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Overview
An attempt to understand human attachment to the canis familiaris in terms of reciprocity and empathy, Melancholia’sDog tackles such difficult concepts as intimacy and kinship with dogs, the shame associated with identification with their suffering, and the reasons for the profound mourning over their deaths. In addition to philosophy and psychoanalysis, Alice A. Kuzniar turns to the insights and images offered by the literary and visual arts—the short stories of Ivan Turgenev and Franz Kafka, the novels of J. M. Coetzee and Rebecca Brown, the photography of Sally Mann and William Wegman, and the artwork of David Hockney and Sue Coe. Without falling into sentimentality or anthropomorphization, Kuzniar honors and learns from our canine companions, above all attending to the silences and sadness brought on by the effort to represent the dog as perfectly and faithfully as it is said to love.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780226465784 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 11/01/2006 |
| Pages: | 216 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.90(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Melancholia's Dog
By ALICE A. KUZNIAR
The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2006
The University of Chicago
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-46578-4
Chapter One Muteness
In his Sonnets to Orpheus (1923), a cycle devoted to the difficult beauty of poetry, Rainer Maria Rilke addresses his sixteenth sonnet to his friend, a dog. It begins: "Du, mein Freund, bist einsam, weil ... / Wir machen mit Worten und Fingerzeigen / uns allmählich die Welt zu eigen" (Werke 497). [You, my friend, are lonely, because ... / We, with words and finger-pointings, / gradually make the world our own (47).] Although befriended by the poet, the dog is lonely. And although, given the ellipsis at the end of the first line, the reason for this isolation seems to elude the poet, Rilke immediately juxtaposes the dog to the human being who makes the world his own by familiarizing himself with it through words: hence the dog is presumably lonely because, unlike man, it is without the means of representation. Rilke here joins a long tradition of ascribing muteness, isolation, and hence melancholy to animals. Heidegger in his Freiburg seminar lectures of 1929-30, for instance, speaks of the animal as being poor in the world (weltarm), resulting in its sadness. In explicating Heidegger, Derrida sees him as attributing this despondency to the animal's banishment from the world of man, which includes the realm of speech: the animal exudes the "impression of sadness ... as if [he] remained a man enshrouded, suffering, deprived on account of having access neither to the world of man that he nonetheless senses, nor to truth, speech, death, or the Being of the being as such" ("Eating Well" 111-12). What separates man from beast is the latter's muteness, which is also a dumbness or dullness that mourns for what it senses yet cannot articulate.
Another early twentieth-century German writer whom Derrida discusses in conjunction with animals, sadness, and the lack of language is Walter Benjamin. In his 1916 essay "On Language as Such and on the Language of Man," Benjamin speculates that after the Fall nature is engulfed by a deep sadness and muteness (Stummheit [2.1:155]). Were nature to be endowed with language she would raise her voice in lament (klagen). But such a lament would still be an inarticulate utterance, a physical exhalation (sinnlichen Hauch), it being in the nature of the plaint that it is the most undifferentiated, powerless expression (der undifferenzierteste, ohnmächtige Ausdruck der Sprache). Such a pure lament would be unable to designate its causes. Thus even while with voice, nature is deemed voiceless. One is reminded of Nietzsche's aphorism in "On the Uses and Abuses of History": "The human may well ask the animal one day, 'Why do you not talk to me of your bliss and only look at me?' The animal really wants to answer and say: 'It comes of always forgetting right away what I wanted to say.' Thereupon it forgot even this answer and fell silent so that the human could only wonder" (2:101). Here too the animal in beginning to speak immediately becomes speechless. Moreover, its forgetting can be attributed not to a pure bliss but to a profound sadness, it being in the nature of melancholy to be unable to locate and articulate the cause of its helplessness.
Precisely because melancholy is characterized by this tendency to fall silent, Benjamin comes to question his initial postulation that it is her speechlessness that lies at the root of nature's sadness. He in fact reverses the order of causation: it is not her powerlessness, her speechlessness that renders nature melancholic, but her melancholy that makes her silent, suggesting that there is another reason for her despondency. Nature, Benjamin then proposes, is dejected because she feels misrecognized in the act of being named by human language. The naming is a form of recognition, but it falsely labels what is essentially unidentifiable (Unerkennbaren [2.1:155]). As if resigned to her sorry fate, nature realizes that there would be no point in participating in this language, a language that needlessly, superfluously, and disproportionately squanders itself in what Benjamin calls overnaming (Überbenennung). If nature is solemnly mute, then human speech immoderately babbles. Überbenennung suggests a dissipation of words and disregard for them. More fundamentally and inescapably, postlapsarian signification sets up an incongruous relation between word and thing; language overshoots the mark. Benjamin thus implies that nature's muteness is a deliberate reticence, a notion to which I shall return shortly.
