INVISIBLE BEASTS AND BIOLOGICAL TALES:
Writing the Posthumanist Bestiary
Introduction
This paper is based on the author’s notes for an ICS Fellows presentation, in
2012, concerning the writing of a book called Our Invisible Beasts: Tales of the
Animals that Go Unseen Among Us. Conceived as a contemporary bestiary, the book
consists of related stories about imaginary animals, based on scientific facts. A
narrator describes the animals as she explores questions of sex, love, evolution,
extinction, the nature of the mind, and the nature of animality. Each story takes
intriguing data from the life sciences -- from quirky facts to important ideas – and
weaves them into a playful, poetic, and philosophical tale. The goal of the text is to
establish a new form of writing that explores, imaginatively, what it means to be
human within the natural order – a form based on the traditional bestiary, but
updated for our contemporary context and its topics.
The discussion below surveys the author’s main conceptual and artistic
sources for writing a contemporary, posthumanist bestiary, and relates these main
sources both to topics in posthumanist discourse, and to the author’s writing
practice.
The traditional bestiary
The bestiary in literature harks back to antiquity: the paradigmatic example
is Pliny the Elder’s Natural History, composed in the 1st century AD. What makes
Pliny entertaining, for a contemporary audience, is his mixture of factual
observation (e.g., bees are attracted to the sound of struck bronze) and sparkling
fantasy (e.g., pearls come from the sky, which stimulates oysters to open their shells
and impregnates them with morning dew.) The pleasures of Pliny include his
piquant reflections, as when he gossips about a certain Lollia Paulina whom he saw
wrapped in layers of pearls, or relates how Cleopatra swallowed a pearl to prove a
point to Mark Anthony. Pliny’s engaging mix of lore, anecdote, legend, and reflection
is the hallmark of the traditional bestiary. Medieval bestiaries, richly illustrated,
drew moral and religious meanings by comparing humans and animals, using
metaphor, symbol, and parable. In a 13th-century bestiary, the panther is described
(oddly) as having such a sweet breath that other animals willingly follow the sound
of its voice. The conclusion is a religious lesson: “Thus our Lord Jesus Christ, the
true panther, descended from heaven and saved us from the power of the devil”
[Daston and Park, 43]i Similarly, the ostrich is described as burying its eggs in sand,
then instantly forgetting about them and wandering off. And so – goes the moral –
the reader should forget earthly things to follow spiritual promptings. [Daston and
Park, 73]. Besides moralizing, the medieval bestiary also conjured feelings of
wonder through its descriptions of fantastic beasts like the terrifying, blood-red
manticore, or the halcyon, a bird whose presence calmed the ocean. The narrative
devices and sources of the traditional bestiary – symbol, metaphor, and parable;
lore, legend, anecdote and fantasy – produced a form that, for centuries, entertained
its readers with animal marvels, and edified them with lessons in wisdom, morality,
and religious belief.
In adapting the traditional bestiary to a contemporary context and presentday topics, I have preserved its narrative devices and sources, which help to create
poetic, meaningful connections between the image of an animal and the concerns of
human life. (Examples follow later in the essay.)
The scientific description
Our Invisible Beasts began as a game played with some biologist friends of the
author’s. For, while I admire the worthy qualities of old bestiaries, I’m even more
attracted to modern scientific tales of animals. The game went like this: I would
glean a few odd facts from the Internet, and then invent an imaginary animal based
on them. I would describe the imaginary animals to the biologists. Typically, they
would reply,
“Oh yes, there’s a creature that does that.” This proved the principle that
whatever human imagination could concoct, nature already had. Finally, I invented
an imaginary animal (“The Golden Egg,” published in The Kenyon Review) that I was
sure didn’t exist: it nourished itself on the energy released by natural cold fusion.
My biologist colleagues smiled and said,
“In principle, it’s possible … and we don’t know everything that’s out there.”
