. Grandin's struggle with her own autistic thinking and how to fit it into the world of science shows another. Wesling's findings, from his close readings on up to his big ideas, extend our sense of reading and...