Although Benjamin casts doubt on human language, which ends up diminishing what it designates, Derrida nonetheless positions Benjamin squarely within the Western philosophical practice that elevates man over animals. According to this tradition, Derrida notes, the single, indivisible limit that separates man from animal is consistently determined by knowledge of the word and the voice that can name. Stated explicitly, the animal is defined as that being that lacks the word. Thus, in its efforts to define the quintessentially human, Western philosophy has sought to bolster human uniqueness and superiority by abrogating to itself the sole command of speech. Indeed, "animal" is the designation that man has reserved for himself to bestow in order to maintain his sole proprietary right over language: "Animal is a word that men have given themselves the right to give, ... reserving for them, for humans, the right to the word, the name, the verb, the attribute, to a language of words, in short to the very thing that the others in question would be deprived of, those that are corralled within the grand territory of the beasts: the Animal. All the philosophers we will investigate (from Aristotle to Lacan, and including Descartes, Kant, Heidegger, and Lévinas), all of them say the same thing: the animal is without language" ("The Animal" 400). Another major contemporary philosopher, Giorgio Agamben, has joined Derrida in this critical analysis of Western philosophy's strategic and persistent denigration of the animal by observing that man "must recognize himself in a non-man in order to be human" (27). This maneuver is accomplished primarily via an exclusionary self-assignation of language: "In identifying himself with language, the speaking man places his own muteness outside of himself, as already and not yet human" (35).
Confronting this philosophical tradition, Derrida questions, during his long meditation on what his cat's gaze means to him, whether there is any sign whatsoever of the creature's linguistic inferiority, for his cat does not exhibit the need for words. Instead it is he, the philosopher, who, in his "own melancholy" (387, emphasis mine), desires to lend the cat a voice and to interpret what the creature would say to him. Echoing Benjamin's "Überbenennung," this fantasy would indulge in an overinterpretation ("surinterpréter" [269, emphasis mine]). Thus, in a fascinating reversal of Benjamin's and Rilke's position, it is now the human being who is melancholic. Derrida leads us to question whose melancholy we are then dealing with. Whose longing and for what? Whose loneliness? Above all, whose muteness? What are the reasons and implications for this projection of one's own melancholy onto the animal? It is this reversal, this folding in on itself, of who is deemed silent and sad that I want to investigate more closely in this chapter. Where indeed can the distinctions between man and animal be upheld if they so collapse on themselves? And if Derrida's cat demonstrates no need for words and Benjamin suggests that human words are invariably an Überbenennung, what would it mean to bestow language on the dog? Can one find such critical reflection on language, even repeal of it, precisely in literary works that narrate from a canine perspective? The question then becomes not "do they have language?" but "do we have an adequate language to speak to them and about them?" Furthermore, how would one represent the vocal reticence of the animal and how can it signify something beyond lack or deficiency? I want to address the question of "whose muteness" from the philosophers Ludwig Wittgenstein to Emmanuel Levinas, from the novelists Ivan Turgenev to Charles Siebert, and from visual artists David Hockney to Pentti Sammallahti.
However much one resists, as does Derrida, denying animals the gift of language and however open one is to other means of communication, whether these be physical or extrasensory, animal stillness is not therefore any less pressing, especially for the devoted pet lover. I have spent hours trying to penetrate the minds of my whippets and despair of ever understanding them fully. Because they are such dear companions, not knowing what they think creates an ache, a yearning that is at times a daily affliction. My fascination and attraction are amplified by their silence, untranslatability, and detachment. The intimacy between us is even enhanced by their silence, for with the failure of words, I encounter instead the loveliness of their bodies and mien, the thereness of their secretive being. My dogs are thus both intimate and distant, and, because I want to be closer to them, I fall prey to a sweet melancholy.
The questions run through my mind: What do they suppose I'm saying? What do I understand them as communicating? In the midst of my attempt to escape my anthropocentrism, I feel I sink more deeply into it by the unavoidability of projection. And even when their sighthound eyes are deeply expressive and responsive, I am still lost. I want to know the true desire of this enigmatic Other and say to their gazes: What do you want? What are you aiming at with your look? In A Lover's Discourse Roland Barthes explores these imaginary monologues conducted by the one secluded in love, and he observes in words that aptly fit the longings of the passionate dog owner: "I cannot decipher you because I don't know how you decipher me" (134). And, "The amorous subject suffers anxiety because the loved object replies scantily or not at all to his language" (167). In our incessant specular reflections, we wonder if the dog, too, would frustratingly accuse us of responding "scantily or not at all to his language," failing to match his attention and devotion. Or does the dog cheerfully assume his barking and tail wagging are transparent and will be immediately comprehended? Is it only we who are melancholic over the gap in communication between us?
But what if they could speak in human tongue? The literary tradition of the dog gifted with human speech goes back to Lucian's Dialogues of the Dead and counts among its writers such luminaries as Cervantes ("Colloquy of the Dogs" [1613]), E. T. A. Hoffmann ("Account of the Most Recent Fortunes of the Dog Berganza" [1813]), Gogol ("The Diary of a Madman" [1833-34]), Franz Kafka ("The Researches of a Dog" [1922]), Mikhail Bulgakov (The Heart of a Dog [1925]), and Paul Auster (Timbuktu [1999]). In addition, the fantasy of the talking dog has spawned countless sentimental poems and trite stories. In popular visual culture it has inspired cute comic strips from Charles Schultz's Peanuts to Gary Larson's Far Side and the animated mutt from Pluto to the computer-generated figures in Cats and Dogs (2001).
