Modernism’s Animal Metaphors

Abstract

Modernism’s Animal Metaphors Derek Ryan Primordial Modernism: Animals, Ideas, transition (1927–1938). Cathryn Setz. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019. Pp. 224. $105.00 (hardback); $24.95 (paperback). The Modernist Exoskeleton: Insects, War, Literary Form. Rachel Murray. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020. Pp. 224. $110.00 (hardback); $24.95 (eBook). In his classic essay “Why Look at Animals?,” John Berger speculates that “the first metaphor was animal.” His hunch is that at some point in time human proximity to animals initiated a metaphorical relation through which the earliest questions could be asked about what the human and the nonhuman “shared in common” and “what differentiated them.” But if evidence of the ancient significance of animals for human life can be found in zodiac signs, Hindu mythology and Homer’s Iliad (among a list that is, Berger admits, “endless”), in capitalist modernity this relationship has been ostensibly lost, with animals physically marginalized and psychically co-opted.1 The story of how modernism fits into this sweeping history of metaphor and marginalization is now being told. Scholars of modernist animal studies are interested in how and why creaturely metaphors might reinforce speciesism and be used to dehumanize entire peoples, but also how they can destabilize a sense of human superiority and, perhaps counterintuitively, enhance understandings of nonhuman life.2 In the two excellent books under review here, Cathryn Setz and Rachel Murray intensify and nuance our understanding of animal metaphor and other creaturely tropes across a wide range of experimental writing that engages phenomena specific to the early twentieth century: developments in the biological sciences, [End Page 431] eugenicist discourse, the rise of fascism, and the trauma of the First and Second World Wars. Notably, where Berger turns to cattle and horses, elephants and lions, cats and dogs—encompassing working animals, captivation and domestication—for his evidence, these new accounts direct our attention towards the most commonly overlooked creatures of all. The pages of Primordial Modernism: Animals, Ideas, transition (1927–1938) and The Modernist Exoskeleton: Insects, War, Literary Form are populated by amoebas, fish, lizards, birds, butterflies, ants, caterpillars and worms. Published one year apart in Edinburgh University Press’s “Critical Studies in Modernist Culture” series, edited by Tim Armstrong and Rebecca Beasley, these books sit remarkably well together as evidence of the centrality of animal metaphor to modernism’s experiments in form and its conceptualization of experience. They show how animals inspired, in often surprising and profound ways, what Setz refers to as a “primordialist aesthetics” (10), where writing oozes, buzzes, and flies; or what Murray terms an “entomological aesthetics” (13), in which forms bristle, burst, and swarm. Both monographs are carefully contextualized and elegantly organized, with a precise thematic focus that belies the breadth of material covered across “little magazines” and periodical culture, avant-garde poetry and the modernist novel. While primarily studies in literary aesthetics, they are especially notable for their engagement with the history of science (illustrated through the inclusion of well-chosen images to accompany the detailed discussions). If modernist approaches to animality have, since Margot Norris’s Beasts of the Modernist Imagination (1985), been explicitly framed as a response to Darwin, then in Setz’s and Murray’s work we find crucial refinements to modernism’s engagement with evolutionary discourse, including the many now discredited theories that nonetheless fed the modernist imagination with sometimes troubling, often humorous, but always fascinating results.3 Setz’s study is centered on the rich array of animal metaphors that appear throughout the journal transition, which for just over a decade from 1927 onwards served editor Eugene Jolas’s “quest to seek the ‘Revolution of the Word’,” most famously declared in his manifesto of that title (3–4). The book’s first motivating principle is to reclaim the importance of a magazine that has (along with its editor) been too readily dismissed, its reputation dented by the disparaging remarks of Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot among many others. Yet despite a relatively small print run and occasionally questionable content, Setz reminds her readers that this lowly creature of modernism in fact circulated a high number of avant-garde works among its twenty-seven issues and more than 4,000 pages...