MEANING OF ANIMALS IN MODERN FICTION

Five Cows, Some Sheep and Some Hogs

In the fictions of Defoe and Swift, both animality and inhumanity emerge as concepts disruptive to the protagonist’s secure claim to humanity. Crusoe comes to think of himself as an animal, and fears acting inhumanly; Gulliver is treated as an animal, and thought inhuman by those he meets. But whereas Gulliver ends up estranged from all three categories, Crusoe makes his way back to identification with the specific form of humanity characteristic of Enlightenment modernity. Although his fear of intruders makes him feel like a hunted beast, once other humans actually appear in the narrative, he emerges from his identification with animality to reassert himself as a modern subject by means of the unequivocal separation from, and dominion over, non-humans and non-Europeans alike.
And this can only occur because he has maintained the cultural and economic scaffolding of modernity’s human–animal practices: an agricultural system based on capitalist principles; the facilitation of hunting and slaughter by gunpowder; participation in the wider circuit of mercantile exchange in animal products; and a relentless infrastructural forward momentum in the harvesting and processing of animal resources. Each of these elements displays the defining quality of the modern, that is, mobility: temporally, the assumption that history advances from a lesser past to a greater present and an improved future; spatially, the commitment to scientific, mercantile and imperialist expansion.
In their initial desire for travel, their fascination with innovation, their entrepreneurial acumen and their faith in the conjunction between technological and moral advancement, Crusoe and Gulliver are both embodiments of the modern disposition. Indeed it is Gulliver’s blindness to the complacencies of this disposition that makes him a perfect target for Swift’s satire. Hence, for example, when the King of Brobdingnag rejects his offer of the means to perpetrate mass slaughter on any who oppose him, Gulliver can only deplore the ‘Narrowness of Thinking’ that holds the giant nation back (Swift 2002 [1726]: 111). It is only at the end of the Travels, as a result of his identification with the anti-progressive Houyhnhnms, that Gulliver renounces modernity and returns to life in a stable with his horses. This coda is a droll reversal of the historical process of separation between farmers and animals that marked the rise of the modern agricultural system: namely the move away, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, from the premodern long-house in which humans and cattle had slept under the same roof (Thomas 1984: 40, 95). In Defoe’s narrative, however, progress and expansionism continue to be presented in a positive light, despite significant moments of ambiguity. Crusoe’s reverence for modern commodity production is emblematized in his extended description of making bread. Beginning from the ‘meer State of Nature’, he has to reinvent each piece of equipment and each specialized form of labour that he would rely on at home, from ploughing to baking (Defoe 1994 [1719]: 86–7). In the same way he details his painstaking, step-by-step reconstruction of a modern agricultural economy based on animal capital. Unlike his precursor Selkirk, Crusoe is thrifty with his gunpowder, dividing it into numerous small caches like a speculator diversifying his portfolio.
And this investor acumen provides the motivation and means to build up a herd of farmed animals. As his supplies of powder dwindle, Crusoe wonders how he will be able to kill goats without it. He does not consider the type of metamorphosis reputedly undergone by Selkirk, into the bodily form of a predator. Instead, ‘I set my self to study some Art to trap and snare the Goats, to see whether I could not catch some of them alive, and particularly I wanted a She-goat great with young’ (Defoe 1994 [1719]: 105). A series of painstaking attempts – the hunting of goats with his dog, the treating and fostering of injured animals, the setting of snares – demonstrates Crusoe’s penchant for applied, experimental progressivism (56, 81–2).
Eventually he acquires the elements of a future breeding stock, one male and two female kids, and sets about developing, stage by stage, the infrastructure needed to support this embryonic primary industry: the construction of a secure hedge around a piece of land, the establishment of a stock-feeding regime, the first season’s breeding, the fencing of ‘five several Pieces of Ground to feed them in, with little Pens to drive them into, to take them as I wanted, and Gates out of one Piece of Ground into another’, and eventually the commencement of dairying (first milk, then butter, then cheese) as a secondary venture.
As Robert Marzec has argued, Crusoe enacts in microcosm one of the fundamental economic, social and environmental processes underlying Britain’s transition to modernity: that of enclosure. Involving ‘the meticulous measurement of a piece of land, followed by the surrounding of that land with barriers designed to close off the free passage of people and animals’ (2002: 138), enclosure prepared the ground for an intensively managed agricultural system that would find its logical conclusion in the feed-lotting of the twentieth century. With this reorganization of human–animal space came the dislocation of large portions of the human populace, a reconstitution of the rural labour force and a displacement of the traditional peasantry, many of whom moved to the cities and became the urban working class or unemployed poor.
Moreover enclosure provided a paradigm which, with the emergence of British imperialism, ‘could readily be transplanted to distant territories’ both as a material ‘apparatus’ and a ‘structure of feeling’, thereby giving ideological, social and economic form to colonial plantation agriculture. Defoe himself, in his Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain, expresses a strong advocacy of enclosure as a ‘radically new mode of enlightened (imperial) existence’ (Marzec 2002: 130).
In accordance with this attitude, Crusoe’s second thought in the event of danger – following immediately on his first, which is for his own survival – is for the security of his agricultural property. Discovering his island is visited by cannibals, he imagines they will return ‘in greater Numbers, and devour me’, before worrying ‘that if it should happen so that they should not find me, yet they would find my Enclosure, destroy all my Corn, carry away all my Flock of tame Goats, and I should perish at last for meer Want’ (Defoe 1994 [1719]: 113). Indeed, Crusoe’s commitment to his investments eventually outweighs his (prodigious) desire for self-preservation. During this attack of fright, which afflicts him for several days, the thought that forces him to leave his fortification is the need to attend to his flock.
And when he calms down sufficiently to plan more secure defences – for himself and his animal capital – he repeats the strategy he used to husband his gunpowder, deciding that ‘the most rational Design’ would be