This seemed magical: I dreamed up animals in the fanciful spirit of the traditional
bestiary, only to find them alchemized into actual (or potential) creatures, through
the addition of a very little scientific knowledge.
With this in mind, we note that the one thing the traditional bestiary failed to
do – rather spectacularly -- was to educate readers about real animals. Coming from
a pre-scientific worldview, the old-style bestiary expressed a point of view both
ignorant and anthropocentric. Its beasts were symbols, metaphors, and fantasies -mirrors of human beliefs and concerns, bearing scant relation to real animals. By
contrast (as Stephen Jay Gould and others have documentedii) since the 17th
century, biologists have striven toward descriptions of animals qua animals, free of
human baggage in the form of religious belief, unsubstantiated lore, and subjective
bias [Daston and Park, 303-363]. While it would be naïve to say that scientific
descriptions attain the ideal of objectivity, they do a better job at it than medieval
bestiaries. Scientific descriptions of animals exhilarate us with the sense of raw
discovery. Hearing about a remarkable animal, we’re prone to ask, “Is that true?!”
There’s an excitement in learning what is, as far as science can determine, true.
Sometimes the excitement comes from an animal’s meaning for our own condition,
as when the journal of international relations, Foreign Affairs, ran an article
suggesting that diplomacy could profit from the study of bonobo chimpanzees.iii But
just as often, it’s excitement over the strangeness of other creatures who share our
world in forms wildly different from ours – as in today’s newsfeed on my email
website, which chronicles, alongside the latest celebrity divorce, the existence of
suboceanic amoebas at a depth no one had anticipated.
In adapting the scientific description of animals to bestiary tales, I have kept
the core of facts that conduces to the sense of life-experiences vastly different from
ours, as well as to respect for, and admiration of, these fellow-creatures’ ways.
Posthumanist influence
Our Invisible Beasts has a mission: to give literary form to new thinking about
animals, humans, and nature, using a combination of the traditional bestiary and
scientific description. Conceptually, this mission derives ideas from current
posthumanist theory, as well as from the life sciences. Posthumanism is a wideranging and complex intellectual movement; engaging such diverse and influential
cultural critics as Jacques Derridaiv, Donna Harawayv, Martha Nussbaumvi. and
Giorgio Agambenvii, its precise delineation (including its distinction from, or
inclusion of, “animal studies”) lies beyond the scope of this essay. What follows is a
thumbnail sketch of its general meaning for the text of Our Invisible Beasts, and its
cultural scope.
Generally, posthumanism presents a radical departure from millennia-long
strains of Western thought. Classical philosophy, Judeo-Christian beliefs, and the
Scientific Revolution’s legacies of Baconian and Cartesian thought, have all tended to
view humanity as that which – by definition -- transcends the animal, through
possessing (respectively) rationality, a privileged relation to God, control over
nature, and consciousness. Posthumanism seeks to dethrone humanity from its
illusory eminence, and to redraw the borders of such concepts as human and
animal, nature and culture:
[Posthumanism] forces us to rethink our taken-for-granted modes of human
experience … by recontextualizing them in terms of the entire sensorium of other
living beings … since we ourselves are human animals, part of the evolutionary
history and behavioral and psychological repertoire of the human itself. But it also
insists that we attend to the specificity of the human … by … acknowledging that it is
fundamentally a prosthetic creature that has coevolved with various forms of
technicity and materiality … this includes [for Derrida] … language in the broadest
sense.viii [Wolfe, xxv]
In other words, we are animals among animals, and part of our specific
creatureliness is the way we extend ourselves through materials, technologies, and
language. Posthumanist thought emerges from a slew of contemporary
developments altering our notions of humans and animals in numerous ways. A
small sample includes the animal rights movement; environmental activism; Steven
Pinker’s work on the evolutionary basis for human language; Franz de Waal’s work
on the primatology of human behavior; and, from neuroscience, evidence that
human cognition’s mechanisms are not basically different from other mammals’.ix
[Churchland, 23] In short, posthumanism comes from, and addresses itself to, a
broad range of cultural activities and frameworks; scholars apply posthumanist
critiques to a spectrum of topics in the humanities, the social sciences, the
environmental sciences, and the arts. Posthumanism’s importance in literary
studies was recently confirmed when PMLA, the prestigious journal of the Modern
Languages Association, ran a feature column entitled “Why Animals Now?”x
Relevant posthumanist topics
The following discussion touches briefly on posthumanist texts and ideas
informing the stories and themes in Our Invisible Beasts. These are not intended as
exhaustive or expert discussions of the texts at hand; rather, as indications of the
usefulness of certain ideas and textual moments to the bestiary’s composition.
