AFFECTING ANIMALS: INTERSPECIES ATTACHMENTS IN MODERNIST LITERATURE By Stacy Lyn Rule A DISSERTATION Submitted to Michigan State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of English—Doctor of Philosophy 2018 AFFECTING ANIMALS: INTERSPECIES ATTACHMENTS IN MODERNIST ABSTRACT LITERATURE By Stacy Lyn Rule This dissertation examines how animality is implicated in the making of affect in the literary modern period. Looking to the theories of Henri Bergson, Sigmund Freud, and Silvan Tomkins, I consider how these thinkers set boundaries between human and animal capacities for feeling. I then attend to how modernist authors respond to these protocols. Chapters one through three read interspecies affect in the narratives of William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway, showing how they attempt to revise modern expectations of how animals can move people. The final chapter looks to how animals inform Djuna Barnes’ impersonal affect theory. This paper broadens our understandings of modernist affect, arguing that we cannot grasp the full spectrum of feelings in modernity without attending to animality. It is further significant because it gives careful attention to animal experiences in the literature, attempting to read them alongside anecdotal and scientific speculations about the emotional habits, perceptual abilities and social lives of animals. This approach fills a gap in current scholarship that interrogates modern constructions of animality but fails to explore how these fantastic attachments impact the lives of animals. Copyright by STACY LYN RULE 2018 For Dubs, my first teacher iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This work has benefitted from the guidance of my wonderful dissertation committee. I am grateful to my chair, Arthur Versluis, for his careful readings of my work and his encouragement. I thank Patrick O’Donnell for his thoughtful criticism and for giving me the tools to think through how to pull together my first extended project. I thank Scott Michaelsen for being such an excellent teacher—for giving incisive feedback, challenging me to find a way forward, and for being so generous with his time. His continued insight made it possible to juggle the interdisciplinary areas combined in this study. I wish to extend my deepest thanks to Linda Kalof, my Animal Studies professor, who has profoundly shaped my personal and professional goals. Her wisdom, dedication, and poise remain an inspiration to me. I am blessed with very caring friends and family who all helped me in their own ways. I thank my mother and sisters for their love, humor, and confidence in me, as well as Mark, Doug, Kaitlyn, Michael, Ingrid, Julie, Scott, and of course Marcus—a magical distraction. I am grateful to Francis and Linda for their love and prayers, and to my friend and colleague, Jennifer Kelly, whose intellectual support and friendship I treasure. Foremost, I thank my husband Chris for encouraging me with his special combination of grit and perspective. He knows intimately the highs and lows of this whole affair, and he has supported me with grace. Last, I want to acknowledge Kendall, our beautiful dog. Dissertating can be an isolating process, and she made sure I never really worked alone. She was a constant reminder of the complicated attachments by which we humans and animals “share as much as we do, and yet also [do] not share,” and her touch is everywhere in this paper (Diamond 2008, 3). v TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………………………………...1 CHAPTER 1 The Modern Spirit: Belatedness and Equine Possession in The Hamlet……………………….. ..9 CHAPTER 2 Saving Face: Hemingway’s Animal Mortification ……………………………………………. .29 CHAPTER 3 “You don’t know what worry is”: Interspecies Apprehension in As I Lay Dying……………….49 CHAPTER 4 The “most formless loss”: Djuna Barnes and the Affective Politics of Animal Performance…..69 CONCLUSION…………………………………………………………………………….….....89 BIBLIOGRAPHY………………………………………………………………………………..94 vi INTRODUCTION Scholars are increasingly turning to affect theory to reanimate discussions of how writers articulated modern experience, pointing to new modes of feeling that began to take shape in the literature. Anxiety (Ngai 2005), melancholia (Clewell 2009), and shame (Love 2012), for instance, are linked to the acute injuries of modern culture. Many critics explore how authors drew from the social sciences in efforts to create aesthetic strategies for coping. Jonathon Flatley and Seth Moglen (2007) both read modernist texts alongside psychoanalytic theories of grief, showing how writers looked for ways to “change one relation of loss into another” (Flatley 2008, 2). Similarly Rochelle Rives shows how modernist impersonality uses sociologist George Simmel’s concept of the “blasé” attitude, an indifference marking the modern subject’s withdrawal from urban overstimulation (Rives 2012, Illouz 2007). Still other studies point to new feelings of boredom (Crangle 2010, Pease 2012), irritation (Ngai 2005), fear avoidance (Cole 2015) and more. Affecting Animals argues that modern figurations of affect are deeply tethered to animality. Affect’s characteristic slipperiness or resistance to codification as well as the ways it has historically been opposed to rationality firmly anchor it in the discourse of species. Julie Taylor claims New Critics belied anxiety about “embodied feeling,” where reasons for physiological shifts are illogical or unknown (Taylor 2015, 3). Such wariness is profoundly related to modernity’s various constructs of precarious animality. Thus, Anthony Cuda argues that behind T.S. Eliot’s favorite trope of the etherized patient is a fear of being an irrational, soulless animal (Cuda 2004). This dissertation considers how animality figures in the production of affect in modernity. I pursue two main lines of inquiry. First, what affect categories were devised according to modern conceptions of human identity, and how did such regimes of feeling 1 diagnose and elaborate, contest or energize interspecies relations? Second, how do modernists rework anthropocentric theories of feeling in ways that account for animal agency? I have chosen four works—Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood, William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying and The Hamlet, and Ernest Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon—each of which depicts animals as interested creatures with influential force. I show how authors developed theories of interspecies affect through a focus on the psychosomatic ways humans and animals attach to and move each other. These formulations, I claim, both articulate and attempt to modify what being affected by animals could feel like in modernity. Recent critical approaches to modernist affect and animals center on the congealing of repressive social practices via animalized affect. Due to the way dehumanization is grounded in animal abjection, these projects show, authors deploy animals as tropes for human feelings that fall outside affective protocols (Seitler 2008, Taylor 2012). But while critics have done a nice job of showing how modernists articulate nonnormative affect through “the animal,” these studies finally center on human experience. Interrogating ideologies is a necessary step, but it is one that nevertheless leaves animals chained to our false conceptions. These studies do not adequately explore how it was with animals themselves, who after all existed in ways that differed from modern constructions. Other scholars give greater attention to animal experience, examining how writers occasion thinking about our complicated feelings about nonhuman creatures. For instance, Doug Hayes argues Franz Kafka’s depictions of animal mimicry draw out humanity’s “need, unbeknown to itself, to have its own conscience assuaged” for its mass victimization of animals (Hayes 2015, 198). Further work emphasizes modes of feeling, like mortal vulnerability, humans and animals share (Rohman 2009, Nieland 2008). While this scholarship treats human and animal conditions generally, other critiques stress the need for reading fictional animals within 2 specific historical locations. Philip Armstrong (2008) pursues this line of inquiry, tracing looser forms of human and animal attachments that coalesced around projects of globalization. He shows, for instance, how Hemingway’s late work redeployed sentimental feeling against aesthetic imperatives that shunned the practice. My own intervention addresses modernist representations of interspecies affect in a significantly more intimate way, focusing on the situated bodies of particular animal characters as “subjects of a life,” as Tom Regan puts it. This requires fleshing out textual animals through informed attention to animal behavior. I take my cue here from scholarship that assesses how fictional animal depictions were informed by the purposeful study of animals. Issuing a corrective to symbolic readings of animal characters, critics cite authorial engagements with scientific texts, as well as fieldwork and detailed observation (Beegel 2000, Hovanec 2013). I will clarify this approach in greater detail below, but first I need to explain my reason for this commitment to species specific, characterological readings. Of all the ways moderns put animality to work in their affect theories, perhaps the most enduring practice is that of a conceptual resource for organic energy or the innate wildness thought to constitute autonomy. As Margot Norris observes, animals were marshaled to “accommodate the exploration of organic, feral, natural life” within an increasingly disciplined culture (Norris 1985, 20). Such work conceived of animals as a species of pure, unruly, and nonlinguistic vitality. This binding of animals and affect in modern literature is paralleled by affect theorists today who insist on the opposition between affect and signification. For these thinkers, affect is the unacknowledged momentum required for continued activity and change. As Brian Massumi has it, language is “in opposition” to affective intensity, which is the “nonconscious, never-to-be conscious autonomic remainder” (Massumi 2002, 25). 3 This notion of affect as a free, prediscursive excess tantamount to life itself recalls early twentieth century theories that merge affect and animality. While Sigmund Freud coded irrational emotion as a return of humanity’s prehistory, Henri Bergson’s vitalism claimed instinct gives animals a unique sympathy with life. What both ideologies share is an alignment of animals and affect that situates them elsewhere, outside human culture, in suspended captivity. Citing Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s “becoming-animal,” Nicole Shukin incisively argues the concept “fetishizes affect as an animal alterity that eludes rather than enters into calculations of power” (Shukin 2009, 31). Unmediated affect repeats the nature/culture duality. This is ironic, Ruth Leys points out, since affect theorists who see affect as anti-intentionalist sometimes seem motivated by a desire to “overtur[n] the human-nonhuman animal divide” (Leys 2011, 470). According to this view, since language has long been cited as the structuring condition of human experience that severs us from other species, prelinguistic affect appears to be a useful approach to understanding human and animal relations. However, in my view, work that idealizes animals as escaping the strictures of language is guided by the fallacy that our touchpoint with other animals must be asignifying, since it falsely imagines that they are. Resultingly, nonhuman creatures are rendered formless and therefore meaningless. For as Judith Butler asserts about subject development generally, we “are not really thinkable without… formation” (2015, 8). Textual animals are better understood through an approach that carefully combines a holistic understanding of animal behavior and perceptual modes with the historical circumstances and affective scenarios imagined in the literature. My readings are therefore informed by detailed analyses of signifying animal kinds. For while language is, as Maria- Daniella Dick argues, the “a priori from which affect must begin,” there are many languages (Dick 2015, 171). I rely in part on animal behavior studies to help animate the literature by interpreting what certain signals might mean. This requires balancing the value of this data with 4 the limitations of its research protocols. Establishing patterns, states, and normative behaviors, often with an eye toward functionality, these materials set up what animal activity counts and why. I supplement this literature with anecdotal accounts written by those who have established long term personal relationships with the animals they speculate about. Like literature itself, such work is holistic and therefore can better approximate lived experience. In the chapters that follow, I begin by giving historicized accounts of major affect theories in modernity. These systems of thought draw explicit divisions between humans and animals. I then examine how modernist authors engage with these founding myths by way of animality, defending thresholds or extending horizons of human and animal affect. Each work devises a particular affect that at once critiques emotional protocols and represents a mode of attachment whereby human and animal characters significantly move each other. Throughout this project, I use the terms affect, emotion, and feeling in different contexts. Rather than try to pin down or isolate each term, my usage aims to emphasize certain valences. Following Sianne Ngai, I understand affects as “less formed and structured than emotions, but not lacking form or structure altogether; less ‘sociolinguistically fixed,’ but by no means code- free or meaningless…” (Ngai 2005, 27). The term emotion has become something of a dirty word among affect theorists today, usually taken to refer to states of consciousness unified within subjects who express them through thought and speech. In the following chapters, it denotes aspirational categories of experience, as in emotional scripts. I use the word affect to emphasize intersubjective attachment, as in how one moves and is moved, and it often figures as a disturbance. I also use affect as a title for modernist innovations or patternings of collective experience. I write “affective atmosphere” when I want to stress a prevailing mood or vague awareness shared across a field of relations. Last, the term feeling tends to refer to psychosomatic experience, especially as it speaks to one’s sense of social location. 5 Chapter one is anchored in the affect theory of Henri Bergson, the influential predecessor of Deleuze and Guattari, whose work remains central to affect theory today. Bergson fuses animality with affect itself, defining animals by an instinctual activity or disinterested force that finally prevents them from exceeding their material forms. Meanwhile, he claims industrial progress is an expression of humanity’s intellect, guaranteeing us infinite freedom. I put Bergson’s theory in conversation with William Faulkner’s The Hamlet, wherein characters do not coincide with industrial capitalism but instead find themselves ever behind it. Faulkner develops a notion of belatedness, a low-frequency affect that is at once a byproduct of technological imperatives and a mode of attunement that disposes characters to obey such imperatives. I examine how this pressure bears on the novel’s commodified horses who are violently inscribed by the captivity Bergsonian thought says defines animality. Moving on from modern thought that conflates affect and animals, chapter two examines a view of affect as a surface phenomenon. I couple Death in the Afternoon with the affect theory of psychologist Silvan Tomkins, whose fixation on the human face as the locus of identity leads him to assert humans alone suffer from shame. Thus while Bergson speculates animals enjoy unmediated affect, Tomkins thinks animals lack the biological sophistication to do so. This places him and the scientific tradition he is writing in alongside the production of the modern face as that which unifies human subjects. Like many modernist works, Hemingway is not fully prepared to forfeit human agency in favor of a strictly biological account of affect. Instead he automatizes the bodies of fighting bulls, binding them to shame to produce aesthetic pleasure. Animal and human affection1 in his theory is linked in a mutual intensification with ironic orientations. 1 The felt expression of affect in subjects. 6 The third chapter engages with affects said to be the property of discrete subjects. Of course Sigmund Freud is the central figure for the delineation of modern emotion categories possessed by individuals. Through a reading of As I Lay Dying, I examine the function of anxiety—that most notable modern affect—and the specific temporal pressure it exerts on characters. Whereas belatedness converts a possibility into an inevitability, and shame is backward looking, in anxiety a crisis approaches. In Freud’s psychoanalytic complex, animals serve as receptacles for affections that are excessive and outdated. Thus for Freud, anxiety results from a compromised or unhealthy human-animal divide. Faulkner turns this clinical reasoning on its head as the hyper-vigilance of anxious characters constitutes an epistemic privilege that acknowledges ahuman influences and expands the human sensorium. The final chapter enacts a shift away from human and animal connections to an exploration of disconnection. While chapters one through three emphasize spirited interspecies affect, the animals in Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood are decidedly unlively. Addressing the problem of animal expressivity, the novel asks how nonhuman creatures can authentically move others when their intentions are violently and coercively usurped. Like Hemingway, Barnes privileges the body as productive artifice, where affect is performatively constituted. But for her, the authentic self-displays of spectacle animals are frustrated by a confinement that severely impairs their ability to attach, giving rise to a confused affective activity that I term placelessness. I show how Barnes conjoins animal placelessness to the modernist doctrine of impersonality, finally troubling ideals of anonymity and unknowability and pointing forcefully to the violence of depersonalization. Representing animal affections within modernity’s social fields, each modernist narrative indexes the historical experiences of nonhuman creatures. They prompt readers to imagine how animals meaningfully labored to meet the demands of situations—forming habits or breaking 7 them; acting out, showing off, or flying under the radar; detaching from their oppressive worlds or stretching themselves to connect or find a means to be at home. Toiling away through speculative adjustments, they too discovered how to live in modernity. 8 The Modern Spirit: Belatedness and Equine Possession in The Hamlet CHAPTER 1 I like horses and dogs— Interviewer: You like animals, don't you? Faulkner: Interviewer: You like them more than people.2 Faulkner: I like intelligent animals. Horses are intelligent, and so are dogs. Not as intelligent as rats. ––“Interview with Vida Marković” Lion in the Garden William Faulkner cleverly answers interviewer Vida Marković’s suggestion of misanthropy by dismissing the human versus animal opposition she invokes and instead aligning his affinity for animals, including human animals, with their intelligence.3 The implication is that he does like some people—those who are intelligent, like horses, dogs, and rats. Faulkner’s suggestion that some animals are more intelligent than some people inverts a humanist assumption with particular traction in the literary modern period. While humankind’s exceptional rationality has been asserted since antiquity,4 this claim, often associated with tool making, took on new meaning in the work of French metaphysician Henri Bergson. A key figure in modernity, Bergson joins intellect with tool making’s modern corollary, industrial technology, redefining the human-animal divide as a difference that grows in proportion to mechanical progress. Faulkner denounces such aspirations. Central to his affect theory is an awareness of how humans and animals are energetically and materially entangled from the start. 2 Coupling affinity for animals with hostility to humans suggests sympathy for animals might lead one to question human exceptionalism. 3 Published the same year as this interview, Faulkner’s final book, The Reivers, supplies the following definition of intelligence: “the ability to cope with environment: which means to accept environment yet still retain at least something of personal liberty” (2011, 119). On this basis, the book’s narrator ranks human intellect below that of rats, mules, cats and dogs. 4For a full consideration of human rationality defined against animal irrationality in ancient philosophy, see Sorabji 1995. 9 Through a reading of William Faulkner’s The Hamlet, the following pages examine Bergson’s notion of intellect, underpinned by species difference, and its promise of unlimited freedom. The novel suggests our technological identity is an entropic ruse that has subjects laboring under the illusion that industrial expansion is natural, unstoppable, and above all human. Faulkner’s characters are trapped, at once out of sync with the progress said to define them and resigned to its eventuality. Dramatizing the extent to which Bergsonian thought requires the denial of animal interests, the novel stages an encounter with horses who violently protest their captivity. Ultimately, their refusal to authenticate humanity proves fatal for them and renders human characters exploited, demonstrating how human and animal experience is tragically linked under the burden of modern progress. In Creative Evolution, Bergson puts forward an alternative theory of life in response to what he saw as reductive evolutionary theories. In a reversal of Charles Darwin’s biological continuism (where humans and animals differ in degree, not kind), Bergson rejects the assumption that creatures are made in cumulative steps. “Life does not proceed by the association and addition of elements,” he writes, “but by its dissociation and division” ([1907] 1998, 89). Because any variation alters a being entirely and constitutes a change in kind,5 he argues, humanity’s relation to animality is one of discontinuity. Defining life as movement,6 he writes all animal life is characterized by mobility. Yet this mobility is weighed down by corporeal form and the practical necessities that go along with it. An animal is at once 5 Today, animal advocates across academia maintain Darwin’s claim in efforts to break down the human animal divide said to justify animal oppression. Marc Bekoff and Jessica Pierce (2009), for example, claim moral activity in humans and animals differs “in degree, not kind” and can therefore be understood through “careful anthropomorphism” (107, xiv). 6 In this scheme, ants and humans are the evolutionary pinnacles of the arthropods and vertebrates, respectively, since they thrive “in the most diverse environments, through the greatest possible variety of obstacles, so as to cover the widest possible extent of ground,” writes Bergson. “A species which claims the entire earth for its domain is truly a dominating and consequently superior species” ([1907] 1998, 133). 10 continually moving or tending toward “the form it is about to take” and settling, “drawn aside from its direction” (135). Beginning from this general animal condition, Bergson then bifurcates human and animal life, asserting that each group has developed along two distinct but interrelated paths—instinct and intellect—which constitute “radically different kinds of knowledge” (143). Here, instinct and intellect are not mutually exclusive traits but instead figure as “ideal limit[s]” or tendencies at opposite ends of a continuum (139). Animals have intelligence just as humans have instinct, Bergson reasons, but in both groups it is the opposite that is emphasized. While animal instinct constitutes a special sympathy or direct access to “the most intimate secrets of life,” intellect is the means by which beings enhance or exceed the function of their material forms and thus invent new lines of movement (165). This latter tendency—intellect—is the province of humanity, and its prime expression is mechanical invention. Formatively tied to this ever-expanding phenomenon in an era of unprecedented industrial production, human form emerges as that which can be infinitely remade. Technological innovation is humanity’s “essential feature,” writes Bergson, and “the inventions which strew the road of progress have also traced its direction” (138). Importantly, this direction tends away from other animals. For while nonhuman animals use tools,7 he claims they do not build them8 let alone build meta-tools. Human intellect, he stresses, is defined “especially”9 by 7 This is the basis for Bergson’s hierarchal structure: “The animals that rank immediately after man in the matter of intelligence, the apes and elephants, are those that can use artificial instrument occasionally” ([1907] 1998, 137-38). 