"to enclose two or three little Bits of Land, remote from one another and as much conceal’d as I could, where I might keep about half a Dozen young Goats in each Place: So that if any Disaster happen’d to the Flock in general, I might be able to raise them again with little Trouble and Time".

Later, once the island’s human population has been augmented by Friday and some other castaways, Crusoe subcontracts management of his stock portfolio to these settlers before he departs: ‘I gave them a Description of the Way I manag’d the Goats, and Directions to milk and fatten them, and to make both Butter and Cheese’. This enables him on his eventual return to subdivide the island amongst his tenants, although of course ‘reserv[ing] to myself the Property of the whole’. He is now wellplaced to integrate his new colony into the commercial trading networks of the circum-Atlantic economy: ‘I sent them also from the Brasils five Cows, three of them being big with Calf, some Sheep, and some Hogs, which, when I came again, were considerably encreas’d’. Crusoe concludes his parable of colonial economic enclosure by introducing further stock, just as the acclimatization societies in Australasia and the Americas would do a century later (Ritvo 1987: 232–42).
In so doing, Crusoe completes his single-handed progression through the stages of those conjectural histories of social evolution produced during the Enlightenment which trace human progress from vulnerability to wild beasts and natural disaster, to the establishment of agriculture by means of sequential enclosure, and the concomitant development of a complex economic and social infrastructure. It is clear, however, that Crusoe’s ability to move from primitivism to modernity in little more than two decades depends not merely upon his entrepreneurial acumen, but also upon his firepower. The first time he discharges his firearm on the island, Crusoe imagines that ‘it was the first Gun that had been fir’d there since the Creation of the World’.
Although he brings down nothing but the flesh of a ‘Great Bird’ which is ‘Carrion and fit for nothing’ (Defoe 1994 [1719]: 40), what matters most are the rhetorical echoes of this inaugural report. The weapon is being deployed not merely as a hunting tool but as an instrument of discovery: it is to the colonial terrain what the scalpel is to the scientist’s table. Crusoe surveys his domain down the barrel of a gun, in the same way that eighteenth- and nineteenth century natural historians collected specimens. In his first few weeks on the island he goes out ‘once at least every Day with my Gun’ not just to hunt for food but also ‘to divert my self ’ and ‘to acquaint my self with what the Island produc’d’ement of the new terrain’s transition to modernity, and the introduction of the technological instrument by which this will be achieved.
Enlightened expansionism requires that Crusoe’s advancement demonstrates a concomitant improvement of non-European peoples as well as territories. Because it conjoins symbolic and material dominion, the gun proves indispensable to Crusoe’s repeated enactment of one of the central fantasies of Enlightenment historiography: the facilitation of the non-European’s progression from helpless savagery to engagement in the modern economy. The first instance is provided by Crusoe’s landfall on the African coast with Xury – first his fellow-slave, then his friend and servant, and ultimately his ex-slave. The two runaways are in constant fear of the wild beasts they see upon shore, but Crusoe deals with this according to what will become a familiar two-act theatre of cultural superiority.
First, he shoots an animal. This immediately establishes his dominion over the non-human world, while displaying his power to awestruck non-European observers. When he shoots a lion this witness is Xury; a few weeks later he kills a leopard for an admiring audience of local Africans: ‘[i]t is impossible to express the Astonishment of these poor Creatures at the Noise and Fire of my Gun; some of them were even ready to dye for Fear, and fell down as Dead with the very Terror’ (Defoe 1994 [1719]: 22, 24). The second act involves teaching the non-European to use a gun as the agent of the European master. Thus, having first wounded the lion, Crusoe instructs Xury to go ashore and finish it off. This demonstrates the modernization of the non-European, who gratefully gains (subordinate) access to the benefits of European technological progress. An optional coda to this two part performance entails the extraction of profit.
Crusoe is at first disappointed with the lion’s death, since he can see no return on his investment of powder and shot; on reflection, however, he decides to take the animal’s skin, which he later sells for forty ducats. The leopard gives an even better return: not only does Crusoe collect another skin to sell later on, but by donating the animal’s flesh to the local people he wins both their gratitude and their gifts of water, vegetable roots and corn. The same theatre of European polity and commerce is performed during Crusoe’s more extended relationship with Friday.
Crusoe’s intervention in Friday’s flight from his captors rehearses the Englishman’s superior ordnance, which results in the stock imperial fantasy of a non-European savage making voluntary obeisance to European power. Crusoe’s naked foot, associated earlier in the text with his own vulnerability to predatory invasion, is seized by Friday and placed on his head in a pageant of welcome submission to the redemptive intervention of just European force (Defoe 1994 [1719]: 147).
As usual in such scenes, an attitude of cargo-cult devotion – or what Rawson calls ‘gunpowder magic’ (2001: 66) – is imputed to the non-European: ignorant admiration and awe in the face of technological modernity. Nor is Friday’s reaction different the next time he witnesses a firearm in use. On this occasion, Crusoe’s intention is explicitly to advance his new subject’s rapid evolution through the same developmental sequence – from primitivism to modernity – marked out by his own tenure on the island. In order to ‘bring Friday off from his horrid way of feeding, and from the Relish of a Cannibal’s Stomach’, Crusoe resolves to ‘let him taste other Flesh; so I took him out with me one 'Morning to the Woods’:

"I saw a She Goat lying down in the Shade, and two young Kids sitting by her. I catch’d hold of Friday, Hold, says I, stand still; and made Signs to him not to stir, immediately presented my Piece, shot and kill’d one of the Kids. The poor Creature . . . did not know, or could imagine how it was done, was sensibly surpriz’d, trembled, and shook, and look’d so amaz’d, that I thought he would have sunk down. He did not see the Kid I shot at, or perceive I had kill’d it, but ripp’d up his Wastcoat to feel if he was not wounded".

As Flynn argues, the semantic transfer between Friday and the slaughtered kid – the phrase ‘poor Creature’ at first seems to refer to the latter – mirrors Friday’s own confusion about who has been the victim of Crusoe’s weapon (1990: 156). In Crusoe’s view, for Friday the boundary between human and animal remains unclear, a perception confirmed by his continued tendency to regard other people as meat. In this sense, Friday becomes the negative of Crusoe’s own animal identifications, which must now be superseded. Crusoe’s aim is to allow Friday access to a form of enlightened humanity defined by its separation from and dominion over animality, thereby inviting him into the economic structure of modernity.
This requires a lesson in what it means to be human – undertaken, inevitably, in relation to the animal. In the process, of course, Crusoe simultaneously reasserts his own position within the modern category of the human. The forms of human–animal intimacy and identification he relied upon prior to Friday’s arrival now disappear entirely from the narrative. Friday’s successful apprenticeship is displayed in the final pages of the novel. Upon returning to Europe, Crusoe travels with his man through the Pyrenees in an adventure that echoes his adventures with Xury prior to his arrival on the island. Thus, during the attack by wolves, Friday plays the role of Crusoe’s agent in the second act of the theatre of dominion. And as the consummation of this process Friday kills a bear, stepping up to the animal and placing his gun directly against its head before firing – just as Xury did with the lion during Crusoe’s first trial of his system of gun-barrel husbandry (Defoe 1994 [1719]: 22, 214).

By Philip Armstrong as 'Five Cows, Some Sheep and Some Hogs' in the book "What Animals Mean in the Fiction of Modernity", published in the USA and Canada by Routledge, New York, 2008, excerpts from pages 27-32. Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.

About the book:

Philip Armstrong teaches at the University of Canterbury, Aotearoa, where he is Co-Director of the New Zealand Centre for Human-Animal Studies.


"What Animals Mean in the Fiction of Modernity" argues that non-human animals, and stories about them, have always been closely bound up with the conceptual and material work of modernity. In the first half of the book, Philip Armstrong examines the function of animals and animal representations in four classic narratives: Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver’s Travels, Frankenstein and Moby-Dick. He then goes on to explore how these stories have been re-worked, in ways that reflect shifting social and environmental forces, by later novelists, including H.G. Wells, Upton Sinclair, D.H. Lawrence, Ernest Hemingway, Franz Kafka, Brigid Brophy, Bernard Malamud, Timothy Findley, Will Self, Margaret Atwood, Yann Martel and J.M. Coetzee. What Animals Mean also introduces readers to new developments in the study of human-animal relations. It does so by attending to the significance of animals to humans, and to animals’ own purposes or designs; to what animals mean to us, and to what they mean to do, and how they mean to live.