* Points of view: human or animal?
Jacques Derrida, the founder of deconstructionist philosophy, begins a
meditation with a puzzle about humans, animals, and nakedness. He describes what
happens when his cat follows him into the bathroom in the morning:
I often ask myself, just to see, who I am … at the moment when, caught naked,
in silence, by the gaze of an animal, for example, the eyes of a cat, I have
trouble, yes, a bad time, overcoming my embarrassment.1
Derrida ponders his embarrassment. Significantly, it reminds us of the
biblical story of Adam and Eve, in which the first result of eating the forbidden fruit
is to become aware of one’s nakedness. To know that you’re naked, in Genesis, is to
be human – and, by the same token, to be different from all other creatures. The
fruit of knowledge is eaten only by humans: all other species lack the knowledge and
self-awareness of Adam, Eve, and their descendants. The biblical story lies at the
beginnings of a venerable tradition in Western thought, in which all nonhuman
species lack the mental and spiritual status of humans, who alone are thought to
possess souls and minds worthy of God’s – and philosophy’s – special attention.
Rather whimsically, Derrida probes the Eden story in his musings about being seen
naked by his pet cat. He tells us that an animal “is not naked because it is naked”2: it
has no concept of being naked because it just is. But a human “could never be
naked any more because he has the sense of nakedness”3: he (or she) might go
without clothes, but is always aware of what it means to be naked. In a paradoxical
sense, neither the embarrassed human nor the blissfully ignorant cat is really naked.
Despite this reasoning, Derrida still feels awkward about his cat staring at him when
he exits the shower. What sort of shame afflicts him? He finds two sorts, both
rooted in tradition:
Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am (New York: Fordham University
Press, 2008), 3-4
2 Ibid.,5
3 Ibid.,5
1
… would I be ashamed like a beast that has no longer the sense of its nudity?
Or … like a man who retains the sense of his nudity? Who am I, therefore?4
Is he embarrassed at being naked like an animal – the way we’re ashamed
when we’re told “you’re behaving like a beast”? Or is the shame he feels the mark of
his being truly human, and completely different from other animals? Who is he – a
beast, or a creature different from all beasts? (The title of this book-length
meditation, assembled and published posthumously, may hint at an answer: it is The
Animal That Therefore I Am.)
But there is a third possibility in the situation. Thinking about his cat,
Derrida reminds us:
-- something that philosophy perhaps forgets, perhaps being this calculated
forgetting itself – it [the cat] can look at me. It has its point of view regarding
me. 5
Knowing viscerally that an animal has its point of view can change human attitudes, as
happened to the poet Ted Hughes. Having grown up as a hunter and fisherman, he began
writing poems about animals, and as he did, he tells us,
… my attitude to animals changed. I accused myself of disturbing their lives.
I began to look at them, you see, from their own point of view.6
Derrida may feel embarrassed because his cat, he knows, is capable of judging him, after
its own lights. This may seem obvious to people dealing with animals on a daily basis,
like pet owners, accustomed to interpreting an animal’s point of view -- a wish to eat, a
Ibid.,5
Ibid., 11
6 Ted Hughes, cited in Can Poetry Save the Earth? A Field Guide to Nature Poems, by
John Felstiner (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009) 327
4
5
mood of joy or distress, or a request like, Follow me to my toy that’s stuck under the sofa!