8 More than a half century later, primatologist Jane Goodall broke ground by providing evidence that nonhuman animals make tools. In 1960, Goodall observed chimpanzees in the Gombe National Park make hunting implements by removing leaves from sticks and using them to pull termites out of termite nests. This discovery “convinced a number of scientists that it was necessary to redefine man in a more complex manner than before,” she writes. “Or else, as Louise Leakey put it, we should by definition have to accept the chimpanzees as Man” (2000, 37). 11 its manufacture of “tools to make tools, and of indefinitely varying the manufacture” (139 emphasis his). Continual expansion is paramount as it signifies the growing distance we put between ourselves and other animals. While Bergson maintains it is impossible to draw the line between humans and animals, here and elsewhere he does just that. He positions the ability to “recognize a constructed object” like a trap as the limit point of animal intellect. This appraisal constitutes the “the beginning of invention” but does not materialize into a genuine creation (138). Further, he allows that animals enlarge or redefine habits, but such minimal expansions in freedom are then habitualized such that “the gates of [an animal’s] prison close as soon as they are opened; by pulling at its chain it succeeds only in stretching it” (264). Humans, however, “break the chain.” Yet, like the scientific theories Bergson responds to, his creative evolution is similarly shadowed by what Dana Seitler calls “a nervous question” (2008, 3). Namely, “if evolution makes thinkable the idea of infinite progress, doesn’t it also raise the specter of an equally infinite regress?” Such residual tendencies “lie dormant” and “can be awakened,” Bergson writes ([1907] 1998, 135). The threat of nonhuman animality is only put down, for him, through perpetual innovation. Endorsing continual technological development as a matter of human identity, Bergson’s theory marks a culturally conditioned fascination with productivity that serves the interests of capitalism. Demonstrating an inflated confidence in modernization’s promise of human advancement, he postulates, “man is capable of learning any sort of exercise, of constructing any sort of object… and consequently the choice… is unlimited” (263). Such magical thinking is symptomatic of the modern spirit whereby, Daniel Bell notes, one assumes “that one can remake one's self and remake society” (1987, 123). Further, in a move that aligns this liberty with 9 Likewise, Aristotle claimed animals have something like a technological impulse, but this cannot be equated with humanity’s creative capacities (Sorabji 1995, 14). 12 economic development, Bergson claims technology is the locus around which human life is organized: “even to-day our social life gravitates around the manufacture and use of artificial instruments…” ([1907] 1998,138). Such developments are naturalized or biologically rooted, such that technology’s damaging effects—the ways it instrumentalizes, standardizes and deadens—are contained as inherently human faults. Bergson is highly critical of intellect for being goal-oriented to the exclusion of that which does not interest it, continually behaving as if “cause determines its effect, that like conditions like, that all is repeated and that all is given” (268). Chief among intellect’s failings is objectification when “we treat each of [the living] as a thing rather than as a progress, forgetting that the very permanence of their form is only the outline of a movement” (128). The very intellectual tendency said to free humans is also that which is “hazardous” and cuts us off from life (143). Figured as technological progress, Bergson’s conception of human identity ultimately articulates modernity’s affective dilemma. It embodies both the hope that mechanical invention will lead to greater autonomy coupled with the wariness that such developments are inimical to life itself. The Hamlet depicts this problem as modernity’s promise of freedom translates to an ambient sense of captivity. The agent of this captivity is Flem Snopes, a stoic confidence man who quickly rises in both social and economic status, eventually taking control of Frenchman’s Bend. His arrival to town marks a new order, ambiguously linked to industrial capitalism. Richard Godden argues Flem cannot be easily read as the embodiment of capitalism and instead views him as a transitional, radical figure. He claims Flem alternatively deploys capitalism’s new cash-based rules alongside older “populist” tactics that recall his father’s barn burning in order to strike against the credit-based regime both Varner and Ratliff unfairly profit from (Godden 2007, 39). Hence, he claims the auction horses target the older system, “emphasiz[ing] that any perk or palliative on offer within the system is simply a ‘painted’ screen obscuring a savage regime” 13 (Godden 2007, 40). Yet, as Lance Landon writes, the horses can equally be aligned with “a fully realized, if ever promissory consumer culture” (Landon 2012, 31). Thus while it is true that Flem cannot be seen as belonging neatly to either camp, it is difficult to ignore the fact that he takes his revenge on the older regime by injuring its most victimized subjects anew, and profiting from them to boot. Flem’s role might be better understood as announcing how capitalism’s new coercions reanimate older ones.10 We see this when Ratliff reprimands the peasants for complying with Flem, lamenting, “Ain’t none of you folks out there done nothing about it” (Faulkner [1931] 1991, 78). Blaming the men for their own exploitation implies they freely enter into economic agreements. But of course Faulkner deploys the accusation to highlight the extent to which such exchanges, old and new, are driven by their destitute positions. Animal oppression is chief among those wounds the novel doubles down on through Flem’s hybrid activity. I will return to the auction scene later, but for now want to briefly note that the auctioneer’s sales pitch, which insists the horses are merely “skittish,” links the event to nineteenth century horse trading (301). Such “euphemism[s],” Elizabeth Letts writes, were characteristic of horse traders who claimed “a lazy horse was ‘gentle,’ and a poorly trained horse was ‘spirited’” (2001, 98).11 Thus although the auction is mainly driven by symbolic acquisition, it also recalls the cruelty by which earlier horse traders profited. In its modern form, animal exploitation figures as a means by which to articulate Bergson’s notion of human identity. Thus the people of the hamlet first encounter Flem like 10 This interpretation, in which newer, more distant injustices announce those that are older and more local is indebted to John T. Matthews’ insight, in “As I Lay Dying in the Machine Age,” that “state paternalism in the twenties and thirties… is a social transformation that, in As I Lay Dying, helps to expose the arbitrary authority of the father in the nuclear family” (1992, 77). 11 Meanwhile, Letts adds, the physical manipulation of horses to conceal undesirable conditions included “feeding old horses pepper to make them appear more lively, dying their coats, or stuffing their noses with rags to hide a wheeze…” Faulkner represents these latter practices in Ab Snopes’ shrewd dealings with Ab Stamper. 14 “half-wild cattle” who approach “completely wary, almost decorous, like following the word of the advent of a strange beast upon their range…” (Faulkner [1931] 1991, 57). These speaking animals have an intelligent sense that Flem, the new clerk of the town store, will redefine them as he who “in the future they would have to deal with for the necessities of living.” On the one hand, such future dependence offers the transcendence of their animality. Hence a chief marker of the Snopes men is their “absolute needless violence” to animals, a hostility that continually asserts human hierarchy (54).12 On the other, the changes Flem orchestrates cause the residents to feel increasingly targeted and powerless. Powerfully rooting himself before its inhabitants fully realize it, Flem’s subversive tactics lead the other characters to conclude he cannot be outmaneuvered (345). The novel stresses a growing sense of resignation that operates as a covert force mobilizing characters in ways they are only dimly aware of. For Flem’s affective influence is registered communally as a kind of precognizant experience. Affect theorist Lauren Berlant has described change as “an impact lived on the body before anything is understood, and as such is simultaneously meaningful and ineloquent…” (2011, 39). Accordingly Faulkner’s main means of conveying this manner in which things take shape is through foreshadowing. Such foreshadowing constitutes a kind of dialed-back knowing, a loosely formed “in-ness” that the characters inhabit. For example, when Eck Snopes becomes the new blacksmith, the narrator assumes the men’s future perspective: A few days later they learned that the new smith was living in the house where [Flem] lived… Six months later the smith had married one of the daughters of the family where the two of them boarded. Ten months after that he was pushing a perambulator (once— or still—Will Varner’s…) about the village on Sundays… (Faulkner [1931] 1991, 73). 12 Flem’s horse auction, Ab’s handling of Varner’s mules “with a savage yank” and Ike’s zoophilia, which results in the abuse and eventual death of Houston’s cow, are all evidence of this (Faulkner 1991, 55). 15 For a moment what will be coalesces until the narrator pulls back, telling us: “But all that appeared later.” For now, the men merely perceive in Eck “a definite limitation of physical coordination.” This yet unexplained awkwardness is the nascent knowledge that meaning is being drained from local establishments. For Eck is no blacksmith, and through him the business would later “disintegrat[e] into dead components of pieces of wood and iron straps and vain tools.” Nevertheless, the narrator notes, “All they saw now was that they had a new blacksmith.” In another scene, the men recognize “something in Jody’s eyes… a shadow, something between annoyance and speculation and purest foreknowledge” (66). Describing the real and imagined nature of affection, this faint disturbance is only later understood as the moment Flem “passed Jody.” However, while Faulkner’s strategy to give the plot in advance lends credence to the men’s suspicions, it is also the means by which their lived present falls behind Flem’s plans and the narrative itself. At once oblique and immanent, Flem’s ascendancy constrains the other characters, giving rise to a particular mode of attunement—belatedness. The affect belatedness signals participation in the modern ideology, espoused by Bergson, emphasizing industrial expansion as natural and therefore certain. Belatedness describes the psychosomatic labor of subjects failing to achieve a transformation that, paradoxically, seems inevitable. Unable to get ahead of Flem, the people of Frenchman’s Bend feel themselves perpetually behind, even as progress apparently pitches them forward. Rendered stuck, the men’s primary expression of belatedness is watching. For while they have hunches about Flem’s activity, they do little but wait for confirmation. Their observation is so practiced that the men are ultimately tagged “the watchers” (303). Noting such watchfulness seems “irresistible, like an addiction” to Faulkner’s characters, Peter Nicolaisen writes, “As a communal group they are either unwilling or unable to act, paralyzed, speechless” (1997, 654). However, while Nicolaisen claims this “is an urge Faulkner never explains,” one 16 that “suggests meaning where there actually is none,” I argue such paralyzed absorption is instead a feature of belatedness (655). It marks the liminal subject position of being overdetermined yet always behind, unable to identify with the pressing “up-to-dateness” that defines the modern spirit (Duck 2009, 214). Belatedness nourishes stagnation, stripping Faulkner’s characters of the creative freedom progress promises to infinitely deliver. As a self- defeating investment, belatedness might be considered an instance of what Berlant calls cruel optimism: “A relation of cruel optimism exists when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing” she writes, such that “the object that draws your attachment actively impedes the aim that brought you to it initially” (2011, 1). Taken to its most destructive limit, belatedness produces the kind of frenetic action embodied by the pathetic figure of Henry Armstid in the novel’s final scene. Digging for a buried treasure that does not exist,13 Armstid is depicted as “spading himself into the waxing twilight with the regularity of a mechanical toy and with something monstrous in his unflagging effort, as if the toy were too light for what it had been set to do, or too tightly wound” (Faulkner [1931] 1991, 405). As an impoverished tenant farmer, he is both painfully aware of his lack of the freedom said to define humanity and fatally attached to that false progress. Crucially, the men’s affection is the enabling condition for Flem’s success. As an expression of industrial capitalism’s power, their belatedness is a cooperative act, a sensory comportment that at once discovers and elaborates the situation. As Kathleen Stewart explains, “affect is a gathering place of accumulative dispositions… attuned to the way a tendency takes on consistency, or a new regime of sensation becomes a threshold to the real” (2010, 340).” On the one hand, there was already a certain valence and body of proximate elements taking shape, 13 That the coins turn out to be recently minted rather than valuable relics affirms industrial progress is not naturally rooted (or buried) in human subjectivity but instead, like the money, is presently in circulation or in the making. 17 something for the men to attach to. And yet, the way they attach—their expectant complacency—lends weight to interested ideas and so helps effectuate them. Meanwhile, the novel points to a mode of living apart from the normal effort of belatedness that shapes the hamlet in its description of Ratliff after his year-long illness. Pleasurably out of step with the oppressive rhythms of a growing capitalist economy under which “the body is slave both waking and sleeping… to time’s headlong course,” the hiatus has Ratliff “luxuriating… in lassitude.” But his apparent lack of vitality is actually a less bound mode of living. He is “emanating in fact a sort of delicate robustness like some hardy odorless infrequent woodland plant blooming” (75). This action cloaked in inaction is the very opposite of belatedness whereby an acceptance of the myth of progress prospectively fixes and yet presents as the action of catching up. Undergirded by a feigned transition away from nonhuman animality, being human in the Machine Age involves a sense of being trapped that, supposedly, goes along with freedom. Accordingly, in Book Four, belatedness is met with animal subjectivities who frustrate narratives of progress. At the horse auction, Flem’s horse handler, Buck Hipps, sells a group of wild horses who fiercely resist captivity. The animals exude a dense mix of vulnerability and power that, in the context of the sale, appears garish (299). Shackled together by barbed wire, these formidable creatures are “Calico-coated, small-bodied, with delicate legs and pink faces in which their mismatched eyes rolled wild and subdued, they huddled, gaudy motionless and alert, wild as deer, deadly as rattlesnakes, quiet as doves” (300). Here, “gaudy” is the privileged descriptor for the palpable misalignment between animal and economic interests. The horses’ captivity is described as an offensive illusion: “the very idea that all that fury and motion should be transpiring inside any one fence was something to be repudiated with contempt, like a mirror trick” (304). While Hipps claims the horses are “good gentle ponies,” this sales talk does not square with reality. The animals have already injured him, leaving evidence of their forceful 18 capture.14 And when he “approache[s] the animals, his hand extended,” his acquisitive gesture is met with violence (301). Though he tries to demonstrate the ease with which the horses can be managed, he is obviously thrown off balance: “‘See?’ the stranger said in a panting voice, the veins standing white and rigid in his neck and along his jaw” (302). Such labored breath and bodily tension constitute physiological tells that, affect theorist Ben Highmore writes, “giv[e] you away.” Here, affect is the “cuckoo in the nest… your personal polygraph machine” (2010, 118). Hipps’ embodied adjustments undermine his attempts to seem unaffected in the face of resistance, comically and ironically calling ever more attention to the equine sentiment he would dismiss. Scholars have read the auction’s strange mood as a blend of comic and tragic elements through which Faulkner artfully addresses exploitation. Daniel Hoffman claims that while characters are the subjects of “satirical mockery,” they are also “mythologize[d]” or “deif[ied]” such that they appear “larger than life” (1986, 90). Similarly, Carey Wall writes Faulkner abstracts his characters by deploying the conventions of the “tall tale,” including “circumlocution, metaphor, and exaggeration” (1968, 20-21). If characters appear as types, he claims, they are only so in order to emphasize the excessive feeling driving these absurd situations. Through the men’s seemingly cartoonish behavior, he concludes, Faulkner highlights “a peculiarly intense response to… injustice” (18). Likewise, although the horses might appear as comic spectacles (“dizzy fish in a bowl,” for example), ultimately the stress falls on their victimization (Faulkner [1931] 1991, 304). When Hipps makes light of the horses’ violence, there is “no mirth or humor in his voice” (315). Such incongruity unsettles, pointing to the disturbing frivolity with which the animals’ “fatal and hopeless desperation” is regarded (318). 14 Noble et al. explain, “The moment of flight, manifested as head tossing, a rigid body, shying, and, in extreme cases, bucking, spinning, bolting or rearing, is the most dangerous in terms of accidents and injuries to horse handlers…” (2013, 121). 19 Eventually Hipps creates consumers by playing on the ambient belatedness that has been gathering force throughout the novel. The purchase and domestication of the horses is offered as the means for the men to articulate the progress by which modern culture defines them. Pulling into town “a little before sundown,” Hipps couples the animals with the release from labor at day’s end, thereby drawing a parallel between equine and socioeconomic mobility (299). Further, he places the horses in a linear narrative, framing their value as future-oriented. “Pretty lively now,” he tells the men. “But it’ll work out of them in a couple of days” (304). Converting equine aggression into a power the men can eventually control, this marketing rhetoric is grounded in technological imperatives that shaped human identity at the turn of the twentieth century. Accordingly, Hipps advertises the horses’ production value, emphasizing their “shoulder action” and speed, breaking them down into elements of physical power (316). He also inflates such worth by representing their energy as unlimited, telling the men to “work them like hell all day and every time you think of it” (319). While the men initially take the horses’ protests seriously and doubt they can be tamed, Hipps overcomes this by tapping into the men’s collective belatedness. He invokes the feel of progress—its forward momentum—by giving one horse away to start the bidding. The gesture at once creates a false sense that progress’s promise is already underway and triggers the resignation endemic to belatedness. Viscerally affected, the men get caught up in a rising excitement that one critic has called “horse fever,” and the animals quickly sell (Watson 1968, 64). Representing the horses as sheer energy output reflects a notion of animals as basically instinctual creatures. Returning to Bergson, animals bear out the tendencies people relinquished as we became human “only by abandoning a part of [ourselves] on the way. The losses are represented by the rest of the animal world…” ([1907] 1998, 266). Couching humanity in a language of loss here, he writes that while humans have “unloaded” certain “encumbrances” onto 20 other animals, we have also “had to give up valuable goods” (267). By goods he means instinct’s immediacy with life. For Bergson, instinct is neither “lapsed intelligence” that has been transferred to subsequent generations as mechanical habit nor behaviors naturally selected and modified according to their usefulness (169). Instinct is rather a natural sympathy that “teaches… from within” (174). Several critics have argued this complementary relation between human intellect and animal instinct, as opposed to rigid hierarchy, amounts to a counter-humanist sensibility in Bergson’s metaphysics.15 Noting his inattention to the ways modern technology is damaging to animals and the environment, P.A.Y. Gunter nevertheless sees in Bergson “a strong basis for environmentalism” (1999, 169). Contra Cartesian dualism which claims a total division between mind and matter, she notes, Bergson conceives of the two as distinct but interrelated. “Man, and all living things ‘hold together,’ she writes. “They are parts of a whole, no members of which can be understood as existing in splendid isolation from the others” (174). Likewise Kathy Rudy cites the distribution of virtues across species as “one organism makes gains in one direction but may also simultaneously lose talents, or capabilities, in another” (2014, 211). However, while this seeming balance seems to upset human dominion, it actually licenses it. Ultimately, animals figure as meaningless beings whose lack of intelligence structures our own. Denied the complexity of consciousness, animal experience is delegitimized in favor of an anthropocentric account of social change. Bergson’s account of technological expansion depends on forgetting how animals have contributed to that history. He inadvertently intimates this interconnection when he describes humanity as “one immense army galloping… in an overwhelming charge able to beat down every resistance and clear the most formidable obstacles, perhaps even death” ([1907] 1998, 271 emphasis added). Insofar as death signifies the 15 In the main, such endorsements are ambivalent. Margot Norris, for example, claims (though she does not elaborate) that Bergson’s vitalism is “only partially betrayed by… anthropocentric teleology” (1985, 231). 21 loss of human identity, the use of equine imagery here as the human race “gallop[s]” to absolute freedom suggests the instinctual animality on which human identity depends. But on a literal level, the remark belies the historical role of horses in the invention of locomotive technologies. According to Rebecca Solnit (2003), before the public railways of the early 1800s, horses set the pace of transportation as “barges moved at the speed of the river or the pace of the horses that pulled them along the canals” (9). Further, the development of the steam engine,16 which Bergson specifically extols, is tethered to horses.17 In the agricultural sector, Anne Greene writes, the stationary steam engine began as “a complement to horse power” (2008, 197), and was initially made mobile by pairing it with horses who provided “individual, versatile, self- propelled power” (42). Despite this, Bergson confines the steam engine to the realm of “human relations” as emblematic of the mechanical tendency said to “define our species” ([1907] 1998, 138-139). Yet such industry would have been impossible without the cooperation18 of horses who, Greene points out, are “amenable to human direction and training, [have] an excellent memory for patterns, and can memorize a work routine and perform it with little or no supervision” (2008, 22). Further, she explains, self-propelled steam engines (which replaced horse-drawn units) were modeled on equine bodies. In order to function “under actual farm conditions, operating on soft, uneven ground without sinking in or tipping over,” Greene writes, “a self-propelled steam engine had to be like a horse” (198). This biomimetic technology is not, as Bergson contends, the means by which we surpass nonhuman animals, but instead marks our dependence on them. 16 The steam engine enabled the new manufacturing processes of the industrial revolution. 