The Animal Part: Human and Other Animals in the Poetic Imagination
Mark Payne. (2010). Chicago & London: Chicago University Press.
Payne’s central aim is to interrogate the perceived boundary between humans and animals; a study which falls into two parts. The first – “The Abject Animal” – deals with aggression, initially between animals (Chapter 1) and then human aggression towards animals (Chapter 2). Payne focusses on the “otherness” of animals in poetry and Chapter 1 features an interesting reading of Hipponax’s “limping” iambic metre (and its influence on William Carlos Williams’ poem Paterson) to ‘communicate the experience of physical impediment by formal means’ (p. 48), with the metre coming to represent the bestial aggression of the poem’s content.
The second half – “Becoming Something Else” – turns its attention to removing the boundary between animals and humans. Chapter 3 discusses human perceptions of animal sociality with a particular focus on Aristotle’s positing of potential bird political organisation which Payne then contrasts with Aristophanes’ Birds. While Chapter 3 focusses on animals engaging with human-like behaviour, Chapter 4 instead looks at humans becoming animals and other natural forms (e.g. trees) with discussion of Semonides’ poem that equates different types of wives to different animals and the transformative narratives of Ovid’s Metamorphoses.
Example quotation
There are good reasons for thinking that new regimes of desire are coming to occupy the contact zone between human beings and other animals. Not only are the complexities of social interaction in animals once taken as the purest instantiations of wilderness – wolves and whales, for example – being charted, but modes of sociality are themselves increasingly being shown to be amenable to the same kind of genomic intervention as an organism’s physical characteristics. When human beings no longer understand their encounters with other animals as a meeting between nature and culture, how will they experience them?
(p.145)