But traditional Western philosophy denies animals a meaningful point of view. In the
mid-17th century, Renee Descartes, in his groundbreaking works of modern thought,
stated that animals possessed no equivalent to human minds, but were, essentially,
machines. For centuries, an animal’s point of view has long been considered
unimportant, and even nonexistent. Susan McHugh, a literary scholar, relates how
during her college years, she once spoke up in an English class to suggest that
Wordsworth’s poem, “Nutting,” reflected the thoughts of a squirrel. Her professor
objected that “‘Animals don’t think, and they certainly don’t write poetry.’”7 Yet
today, McHugh avers, both our knowledge about animals and our thinking about
literature have changed: animals are increasingly examined as active presences
within culture, rather than mere scenery or the raw, unthinking material of literary
symbols and metaphors. In her words,
Although no one to date seriously argues that squirrels write poetry, animals
are being reconceptualized as active participants in all sorts of cultural
production, and that participation has material and methodological
consequences for literary scholarship.8
The point of view of nonhuman animals is a consistent theme in Our Invisible
Beasts; clear lines are drawn between human perceptions of nonhumans, and the
motivations of nonhumans regardless of human perceptions. A brief example: in
the tale entitled “The Couch Conch,” a conch is used to reflect on the nature of
human relationships; however, the conch’s motivations, and its peculiar abilities,
Susan McHugh, “Literary Animal Agents,” Proceedings of the Modern Language
Association of America No. 124.2 (2009) 487
8 Ibid., 490
7
are celebrated as much for themselves as for their potential symbolic meaning.
Indeed, without a clear scientific grasp of the conch’s abilities, and an appreciation
of their uniqueness – hence, of the conch as an agent with a point of view other than
human -- the tale’s symbolic dimension would lack its basic vocabulary.
* Visibility and Invisibility
In the Western tradition, sight is the sense most closely associated with
knowledge, science and power. In an early work called Of the Interpretation of
Nature, Francis Bacon, founder of the Royal Society, imagines science as a light in
nature, gradually disclosing all nature’s secrets to human knowledge:
if a man could succeed, not in striking out some particular invention, however
useful, but in kindling a light in nature -- a light which should in its very rising touch and
illuminate all the border-regions that confine upon the circle of our present knowledge;
and so spreading further and further should presently disclose and bring into sight all that
is most hidden and secret in the world, -- that man (I thought) would be the benefactor
indeed of the human race, -- the propagator of man's empire over the universe, the
champion of liberty, the conqueror and subduer of necessities.9
The metaphor of the light of knowledge pressing back the darkness of ignorance
is familiar to all educated citizens of the West. What the metaphor fails to acknowledge,
however, is that light cannot reveal what we are not equipped to perceive. While Bacon’s
image presumes that humans can eventually see, know, and conquer all, our natural
limitations mean that we can only perceive our special human slice of reality. In the
words of the posthumanist scholar Cary Wolfe, it is not true that
Francis Bacon, “Of the Interpretation of Nature, Proem,” in The Works of Francis
Bacon, ed. James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis, and Douglas Denon Heath (New York:
Cambridge University Press,1868, digitally printed edition, 2011) 84-5
9
… the invisible is only – indeed, merely – that which has not yet been seen by a
subject who is, in principle, capable of seeing all.10
Experiments in inattentional blindness show that our brains, sometimes, do not
permit us to see things at which we might even be staring, if they make no sense in
context. Visibility and knowledge, then, are not simple. The widening circle of light,
sight, knowledge and human empire that Bacon imagined is strewn with invisible
and unknown things lying in plain view. Among these hidden phenomena are the
points of view of other animals, whose perceived worlds are very much unlike ours,
and one another’s. Given how differently various species perceive the world, the old
metaphor of the world as a widening circle of seen things doesn’t seem quite
adequate. In Wolfe’s words,
… does it make sense to say that a ring-tailed lemur ‘does not see’ the object
of the bat’s echolocation? That a starfish ‘does not see’ the image in an insect’s
compound eye? 11
The philosophical issue that Wolfe calls “the question of the visible” is related
to what Derrida calls “the question of the animal.” It’s a question of finding new
ways to define our human presence in the world shared with other species, who
inhabit invisible realities lying all around and within our own. To assume that we
can see, know, and therefore conquer all of nature can result in serious mistakes due
to our necessarily incomplete view of nature’s big picture: for instance, the harmful
effects of DDT come to mind.