17 The centrality of horses is reflected in the term “horsepower,” a unit of measurement originally derived from comparing the power output of horses to steam engines. 18 Their disposition and intelligence made horses useful in many jobs. Greene writes, for example, horses learned when and how long to stop and start along milk delivery routes and could be even be trusted to deliver goods alone. 22 The novel shows the extent to which human potential is yoked to animality as the dismissal of equine interests thwarts the men’s plans. For while belatedness indexes an attachment to the promise of a forward movement that qualifies one as human, the horses enact a circular disturbance that contests this fantasy. As Hipps pushes forward, driving the animals into the lot and barn, they repeatedly countervail, rising up in a “back-surging mass” (Faulkner [1931] 1991, 303). Enacting a series of rhythmic patterns, they band together, break, and re- group: “the horses huddled in mazy camouflage, or singly or in pairs rushed, fluid, phantom, and unceasing, to huddle again in mirage-like clumps” (305). Critics have consistently interpreted the ethereal feel of such passages to the men being enchanted by the promise of power, masculinity, and class mobility that the horses represent to them (Cross 1967, Polk 2000/01, Watson 1968). Meanwhile, Wall claims the “hobgoblin and somewhat spectral” horses are mystified to emphasize their illusory economic value and thus the men’s exploitation (1968, 20). However, I suggest that the heady atmosphere exceeds the men’s predicament, pointing just as well to the lived experience of the commodified horses. Here, Faulkner’s strategy for diagnosing the auction’s affective situation turns on the capacious concept of possession, where the horses’ commodification renders them possessed in a double sense—as both property and living beings. The chapter’s opening description of the horses as “obviously alive objects” states perfectly this confused status of animals in modernity (Faulkner [1931] 1991, 299). On the one hand, that the horses are up for sale suggests they are static, insensible things. And yet, these apparent market objects seem to continually act out in self organized, interested ways. That such objects would claim themselves and assume their own freedom comes across as a kind of ghoulish possession. When the horses attack Hipps, he suggests they are supernatural, calling them “transmogrified hallucinations of Job and Jezebel”19 (302). For if animals are naturally captive, as Bergson 19 The Book of Job describes the fearful experience of receiving divine revelation through a 23 suggests, then their resistance can only be phantom, fear-inducing, even “evil” (318). As the horses’ reification is continually ghosted by their interested animation, the mystical, distorting elements at the auction should be read as an effect of the double lens through which the animals are at once owned and self possessed. While the horses’ uncontrollability is coded as outside the world’s order or “demonic,” Faulkner’s account of how the animals mobilize is rooted in beliefs about the social activity and general coping tendencies of horses (Greet 1957, 786). Most writing about horse behavior begins by stressing their cautious nature as prey animals. Equipped with keen sensory abilities,20 their primary means of survival is to perceive danger early enough to avoid it. In general, horses manage their fears through evasion as they “do not approach threatening stimuli and they tend to respond nervously to novelty in a known environment” (Christensen et al. 2005, 54). Finding themselves trapped in an unfamiliar place and unable to get the space they need, the horses in the novel repeatedly avoid the men by gathering together. As Temple Grandin speculates, “herd animals like horses and cows create their own ‘small space’ by clustering… in groups” (2005, 208). Such grouping, Henry Blake claims, is also the means by which fearful horses might reassure each other through touch: “they will bunch together, pushing against each other, and pushing their necks and heads across each other… the more frightened and nervous horses getting reassurance from the steadier and quieter horses” (2007, 141). The auction horses’ comportment, then, might be understood as both an effort to claim space for themselves away from the men and a means to find social support. “[H]uddled in a quiet clump,” they attune vision in a dream. In First Kings, Jezebel is a false prophet aligned with demons. 20 Marlitt Wendt points out horses “possess a highly efficient sense of smell and an extremely sensitive tactile sense. They can feel the finest of vibrations through their hooves… and can find a watering hole merely through their sense of smell” (2009, 29). Cherry Hill writes a horse’s ears have remarkable range as “these large moveable funnels are able to twist nearly 180 degrees from front to back as they focus on and gather sounds” (2006, 26). 24 together, “watching the men” (Faulkner [1931] 1991, 308). In these sympathetic assemblages, the horses are on edge, grasping for stability. Just as Hipps’ trapping of the men operates on an affective register, so too does his manipulation of the horses. He undermines their efforts to organize themselves, targeting the “point animal” or leader,21 who Joe Camp understands as a “deeply rooted… source of emotional comfort” (2008, 69). Further, by relentlessly pursuing the animals, the Texan takes away their usual resolution strategy of physical distancing. He so threatens them that they “tur[n] inward upon themselves” and break into violence (Faulkner [1931] 1991, 310). According to Leif Hallberg, violence is a last resort for horses whose expressions tend to move from the subtlest to the most noticeable: “It is as if equine communication begins with an intention, moves to the faintest whisper, and then ascends to a clearly spoken voice, and if those three levels do not get the message across, [the communication] ends in a scream” (2008, 112). But while Hallberg suggests violence constitutes a breakdown in communication, Faulkner frames such violence as an intelligent and influential mode of affective expression. The horses move by affective transmission or “contagion passing back through the herd from animal to animal” (Faulkner [1931] 1991, 303 emphasis added). Again and again they cycle through intervals of neurological activity that coincide with their patterns of movement as they cluster and avoid, disperse and attack, exhaust themselves and come together again. This rhythmic circularity is the distressed means by which the animals both avoid capture and, in the context of the overdetermined belatedness that backgrounds the novel, demonstrate things are unfinished and can resolve otherwise. 21 Horses are highly social creatures who develop and depend on secure relationships. In the wild, they are said to create tight-knit, quite stable social groups called “bands” (Fureix et al. 2012, 217). 25 Scholars often misread such rich depictions of equine activity, reducing them to symbols of disinterested motion.22 Referring to Faulkner’s famous quote that an artist’s goal is to “arrest motion,” Christopher T. White argues Faulkner uses horses to “register through written prose, the energy, quality, and sensation of motion—or rather, as Faulkner would have it, life at its most basic” (2008, 92). But while Faulkner does seem to share Bergson’s belief that “the essence of life is in the movement by which life is transmitted,” the novelist points to conscious motivations (Bergson [1907] 1998, 128). “Life is motion,” Faulkner said, “and motion is concerned with what makes man move—which are ambition, power, pleasure” (Meriwether and Millgate 1980, 253). Faulkner’s conception of movement as life goes beyond sheer force. And yet White, when interpreting Faulkner’s equine representations, drops intention and makes their animation purely a somatic symbol. While people are the context of Faulkner’s quote, his statement does not discount conscious animality. As I hope to show, Faulkner’s depictions of animal mobility are saturated with meaningful investments and discourage a view of them as lacking intention. Describing a horse who breaks from the others, the narrator tells us, “One of the animals emerged. It seemed not to gallop but to flow, bodiless, without dimension. Yet there was the rapid beat of hard hooves on the packed earth” (Faulkner [1931] 1991, 305). Here, the cultural abstraction that threatens to divest the animal of creaturely experience as it seems bodiless is challenged by a tangible corporeality that insists against this distortion. In another example, when Hipps relates to a horse at the level of blunt force by hitting him with a gun, the text emphasizes animal agency: “the pony recovered at once and pawed itself to its knees and 22 Modern horses were known for their impressive speed, a status typified by Edward James Muybridge’s 1872 photographic studies, “The Horse in Motion.” The photos captured what was too quick for the human eye to perceive—a galloping horse’s hooves all off the ground at once. The photographed horse was named Occident. 26 heaved… and fought itself up…” (318). The auction horses are not mere free floating, passive raw power, but instead earthbound, intentional creatures. Replicating the logic of belatedness where modern subjects are defined by technological developments that seem already given yet always beyond reach, the buyers are inscribed by a symbolic transfer they can never materially complete. Showing how humanity’s fantastic freedom is conjoined with animal captivity, the men and horses are locked in ironic affection— the more the men try to seize them, the more the horses run away. Making visible the lower frequency by which affect moves subjects, the horses are “like a snowball [the men] might have been pushing by some invisible means” (333). Finally the animals escape the enclosure, but the rupture is hardly emancipatory for them, as the break ultimately leaves all but one dead. Considering the tendency of frightened horses to fatally rebel, Jean Halley writes that a horse trapped in a wire “will fight to get free, no matter what free means… even as the skin on its leg is peeled all away, even as the wire grips tighter and tighter to its bare bone” (2007, 261). While we should hesitate to accept such a sweeping proposition, the idea that such behavior might be typical of trapped horses gives us some sense of what it might be like for one to be artificially attached to as an object. Today the ignoring of our obligations to horses in exchange for protocols that seem economical or expedient gives rise to forms of hyperactivity like wall- banging (when a horse continually “heav[es] herself” into a wall) and cribbing (when horses compulsively bite and pull back on an object with their upper front teeth, often while sucking air) as well as biological abnormalities (Klinck 2001, 10). Equine infertility, for instance, has been connected to stressful capture and confinement practices thought to cause drops in progesterone levels (Boyd and Keiper 2005, 78). Meanwhile, many scholars have attributed elevated levels of aggression in feral horses to management practices that upset their social dynamics. Noting injuries from equine combat are otherwise rare, these thinkers blame social deprivation (such as 27 isolating stallions), lack of adequate space and food (Fureix et al. 2012, 222), and “forced proximity” (Christensen et al. 2005, 19). In The Hamlet the instrumentalization of equine affect is made strange such that the ordinary resistance of agricultural animals is felt afresh as an influential force that destabilizes modern progress. I have argued that Bergson’s affect theory naturalizes industrial capitalism as the highest expression of human identity, promoting a view of animals as forms of disinterested energy available for industrial use. This exaggerates the role of humans in technological innovation and forgets how animal agency has shaped such technologies. Thus human and animal characters in The Hamlet find themselves alienated, required to perform corollary conceptions of themselves that, while supportive of modern capitalism, do not fit. Bergson’s metaphysics foregrounds immediacy as a privileged component of modern affect theory. Indeed while he exalts humanity’s technological tendency, he also expresses admiration for animal instinct thought to directly coincide with life. As we have seen, the conflation of animals and unmediated affect has the effect of lifting them out of social contexts, violently reducing them to pure, meaningless energy. In next chapter, the modern wish for unmediated affect is cast upon the wide shoulders of Death in the Afternoon’s performing bulls, whose task it is to resolve for the narrator the tension between meaning and unmediated feeling. 28 Saving Face: Hemingway’s Animal Mortification CHAPTER 2 From the outset of Ernest Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon, the narrator is preoccupied with the question of why things strike us so. Specifically, he asks how animal suffering moves us, or not. “At the first bullfight I ever went to I expected to be horrified and perhaps sickened,” he begins, but instead found he “liked it so much” (Hemingway [1932] 2003, 1, 3). Similarly, people he thought would be disturbed by the violence to animals were “unaffected,” while others “were so affected that they were made physically ill” (4). In the supplemental section titled “Some Reactions,”23 he catalogues the behavior of audience members he has witnessed, reporting their ages, sexes, and other details. In the end, he finds no means by which to predict who will enjoy a bullfight: “The only conclusion I draw from these reactions is that some people will like the fights and others will not” (470). To truly know how you would feel, he reasons, you must actually witness the things he writes of. Though the bullfight’s production of affect is contingent upon unaccountable factors, the narrator attempts to mitigate this by shaping our view of bullfights, encouraging us to understand his love for them. The key to this is to view bullfighting through a narrow form of attention that privileges, above all, honor. “In Spain honor is a very real thing,” he explains. “Called pundonor, it means honor, probity, courage, self-respect and pride in one word” (91). The bullfight’s three structured acts, which culminate in the bull’s death, are designed to draw out these qualities. An ideal bull is said to welcome the fight, charging again and again despite the injuries he receives. Meanwhile the matador24 demonstrates his courage by facing such a bull and killing him well. A truly great killer “must have a spiritual enjoyment of the moment of killing,” we are told, or 23 The full title is “Some Reactions of a Few Individuals to the Integral Spanish Bullfight.” 24 Defined as “a formal killer of bulls” (Hemingway [1932] 2003, 419). 29 “have pleasure in taking to himself one the Godlike attributes; that of giving [death] (232-33). Beyond bravery and skill, the best matadors show hubris. Despite the narrator’s insistence that pride drives bullfighting, such spectacles are ultimately about shame. This chapter engages the affect theory of American psychologist Silvan Tomkins to examine how shame functions as the primary motivation for the bullfights Hemingway describes. Both Hemingway and Tomkins devise affect theories centered on shame in response to modes of sociality marked by alienation. Influenced by modern scientific discourse linking facial expression to character, their formulations establish the biological depth of human affection via a merely superficial display of affect by animals. For while Tomkins claims shame is an involuntary biological protocol animals lack, Hemingway ambiguously deploys physiognomic principles, imposing shame’s apparent markers upon bulls in order to instigate the audience’s somatic feeling. Ultimately, the play between the organic and the socially produced is a profitable undecidability in Hemingway’s affect theory, where pride can be made to outpace shame. For Tomkins, shame-humiliation is a negative affect that results when one is interested in something and that positive attention is abruptly blocked.25 The barrier to continued interest is only partial, he emphasizes, such that one both wants and does not want to pursue the object. Tomkins describes it as “an affect of relatively high toxicity… felt as a sickness of the soul which leaves man naked, defeated, alienated, and lacking in dignity” (Sedgwick and Frank 1995, 148). Such insecurity is accompanied by mental confusion and an intense feeling of exposure. There is a heightened awareness of the face and usually blushing, he notes, as one feels a strong 25 Social scientists take issue with Tomkins’ claim that all instances where positive affect is incompletely reduced cause shame. David W. Harder asks, “For example, does a person feel shame if a computer game being enjoyed suddenly ceases because of power failure?” (1995, 370). Meanwhile, Paul Gilbert revises Tomkin’s definition, writing shame results from “a loss of positive affect associated with devaluations of the self” (1998, 5). 30 sense of being looked at by others with scorn. The individual involuntarily lowers his or her head, looks down and away from others, and feels worthless and isolated. Thus, June Price Tangney writes, “people feeling shame often report a desire to flee from the shame-inducing situation, or to ‘sink into the floor and disappear’” (1995, 119). In shame, one feels alone and incapacitated, yet painfully on display. Positing a system of biological scripts that initiate involuntary activity, Tomkins envisions emotion as a mechanized phenomenon governed by predetermined outworkings. Ruth Leys rightly calls this “reductive,” arguing that “what is at issue is the materialist claim that our intentions have no influence on our actions because they arrive too late in the chain of events to do anything but monitor what the brain decides for us” (2011, 800). Indeed, Tomkins’ own logic undermines his claim of affect’s autonomy and suggests the distinction is only retrospectively applied. For instance, he writes that whatever affect program is triggered, it intensifies the positive or negative impact of its object.26 Clearly a judgement is already involved here as the initial impact is coded with a valuation—good or bad—that is then amplified, made better or worse. Further, the full description of any one of Tomkins’ affects includes overdetermined expressive markers and rich psychological effects. Each affect has its own distinct profile, a well-defined pattern of experience that gives shape to affection and makes it legible as an emotion category. Tomkins’ unwitting investment in the meaning of affects is especially apparent in the case of shame. In his prototypical example, he imagines a series of misrecognitions: “[Shame’s] barrier might be because one is suddenly looked at by one who is strange, or because one wishes to look at or commune with another person but suddenly cannot 26 Affects are self-rewarding or self-punishing. Enjoyment-joy and interest-excitement are positive affects, surprise-startle is neutral, and shame-humiliation, distress-anguish, fear-terror, dissmell, disgust, and anger-rage are negative. 31 because he is strange, or one expected him to be familiar but he suddenly appears unfamiliar, or one started to smile but found one was smiling at a stranger.” (Tomkins 2008, 123) These jarring scenes, which are strikingly similar to Sigmund Freud’s uncanny, describe modernity’s characteristic alienation at home, unexpected breaks, and the familiar made strange.27 Rather than a timeless, automatic script, shame here is modeled on modernity’s collective sense of helplessness. While shame’s cognitive shock marks impotence in the face of destabilizing shifts, the obstructed communion Tomkins describes indexes elided sociality in this crisis mode of estrangement. The structure of the bullfight provides Hemingway with the means to grapple with this very modern feeling. Because it involves a sense of negative evaluation, bullfighting is particularly suited to induce the shame experience. A matador’s career hinges on public opinion, which tends to be harsh and fickle. According to John McCormick and Mario Mascareñas, “If he reaches the eminence of being a figura [a star performer], the public is likely to demand risks amounting to his life” (1967, 6). At the same time, they add, “his idolaters can and probably will turn into his enemies in a matter of minutes.” Before this highly critical crowd, a matador is tasked with demonstrating pride—the trait they value most. “Pride is the strongest characteristic of the [Spanish] race,” Hemingway writes, and “once [cowardice] has been shown… honor is gone” ([1932] 2003, 91). The narrator vividly describes this failure in the ring: 27 Anchored in the human-animal distinction, Freud’s uncanny is concept of an intruding unconscious (1919). He sorts uncanny experiences into two classes, those related to the resurfacing of either repressed castration complexes or primitive animistic beliefs we have not quite dismissed. Concerning the latter, the uncanny marks an individual’s failure to achieve distance from their animal heritage. It goes against natural process. But this undoing of humanity in Freud is translated in Tomkins to the constitution of a more complex humanity. We are our partial, albeit hierarchal, relation to animals. It is shame affect’s superior operation in us, Tomkins suggests, that secures humanity. 32 …in your mind you see the phenomenon, sweating, white-faced and sick with fear, unable to look at the horn or go near it, a couple of swords on the ground, capes all around him, running in at an angle on the bull hoping the sword will strike a vital spot, cushions sailing down into the ring… (226) An apt picture of shame at its worst—publicly humiliated on a grand stage, alienated from the community, haunted by failure, and unable to recover his dignity. Closely resembling Tomkins’ shame theory wherein positive affect is only partially reduced such that interest in the object remains, Hemingway’s matador fixates on the scene, recreating it in his sleep: “That was two years ago and he hasn’t fought since except in bed at night when he wakes up wet with sweat… everyone knows he is a coward and worthless…” These subconscious efforts the narrator imagines constitute both the shamed subject’s characteristic reluctance to give up the object and his desire to repair the broken social connection shame institutes. In Tomkins’ words, one wants “to have the other look with interest or enjoyment rather than derision” (Tomkins 2008, 361). It is significant Hemingway approaches modern alienation through the bullfight’s contest of life and death. At its most severe, shame is an excruciating exposure that threatens a person totally. Writing of the various interpretations of shame, Donald Nathanson notes that one may feel “at risk of death” (1992, 158). Hence the term “mortification,” he writes, “the Latin roots of which imply that shame can strike one dead” (19). The Oxford English Dictionary defines mortify as “to cause to feel humiliated or embarrassed,” but also “to kill or put to death.” Thus bullfighter Juan Belmonte, whose career Hemingway highlights in Death in the Afternoon, wrote he would rather die than be “discredit[ed]” (1937, 159). 33 Several critics have pointed to the sacrificial economy at play in Hemingway’s text, arguing bull deaths function to reconstitute masculine pride.28 Philip Armstrong calls this Hemingway’s “therio-primitivism,” whereby masculinity is recovered by “consum[ing] the animal’s vitality and purity” (2008, 153).29 The bullfight promises the transfer of virile energy from bull to man such that male character is made whole. Similarly, Peter Messent argues Death in the Afternoon belies its author’s “desire for an environment where nature is still a redemptive presence,” making “cultural practice… coherent and organic” (2004, 131). Intact nature serves as the antidote to a corrupt culture as the bull functions to ground pride as a natural property. But is the masculinity on offer in Death in the Afternoon really an essential one? Recent scholarship has argued instead that Hemingway gives a performative account of identity. “To kill a bull correctly one must be a man” Thomas Strychacz explains (2003, 159). “Confusingly, however, that manliness can only be represented (so that essential being becomes contingent on the quality of display)” (160). Other readings emphasize pride not as that which must be acted, but that which can be acted. Michael Thurston argues that by showing “bravery and truth and sexuality” are “always-already a set of deferred promises,” Hemingway’s work “opens up a space for masquerade, for making something so by acting it” (1998, 91, 58). Likewise, Timo Müller writes the author’s postures are acknowledged constructs that nevertheless effectively “fortify his position” (2009, 40). Hemingway’s work is thus invested not in reestablishing pride as a property of male subjects, but in the ever more advantageous notion 28 Writing of the threats to manhood, Gerald N. Izenberg cites number of factors including early feminism, industrialization and market dependence, and the new focus on abnormal male identity in studies of homosexuality and sexual malfunction (2000, 9-10). 