But, although commonplace, either how innocent or high-minded are such attempts to endow the dog with language? The historian of contemporary art Steve Baker coined the word "disnification" to express the dissonance and misleading signification in current Hollywood practice; Disney only makes non-sense of the animal (Picturing the Beast 174-75). No less kind to literary forays into the talking dog genre, Roger Grenier, author of On the Difficulty of Being a Dog, acerbically observes that "worst of all is a writer who makes animals talk, as Colette does in her Creature Conversations. Anyone trying to write like a dumb animal writes like a dumb animal" (73). Perhaps for this reason Virginia Woolf disparaged her novel Flush (1933), where she whimsically expressed the feelings of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's spaniel: she called it a "silly book ... a waste of time" (Diary 153). Clearly the imaginative leap into the dog's thoughts arises from the desire to supply what is missing; it is compensatory for both the animal's silence and human incomprehension. But so often the attempt to bring animals to life fails to capture their very presence and, as Baker and Grenier suggest, descends into banality and insipidness. Especially in the humorous genres such as cartoons, the anthropomorphizing gesture reduces the animals to the silliness of humans.
Making animals talk, moreover, betrays the supposition that they don't otherwise communicate. And it presupposes that human verbal communication always is efficacious and direct. John Muir, founder of the Sierra Club, challenges both presumptions in Strickeen (1897), a novel on a dog by the same name: "We know about as little of [animals] in their inner life and conversation as we do of the inhabitants of other stars.... 'If they could talk' we say. But they do in a universal language no Babel has ever confused; and the gift to them of articulate speech would probably leave us about as far apart as before. How much do we make of speech in knowing each other[?]" (108). The most sarcastic critic of such ventriloquistic chatter is cultural sociologist Jean Baudrillard, who detects in contemporary oversaturation with media signs a nervousness and discomfort with the taciturnness of real-live animals: "In a world bent on doing nothing but making one speak, in a world assembled under the hegemony of signs and discourse, their silence weighs more and more heavily on our organization of meaning.... Nowhere do they really speak, because they only furnish the responses one asks for. It is their way of sending the Human back to his circular codes, behind which their silence analyzes us" (137-38).
In the face of such Überbenennung (as Benjamin so cogently assessed, as if anticipating today's pervasive "disnification") is it possible to conceive of an alternative? Derrida, in fact, offers an ever so brief and tentative response that I should like to pursue further: "It would not be a matter of 'giving speech back' to animals but perhaps of acceding to a thinking, however fabulous and chimerical it might be, that thinks the absence of the name and of the word otherwise, as something other than a privation" ("The Animal" 416). As an answer to the purported muteness of animals, he points out that it is not a question of endowing them with speech-we recall that his cat demonstrates no need of words. But how could his goal of reconceptualizing what the absence of words would be other than as privation be accomplished? What would it look like? To answer this question I first want to turn to various philosophers who have rethought animal silence, reticence, reserve, and self-containment. I then want to examine how various literary and visual artists reconceptualize the silence in nature alongside man's own pauses, whether these be in his own linguistic hesitation or in deference toward the animal and its enigma. I turn to the literary and visual arts out of the conviction that, precisely because they operate in the realm Derrida calls the "fabulous and chimerical," they can provide remarkable imaginative insight into ways in which this rethinking of animal wordlessness can occur so that it is not regarded as poverty or privation. Art is where the longing to come into contact with the mystery of animal being expresses itself.
Hearne, Wittgenstein, Kierkegaard, and Levinas
One contemporary author who has responded eloquently and forcefully to the philosophical assumption that animals are deficient in language is Vicki Hearne. An obedience trainer herself, she testifies to the elegant understanding that can arise between an accomplished handler and her dog: they are "obedient to each other and to language" (Adam's Task 56). Her paradoxes are just and to the point: "A well-trained dog or horse may be said to have a greater command of language than a human being whose code is infinitely more complex" (Adam's Task 42). This communication goes beyond verbal commands to include unmediated bodily response. In her novel The White German Shepherd (1988) she encourages her reader to envisage the scenario of a dog "standing by your side, so that you and the dog are both looking ahead, ... and there is, for the moment, no Gap. The Gap is everywhere, between lovers, between friends, between the world and God, between the mind and what you say. In dog training you go for the right posture, ruthlessly, and then there is no Gap, things fit together, and when they fit, they move" (20).
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Melancholia's Dog by ALICE A. KUZNIAR Copyright © 2006 by The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission.
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Table of Contents
List of IllustrationsAcknowledgments
Introduction
1. Muteness
2. Shame
3. Intimacy
4. Mourning
Notes
Works Cited
Index