Verschaffel / Vermink Zoology

On (Post)Modern Animals in the City
1. Auflage 2015
ISBN: 978-1-84351-428-2
Verlag: The Lilliput Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 160 Seiten

An exploration of urban wildlife published by the Lilliput Press.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Verschaffel, Bart

Vermink, Mark

Leseproben

To the realm of fables: the animal fables from Mesopotamia to Disneyland

In 1927 cartoon film-maker Walt Disney left Hollywood for New York because of a dispute over ‘Oswald the Rabbit’, a cartoon character with which he had had a modest success. The film’s distributor, Mintz, had engaged a number of its cartoon artists, stealing them behind Disney’s back so as to make the Oswald films himself. Walt was deeply disappointed, but appeared to be helpless: the rights to Oswald belonged, as was the practice in the film industry in those days, to Mintz. Disney had to return empty-handed to LA: with no artists, and no cartoon character. He had nothing left, his career was over.

Richard Schickel relates in his (unofficial) biography of Disney, The Disney Version, that Walt (or the publicity department of the Disney studio) put out the following story in 1934 for the Windsor Magazine:

‘But was I down in the dumps?’ Walt asked himself (in the train going home): ‘— not in the least. In my heart of hearts I was happy, because out of the difficulties and confusion there grew a cheeky, comic character — at first vague and uncertain — but it grew and grew. Finally, a mouse was born: a frisky, playful little mouse. The idea gradually took me over completely. The wheels turned to its rhythm — it was as if the train was saying “chug, chug, chug, chug, mouse!” The train’s whistle screamed it: “A m-m-mowa-ouse!” Once the train had reached the Midwest, I had already dressed my dream mouse in a pair of basic red shorts with two large mother-of-pearl buttons, thought out my first scenario, and was once again on top!’ Mickey Mouse, the most famous animal of the twentieth century, was born.

The human animal

‘If you look at an animal closely, you get the feeling that there’s a person inside laughing at you.’ (Elias Canetti)

Philosophers have since the beginning of time tried to convince us that we are different from animals. We would agree that that is chauvinistic, but in practice we might not be so sure: ‘The Serbs are beasts, but at the same time they are men’, declared a Muslim fighter in Sarajevo. At the end of the nineteenth century there was an extensive family of Indians on exhibition in the ‘Jardin d’Acclimation’ — a section of the Paris Zoo — together with their totem poles and wigwams: something which was copied in Antwerp in 1885 with ‘negroes’ from the Congo and in 1944 with another sort of ‘black’.

People can ask themselves: ‘If Man is really so different from an animal — if he really is that reasoning, self-conscious, political, talking, laughing, disciplined being as the philosophers would have us believe — why then does he need all those limiting definitions to prove his identity, to differentiate him from the animals?’ Levi-Strauss notes at the beginning of his work Totemism Today [Le Totémisme Aujourd’hui] that modern anthropology was created out of fear of the animal in Man:

To preserve the integrity and at the same time to give a foundation to the mentality of the normal, white, adult man, there was nothing easier than to group together all the practices and beliefs which seemed strange to him — even if they were all different and plucked out of context. An inert mass of ideas crystallized around this, which would have been less innocent if men had acknowledged their presence and activity in all cultures and civilizations, including our own. Totemism is primarily a projection outside our world, through a sort of exorcism, of mental attitudes which cannot be reconciled with the requirement for there to be a division between Man and Nature, which in Christian thinking [and not only there — author’s note] is held to be essential for it. [sic]

Late nineteenth-century anthropology tried to exorcise the animal-in-man scientifically. Lévi-Strauss compares this to the way in which Charcot dismissed hysteria (and, we might also add, the way in which Durkheim dismissed religion and the sacred from sociology). All these positivistic sciences tried to get rid of the animal, desire, the sacred — the ‘irrational’ — from human nature. Under the pretext of scientific objectivity, scientists wanted to make madness, desire, the primitive and religion more different than they really are. This can be explained by the common tendency of different scientific disciplines at the end of the nineteenth century ‘to describe human phenomena as each being something separate — and in the form of what I would call a “natural situation” — which the scientists preferred to keep outside their moral universe with the purpose of preserving the clear conscience they cherished against those phenomena’. (Lévi-Strauss) [sic]