29 Interestingly, in Tomkins’ later work, he too claims Hemingway enacts a “strategy of purification,” arguing the author became “ultramasculine” to compensate for his gender confusion (Demos 1995, 395). Citing Hemingway’s lifelong interest in cross-dressing, Tomkins speculates that Hemingway’s obsession with masculinity stemmed from his mother’s dressing him as a girl. 34 of pride as a construct. This is why the narrator aligns pride with taste: “Either you have this or you have not, just as… you have or have not an ear for music” (Hemingway [1932] 2003, 9). And yet, taste also involves “increasing knowledge and sensory education” (11). An attempt to resolve this disjunction takes the narrator into an extended discussion of music and wine which, he fumbles, “seems to have gotten away from bullfighting…” Ultimately what is being described here is the bullfight’s cultivation of aspirational pride, where the motive is to belong. As the thing one both has and must be educated in, pride is coded into a normative emotion through which spectators might find legibility. I suggest this performativity extends to animal characters. For Hemingway holds up a notion of the bull’s prideful essence only to everywhere insist on the necessity for its careful cultivation. For example, the narrator claims bulls are biologically resistant to shame, owing to strict breeding practices through which a brave bull “has been kept pure” (Hemingway [1932] 2003, 113). Of course, this intervention means such emotional purity is not natural at all but has been artificially reproduced through human mediation. Here, an admixture of cultural practice and biology is thought to result in one unified emotion—pride. But, as we will see, even genetic manipulation cannot essentialize animal affect. Death in the Afternoon depicts its animal victims in a manner that approximates the shame experience Tomkins would later codify. Reading Hemingway’s text productively alongside Tomkins’ theory hinges on their joint investment in the body’s surface as the site of affection. Tomkins attributes shame’s seemingly vital danger to its special relation to the face. Asking, “How can loss of face be more intolerable than loss of life?” he concludes, “It is because 35 the self lives in the face…” (Tomkins 2008, 359).30 The emphasis on faciality here as that which unifies identity is central to Tomkins’ understanding of all affective experience. He speculates that affects are “innately related in a one-to-one fashion with an organ system [the face] that is extraordinarily visible” (113). Claiming that affects happen on its surface, the face is not merely a site of communication, it is affect itself: “In short, affect is primarily facial behavior” (emphasis added). Here, Tomkins’ privileging of human facial expression as pure affect aligns him with theories of physiognomy, which understood the face as a legible surface that gave form to character.31 As Tom Gunning has illustrated, physiognomy developed beside photographic technologies32 that enhanced scientists’ ability to scrutinize facial activity in modernity, particularly “through its increasing mastery of the increments of time and its ability to freeze an instantaneous event, such as a sudden facial expression or the convulsions of a hysteric's limbs” (1997, 16). Tomkins embraced this techno-human interface, believing photography would ultimately provide evidence of innate, patterned affect on faces.33 He also assumed such technology would allow him to see through the willful concealment of emotion (Tomkins 2008, 30 In shame, he emphasizes, the “individual calls a halt to looking at another person, particularly the other person’s face, and to the other person’s looking at him, particularly his face” (Tomkins 2008, 120). 31 Tracing a history of standardized human expression, Lucy Hartley writes eighteenth century thinkers claimed an autonomous soul drove human mental and physical processes. Informed by Cartesian dualism, they believed this spiritual force was what separated us from nonhuman lifeforms. Later, owing to an interest in instinct and reflex actions, this assumption of soul- directed human expressive behavior eventually shifted to theories of mechanized expression: “The importance of this change cannot be overestimated,” she writes, “as it… deemed instinct or involuntary action as an innate factor in directing action.” She goes on to note that this model of innate physiological activity is considered “the basis of modern psychology” (2001, 30). 32 Physiognomy and photography mutually informed each other. “The desire to know the face in its most transitory and bizarre manifestations was stimulated by the use of photography,” Gunning writes, “but that desire, in turn, also stimulated the development of photography itself, spurring it to increasing technical mastery over time and motion, prodding it toward the actual invention of motion pictures” (1997, 25). 33 For example, he writes, “With high-speed moving picture cameras it should be possible to delineate the precise nature of the [shame] response as it first appears upon the recognition of the unfamiliar face” (Sedgewick and Frank 1995, 135). 36 115). For while people have a limited ability to mediate their involuntary affect displays as they adopt certain styles of behavior and learn to control expression, he believes the face (as the biological locus of affect) is especially resistant to such conditioning (101). Therefore, he claims, “It will eventually be possible to discriminate the difference between a voluntary and an involuntary smile by means of the high-speed camera” (115).34 Like Tomkins, Hemingway suggests action photography makes visible certain truths about affect. Noting the author collected some 400 photographs at his own expense for Death in the Afternoon, Anthony Brand observes he prioritizes pictures “taken straight on, at eye level,” an angle which “reveals an insistence on immediacy” (2004, 168). Such formal choices disclose a desire to capture secrets embedded in physical expression. As the narrator explains, he wants “to see certain definite action,” to gain access to “the actual things [that] produced the emotion… (Hemingway [1932] 2003, 3, 2). Such elements, he claims, are timeless facts, “as valid in a year or in ten years or… always.” Hemingway’s presentation of these photographic ‘facts’ speaks to his interest in how visual surfaces can themselves be arranged to instigate particular feelings, namely pride and shame—“the feeling of life and death [he] was working for” (3). At the same time, his aesthetic wish to achieve unmediated sensation speaks to his hope of naturalizing affect through animals. As I show below, bull deaths are summoned to supply the elusive biological substrate Hemingway’s performative account of identity disallows. Death in the Afternoon artfully guides readers through the phases of shame, projecting it upon bulls without ever admitting this strategy. Here, we might view Hemingway’s covert application of shame as an instance of his iceberg technique, the famed “deep structure” of 34 Years later, after testing this assumption, Tomkins found that the further magnification of faces failed to “yield secrets of affect” (qtd in Ngai 2005, 78). Instead, he writes, “the smile becomes an interminable bore, forfeiting much vital information which can be seen easily by the naked eye or by a conventional slow motion camera.” 37 unexpressed elements by which the author seeks to move his readers to experience an “emotional identification” (Zapf 1988, 289, 290). Beneath the book’s illusory focus on skilled combat within a context of tragedy is a picture of animal shame that, it is hoped, will prompt pleasurable, embodied shifts in the audience that amount to pride. Accordingly, the first act is about displaying the bull’s positive affect. The bull “comes out in full possession of all of his faculties, confident, fast, vicious and conquering,” we are told, as he tries to “sweep the ring clear of his enemies” (Hemingway [1932] 2003, 98, 146). McCormick and Mascareñas describe a good bull’s entrance into the ring as an affective event. Emerging “first at a trot, then at a canter, head and horns high, his senses completely alert,” they write, such bulls are “know[n] in the pit of the stomach, suddenly and viscerally” (McCormick and Mascareñas 1967, 27). However, while an aggressive bull is said to be “levantado,” meaning lofty, in reality it is unlikely the animal enters the ring this way (Hemingway [1932] 2003, 146). For as the narrator notes, bulls have a strong herd instinct: “When they are together… they are quiet because the feeling of numbers gives them confidence” (Hemingway [1932] 2003, 108). Fighting bulls live together for years on a protected ranch. But from the transportation stage forward, a bull is isolated in new surroundings, shuffled from corral to pen and then into the arena. A bull released into the ring will “charge instantly and repeatedly anything, man, horse, or any moving object” (107). While the narrator describes the bull as courageous, such behavior suggests he initially feels vulnerable and confused, charging readily at objects but easily moving on to other stimuli that might threaten him. A.L. Kennedy explains that because bulls are equipped with a greater ability to defend themselves than other prey animals, they tend to charge when they feel threatened: “They run away, forwards” (1999, 42).35 Thus she points out, “the bull [who] charges 35 Insofar as fear of shame motivates bullfighters, they too run away forwards. 38 the hardest and looks the bravest may actually be the most stressed and fearful. So agresividad might be translated… as terror or extreme stress.” The bull’s essential pride is undermined not only by the animal’s initial behavior in the ring, but also by his subsequent affective manipulation. Bullfighters must strategically engage with his defensive behavior so as to make him appear a willing opponent. The men encourage spectators to misinterpret the animal’s nervous energy such that, Michael A. Ogorzaly observes, the bull who is “frightened, hurting, looking for a way out, seems wild, uncontrollable, unstoppable” (2006, 6). Attuning to the animal, bullfighters determine his coping tendencies, anticipate his moves, and generally manipulate him into behaving in accordance with the narrative sequence. “Basically,” McCormick and Mascareñas explain, “the toro is a tranquil, patient animal [who] charges only when obliged to do so, when conflict can no longer be avoided; when he feels that to attack and fight is the only way left for him to free himself from what provokes and irritates him” (1967, 164). While men on horseback force pics into the bull’s shoulders to incite him,36 their horses make him focus and persuade him to engage in the long and short term. For “a bull [who] has successfully charged the horses and has killed or wounded one or several… goes on the rest of the fight believing that his charges will lead to something” (Hemingway [1932] 2003, 149). These early successes suit the event’s script, which holds that “[a]t the end of the first act [the bull] has apparently won” (98). This perceived victory, coupled with the assumption that the bull’s “greatest pleasure is combat,”37 establishes him as experiencing interest-excitement said to undergird shame (113). 36 Hemingway writes the pics are “very hard on the bull,” and that while they ought to be applied to the shoulder muscle, they are often misplaced in more tender areas ([1932] 2003, 434). 37 This statement loosely projects onto the bull the narrator’s own belief that “killing cleanly and in a way which gives you aesthetic pleasure and pride has always been one of the greatest enjoyments of a part of the human race” (Hemingway [1932] 2003, 232). 39 The discrepancy between the bull’s inalienable pride and his performance grows more insistent in the second act. The bull changes from “lofty” and capable to “parado,” meaning “slowed” (Hemingway [1932] 2003, 146). He begins to take on significance as the bearer of shame-humiliation as unmounted men repeatedly wound him with “bandarillas,” pairs of sticks with steel blades on the ends. Tomkin’s shame theory is instructive here, explaining why the bull might be fatigued in the particular manner he is. Boundaries to his apparent pleasure and success are repeatedly instituted, creating the very conditions for shame. The cape, for instance, functions as a recurrent, elusive hazard that creates interest-excitement with a barrier. With it, the matador directs the bull in certain directions only to turn swiftly such that the object continually vanishes before the animal reaches it. Carefully regulating the bull’s positive experience, the matador maintains that ambiguity by which the shamed subject is unwilling to forfeit the object. Such tension is crucial, readers learn, as the bull must be worn out, but not so much that he is ruined for the final act. It is a grisly process of wounding and tiring the bull, but also of creating spaces of hope for him, coercing his participation and exertion. Time and again the animal’s efforts are thwarted until he becomes “disillusioned about his power” and “cut down,” a description that belies his symbolic burden (Hemingway [1932] 2003, 147). Hemingway’s affect theory demands a certain organic grounding to supplement what is an obviously superficial show of animal shame. In act three, the bull’s mimetic gestures are coupled with actual mortification or death that lends material reality to an otherwise hollow demonstration. We see this as the animal is forced to display shame’s most prominent expressive marker—the low head. This is not merely a figuration, but a practical necessity. Everything in a bullfight leads up to the fatiguing of the hump of muscle on the bull’s neck, since “when the bull carries his head [high]… a man could not reach over the horns with a sword” (Hemingway [1932] 2003, “Illustrations”). But in the context of shame, the bull’s low head mirrors the 40 characteristic avoidance behavior—hanging one’s head low—of a shamed individual (Sedgwick and Frank 1995, 136). “By dropping his eyes, his eyelids, his head, and sometimes the whole upper part of his body,” Tomkins explains, “the individual calls a halt to looking at another person…” (134). It is a signal of self-contempt, and where oppression is present it is an act through which “the hierarchal relationship is maintained” (139). Reinforcing human supremacy in his final moments, the bull as shamed one mimics the “loss of face” which is also the condition for his literal mortification. Hemingway preserves the effacement in the book’s photographic essay. One picture shows a bull with his front body collapsed, head in the sand. Emphasizing the matador’s domination, the caption explains the matador has worked the bull into “turning so short38 that he has brought him to his knees” (“Illustrations,” emphasis added). In the fifteen minutes an average bullfight lasts, each phase of shame affect—alienation, mental confusion, averted gaze, and the painful exposure that imperils identity—is represented. Bulls are publicly shorn from the herd, cut down, made to hang their heads low. When they are finally killed, mere display is outstripped by a more literal defacing. The organization of human affect through the illegibility of animal faces is an element the affect theories of Hemingway and Tomkins share. While Hemingway assembles the modern male face through animal disfigurement, Tomkins asserts animals lack the self-consciousness— the ability to see their own faces—necessary to truly experience shame. Following Charles Darwin who claimed animals do not blush and Freud who speculated that shame originated with the “assumption of an upright gate,” Tomkins claims humans are uniquely vulnerable to shame ([1930] 2010, 78).39 Lacking this specific self-consciousness, animals do not partake in the full 38 Earlier the narrator notes “the bull cannot turn in a shorter space than his own length” (Hemingway [1932] 2003, 194). 39 Freud claims the new posture “made his genitals, which were previously concealed, visible and in need of protection, and so provoked feelings of shame” ([1930] 2010, 78). 41 expression of normative (human) shame. Indeed Tomkins defends shame’s status as a biological mechanism in humans by contrasting it with animal shame, which he views as learned: The dog appears to be as capable of responding with shame as man. While this occurrence of shame in lower animals might be taken as evidence for the view that shame is an innately patterned affect, it is nonetheless consistent with the alternative interpretation that shame [in animals] is a highly probable strategy which will be learned in order to reduce communication whenever this becomes distressing or frightening. (Tomkins 2008, 353 emphasis added) This passage stresses that the evidence for human shame’s innateness is not to be found in our similarities with animals, but in our difference from them. So while Tomkins’ shame theory reinscribes the species boundary, remarkably, it does this by way of granting animals agency. By allowing that dogs purposely turn away (rather than express innate shame), animal intention becomes the outside that structures humanity’s biological impulses.40 In this odd reversal that runs counter to a history of humanism that denies animals have intellect, humans involuntarily react while animals meaningfully perform. Tomkins’ notion of performative animal affect speaks to the disjunction between the narrator’s presentation of the bulls and their self-presentation. Although Hemingway’s text grossly objectifies the animals, hoping to empty them of their own significance, it nevertheless offers readers a lucid representation of animal suffering. As Max Eastman’s 1934 critical review 40 Taylor wrongly asserts Tomkins’ shame theory “lends itself to anti-essentialist projects because for him the shame response is not an ‘innately patterned affect’” but instead a learned response (Djuna Barnes and Affective Modernism 115). She misreads Tomkins, taking his quote [shame is “a self-conscious strategy… which calls for no special innate program”] out of context. In fact Tomkins is only entertaining the counter claim that shame is a learned behavior in order to refute it. Ultimately he maintains shame is a physiological mechanism: “We are inclined to favor the theory that shame is an innate auxiliary affect and a specific inhibitor of continuing interest and enjoyment” (Tomkins 353). 42 observes, readers see the bull “steadily brought dreadfully down from his beauty of power, until he stands horribly torpid, sinking lead-like into his tracks, lacking the mere strength of muscle to lift his vast head, panting, gasping… altogether lost-baby-like…” (qtd. in Wolfe 2003, 141-2). The very interested dynamism that enables matadors to manipulate the bull’s feelings is also that which finally undercuts his functional role. Resultingly, for readers, the event comes to feel like a dumb exercise. The narrator continually tries to control our experience, directing us what to care about, how to look, and what to attach to. Rather than draw readers in to the dramatic action, such drilling brings about a pervasive feeling of detachment, promoting sympathetic identification with the bull. We remain, like the spectacle animals themselves, anterior to the bullfight’s affective protocols, unable to privilege that which we are called upon to privilege. Likewise, the narrator himself admits to being moved by the bull’s interested animation. The bull’s decline in the second act is so sharp, the narrator recalls, it used to produce hostility in him: When I first saw bullfights the only part that I did not like was the banderillas. They seemed to make such a great and cruel change in the bull. He became an altogether different animal when the banderillas were in and I resented the loss of the free, wild quality he brought with him into the ring... (Hemingway [1932] 2003, 98) The narrator’s initial feeling of loss is a visceral shift that registered the painful labor of the bull’s passing into a worse state. Only after extensive conditioning could he fully objectify the bull for aesthetic benefit: “I kept my admiration for him always but felt no more sympathy for him than for a canvas or the marble a sculpture cuts or the dry powder snow your skis cut through” (98-99). Here, the narrator’s blocked sympathy coincides with his aesthetic commitment, one that might index his own shame. That is, the turning of his attention from the bull’s interests to his own is a shift that itself mimics the structure of shame. As Susan Fraiman 43 (2012) argues, the posture of recoil has the effect of cutting humans off from the receptivity needed to properly recognize animals. In her critique of Jacques Derrida’s speech on animality,41 she observes that Tomkins’ description of shame hits on the moment when “interest flips into incuriosity” and one “retreat[s] from another’s gaze” (97). This means shame both motivates the bull’s exploitation and disposes certain spectators to a psychological comportment that disregards his suffering. For such audiences, the bull’s death signifies the overcoming of human shame, and is savored as an ecstatic experience. An ideal bullfight produces in spectators a feeling of pride that is “as profound as any religious ecstasy” (Hemingway [1932] 2003, 206). “He is performing a work of art42 and he is playing with death, bringing it closer, closer, closer… He gives the feeling of his immortality, and, as you watch it, it becomes yours” (213). Such elation recalls the pleasure oppressed people experienced during animal blood sports in antiquity. Noting that “[b]rutality was an integral part of Roman culture,” Linda Kalof writes public animal slaughter seems to have been compensatory, providing “an opportunity for spectators to identify with victory rather than defeat” (2007, 31). Likewise, in the bullfight, a certain kind of spectator might experience feelings of invincibility in direct proportion to the bull’s loss of vitality. Yet, because pride is produced, the false feeling of immortality the bull’s death allows soon passes, leaving one “as empty, as changed and as sad as any major emotion will leave you” (Hemingway [1932] 2003, 207). Some critics have erroneously believed the narrator’s claim that the sadness 41 Fraiman claims Derrida’s shameful encounter with his cat ultimately leads him only to self inquiry, closing him off from animal experience, a problem Donna Haraway (2008) has also noted. 42Regarding Hemingway’s stylistic code, critics have pointed out the incompatibility of art and death. Otto Friedrich writes, “Killing, never ‘great,’ never aesthetic, can only be justified when there is some need for it, and on such occasions there are no rules for making it beautiful” (1957, 524). Likewise, Kennedy suggests the bullfight’s “level of cruelty and violence prevent it from being art, that art cannot exceed certain parameters of damage, that it cannot cause death” (1999, 82). 44 experienced at the end of the bullfight is due to the bull’s death—a so-called tragedy.43 But this sensation of loss actually marks the dissipation of pride that coincides with the bull’s death. For the bullfight’s emotional payoff is only ever brokenly maintained through repetition. As Belmonte’s shame-driven career and eventual suicide suggest, any pride the bullfight offers is a temporary salve. In his autobiography, Killer of Bulls, Belmonte is frank about the prominent role shame played in his formative years.44 His sensitivity to embarrassment would continue throughout even his very successful career as a bullfighter. Prone to shame, his victories in the ring gave him a means to combat his feeling “insignificant” (Belmonte 1937, 66). As Tomkins argues, “[W]e must expect that all those who have suffered chronic shame must nurture a deep wish to humiliate the other… An eye for an eye, because otherwise I alone am blind, and, if you are also blind, I am less so” (Sedgwick and Frank 1995, 73). Suggesting Belmonte was distinctly driven in the ring, Hemingway’s narrator characterizes him as predatory, observing there was always a wolf look about [him]” (Hemingway [1932] 2003, 178). He further observes Belmonte “took great pride in doing everything perfectly.” Kennedy implies this pursuit of pride was compulsive. Claiming he was “powerless to live without” the feeling of being a matador, she notes he fought bulls well into his old age (1999, 75). When finally he was no longer able to offload his shame in the bullring, he killed himself. Critics have made similar speculations about Hemingway’s suicide, suggesting it was motivated by shame.45 43 For example, Ibáñez argues aficionados “cannot rejoice in the bull’s death, because it symbolizes their own death” (2004, 145). The acclaim and celebration that follows the bull’s death, which itself is hoped for, easily refutes this claim. 