Cary Wolfe, What Is Posthumanism? (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2010) 132
11 Ibid., 133
10
In Our Invisible Beasts , the theme of invisibility is, of course, a primary one:
all the animals are invisible except to the narrator. The meanings of this invisibility
are nuanced and ambiguous, ranging from a possible delusion of the narrator, to the
factual trait of human inattentional blindness, to the unexplained mystery inscribing
the presence of imagination. Ultimately, in Our Invisible Beasts, the question of why
the animals are invisible fades (so to say) before the question of humanity’s
ignorance of the meaning of animality – our own, and others species.’ In the
narrator’s words, “Human are the most invisible beasts because we do not see
ourselves as beasts.”
* Human Animality and Morality
What are the “’building blocks’ of morality” that humans share with other
primates? Frans de Waal, the influential primatologist operating out of the Yerkes
National Primate Research Center, lists the following traits that have “obvious
parallels with other primates”12:
1. The capacity for empathy.
2. A tendency for reciprocity.
3. A sense of fairness.
4. The ability to harmonize relationships.
The source of these building blocks lies in our evolution as social animals, de Waal
insists, taking issue with thinkers who prefer to view humans as radically different
from other species:
12
Frans de Waal, “Addendum to Down with Dualism!”, 193
… for those philosophers and other scholars who wish to insist on the
differences between humans and other animals I have only one piece of advice: they
will never understand the basis of human morality without paying close attention to
our primate psychology and our need, like other primates, to get along in a group.13
Our Invisible Beasts draws on de Waal’s scientific opinion for the creation of
situations and characters; a prime example is e.g., Erik, the narrator’s brother-in-law
who, though literate and employed, conforms in other ways to the description of a
male silverback gorilla. More fundamentally, however, de Waal’s, and other
ethologists’, emphasis on human traits as animal traits is reflected in the
contemporary, posthumanist bestiary’s approach to all its creatures. This approach
is best summarized in the epigraph:
Animal life is mindful. The mind’s life is animal.
Copyright  2013
Sharona Muir
Daston, Lorraine, and Park, Katherine, Wonders and the Order of Nature, Zone
Books, New York, 1998.
ii See: Gould, Stephen Jay, The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister’s Pox: Mending the
Gap between Science and the Humanities, Belknap/Harvard University Press,
Cambridge, 2011.
iii “A Natural History of Peace,” Robert M. Sapolsky, Foreign Affairs,
January/February 2006.
i
13
Ibid., 192
See: Derrida, Jacques, The Animal That Therefore I Am, Fordham University Press,
New York, 2008.
v See: Haraway, Donna, When Species Meet, University of Minnesota Press,
Minneapolis, 2007.
vi See: Nussbaum, Martha, Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species
Membership, Belknap/Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 2006.
vii See: Agamben, Girogio, The Open: Man and Animal, Stanford University Press,
Stanford, 2004.
viii Wolfe, Carey, What Is Posthumanism?, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis,
2010.
ix Churchland, Paul, Neurophilosophy at Work, Cambridge University Press, 2007.
x Marianne DeKoven, “Guest Column: Why Animals Now?” PMLA, 2009.
iv