UC Berkeley

In our geological and cultural epoch dominated by destructive anthropocentric practices, the radical inclusion of non-human perspectives seems more imperative than ever, and yet how to include non-human “voices” in the academy has been contested, particularly as speaking for non-humans is as problematic as speaking for any subaltern. Surprisingly little animal studies scholarship has consulted the research of individuals who spend 100% of their working hours thinking about and researching non-human animals, i.e. biologists. My dissertation, First Person Animals: Interspecific Communication in the Anthropocene, is centered in close readings of literary depictions of (mis)communication between humans and other animals in modern texts and is informed by innovative biological research in animal communication. By reading literary texts that imagine other animals as sentient subjects engaging in communication across species, my work helps us to envision a path towards attending to non-human voices, without attempting to incorporate them into the academy under the auspices of liberal pluralism. To avoid speaking for animals and giving (human) speech back to them, we need only regard the diverse and nuanced intermodal communication—visual, auditory, vibrational, chemical, tactile—real life animals engage in every day.

My first chapter traces the blurring of human and non-human in the first person narrators of Julio Cortázar’s “Axolotl” and Italo Svevo’s Argo e il suo padrone. I argue the most interesting talking animal stories, or at least those most relevant to animal studies, directly problematize the difficulties of translating the non-human experience. “Axolotl” and Argo e il suo padrone literalize this translation in their very plots: in both stories, human voices speak through non-human bodies. The fantastic ventriloquism in these texts leaves it unclear whose voice—and whose experience—we are reading, thereby helping us to imagine non-human worlds without falling into the trap of speaking for other species or claiming to accurately understand their experiences. My second chapter, centered in comparative close readings of Franz Kafka’s “A Report to an Academy,” Leopoldo Lugones’s “Yzur,” and Horacio Quiroga’s “Juan Darién,” explores the dangers of non-human animals learning human language through training and education. In the texts I present in this chapter, the plots culminate in the literal or metaphorical death of the non-human animal who gains such abilities. I argue that the repeated violence, both of these non-human animal deaths and of the linguistic training itself, reveals an underlying fear present in the popular modern imagination and in biology alike: a speaking non-human animal disrupts our conception of our own human exceptionalism. Read together, these texts suggest that violence, not speech, is humanity’s defining trait. My third chapter investigates the zoomorphic human protagonist of Giovanni Verga’s Jeli il pastore who is unable to successfully communicate with his conspecifics. Drawing from archival research I conducted at the Fondazione Verga in Catania, I close read various passages from early unpublished drafts of Jeli il pastore which, I argue, provide insight into Jeli’s seemingly unexpected final act. Jeli’s violent murdering of his human rival, constructed as a zoomorphic simile, makes more sense when we consider two earlier essential aspects of the text: Jeli’s ability to communicate with and thereby empathize with other species, as epitomized by his kinship to horses, and the proliferation of zoomorphic figurative language in the text.

Together, these chapters suggest we need not speak through other animals, teach them our human language, nor zoomorphize ourselves in order to be able to meaningfully communicate with them; we need only reframe what we mean by communication. To necessarily privilege the specific types of communication we use—and even our own human-to-human communication is not one-dimensional or unimodal—is problematic and undercuts the immense diversity and complexity of the information transfer among and across different species. The literary texts discussed in these chapters, when read with a multimodal conception of communication in mind, invite us to accede to the fabulous and chimerical thinking Jacques Derrida encourages: where we once saw other animals’ absence of human language as a privation, we now see our own hubris at having defined meaningful communication so narrowly. A veritable and decidedly intermodal cacophony of interspecific conversations broadcasts all around us, if we but tune in to listen.