44 He was born poor and often felt excluded and inferior. Lacking the skill and confidence to cope with the rampant theft and haggling at his father’s shop, twice the matador recalls he could have “died of shame” (Belmonte 1937, 41-42). He offers other examples of his chronic shame, including being forbidden to participate in his mother’s funeral. 45 Biographers Richard K. and Rena Sanderson write, “This reading of the suicide remains popular: Hemingway is portrayed as so dedicated to his story-telling art, and so personally identified with his own ‘code-heroes,’ that he cancelled his own life story when his control over 45 Despite the narrative’s heavy aestheticism, animal agency in Death in the Afternoon still comes through. Margot Norris points to those who escape the ring, attack bystanders, and generally refuse to enact the proper drama of the bullfight. For her, such animals evince “the autonomy of the animal, its use of its power for its own ends” (1985, 209). Meanwhile, in the case of bulls who do not rebel, the ability to so manipulate them suggests possibilities for less violent relations. Indeed, Hemingway’s narrator remarks on the range of affective attachments bulls are capable of as they “recognize and know the mayoral or herder who is in charge of them on the ranch and on their trip to the ring, and will even allow him to stroke or pat them... curry [them] like a horse, and even mount [their] back[s]” (Hemingway [1932] 2003, 113). One of the unpublished photographs Hemingway considered including in his book depicts such a scene (Brand 2004, 204). A smiling man sits on the back of a bull named Brujito who is engaged in sniffing the ground. The caption reads Brujito was praised for his nobility,46 presumably a quality he displayed in the ring before being killed. Each bullfight takes the privilege of such interspecies affection and abuses this understanding for a benefit that is hollow and fleeting. Thus Hemingway’s peer, John Steinbeck, writes, “Perhaps [matadors give] the audience a little courage of a certain kind, but not the kind the audience or the world needs” (qtd. in Ogorzaly 2006, 11). Likewise, Frank McConnell writes of the “human emptiness” always risked in Hemingway’s code, the threat that the “style devised as a shield against nada [will] become the voice of nada” (1986, 168). Indeed bullfighting produces the very thing it seeks to banish as its animal deaths actually demonstrate the indignity of the human species. it began to slip.” While this “may seem a little too pat,” they admit, elsewhere noting the author’s history of depression and early experience with his father’s suicide, “it is nevertheless consistent with clinical notions of suicide as a communicative act” (1997, 409). 46 Noble bulls, Anthony Brand notes, have the ability to discern when they are being challenged: “a noble bull will not, for example, attack a bullfighter he has felled or unseated (2004, 204). 46 It has been suggested that writing itself can produce shame affect. “There is shame in being highly interested in something and unable to convey it to others,” Elspeth Probyn claims. “Simply put, it’s the challenge of making the writing equal to the subject being written about” (2010, 72). This could be especially so when one is tasked with writing about another’s pain. Working on this chapter, I have felt a shrinking twinge we might call shame at how bullfighting culture tortures animals for emotional and monetary profit. Tomkins would call this “empathic shame,” where “the critic hangs his head in shame at what the other has done” (Tomkins 2008, 362). The narrator of Death in the Afternoon speculates that there are two kinds of people, humanitarians, “those who identify with human beings,” and animalarians,47 people who “identify with, that is, put themselves in the position of, animals” (Hemingway [1932] 2003, 5). He sets the terms up as mutually exclusive, claiming there is “a fundamental cleavage between people on this basis.” Yet it would seem that those who feel empathic shame at animal suffering identify with animals also and at the same time as they identify with humans. Perhaps what gives such cringes their particular sting is one’s inability to separate from such oppressors. Here human identification constitutes an investment in animal suffering that comes across as a self- betrayal. One cannot practice Animal Studies without feeling constantly implicated by the ways we humans have and continue to injure animals. Thus Norris admits, “The gaze of wild animals in a zoo still makes me feel diffident and ashamed, as do, at times, the eyes of degraded household pets” (1985, 24). It is inevitably this self-disdain that gives some scholarship its misanthropic leanings. Biological essentialism aside, Tomkins’ understanding of shame as partially blocked positive affect here persists as the joy and interest nonhuman animals inspire in us is impeded by the knowledge of our manifold cruelties. Insofar as an “unwillingness… to 47 Animalarians are “the almost professional lovers of dogs, and other beasts.” He assumes such people “are capable of greater cruelty to human beings than those who do not identify themselves readily with animals” (Hemingway [1932] 2003, 5). 47 renounce the object” might belong to the shame experience, writing about animals involves opposing valences (Tomkins 2008, 361). It dampens our spirits, seeming to divest us from all possibility of representing animals, even as it maintains our affection and desire to represent them. 48 CHAPTER 3 “You don’t know what worry is”: Interspecies Apprehension in As I Lay Dying While Hemingway’s rigorous patterning of affect reflects his belief that it is possible to pin down “the real thing… if you stat[e] it purely enough,” William Faulkner’s approach assumes the opposite (Hemingway [1932] 2003, 2). Faulkner seeks ever more variegation. As one critic writes, “Faulkner's rolling sentences and rich diction incorporate a linguistic analogue of tremendous vitality, a headlong involvement in the multifariousness of life…” (Hagopian 1959, 178). Many suggest Faulkner’s fullest depictions center on negative experience. John T. Flanagan identifies Faulkner’s “obsessive liking for adjectives with strong negative impact” (1963, 431). He goes on to cite the author’s propensity for modifying words by attaching “less” (“lifeless, tearless, nameless…”) and “un” as in “unplumbable.” Through negation, such linguistic constructions at once emphatically signify and defer, such that whatever accumulates (and quite a lot does), we get the sense that there is always more. Jeffrey Stayton compares Faulkner’s prose to expressionism, showing how his violent, intense language seems to pour out (2009, 33). Faulkner forcefully depicts negative affection through continual elaboration. Thus author Toni Morrison finds in his work “a look, even a sort of staring, a refusal-to-look-away approach” (qtd in Vendrame 1997, 680). Resisting knowability, Faulkner’s modernist affect runs counter to psychoanalytic understandings of the period, which conceived of emotional states, located in the minds of discrete subjects and ultimately coded as repressed animality. For Faulkner, this clinical discourse —which finds meaning by devitalizing bodies—actually constitutes, to borrow Morrison’s image, a form of looking away. As I Lay Dying decenters the human psyche, retrieving affect from its animalized, ancillary position. Instead of marking subjects as sick or even inhuman, excessive negative affection is both diagnostic and collective. While critics commonly analyze the novel in the 49 context of grief, I argue the book’s central affection more closely resembles anxiety. Rather than devastating, Addie’s death is not yet devastating. In this drawn out present, Faulkner exploits the Freudian notion of anxiety as a regression to a less developed psyche for its resistance to the logic of substitution. Here, worry is both a gnawing feeling and the feeling that gnaws at or erodes animal objectification, enabling empathic experience. Ultimately, it is through such animal affiliation—the apparent marker of psychic disorder—that Faulkner’s characters find relief. I argue that Jewel’s horse, who critics usually misread as a failed substitution object, helps the Bundren children cope with their suffering. Through him, Faulkner at once resists compensatory logic and makes consolation available. After the matriarch of the Bundrens dies, Dewey Dell, the family’s remaining female figure, remarks on the persistent sound of her mother’s coffin being built. Cash’s sawing “is like a dog outside the house, going back and forth around the house to whatever door you come to, waiting to come in” (Faulkner [1930] 1990, 59). So overwhelmed by the dual crises of her pregnancy and her mother’s death, Dewey Dell suffers from an intense apprehensive expectation. That her worry should take the form of a dog articulates the powerful emotion that threatens to dehumanize subjects in modern psychoanalysis. At the same time, the dog as mere metaphor is exactly what asserts Dewey Dell’s humanity. For as the below will illustrate, Freudian anxiety involves a misperception or confusion of always figural animals with living beings. In Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety, Sigmund Freud (1926) describes anxiety as an unpleasant, felt response to a perceived danger situation. Speculating that being born produces painful physical stimulations that amount to a biological helplessness, he claims birth is anxiety’s prototypical event. Later in life, whenever one perceives dangerous situations “reminiscent” of the birth scene, anxiety functions as a signal alerting the ego to avoid the threat (Inhibitions 67). Unlike other negative affects, he argues, anxiety includes a specific set of “motor innervations” 50 in the heart and lungs,48 discharges which function to relieve the painful excitation (61). Here, heart rate, blood flow and breathing all increase as the body quickly delivers a surge of energy to its muscles. However, such signals are not always reasonable, Freud writes, and this leads him to propose two kinds of anxiety; “realistic anxiety,” where the danger response is “automatic and always justified,” versus “neurotic anxiety,” where one’s judging ego “vividly imagines” a mere potential threat and reorganizes itself to avoid it (Inhibitions 97).49 Today’s thinkers regard the distinction between realistic anxiety and mental disease as one of fear versus anxiety, pointing out that it is the distance of the stimulant that distinguishes the two. In contrast to fear states, where the threat is “in front of us,” anxiety’s object is future- oriented (Bourke 126). Hal Ritter claims, “Fear is a response to an objective set of threatening circumstances. In anxiety, a person is threatened without knowing what the threat is or what to do to meet the threat or attempt to overcome it” (Ritter 52). Thus Robert Sapolsky explains, anxious people suffer from a general “sense of disquiet, of disease, of the sands constantly shifting menacingly beneath your feet—where constant vigilance is the only hope of effectively protecting yourself” (Sapolsky 319). The anxiety in As I Lay Dying stems from an identifiable potential threat (Addie’s death), but one that is continually postponed. Early on, the threat of losing Addie remains imminent 48 Freud aligns this activity with physical shifts at birth where heartbeat increases and the lungs prepare to breathe air. In his early anxiety theory, these symptoms were linked to the breathlessness and palpitations of sexual activity (Inhibitions xxxiv). 49 Freud’s late anxiety theory traces neurosis to one’s failure to keep up with or progress through the normal phases of personality development corresponding to the id, ego, and superego. A normal, mature adult is one who has outgrown childhood danger-situations (Inhibitions 80). According to this logic, anxiety disorders result when one’s psyche falls behind schedule. A neurotic, then, is biologically adequate but psychologically defective, physically on time but mentally tardy. Situated behind the development of a normal adult, neurotic subjects are implicitly animalized. Since the development of the psychoanalytic subject is coupled with the evolution of human species, anxiety renders one prehuman. 51 enough to command vigilance, but is perpetually forestalled. Even after she dies, the promise to bury her in Jefferson makes that passing incomplete. The ongoing presence of her corpse, its odor, and its special mobility—both in the wagon and at times seemingly on its own— continually emphasize Addie’s extant status. Confusing Freud’s notions of anxiety’s reasonable (immediate) and unreasonable (distanced) objects, Addie’s body is an ever-distanced object that nevertheless has material force.50 As a deferred loss her family cannot yet mourn, she enacts the paralyzing circularity of anxiety where its cause is avoided or inaccessible and yet also compels the subject’s obsessive attention. Many scholars have shown how the novel contests clinical assessments of mental illness, particularly through Darl. They argue his apparent insanity, typified by his attempt to burn Addie’s corpse, is actually a sane response to a sick world.51 Yet while Darl’s credible instability is the most pronounced, it is also part of a network of psychosomantic energies that relay between the characters. While Dewey Dell’s racing thoughts signal her nervousness, Anse’s is evident in the continual rubbing of his knees (Faulkner [1930] 1990, 39-40). Meanwhile, Darl’s manifests in his looping declarations that “Addie Bundren is going to die” (28, 40). These fixations lead Jewel to claim the others are impatient for his mother’s funeral, and he accuses them of “burning hell to get her there” (19). At the same time, Jewel’s agitation belies his own restlessness as does his “wooden” appearance, which exhibits the “taut facial expression and 50 Regarding the corpse’s energetic pull, Patrick O’Donnell writes of the “grotesque magnetism of the coffin as an entity around which force and power are focused” (1984, 72). Rosemary Franklin claims Faulkner borrows from the pseudo-scientific concept of “animal magnetism” which posited “a vital principle coursed through all living things in the form of a fluid or current” (1966, 25). 51 Neal Hallgrath points out that Darl’s mental state declines as the novel goes on: “His breakdown is not doomed to happen at some time even before the events of the story unfold. Darl worsens with the unfolding” (2013, 17). See also Deville (1994) and Handy (1959). 52 rigid body stance” associated with anxiety (4, 94, Neylan 1962, 110).52 The family’s perpetual stress results in the kind of fatigue Anse bemoans, confessing that he “just can’t seem to get no heart into anything” (Faulkner [1930] 1990, 38). Likewise, exhibiting what Freud calls the “characteristic tightening of the breath,” Jewel complains he is too tired to breathe the moving air from Dewey Dell’s fan (Freud 1920, paragraph 9, Faulkner [1930] 1990, 15). Amidst these affections, Cash labors just outside the source of apprehension —Addie’s deathbed. Reaching as far as the bottom of the hill below, the “Chuck. Chuck. Chuck. of the adze” perpetually announces: “One lick less. One lick less” (15). While the above symptoms are commensurate with psychoanalytic understandings, Faulkner mobilizes them to undercut a view of anxiety as an irrational condition. That all the family members are similarly affected functions to normalize a situation that psychoanalysis views as both isolated and coming “almost entirely from fantasy” (Gordon 1940, 121). Further, this shared dread extends beyond the characters. The novel’s approaching storm, for instance, is part of a general sense of foreboding, reflecting “the sorrow and affliction… [that is] likely to strike anywhere” (Faulkner [1930] 1990, 71). Immanent disaster is in the air, again and again confirmed and fed into by the behavior of the characters who accommodate it. This collective uneasiness represents an “atmosphere” at the Bundren place. An atmosphere is a field pulled together by a particular affective intensity that is both palpable and influential. Writing of this phenomenon, Teresa Brennan asks, “Is there anyone who has not, at least once, walked into a room and ‘felt the atmosphere’?” (2004, 1). Her query suggests atmospheres are so ordinary that most everyone has experienced them. And yet, the phrase “at least once” implies they are apt to 52 Lester claims Jewel’s wooden appearance signals his “refusal to bend or depart from rural social codes that [he] considers natural and essential to his identity” (2005/2006, 44). However, Jewel’s body tension is actually reflective of his negative affection. As his interactions with his horse demonstrate, he is not always so tense. 53 escape our awareness. According to Ben Anderson, this elusive quality is due to an atmosphere’s being both real and virtual. Expanding on the insights of phenomenologist Mikel Dufrenne, he writes that atmospheres “both exist and do not exist.” “On the one hand,” he explains, they “require completion by the subjects that ‘apprehend’ them. They belong to the perceiving subject. On the other hand, atmospheres ‘emanate’ from the ensemble of elements that make up [‘a space-time’]” (Anderson 2009, 79). Hence, an atmosphere has two orientations since it surrounds bodies of all kinds even as it finds ultimate expression in them. Accordingly, Faulkner reformulates anxiety’s vigilance to a kind of intelligent hyper- attunement. This affective posture constitutes what Kathleen Stewart calls an atmosphere’s “ordinary but prized style of being present” (2010, 346). Worry is a privileged mode that encourages a multisensory participation in the world. Describing the sky, Darl observes that “the light has turned copper; in the eye portentous, in the nose sulphurous, smelling of lightning” (Faulkner [1930] 1990, 40). While Freud claims modern civilization demands “a shift of privilege in the sensorium from smell to sight,” Faulkner’s characters emphasize the integration of these senses (Wolfe 2003, 2). Thus John K. Simon writes, “The impression that the eye hears, that light or voices are treated as solid objects, draws the senses into contact with the scene in a general way so that the material and the sensual are constantly in flux...” (1965, 7). Such reshuffling decenters humans as the sole bodies from which of affective forces emanate, instead regarding affect as both extrahuman and collectively produced. Freud pathologizes such affective crossings, reading them as instances where “the boundary lines between the ego and the external world become uncertain or are drawn incorrectly” ([1930] 2010, 14). Of course, psychoanalysis must defend discrete subjectivity. As Freud admits, the legitimacy of the clinical gaze depends upon a view of emotion as based in an individual. Still, he wonders about shared feeling. At one point he considers whether it might be 54 possible to diagnose “a pathology of cultural communities,” asking could “some civilizations, or some epochs of civilization… have become neurotic?” (148, 147). Yet he concludes, “what would be the use of the most correct analysis of social neurosis, since no one possesses authority to impose such a therapy upon the group” (147-8). In short, collective affect undoes psychoanalysis because it disallows the assumption of an objective, outside position from which to treat. While Freud argues permeable subject boundaries would make a cure impossible, interspecies affect is especially disallowed. His diagnosis of Little Hans, for example, hinges on the boy’s being affected by an animal. “He went for a walk with his mother,” Freud explains, “and saw a bus-horse fall down and kick about with its [sic] feet. This made a great impression on him.53 He was terrified, and thought the horse was dead; and from that time on he thought that all horses would fall down” (Freud [1909] 2001, 125). Freud’s subsequent analysis converts this actual event into a mere trigger for the boy’s Oedipal fantasies, claiming Hans’ worry about dying horses is a mask for his fear of his father. Regarding equine affection as irrational or meaningless on its own terms, Freud a priori translates it into an act of displacement. He rejects the premise that horses have affective force in their own right, insisting, “What made it a neurosis was one thing alone: the replacement of his father by a horse” ([1926] 1989, 25). Under the clinical gaze, human and animal affiliation is not real, only symbolic. Indeed Freud regards animals as off-time, representing humanity’s primitive past.54 Although he does not put it this 53 Later, in an attempt to undermine the horse’s influence, the analyst decides this event “in itself…carried no ‘traumatic force’” (Freud [1909] 2001, 136). 54 In Civilization and its Discontents, Freud claims humanity evolved from its animal ancestry through the taming of instinctual impulses. This was accomplished through “organic repression”—the splitting of the psyche into unconscious and conscious realms. In this founding scene, irrational emotion is contained and animality is repressed in order to become human. And yet, our animal impulses remain, Freud writes, such that “in suitable circumstances… [they] can once more be brought to light” ([1930] 2010, 30-31). 55 way, it follows that only through regression can one ever be affected by nonhuman animals (Freud [1926] 1989, 81). This codification constitutes what Dana Seitler has called the “deliteralization” of animals upon which modernity depends. “Atavism,” she claims, “is not just an abjected form of modern life, a sign indicating modernity’s Other; rather, it is an operation that makes modernity, and the subject of modernity, possible” (2008, 50). In other words, it is by misinterpreting animals that modernity becomes itself. As if to directly oppose our “neurotic animality”— the animal identification psychoanalysis rejects—healing in the novel specifically follows from interspecies affection (Rohman 2009, 23). An early example of this occurs with Dewey Dell is in the barn, where she thinks, “You don’t know what worry is so I can’t worry. I try to but I can’t think long enough to worry” (Faulkner [1930] 1990, 59). Worrying of the very concept of worry here, Dewey Dell refuses to read her suffering as a discrete mental condition, something all in her head. Rejecting Freudian anxiety and its concomitant prohibition against animal affiliation, Dewey Dell turns her attention to a cow, discovering a new, embodied lens through which to clarify her feelings. She feels how the “cow breathes upon [her] hips and back, her breath warm, sweet, stertorous, moaning” (63). Decentralizing thought and sight, the animal’s breath touches her through her heat, taste, smell, and sound. Then she thinks, “The dead air shapes the dead earth in the dead darkness, further away than seeing shapes the dead earth.” Like her mother’s remains, the apparently inanimate and distant has compelling force. Dewey Dell feels her way past sight, such that what the clinical gaze deems outdated, inert, or meaningless—animals, the land, even her own visceral experience—is actually present and formative. Finally, this attunement allows her to name the terms of her suffering: “I feel like a wet seed wild in the hot blind earth” (64). Such interspecies exchanges translate excessive emotion—codified, irrational, isolated—into affection, that which is unpredictable and dynamically produced, but rooted and real. Brennan 56 uses the term “transmission of affect” to designate the way subjects move each other, a “process that is social in origin but biological and physical in effect” (2004, 3). In the novel, Faulkner positions affect transmission between humans and animals as a source of illumination and resilience. Of all the animals in the novel who profitably move human characters, Jewel’s horse has the most transformative impact. With few exceptions, critics have interpreted Jewel’s horse as a replacement object.55 Taking Darl’s claim that Jewel’s mother is a horse at face value, many scholars read the animal as a surrogate for Addie. Such troping is reminiscent of how Freud relegates animals to the realm of metaphor. Others critics argue the novel supplies objects of compensation, like the horse, only to demonstrate the futility of this mode of coping (Lester 2005/2006, 49). Tammy Clewell, for instance, writes characters respond to Addie’s death via substitution, negation, and other attempts at repair that actually leave them inconsolable. Reading the horse as a “symbolic replacement” that Jewel ultimately loses, she claims “compensatory substitution emerges as an absurdity” against which Faulkner offers no relief from suffering (Clewell 2009, 62, 66). However, by readily viewing Jewel’s horse as a mere substitute, this scholarship repeats the anthropomorphic bias the novel consistently works against.56 Further, as the below will illustrate, such readings miss the fact that the horse helps bring about the only real healing in the novel. Meanwhile, against the assumption of the horse as symbol, Erin Edwards claims the animal, like Addie’s problematic corpse, helps undermine normative conceptions of the human 55 See Matthews (2009), Fowler (1988), and Bassett (1981). 