PUBLIC LECTURE: Animal Presences: tussles with anthropomorphism

Abstract: How close allied are humans and animals? What are the possibilities of interpretation between them? Can human language encompass animal experience? Are animals when construed in language always already hybrids?

The troubles and the jokes generated from the primary question of kinship between humans and animals have stimulated writers across the centuries. The emphasis on language as the distinguisher between the human and other life forms remains. In one sense, it is merely self-proving, since it argues for a peculiarity that tells us nothing of other forms of communication between other forms of life. Yet it does set the central dilemma for literature concerning itself with animals. How is it possible to be true to animal experience, even if that were the wish, if your medium is written human language? Will empathy be realistic? Is it not more honest for a writer to avoid claiming understanding?

The lecture shows how writers have often used animals as satiric glosses on the human condition and how the idea of animal rebellion, in particular, has raised issues about human language as well as human nature. It explores the ways in which more recent novelists such as Kundera and Coetzee have sought to respect the presence and the opacity of animals in their fiction. The second part of the lecture discusses, in particular, the present emphasis on dramatic monologue in the voices of other life forms, including but not only those of animals. The examples are poems by Jo Shapcott, Les Murray, and Paul Muldoon. The conclusion considers whether animals can exist fully in language only when they are mythological.

Biographical note: Dame Gillian Beer has recently retired as the King Edward VII Professor of English Literature at Cambridge. Her books include Darwin's Plots (1983, 2000) and Virginia Woolf: the Common Ground (1996). She is a Fellow of the British Academy, for which she served as Vice-President from 1994 to 1996, and a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She was a judge on the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2002, a Booker judge in 1993 and Chair of the Booker judges in 1997. Gillian Beer holds honorary degrees from London University, Liverpool University, Leicester University, Cardiff University, Anglia Polytechnic University, Oxford University, Queens University, Belfast, and Université de Paris Sorbonne. She has been awarded medals by M.I.T., St Andrew's University and the National Autonomous University, Mexico City. She became a DBE in 1998. She is at present President of the British Comparative Literature Association.

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