The last kind of argument in which the relationship between Man and the animals is explicitly taken into account, where the so-called ‘normal, adult, human, white’ advantages have no play, is probably the animal fable. In the fable there is still something left over from the metamorphosis between man and animal which Canetti in his Mass and Power described:

[…] the mythical ancestors of the Australian Aborigines are both human and animal, often even human and plant. […] they are accepted as dwellers of a mythical prehistory, a time when metamorphosis was a general endowment in creatures and took place constantly. The fluidity from that world is often emphasised. A man could change himself into anything, and also had the power to change others.

In the fable people are also animals, if only because the fable is older than the philosophy that men would like to make so unique. Sometimes in ancient ‘animal’ fables people appear, but not a single animal. This is not a contradiction: Man is an animal just like any other.

The animal fable

The fable is a short story in prose or verse that shows ‘animals’ behaving and speaking like humans and contains an implicit or explicit moral lesson. The origin of this genre lies in Mesopotamia, whence it spread on the one hand to India and on the other, to Asia-Minor and Greece. In Greece the fable is inextricably linked with the name of Aesop, a Thracian or Phrygian slave, perhaps mythical, though probably an historical figure who lived in the sixth century before Christ.

When the lion was about to attack the defenceless goat, the goat said: ‘Let me go and I will give you my companion the ewe when I get back to the pen.’

‘If I let you go, then tell me your name,’ said the lion. The goat answered the lion: ‘Do you not know my name? My name is “I shall make you wise”.’

When the lion came to at the pen, he said: ‘I set you free.’

But the goat answered from the other side of the fence: ‘And you have become wise in exchange for all the goats who do not live here!’ (Old Sumerian fable from the city of Nippur)

There are many texts in the fable genre and they appear over a long period of history, from Mesopotamia to the present day. It is one of the few genres to survive the political and literary upheavals of the early middle ages. Man still uses the animal mirror-image to think about himself. But the lack of differentiation, the interchangeability between man and animal inherent in the genre, made the fable dangerous to Western rationalism. To ward off that threat, the function of the fable was completely changed in the eighteenth and ninetenth centuries. A pedagogic-moral instrument was fashioned out of a cynical worldly wisdom about men-as-animals. The fable crept into a growing number of books (and schoolbooks) and anthologies for children, and became part of the teaching process. The underlying intention was clear: to banish the animal, the passions (and the sacred too?) from human nature. The fable became boring and uninteresting for adults.

The victory of rationalism seems complete today: apart from a few enduring exceptions there is but little interest in animal fables. Their moralizing tone disturbs us — even in the ancient Greek fables which were not intended to be like that. The end of the genre seems close at hand — or is it? After all, is the rationalistic façade anything more than a thin veneer? Has the fable not become so all-pervading in our culture that we are overlooking it?

The changing function of the fable

Fables surviving from ancient times do not often sit comfortably with the now fashionable ethical/didactic views going back to the theory of Lessing. The ancient fables of Aesop were not precepts on how we should behave, but guidelines for learning to see life as it really is, in all its mediocrity and ugliness. In an amusing way the fables give us a deep, sometimes bitter though often succinct insight into the human soul:

Animal and visual alphabet, from Johannes Romberck, Congestorium artificiose memorie (Venetian edition, 1533)

The Good Spirits and the Bad Spirits

The bad spirits who wanted to take advantage of the weakness of the good ones, drove them away. The good spirits flew to heaven and there they asked Zeus how they should conduct themselves among men. The god replied that they should not all appear to men at the same...