56 That Clewell, for example, has already decided the horse is a substitute object unworthy of careful attention is clear in her confusion of the horse with Vardaman’s fish. Quoting Vardaman’s description of the horse at length, including the way he moves and appears (“snuffing and stampings” and even his “splotched hide”), she claims it is here that the boy “projects onto the fish thoughts about his mother’s identity” (Clewell 2009, 60 emphasis added). 57 body and its relations (2009, 758). Still, her analysis marginalizes Jewel and his horse’s intimate relationship, which I view as indispensible to the novel’s idea of affect. Edwards argues the book vacillates between two modalities: “the characterological body rooted with its social context, and the tropological corporeality unleashed from such restraints” (760). Reading the play scene with Jewel and his horse as an instance of this tropological mode, she finds that Darl’s animal metaphors (which liken the motion of Jewel and the horse to a snake and bird, respectively) denote the “anonymous matter” of these bodies (758, 760). However, while she is correct in claiming the scene contests the visually organized subject, it is not true that Faulkner accomplishes this through the suspension of the distinct subjectivities of Jewel and the horse.57 For Edwards sets up as a false choice: culturally inscribed characters trapped in “the entropy of the plot” or impersonal “molecularity” (760).58 The latter mode, she writes, is liberating.59 But if we are to suspend character situations in favor of autonomous affect, as Edwards proposes, then it is impossible for such liberation to operate at the level of character experience. Yet, she writes affect finally offers “fleeting curatives for the formative social pressures… not available to characters within the plot.” Such a reading is not only untenable,60 but it misses how Faulkner’s human and animal characters meaningfully affect each other. In what follows, I argue relief in the novel proceeds from the specific kind of relationship Jewel and his horse have developed over time. That is, the “curative” value Edwards cites is, in my view, coextensive with the 57 While Edwards emphasizes that such bifurcation is “not to diminish the novel's investment in representing a specific social milieu,” by reading characterological bodies as crippling, her reading does just that (2009, 760). 58 “Experimental tropes,” Edwards claims, “reorganize the ‘anonymous matter’ of a corporeality that escapes this milieu, marking the death of the completed form of the body in favor of an ambient corporeality and subjectivity, or, in Deleuze and Guattari's terms, the death of molarity in favor of molecularity” (2009, 760). 59 White (2008) makes a similar suggestion, imagining animal expression in the novel is more immediate than that of humans. Like Edwards, he draws from a strain of affect theory, dating back to Henri Bergson, that equates animals with affect. 60 For a fuller analysis of the logical inconsistencies of autonomous affect, see Leys 2001. 58 situated identities at play, identities Faulkner is careful to flesh out in terms of the trafficking of affect. Jewel’s horse is relentlessly real—embodied, sensitive, and deeply influential. He is a descendant61 of the feral herd of spotted horses who resist capture and wreak havoc in The Hamlet. High-spirited and difficult, he reflects the tendency of his bloodline. But his behavior is also shaped by the prevailing negative affect of where he lives. Writing of an environment’s felt quality, horse trainer Mark Rashid explains, “It has been my experience that every horse place, whether it be a boarding operation, training facility, dude ranch, or just someone’s backyard, will have a certain feel to it. It’s in the atmosphere of the place itself, and usually I can feel it as soon as I step out of the pickup” (2000, 131). Rashid’s description is commensurate with Brennan’s above, where an outsider experiences an atmosphere as a visceral shift upon arrival. Such atmospheres powerfully influence a horse’s disposition: “[H]orses at a place where the tension and stress level is through the roof respond in kind, with high anxiety and a lot of pent-up stress that seems unmanageable at times” (131). Similarly, Marlitt Wendt observes chronic stress affects horses in a range of ways. One might “prance around, nip, or have a tendency to rear,” as Jewel’s horse does, while another might “internalize its worries for a long time, until all of a sudden it tries to break out of its miserable situation” (Wendt 2009, 105). While horses can be weighed down by negative affect, they can also help alter it. Many equine professionals claim horses are deeply empathic creatures who can supply help, and there is much anecdotal support for this among horse owners. For example, Henry Blake writes of a horse who habitually responded to his wife’s bouts of sadness by performing a series of tricks to elicit her laughter: “I have even seen him on occasion, when he had unseated my wife, dodge to 61 Against modern ideologies that deny the historicity of nonhuman animals, the author’s creation of an equine lineage attests to meaningful animal cultures. 59 one side on landing and catch her as she came down. This trick was almost infallible because he would not stop bucking until he made her laugh” (2007, 48). Similarly, Joe Camp claims his horse demonstrated an awareness of his injured ribs: “She nudged her nose between my arm and my ribs and pressed her warm muzzle softly against my rib cage. Precisely where it was hurting. She didn’t move for minutes…” (2008, 114). According to such accounts, horses can perceive the emotional and physical pain of others and offer comfort. Today, the affective intelligence of horses is the foundation for equine assisted psychotherapy.62 In this alternative to the clinical situation, instructors combine experiential learning with the insights of horses to help rehabilitate people. Horses offer feedback and support during activities such as grooming, groundwork, and riding. In Faulkner’s novel, anxious characters find relief by sensitively attuning to Jewel’s horse. Vardaman, for instance, finds consolation with the animal after Addie dies. As with Dewey Dell and the cow, Faulkner restricts sight to enhance the other senses, encouraging a more holistic mode of attention.63 Vardaman thinks, “It is dark in the barn, warm, smelling, silent.” With his sight—the human faculty most closely linked with objectifying animal others— impeded, the horse attracts Vardaman through “snuffings and stampings; smells of cooling flesh 62 The first physician to document the healing benefits of riding horses was Hippocrates (c. 460 - c. 370 BC) in ancient Greece (Granados and Agis 2011). Historians date the first documented use of animals to treat mental illness to the late eighteenth century at The York Retreat in England. The facility used “the socializing influence of animal companionship” to help improve the moods of patients and “awaken social and benevolent feelings” (Fine 2006, 25). In the following century, activities with horses were prescribed as part of the recovery for upper class men suffering from neurasthenia or “nerve weakness,” a nervous condition that prefigured Freudian anxiety (Lutz 1991, 4). 63 Brennan points out that “by the nineteenth century sight was the first of the senses, and to this day the only sense, to obtain objective status” (2004, 17). 60 and ammoniac hair” (Faulkner [1930] 1990, 56).64 Christopher T. White reads this scene as a failed effort to “articulate the horse's essence” (2008, 92). “In Vardaman’s concentrated attempt to capture, to re-present…,” he argues, “the horse shatters into ‘an unrelated scattering of components.’” However, I interpret Vardaman as trying to gain a sensuous understanding of the animal, “trying to touch” him through nonormative means (Faulkner [1930] 1990, 54). The apparent dispersion carefully elaborates the horse’s identity as one who is distinct from Vardaman—“an is different from my is”—and yet so profoundly able to affect him. As Brennan points out, affect transmission includes unseen factors that feed into the atmosphere producing chemical shifts in bodies (2004, 165). Faulkner likens being moved in such a way to drinking a tonic: “I see [the horse] dissolve—legs, a rolling eye, a gaudy splotching hide like cold flames— and float upon the dark in fading solution” (Faulkner [1930] 1990, 56-57). Psychosomatically, the horse gets inside Vardaman, as though he were sipping him in without diminishing him. Neither unified nor separate in such moments, they are “all one yet neither; all either yet none.” Finally, Vardaman “can see hearing coil toward him, caressing, shaping his hard shape…. smell and sound.” This awkward sequence of sensations is a means of getting at the ineffable sense of interspecies affective transmission. The effect is medicinal, destabilizing but reassuring, as Vardaman announces “I am not afraid.” The ability of Jewel’s horse to help alleviate anxiety is nowhere clearer in the novel than in the third monologue where Jewel and the animal play together.65 Against the novel’s fatiguing anxious atmosphere, play inspires creativity and the sense that something good and enjoyable is about to happen. As Brennan points out, “affects have an energetic dimension. This is why they 64 As John Berger has cogently argued, under the colonizing gaze of humans “animals are always the observed… objects,” and there is never the expectation that animals themselves will look back (2007, 257). 65 Play is usually defined as a sequence of creative but generally purposeless activities that produce pleasure. 61 enhance or deplete” (2004, 6). Faulkner depicts forces reverberating through his characters senses in species-specific, individual ways. When Jewel whistles to his horse in the field, the animal first experiences the sound as an affective “hit”—a disturbance that interrupts him from what he was doing (Stewart 2007, 10).66 Passing into a new mode of attention, he attunes to Jewel and snorts. An equine snort is a nasal vocalization that can have a range of meanings depending on context, volume, and the individual animal. Researchers have observed horses snort, for example, to convey excitement (Yeon 2012, 184), sound an alarm (Hill 2006, 122), and when they are examining something new (Blake 2007, 44). At the sound of the second whistle, the horse is pulled in Jewel’s direction.67 He descends the hill with his ears “cocking and flicking,” a sign that he is assessing the situation68 (Faulkner [1930] 1990, 12). This trajectory marks a new territory, what Stewart has termed a “bloom space,” defined as “another little world… a promissory note” (2010, 340). Subjects experience it as a sense of forces gathering: “Something throws itself together in a moment as an event and a sensation; a something both animated and inhabitable” (Stewart, 2007, 1). By the time the horse reaches Jewel, his manner registers this new domain where play is possible. The horse stops, “twenty feet away, broadside on, watching Jewel over his shoulder in an attitude kittenish and alert” (Faulkner [1930] 1990, 12). This hopeful posture makes play more likely. As Ben Anderson writes, hope is an “intensive colouring of ongoing experience,” a connective thread by which future play exists in or touches the present (2006, 746). 66When one is affected, “a charge passes through the body and lingers for a little while as an irritation, confusion, judgment, thrill, or musing,” writes Stewart (2007, 39). Though we later try to make meaning of it, “it lives first as an actual charge immanent to acts and scenes—a relay.” 67My wording here is not meant to imply that the horse is unthinking, but to unpack the texture of the situation and to underscore, as Faulkner does, the affective forces that attract him and Jewel. 68 As Carol A. Saslow writes, “humans attend by moving their eyes no matter what the modality of the alerting stimulus. Horses, however, ‘attend’ by pointing their ears” (2002, 217). 62 Ultimately, this energetic conversation takes the form of humor.69 This context allows Faulkner to flesh out the horse’s agency— as one who has ideas and initiates rather than always responds or reacts. Indeed Camp values playing with horses because it gives the animals greater freedom to “do something on [their] own will that will speak to you” (2008, 171). The teasing stance Jewel’s horse adopts is a form of role play, one his owner understands and returns with a similar comic formality: “Come here, sir.” The horse moves Jewel, who gets the joke and responds in kind.70 When Jewel does this, it sets the animal off in a zealous display: “He moves. Moving that quick his coat, bunching, tongues swirling like so many flames” (Faulkner 12). Aaron Moe has pointed to the communicative force of the horse’s surface in these lines as an instance of zoopoetics: “Like a human tongue, the coat of a horse gestures—but there isn’t a focused breath to turn those gestures into speech” (2014). But I would add that the horse’s power to affect his owner extends beyond the meaning conferred by such gestures. In executing them, he endows them with a singular feel, a certain passion, intensity, and speed. In What Animals Teach Us About Politics, Brian Massumi has argued that the particular style with which animals execute movements is the trace of their singularity.71 Individual animals bring a “something- extra” to an activity that makes it his or hers, he claims, a “performative excess” that is the “vitality-affect signature of that animal” (2014, 59 emphasis added). Faulkner perfectly and consistently indexes this additive zest in the horse’s “kittenish” attitude, “curvetting rush,” and “quivering legs” (Faulkner [1930] 1990, 12). These autographs insist that he is neither a 69 Regarding the probability of a continuity between laughter responses in humans and other animals from a neurological perspective, see Panksepp 2000. 70 According to Susan M. Keaveney many horse owners have anecdotally attested to equine humor during play. “A curious theme,” she writes, “is that many horse owners seem to think that their horses find these games humorous” (2008, 447). 71 Massumi’s reading of the affective impact of signifying animals here opens up a space for reversing the claims made in his previous work, Parables for the Virtual, which argues affect is always prediscursive (2002). 63 symbolic substitution nor a figure for anonymous affect. In the world of the novel, he is this animal who exists only once in all of time, and only he can animate this moment in such a way. Because these two characters have developed a play style over time, Faulkner suggests a shorthand between them. There is an ease and familiarity to how their games catch on and carry forward. For example, the horse’s coy address is an aspirational expression that presupposes Jewel is available in such a way that allows him to be humorously affected. As Edward E. Sampson argues, jokes are fundamentally shared. They “are significantly influenced in their formation by the anticipated nature of the audience’s response” (2008, 139 emphasis added). Indeed, Jewel has a considerable role in shaping the content of the horse’s jest insofar as the jest itself is based upon the horse’s impression of what would amuse his owner. This confidence has accrued over time, during many occasions where, as Darl puts it, Jewel can be found “fooling with that horse” (Faulkner [1930] 1990, 11). Regarding such “play rituals” horses develop with certain people, Keaveney points out, “Because these games are not shared with just any human, horse owners interpret rituals, games, or play as a symbolic manifestation of a deeper psychological or emotional bond…” (2008, 447). The horse has learned how to successfully draw his owner in using humor. Likewise, his kick is understood by Jewel as inviting another little game. Here, the horse plays the dangerous obstacle Jewel must circumvent to get feed into the rack. Sue M. McDonnell and Amy Poulin, who have begun to catalogue common equine play behavior,72 explain that when horses kick toward a playmate, it is “rarely with sufficient reach or force to touch or cause injury to the recipient” (2002, 277). Evidently kicking at Jewel is an established signal for this specific game as the horse uses it in a parallel scene. In a later chapter, Jewel approaches the barn to feed the horse. He “enters the stall and waits until it kicks at him so 72 Their equid play ethogram divides play into four categories: object play, play sexual behavior, locomotor play and play fighting. 64 that he can slip past and mount onto the trough…” (Faulkner [1930] 1990, 95). In this later scenario, the horse’s kick is a call—a portal—to a bloom space. But Jewel, despairing over Addie’s death, looks past the gesture. His attention is elsewhere, down the path. In this moment, the horse might experience Jewel’s indifference to him as a kind of deflation as what was potential is now undone. This event, which doubles the play chapter with a difference, shows how contextual and unreliable scenes of affection are. They are not isolated processes but are always informed by a complex of forces already in motion—“an inventory of shimmers” as Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth put it (2010). Things can always go another way. Ultimately, the play passage generates a different feel than the novel’s prevailing anxiety, creating a space outside the overdetermined cycles of avoidance. Where the usual atmosphere asserts a weighted sense of unfolding disaster, the horse draws Jewel in to a game of chase with a different rhythm, one that fosters positive expectancy: “With tossing mane and tail and rolling eye the horse makes another short curvetting rush and stops again” (Faulkner [1930] 1990, 12). This behavior is typical of horse play, Wendt observes, as “partners often strongly exaggerate the actions, they run very fast, stop abruptly, or bite playfully” (2009, 72). Jewel’s horse waits to build anticipation until suddenly releasing the energy, going full force and then halting again. In this pause, the horse’s feet are “bunched,” full of explosive force (Faulkner [1930] 1990, 12). Jewel’s affective attachment here is evident as he adopts a similar posture of momentarily restrained intensity: “Jewel walks steadily towards him, his hands at his sides. Save for Jewel’s legs they are like two figures carved for a tableau savage in the sun.” People who play chase with their companion animals will likely recognize this standoff. The players are outwardly calm, but the calm is staged only to cultivate anticipation. Provoking each other, Jewel and his horse build this positive hope, intensifying the feeling of imminent release until someone gives, moving the game forward. In doing so, they directly counter the stagnant, never arriving feature of anxiety 65 that wears one out. And later, when things escalate to play fighting, the obsessive vigilance anxiety demands shifts toward a different kind of absorption. Since rough play with a horse is dangerous, Jewel must stay focused to avoid injury. While in worry one fixates on impending doom, here there is an increased awareness of the present moment. At one point, the horse waits until Jewel is very close and then rears up, a position where “the forequarters are raised high while the hind legs remain on the ground, resulting in a near-vertical position” (McDonnell and Poulin 2002, 276). Here, Jewel is “enclosed by a glittering maze of hooves” as the horse boxes at him from above (Faulkner [1930] 1990, 12). Jewel’s safety here depends upon his ability to react quickly, using his honed knowledge of how his horse moves. He responds “with the flashing limberness of a snake,” jumping off the ground and landing with a hold on the horse’s nostrils.73 They freeze, again building positive anticipation, until Jewel jumps on the horse’s back “like the lash of a whip” (12-13). Notice how Jewel experiences a special state of agility and competence as he “flows” and “slides.” Finally, riding together, he and his horse achieve a kind of synthesis. Despite the enactment of “spine-jolting jumps,” Faulkner describes Jewel as “shaped to the horse” and “leech-like on the withers” (13).74 The architecture of Jewel’s body reflects their synchronicity as he and the horse create the moves together. During such collaborative riding, Elizabeth Letts notes, a rider’s body is informational, and horses interpret the smallest of changes “such as a slight movement of a rider’s lower legs, a tightening of the reins, or an almost imperceptible shift in balance” (2012, 88). Likewise, Jewel attunes to his horse’s embodied intentions and moves 73 Criticism that interprets this as a sexually suggestive “frantic struggle” tied to Addie is the product of viewing Faulkner’s animal protagonist as a mere symbol, failing to consider him in terms of his animal condition (Potts 2001, 111, Bassett 1981, 129). Indeed Wendt explains equine play is a kind of free form where “behaviours that might very well be serious in a different context” are mixed together. “Horses thus play with elements of flight behavior, aggressive behavior, and sexual behavior, in loose succession” (2009, 72). 74 Withers are the ridge located behind the horse’s shoulders. 66 with him, such that the tense, “wooden-backed” posture that so characterizes Jewel’s appearance in other situations relaxes (Faulkner [1930] 1990, 94). For a time, he finds complete relief from worrying about the loss of his mother. As the chapter comes to a close, “The path is empty; from here he cannot even hear Cash’s sawing” (13). In the so-called age of anxiety, As I Lay Dying decenters the human psyche, retrieving negative affect from its animalized, ancillary position. By deploying anxiety as a vehicle of epistemic privilege, it draws attention to what such instability might be diagnosing—namely the psychic incorporation of nonhuman life that structures normative modern subjects. Against Freud’s ever symbolic animals, Faulkner’s animal characters are living, situated, agential beings who promote a greater awareness in the Bundren children of the somatic aspects of human feeling. I have pointed to scholarship that mistakes this emphasis on the sensual as evidence of affect’s autonomy, a position that attempts to refute the myth of the discrete subject that Freud espouses. Faulkner’s affect theory instead establishes collective affect as that which both personally implicates characters and exceeds them, binding them to other bodies, most prominently animal bodies. Still, the novel’s depiction of worry as both psychosomatically draining and informative suggests nonnormative awareness comes at a cost. Indeed, Faulkner once said “super- perceptivity” is both the cause and “consolation” for madness (qtd in Franklin 1966, 34). Expanded sensitivity means one has to live in a world that often refuses to confirm one’s impressions. The following chapter examines this idea of unacknowledged affection in regard to captive entertainment animals. In Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood, animal oppression figures as an inability to connect up with others in a way that speaks to their experience. Focusing on affect as a relational force by which subjects are moved and move each other, organizing and grounding them in social locations, Barnes explores what happens when beings are unable to authentically 67 attach. She asks what powers remain available to them when, by their lack of participation, affect stalls. 68 The “most formless loss”: Djuna Barnes and The Affective Politics of Animal Performance CHAPTER 4 “Yes, I am sad, sad as a circus-lioness…” ––Jean Rhys Good Morning, Midnight Among critics of Nightwood there is a general consensus that the book rejects received notions of feeling as an internal, cognitive phenomenon through its focus on the complexity of the passionate body and its external appearance. Holding self-expression suspect, Djuna Barnes’ affect theory aligns her with the modernist doctrine of impersonality, where one does not have something so unified as a person to express. Robin Blyn claims the book enacts a “denial of interiority,” and Susana Martins argues minority feeling shows up in the “slippage between mask and performer” (Blyn 2000, 148, Martins 1999, 123). Meanwhile, Julie Taylor writes Barnes counters the expressive model of emotion by “locat[ing] emotions on the surface of the performing body” (2012, 13). These readings emphasize exteriority’s power of affective disclosure. But what about the resistant exteriors of Barnes’ animal characters? Recall the war- torn cow who “had gone somewhere very fast” yet stood still and, most notably, the circus lioness who cried with “tears that never reached the surface” (Barnes [1937] 2006, 26, 60). If Barnes finds corporeal exteriors “more interesting” than psychic depths, then what are we to make of these instances of intense affection where animal surfaces go flat (Taylor 2012, 13)? This chapter explores the affective complexity of animal spectacles in Nightwood. While the book demonstrates the author’s fascination with the critically productive, dynamic displays of disenfranchised bodies, its representations of circus animals are the least animated. Supplementing the novel with Barnes’ journalism and poetry, I show how dull animal bodies are a recurrent theme throughout the author’s oeuvre, marking the failure of authentic creaturely expression. These breakdowns index the particular affective situations of entertainment animals 69 in modernity who were incurably estranged, never at home. Such creatures toiled under countervailing affective pressures as the conditions of captivity were at once alienating and all too well known. For Barnes, this special placelessness presents difficulties for the doctrine of impersonality, disclosing tensions between distinction and anonymity, detachment and attachment, and finally between moving others and not moving them. Nightwood mobilizes the circus motif for its potential to contest normative identity through spectacular performance. For while society at large shunned marginal others, they had value at the circus, which, Deborah L. Parsons notes, “commercialize[d] and exploit[ed] the anomaly” (1998, 267). The circus provided an arena for mass public to openly examine, and be amused by, difference. At the same time, performers themselves deployed their “unusual bodily capital” to earn a good wage and find a certain legibility within a social system that produces normativity by making them unrecognizable (Davis 2002, 27). Further, by staging and exaggerating their difference, they pushed the boundaries of human form. The bodies of performers were “remarkably transgressive,” Janet M. Davis writes, as “women grew long beards, armless ladies sewed with their feet, hairy people worked as ‘missing links,’ and midgets and giants played cowboys, royalty and military figures” (2002, 27). Such figures played with innumerable constructs, including discourses of gender, race, sex and species identity, as well as stories of nationhood and the American wild. But, circus spectacles did more than display abnormal morphologies and parody ideologies; they used playful but subversive tactics to emphasize the slippery nature of public appearance. Drag performers, for example, tricked audience members who “unwittingly became part of the show” (27-28). Critically exploiting the very conditions by which outsiders are fit to entertain, performers prompted in spectators an awareness of their own masks. 70 Nightwood seizes on this radical complexity through a focus on exteriors as only apparent borders. As Sarah Henstra argues, the book’s “circus world of borrowed costumes and elaborate backdrops [is] a dramatization of the performative artifice of all social designation” (2000, 130). Thus trapeze artist Frau Mann is emblematic of identity construction. With tights that are “no longer a covering” but “so much her own flesh,” her appearance is the product of accumulated meanings (Barnes [1937] 2006, 16). Rather than a threshold to the outside, a subject’s skin is dynamic intersubjectivity in disguise. Yet the disguise is necessary, since we come into intelligible being via those languages. As Judith Butler has argued, identities are “performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be its results” (2008, 34). It is only ever through contrived appearance that one can show their difference. The novel’s Dr. Matthew O’Connor understands this. He embraces the façade, identifying himself as “the bearded lady… content because I am my own charlatan” (Barnes [1937] 2006, 107). Writing of the doctor’s crossdressing, Elizabeth Pochoda observes his nightgown “is as close to being the correct raiment as one can come” (1976, 186). You cannot be yourself, but you can wear the right outfit. This means some performances are better than others; they are authentic to the extent that they voice one’s sense of self.75 Unlike Dr. O’Connor, Felix gets it all wrong, for “there was no function in the world for which he could be dressed” (Barnes [1937] 2006, 11). His “embarrassed” appearance, wherefore he is dressed “in part for the evening and in part for the day,” fails at authentic performance. Barnes thus positions the body’s exterior as the productive site of affective attachment. It is where one is moved and where feelings are negotiated. As Dr. O’Connor tells the heartbroken 75 Thus Butler admits, “Despite the dislocation of the subject that the text performs, there is a person here: I went to many meetings, bars, and marches… understood myself to be at the crossroads of some of them…” (2008, xvii emphasis added). 71 Nora, “Our bones ache only when the flesh is on them,” because “the flesh serves to ache the bone and to move the bone” (Barnes [1937] 2006, 91). Barnes understands these affective impacts as a kind of somatic memory. Nora looks for her lost love in the figures of strangers, seeking “some gesture that might turn up in the movements made by Robin,” just as by Nora’s own mannerisms others “might know that she had a part in Robin’s life” (66-67). Recalling current notions of affect as a “fleshly languag[e]” or “material vibrancy,” for Barnes the gesture expresses affective forces articulated through, but equally moving beyond, particular bodies (Brennan 2004, 144, Bennett 2010, xiii). For while Felix, like all Jews, is from “some secret land that he… cannot inherit,” he does receive his father’s telling step, a certain “tension in his leg” (Barnes [1937] 2006, 10, 114). This inherited walk, “dislocated and comic,” encompasses the individual and the collective as it represents both Felix’s suffering and a wider history. Both passive and voluntary, one’s affective surface at once signifies wounding and community, alienation and belonging. Nightwood further asserts that through embodied performance, authentic nonnormative expression can actually coincide with public curiosity. For although Felix and his father would rather conceal their prominent gait, it is nevertheless the most honest communication either of them offers, the means by which they are best, to use Dr. O’Connor’s phrase, “countenanced or understood” (92 emphasis added). Justus Nieland (2008) has argued Barnes’ characters put affect’s publicness to work to find a kind of recognition. Abstracting themselves through multiple layers of self-staging, he writes, minorities complicate their construction in ways that allow them to somewhat flourish. Such mystification is freeing because it distances subjects from the violence of normativity. Resisting social assignment, they are “incomplete, but also at home” (Nieland 2008, 245). Importantly here, characters assert their unknowability in intriguing ways— they “dazzle their estrangement” (239). In other words, what enables Nightwood’s performers 72 and the marginalized people they represent to find a possible home is their ability to convert their exclusion from normative protocols into public “fascination” (227). Holding on to this idea that intense minority feeling becomes authentic and interesting through lively appearances, I turn now to Nightwood’s circus animals. How does Barnes’ affect theory accommodate animality? How do nonhuman performances influence the public? What kind of stage does the modern circus offer animals, and what do their surfaces finally announce? Approaching these concerns puts pressure on the notion of the body’s surface as a dynamic meeting place for affective negotiations. Opacity usually figures as a corrective to knowable content, promoting an incomplete seeing between, rather than a coherent seeing through. But in the case of captive animals whose material confinement and status as nonpersons is doubly debilitating in a very corporeal way, opacity loses its subversive force promoting instead the disappearance of animal feeling. In a slight passage that describes Nora and Robin’s first meeting at the circus, Barnes introduces her animal entertainers. She begins by juxtaposing the colorful facades of tumbling clowns with “smears on their faces” against a dark horse who is precariously balanced on his hindquarters (Barnes [1937] 2006, 59). The clowns give the feeling of unborn potential, “as if they were in the belly of a great mother where there was yet room to play.” The horse, however, is tense as he cautiously moves, his “foreshanks flickering to the whip.” Such movements are dictated by a threat of punishment so practiced that it is known in his body. His legs “shook in apprehension,” a phrase that conveys the union of fear and understanding that attends internalized oppression. The animal “prance[s],” an action that ought to be buoyant and spirited, but instead communicates a dampened energy as he does it “slowly.” This reluctance speaks to his affective situation—his dispirited feeling and the circus’ violent thwarting of a more vital 73 existence. Barnes thus codes the authentic feelings of performing animals as impeded movement, a certain psychosomatic exhaustion. However, lest her readers think trainers wholly control animals on stage, Barnes imagines their passions surface. The elephants enter, and as they pass Robin, they “all but climbed over at that point.” The phrase “all but climbed over” leads us to imagine dramatic activity (Barnes [1937] 2006, 59). Yet the explanatory phrase that follows reads, “They did not seem to see the girl, but as their dusty eyes moved past, the orbit of their light seemed to turn on her.” What was introduced as an outburst on behalf of the animals figures merely as the trace of an almost imperceptible movement—a path from the light of their eyes as they walk by like near automatons. At stake in this miscue is how animals might, to use Pochoda’s phrase, approximate “the correct raiment” to show up and be attached to in non-appropriative ways (1976, 186). That readers are not wowed by the animals’ expression, I suggest, is precisely Barnes’ point. Circus audiences expect to be amazed by grand, novel acts, and so the dissenting light in an elephant’s eye can hardly stir them. The narration establishes the animal performers as sensitive creatures who are enslaved, privileging the light from their eyes as a kind of authentic affective disclosure, even as it frames such disclosure as deflating. Figured as an energetic depletion, authentic animal feeling becomes a problem of political influence, since one’s surface—the dynamic site of identity performance in Barnes’ affect theory—cannot move others if it is not itself sufficiently moving. Elsewhere, Barnes suggests animals’ communicative failures make them fit for the stage where their unhappiness ironically coincides with the audience’s pleasure. In her 1915 poem, “Jungle Jargon,” the speaker claims circus animals are both exploited and entertaining because they unconvincingly imitate humans. With a cheerful tone and steady rhythm, the poem begins by describing a monkey playing around in a scripted way—taunting cats, singing poorly. Written 74 in envelop rhyme, the first and last lines of these stanzas neatly enclose the couplets between, which give the feel of the animal’s role within the act’s amusing artificiality: “Of jungles and of peasantry / It laughed a little pleasantly” (lines 5-6). The third stanza takes a darker turn: And down below where blind bears walk Or lurch in tears upon a rug— It is because they cannot hug, It is because they cannot talk. (lines 9-12) It becomes difficult to experience these lines lightly. The focus on the bears’ lack of sight suggests “tears” might mean crying, and the inner couplet is broken by an em dash that abruptly interrupts the description. In line 11, the speaker feels she has something to account for: “It is because…” Given the darker context, the answer she supplies speaks more to the material situation of the bears than their comic role. Suddenly the animals’ limitations—not being able to see, being off balance—are less funny. The repetitions in lines 11 and 12 make these privations emphatic and disturbing, emphasizing a disjunction between how the animals are feeling and the laughter they are meant to elicit. The disparate feelings of humans and animals are conflicting pressures that Barnes converts into a tension between action and inaction. The speaker ambiguously deploys the adjective “still,” telling us that “soft elephants still undulate” (line 22). In one sense this can be read as a defense of animal captivity such that circus elephants still, as before, move. Or, more subversively, the phrase intimates an illusory movement, the idea that elephants are stilled and yet appear to move smoothly. Likewise, in the article that follows the poem, humanized bears enter “on hind legs, with ‘paws like hands that pray.’” They cross the stage, and again we are told they are “still with paws like hands that pray,” meaning that the imposed posture arrests them, distorting and quelling genuine animal communication (emphasis mine). Made to mimic 75 human expression but vitally diminished by their captivity, animal bodies are stalled beside an apparent liveliness. They come across as moving and yet not moving. In the context of Barnes’ affect theory, the confused appearances of animals point to a violent anonymity. For the only legibility on offer for spectacle animals is an anthropomorphized one that finally demonstrates their lack of human character. Heather Arvidson argues that for Barnes, animal impersonality is a good thing. “To be well,” she reasons, “is to be other than a person, at least insofar as ‘personhood’ designates the domain of thinking, confessing, and self- possessing existence” (2014, 250). Animals escape “the grip of interpretation,” typifying “impersonality’s reprieve from agendas to know, remember, and regulate” (250). However, I contend that Barnes’ constricted animal surfaces imply otherwise, placing animals squarely in the realm of impersonality in its most negative sense, where not being a person means being incapacitated. As Sharon Cameron has pointed out, personality denotes agency. “The word person confers status,” she writes, “designating a rational being in distinction to a thing or an animal” (2007, viii). Hardly a model of liberating impersonality, Barnes’ impersonal animals instead present a special problem as anonymity undercuts their ability to act in their interests. Thus the lions enter the ring with “tails laid down across the floor, dragging and heavy, making the air seem full of withheld strength” (Barnes [1937] 2006, 60). From a physiological perspective, these listless surfaces denote a certain biological feedback,76 a physical fatigue resulting from their embodied entanglement with oppressive technologies. This could be a resistance that benefits the animals, sabotaging the show, were it not for the way such devitalization incapacitates the animals themselves. 76 Writing of biomedia (technologies that extend our senses), affect theorist Patricia Clough claims such technologies succeed by tapping into “the self organization inherent to matter or matter’s capacity to be informational” (2008, 1). Biomedia shows Clough two things: the body is “not merely technological all the way down,” and the point at which technology links up with organic life is also “the limit point of these discourses” (2). 76 Against the impulse to idealize animal impersonality, we should instead consider Barnes’ animal characters as representative of real circus animals. As Tyrus Miller argues, the author targets “Not the suffering of individuation…but the seduction of indifferentiation [sic], a recession into the background” (1999, 126). Owing to personality’s human-defined agency, animals are especially vulnerable to such disappearance. In what follows, I tease out the corporeal burden Barnes’ animal depictions index, showing how animal anonymity not only prevents authentic performance but also violently changes animals’ relations to their bodies. Taking lions as my example, I attempt to address the peculiar affective situations—the psychosomatic pressures, temporal and otherwise—captive animals coped with in modernity. I argue big cats suffered from a dual discomfort with opposing orientations. The very conditions that were psychosomatically jarring, requiring lions to stretch themselves daily, were also pressures that took their toll in a different way, through an entropic sameness. In one sense, circus lions endured profoundly estranging conditions. Subject to human schedules, they were “expected to keep the pace” within the “commerce-driven realm of the newly electric twentieth century city” (Young 2015, 83, 52). That lions struggled in this environment is evident in the many instances where they were labeled “lazy” and people complained of how they slowed performances (“Rich Men” 4, Ballantine 1958, 123). Further, circuses travelled at night, a practice that interfered with the innate biological patterns of lions who, as semi-nocturnal animals, are given to be especially active at dark and rest most of the day (“Circus Tales”). In addition to the confusion of their innate physiological rhythms, lions were deprived of the rich social lives their kind enjoy in the wild. According to George B. Schaller 77 (1972),77 an African pride consists of about 15 lions—generally two to four males, quite a few lionesses (who are almost always direct relatives), and their young. These animals share the same territory, strive to get along,78 hunt and feed together, and exchange affectionate gestures (85). In place of these organic social79 and place attachments, circus lions were joined with other species in contrived scenarios. These included putting them together with prey animals in mixed species acts and during travel. In these combinations, Peta Tait writes, animals had to cope with being “in close proximity [to other species] against their instinctive reactions” or to being among other species that were “not geographically found together” in the wild (2012, 24, 49). Meanwhile, amid these alienating forces, modern circus lions lived in highly monotonous environments. In stark contrast to the “erratic” daily activity of lions in the wild, circus lions were permanently confined to the cage or arena and the regularized activities the circus required (Schaller 126). In addition to their physical captivity, lions were systematically disempowered through training methods that amount to psychological confinement. Here, Lisa Rivera explains, “What is given up is not only free agency but identity” as one’s “captor seeks the captive’s submission to his desires, and this process involves replacing the captive’s cares and values with his own” (2014, 267). A 1910 article details the seven to ten month training period where lions are conditioned to submit to the persistent imposition of the collar, the chain, and the chair. The key to this is repetition: “As many as sixty chairs are sometimes destroyed before the brute is 77 Schaller’s seminal text, The Serengeti Lion: A Study of Predator-Prey Relations (1972), is based on three years of field work and remains the most complete investigation of the lives of African lions in the wild. 78 Lions tend to avoid violence, and conflicts are usually brief (Schaller 136, 132). Most aggression centers on food, as the cats defend their portion and are reluctant to share. Smaller carcasses are fought over, and males routinely use their size and strength to steal carcasses from females. 79 Female lions are “intensely social creatures,” Schaller writes, and they tend to remain with the same group for life: “the composition of the lionesses in a pride remains constant from year to year, except for deaths and emigration of young.” (1972, 143, 37). 78 satisfied there is nothing to be gained by the attacks” (“How Lions” B2). In other words, lions are “taught so thoroughly” that their desires do not matter. Trainers relentlessly disciplined feline bodies to meet entertainment standards, Tait writes, ferreting out the smallest of bodily cues that might precede “rebellious movement” (2012, 184). Restricted to a limited range of acceptable behavior, trapped in small spaces, being fed rather than hunting, and generally understimulated by routine and operant conditioning, cats must have also felt a pervasive sense of boredom.80 In captivity and equally in exile, then, lions were afflicted with a special kind of placelessness—a simultaneous unbelonging and over-belonging. Writing of the particular ambiguity of animals endemic to the circus, Ridout claims, “In the circus the animals shouldn’t be there because it’s cruel to make them perform tricks for us, but also should be there in the sense that they always have been. They are, after all, circus animals, and many of them have even been born into it” (2006, 97). This impossible liminality is further compounded by a certain temporal foreclosure. Biographical accounts from lion trainers in modernity claim the animals were only temporarily cooperative. At around age five lions were said to “go bad” or “sour,” terms circus trainers used to describe lions who stopped responding well and displayed increased aggression (Ballantine 1958, 77). Pat Anthony recalls one such lion who performed successfully for two years until he or she “became a man-hater and chased the [trainer]—tried to kill him one day.” Such behavior indexes a limit point where the chronic unbelonging that captivity demands crosses the threshold of tolerability. Although accounts of “sour” lions had the potential to undermine human dominion by troubling animal domestication’s assumed trajectory of wild to tame, rebellious behavior was often obscured as a natural and “inexplicable part of the aging process” (Davis 2012, 161). Meanwhile problematic feline feeling was contained as trainers “either banished the animal through permanent 80 Here we might wonder how much of the lion’s reputed laziness is attributable to boredom. 79 caging81… or arranged the offender’s execution.” This means things either get worse for the maddened lion as simultaneous boredom and estrangement increased, or he or she was killed. That the circus disorganizes animal life does not mean there is some other place they belong but cannot reach.82 Circus animals, like the oppressed generally, are marked by a cultural system of which they are already active parts. As Julie L. Abraham puts it, the “fundamental paradox” minorities face is that “the history of those who are excluded by the official record is shaped by their relation to that record” (Abraham 257, 254). There is no elsewhere. For circus lions, the notion of an alienating familiarity that amounts to a terminal homelessness is borne out in the numerous accounts of their attempts at freedom. One article details how three lions escaped onto the field only to go “right back into their cage[s]” (“Lions Stage” 3). Another tells of a lioness named Goldie who broke from her cage and, finding herself free but lost in city streets, willingly returned to her “familiar” captivity (“Find Freedom” 1). Such desperate escapes and easy returns evince the affective attrition of conflicted creatures who are trapped, terminally displaced with no home to return to. In the novel, Barnes draws an explicit relation between human and animal exile through the weighted and recurrent posture of bowing down. Its first mention is attached to the victimization of Jews who were forced to “run in the Corso for the amusement of the Christian populace” (Barnes [1937] 2006, 4). Guido is “heavy” with this Jewish history. Emphasizing the sensate body’s role in oppressive social processes, his bowing down is the move “the hunted body makes from muscular contraction” (5). Barnes later depicts a circus lioness bowing down before Robin. That both the animal and Guido perform this “genuflexion” points to their shared 81 The sour lion Anthony cites above remained in his cage for fourteen more years. 82 Today it is hoped that retired animals might find a measure of peace in sanctuaries, but most animal advocates agree such places are finally poor solutions, regrettable necessities. See for example, Emmerman 2014. 80 history of abuse (60, 5). Despite this, Jane Marcus centers the book’s mention of the games on human suffering, writing that “medieval circuses where outcast Jews were terrorized… prophesy with chilling accuracy the Nazi destruction of millions of Jews and other outcasts, devoured by their modern technological lions—the gas chambers and ovens of the concentration camps” (1989, 158-159). Marcus’ troping of lions as death machines here both ignores the historical lions who bear a more direct relation to those in the novel and obscures the fact that such animals were likewise forced to fight in the arenas of antiquity. I suggest instead that we read the mutual slavery of humans and animals, figured in the body’s bowing down, as an opportunity for sympathetic identification. Barnes makes a series of parallels between Jewish and animal abjection, indicating that they share a style of perception. A circus lion brought “to heel” shows Felix “a face like his own” (Barnes [1937] 2006, 14). And like the big cat, Felix “tabulated precisely” the movements of the animal’s trainer. Felix shares with the animals a defensive extrasensitivity—an ability to pick up on the slightest of movements that might precipitate harm or indicate what the oppressor wants. Felix’s son, too, evinces this fixation “as in the scar of a wounded animal will be seen the shudder of its recovery” (115). Human and animal victims are thus aligned by this embodied attunement, a kind of coping whereby “concentration must take the place of participation.” Several critics have argued the novel makes good on this somatic sympathy through Robin’s encounter with the circus lioness. In this scene, the animal bows before Robin, “her paws thrust through the bars and, as she regarded the girl, as if a river were falling behind an impassable heat, her eyes flowed in tears that never reached the surface (Barnes [1937] 2006, 60). Carrie Rohman claims the passage is illustrative of a shared experience whereby Robin’s nonnormative sexuality means she too is subject to “stultification by humanist power structures that repress animality” (2009, 145). Similarly Laura Winkiel reads the scene as a successful 81 attempt on the part of the animal actors “to interact with Robin and break the spectator/performer divide” (1997, 20). However, in my view Barnes holds up this possibility of recognition only to deny it. Although Robin’s being addressed by the animal connotes a certain epistemic privilege to her, the girl finally rejects the connection.83 The animal does in fact move her audience, but her impact does not result in community, since Robin abruptly exits the arena in a way the lion never can. Further, Nora’s taking up of the animal’s perspective enacts a violent displacement. Viscerally affected by the animals’ collective attraction to Robin, Nora colonizes their feelings by turning to Robin herself and leaving with her, underscoring how difficult it is for the animals to be properly witnessed. In the final chapter, aptly titled “Possessed,” Barnes restages this scene of interspecies affection, clueing us in to how bowing down might foster more spirited affiliations. The scene demonstrates a mode of affection reliant on a willful self-diminishment. When Robin meets Nora’s wandering dog “on all fours,” her posture does not just acknowledge the animal’s position, it effectively reworks that position (Barnes [1937] 2006, 179). Rather than designating one as a “serviceable other” whose energies are spent in defensive concentration, bowing down here connotes a desire to understand the other (Sampson 2008, 19). Oppressive attunement moves to curiosity, and Robin’s descent prompts the dog’s “rising from the floor” (Barnes [1937] 2006, 179). Enacting a truly collaborative performance, Robin and the dog move each other through reciprocal action. As Laura Cull writes, such acts have “the potential to produce events and objects unimaginable without their non-human co-creators” (2015, 29). With “grinning and crying,” at once “obscene and touching,” this activity pushes signification to its 83 Robin’s hurried exit from the circus, whereupon the narrator notes the girl “did not say where she wished to be,” suggests a parallel between human and animal subjugation and its attendant unbelonging. Nonetheless, the fact that Robin does leave and has the freedom to move on to other places signals that which is unassimilable about their oppressions. 82 precarious edges (Barnes [1937] 2006, 179, 180). Through Robin and the dog’s prolific surfaces, Barnes brings us to a place where their feelings might touch. Of course such reshuffling is only possible because the dog, like Robin, has the freedom to wander. As the tense faces of Barnes’ entertainment animals insist, captivity fatally undermines creative, transformative expression. Bowing down’s oscillation from “concentration to participation” thus positions authentic performance as a problem of curiosity (Barnes [1937] 2006, 115). For while the lioness’ devitalized energy makes her suffering palpably clear, it is finally this very lucidity that prevents her tears from “reach[ing] the surface” (Barnes [1937] 2006, 60). Recalling Nieland’s insight that the affects of Barnes’ otherwise disqualified people become of interest or relevant through their lively performances, it seems it is precisely the delineation of what is interesting at the circus that accounts for the disparate trajectories of human and animal facades in Nightwood. The difference between agential human performers and unmoving animal ones results from the latter’s inability to turn disinterest into curiosity. If, as Nieland has it, the novel’s “impossible people” are both unknowable and compelling, then the circus animals are the opposite (2008, 242). Their feelings are overly evident and wholly unmoving in the way they need to be.84 All too exposed, the circus’ exploitation of animals is an open secret, too well known to be interesting. The idea that one must be interesting in order to have an impact is problematic in terms of the impersonal aesthetic Barnes employs. Writing of early Hollywood’s influence on new conceptions of relational identity, Christina Walter observes, “Concepts like ‘picture personality’… linked personality not only to fame but also to performance: to have personality meant to be “fascinating, stunning, attractive, [and] magnetic, not only in the case of film stars 84As “Jungle Folk” admits, audiences have “heard so much about” animal resistance and have even felt it themselves ([1915] 1989, 194). 83 but also for the broader public” (2014, 22). This magnetism accounts for personality’s power, an attractiveness whereby one holds sway over others. Given this, “interest” is a conspicuous weapon of impersonality, one that registers one of the doctrine’s internal contradictions—namely the personality required to enact impersonality’s political agenda.85 Barnes’ animal characters behave as sticking points, emphasizing how impersonality requires a certain personality for political efficacy. In “Jungle Folk,” for example, she speculates a lion’s mauling of his trainer is an act of rebellion, but insists she will not cop to being affected by the protest “because the thing has been done…” ([1915] 1989, 197 emphasis added). Aligning the artistic imperative to “make it new” with animal captivity, the author implies that animals, as nonpersons, are powerless in venues dominated by novelty. From here, a further problem arises. On the one hand, the author deploys a negative poetics to show the elision of authentic animal feeling. On the other, the circus’s exploitation of animals proceeds by the same means—by absenting animal personalities. How then can distancing strategies adequately witness animals and avoid reinforcing the very hierarchies they are aimed at dismantling? Barnes finds a certain tragic strength in the problematic surfaces of oppressed bodies who cannot significantly move others. Answering personality’s attraction with repulsion, Nightwood develops a notion of negative power through Robin who moves others away as a means of rejecting violent claims they would make on her to find definition. As Patrick O’Donnell argues, Robin figures as a largely inexpressive and elusive power. Here, “the ‘self’ is a kind of empty vortex around which whirl objects and narratives that are flung off and cast aside as Robin escapes the gravitational force of each exhausted relationship…”(O’Donnell 2009, 528). In 85Vincent Sherry notes that Wyndham Lewis and T.S. Elliot—impersonality’s most oft-cited advocates—both admitted that the “mask of anonymity… is merely an inverted kind of impersonality” (2000, 142). 84 refusing to occupy a position, Robin disorganizes others. Barnes’ approach here is commensurate with Rochelle Rives’ insight that impersonality is a spatial matter since the “strength or authority of a personality depends on how well it ‘fixes’ itself within the social space it inhabits as it simultaneously contacts and influences others” (2012, 27). Of course, Robin’s distancing techniques—her drunkenness, silence, sleepwalking, and incessant wanderings—are all impersonal strategies. While Barnes hardly idealizes it, there is a critical edge to her character’s relative anonymity in that it refuses to underwrite hierarchal positions. Minority dislocation therefore emerges as a negative authority. Here we should bear in mind the special placelessness of circus lions who are doubly displaced via forces that are at once too foreign and mundane. Their lethargic surfaces are energetically deflating for the audience. Like Robin, they have a diminishing effect. As Jane Desmond has written, spectators desire to see animals move: “People’s zoo behavior, feeding or taunting the animals, often aims at getting the animals to move, to do something” (1999, 150). For this reason, she writes, “Zoos have experimented with ways of getting the animals to… perform a behavior, to move, so that people will be more interested” (172). Animal resistance, unmoving and uninteresting, undermines profit. At best then, an impersonal face enacts a valuable distance, one that upsets power relations. At worst, this power of diminishment overwhelms the oppressed being from which it emanates. This passive power is taken to extreme limits in Barnes’ 1914 article titled “The Girl and the Gorilla.” The piece centers on an African gorilla named Dinah who had just been brought to the Bronx Zoo. The “interview” operates on two levels, evincing impersonality’s value and its danger. Dinah models a consciousness that does not recognize human hierarchy. She de-centers the crowd “who might as well be a row of cabbages,” and she ruins an intimate moment of resting her head in Barnes’ lap by “gravely putting an orange peel upon her head” (Barnes [1914] 85 1989, 181, 183). Like Robin who cannot “put herself in another’s place” because “she herself is the only ‘position,’” the author writes Dinah “would rather stand well in her own estimation than upon a social footing” (Barnes [1937] 2006, 155; Barnes [1914] 1989, 181). This asocial disposition is democratizing and even has Barnes herself “crawling” around “for some twenty minutes,” a move that invokes Nightwood’s sympathetic logic of bowing down. However, this move toward equality comes at a cost as Dinah has been so depersonalized that intimacy is difficult. Barnes tells us Dinah has the most puzzling face. “If your dignity permits a competition of faces, you will be left three miles behind at the first loop of the jeering mouth,” Barnes claims, “for believe me, Dinah has the most perfectly ordered set of unbalanced jokes on view of anybody in the world” (Barnes [1914] 1989, 182). Dinah’s impenetrable face would win any contest in impersonality. Insofar as her “unbalanced” features reflect power asymmetries that render her abject, Dinah is certainly funny. But while there is much to make of the absurd, tragically comic face, Barnes wants to understand something of the gorilla’s lived experience. Rejecting the detached stance of zoo spectators, she adopts the gorilla’s posture to access the animal’s point of view. Barnes initiates a dialogue, questioning the “little gray blur,” but the animal remains silent and evasive (182). Finally, the author rises and invokes “the advantages of civilization” to get the answers she wants. Suggesting anthropomorphic fantasies are one of human culture’s privileges, the gorilla begins talking. She has trouble distinguishing between real and artificial light, she says, but she has been fed well and is curious about chewing gum because she wants to understand “what it is… that keeps so many people rotary beneath their hats” (183). Here, the notion that the gorilla flips the conventions of zoo display such that the public becomes the object of the animal’s “appraising stare” mirrors Davis’ claim that circus performers routinely countered objectification by “return[ing] the audience’s gaze with one’s 86 own” (Barnes [1914] 1989, 181; Davis 2002, 27).86 Barnes would like to imagine the gorilla has this political agency. But as she initially admits, Dinah is hardly able to resist so powerfully. She either “does not see” the crowd or she is uninterested (Barnes [1914] 1989, 181). The author’s imaginative animation of the animal’s devitalized body does not hold. Finally, outside the frame of Barnes’ wishful staging, in the editorial preface to the interview, readers learn that Dinah’s living conditions soon resulted in her death. Although Barnes reports Dinah is “immature yet and will grow as time passes,” the gorilla would be paralyzed from confinement by the end of the year (183). And while she writes Dinah’s “appetite is astounding,” the animal stopped eating and died ten months later (181). Dinah’s paralysis and subsequent death powerfully exemplify Barnes’ minority affect theory, illustrating how captivity disorganizes the animal’s relation to her body and how this change literally shows up in her physical form. Dinah is also a profound example of Barnes’ suggestion, in her personal correspondence, that extreme depersonalization is fatal: “to be impersonal one has also to be emotional – one should not be kicked too much, not too much beaten – or the very body that would revolt finally lies still” (qtd. in Taylor 2012, 22). The gorilla’s progressive disintegration, her increasing stillness and inability to attach, gains negative force by shrinking to the point of loss. In aligning literary invention with mass spectacle in their shared imperative for novelty, Barnes refuses to uncritically partake in the climate of optimism that “making it new” implies. For animals, impersonality’s promise to safeguard subjects from the reductive violence of legibility finally threatens total depersonalization. Indeed as I write this paper in Microsoft 86 Barnes delights in such oppositional gazes. Her piece on Arthur Voegtlin, artistic director of New York City’s Hippodrome theatre productions, closes with her exclaiming, “It had taken me two superb hours to find out, in the end, he had been mostly interviewing me!” (“Interviewing Arthur” 84). 87 Word, the program flags “who” whenever it is attached to the word “animal.” The explanation for the correction reads, “Generally, use ‘who’ or ‘whom’ to refer to people. Use ‘that’ or ‘which’ to refer to anything non-human.” Animal persons are a grammatical problem. I have argued that the immobilized bodies of captive animal performers exemplify this anonymous status. The performances of Barnes’ spectacle animals are stalled not because their exteriors are inscribed in ways that mask their experiences, nor because they are so radically different that their faces are illegible. They fail to make an impression because the grounds for doing so require recognition of particularity—what makes one novel. Through the action of bowing down—which variously signifies inferiority and recognition of a good (which is to say, moving) performance—Barnes reframes the problem of agency from an issue of weakness to one of audience indifference. Performances fail to impress when they do not elicit feeling. Put another way, some actors are not engaging because they themselves cannot engage. Better still, one can only be as interesting as they find those around them. This implies bowing down can be a violence or a collaboration. It can mean being transfixed, as Felix is, by the trainer’s oppressive movements and only those movements. Or bowing down can be a posture of awareness that invites authentic, creative participation of the kinds enacted by Jewel and his horse in the previous chapter, or Robin and Nora’s dog in this one, where performances are truly unexpected. Ultimately, the still surfaces of Barnes’ animal actors ask readers to appraise their own postures, asking how they might gravely disable possible sites of attachment, limiting the ability of others to show up, let alone show off. 88 CONCLUSION One way to approach the literatures examined in the foregoing chapters is to view them as responses to modernity’s various dreams of control and progress. Belatedness is a climate in which technology’s promise of freedom seems attainable. This collective feeling in The Hamlet marks a prosperity that is always deferred and thus handily compels subjects to support commodification. In chapter two, Hemingway’s theory aims to naturalize socially contingent affective experience. Here, shame is a misrecognition whereby the self is undone but persists in believing essential identification is possible. Similarly, in As I Lay Dying anxiety is a mode in which Freud’s promise of a discrete human identity feels viable, hence the continual activity of defending against apparent intrusions. And finally, modernist impersonality dreams of subjects gainfully unbound from inherently violent distinctions. And yet, as we have seen, keeping these various faiths requires corollary dismissals of animal aspirations. Hemingway’s affect theory gives the most blatant example of this protocol, asking readers to resolve modern alienation through bulls. My reading aligned Death in the Afternoon with Tomkins’ shame theory to show how Hemingway relies on physiognomy to produce pure—autonomous, involuntary, universal—emotion. He exploits animals to naturalize affect and bridge the gap between essential and contingent feeling. I argued this aim collapses around the bull’s performance which goes beyond mimetic gesture and generates reader sympathy. Because modernity’s promises get by on speciesist economies—not just “the animal” as other but also as living property, valued goods—animals have diagnostic force. Equine resistance in The Hamlet gives the lie to technological freedom and a strictly human account of progress. I showed how the horses’ collective affection recalled their formative role in transport technology 89 and pointed forcibly to the violence of commodification. At the auction, attaching to other living creatures as objects is damaging, for both the animals whose desires are denied, and for the men who willfully deny them. The promise of progress breaks down, but so too do bodies who break themselves on it. In Barnes’ work, this breakdown in connectivity shows up most on the corporeal surfaces of animals. Chapter four showed how Barnes’ affect theory favors embodied performance over psychic emotion, emphasizing the skin’s surface as a permeable point of social contact and influence. Critics have understood Nightwood’s circus is a privileged trope for demonstrating how even the most abject subjects can find social voice. I argued instead that Barnes critiques the circus as a quite literal space where animals’ chronic enslavement progressively drains them of the psychosomatic energy required for social connection. Animals challenge impersonal affect theory as living examples of excessive depersonalization. Affect studies shares modernist impersonality’s commitment to the idea that feeling is collectively produced and always surpasses whatever forms of organization we impose. Scholars who view affect as autonomous take this too far, with particular detriment to animals who serve as exemplars of anonymous, vital potential. If Barnes’ disinterested animal subjects insist on anything, it is that a prescription of placelessness can be terribly injurious. Affect must be theorized on the level of lived experience, and it must account for individuals. It will not do for emancipatory strategies to mimic structures of oppression by dissolving the very unique subjectivities at stake. Our task remains to engage with delineations of belonging. Yet even Dana Seitler’s superb work on atavistic discourse in modernity concludes by lamenting how scholars continue to theorize identity along the lines of self and other. She argues we “keep addressing the question (perhaps unwillingly) of why the subject is in fact decentered and what forms the ‘constitutive outside’… so stalwart and repetitive is the discourse of humanism (2008, 235). I 90 take Seitler’s point. I am troubled that so often readings of animal agency assume the form of resistance such that animal affect comes across as disaffection or deflation. Situations of captivity especially seem to lack the necessary breathing room for imaginative, creaturely expression to be nurtured. Affecting Animals has implied a necessity for revisiting ideological fallacies. Interrogating major affect theories in modern philosophy and psychoanalysis for their speciesist assumptions has shown, at least, the danger of retreating from these objectifying technologies. Affect protocols are not the false other to truer, more authentic feelings. They are the pressures through which complex attachments emerge. Mercifully, even animal attachments in highly oppressive environments can be vitalizing. As Vinciane Despret illustrates, captive animals can discover surprising ways of relating according to their talents and what interests them. Thus, she points out, confinement “constitute[s] in some ways a series of different propositions, and as such, they can be judged favorably, or not, and always in a certain respect” (Despret 63). Her study invites us to wonder about moments when subjugated animals find a measure of ease, of pleasure, or something to be curious about. Of course they deserve more. But if we neglect or pass too quickly over these occasions, we underestimate their power and diminish them as surely as the violent enterprises we criticize. Fruitful investments begin, as oppressive ones do, as embryonic energies that accrue power as they are cared for. Faulkner explores this potential in As I Lay Dying, where interspecies affect is a productive site of transformed feeling that extends characters’ sensory abilities. I argued against two prominent interpretations of Jewel’s horse in Faulkner scholarship. The first claims the horse is a replacement object for Addie, and the second sees him as a figure for autonomous affect. I showed how these readings repeat the reductions of animality we see in Freud and Bergson, respectively. Then I argued that the animal’s affective impact depends upon 91 his unique character, composed of his particular somatic abilities, social ties and life story. Faulkner is emphatic on this point, situating the horse within an intertextual equine history. The sole animal who survives The Hamlet’s auction goes on to beget Jewel’s horse. Affecting Animals advances approaches to modernist studies by claiming we cannot understand the full reach of modernist affect without unpacking literary representations of animality. Further, it shows that the contestation of humanity’s primacy is but a starting point to projects that demand more nuanced attention to animal subjectivities. I have tried to give bi- directional accounts of interspecies affection, focusing on the psychosomatic work of social practices. Across species lines, human and animal characters took up defensive postures of alertness or avoidance, they settled in the reassuring company of companions, or they floundered in the stripped down vulnerability of separation. As I suggested at the outset, these affections help us to ask after a host of promises held out in modernity. But while they shed light on humanist dreams, they also illuminate what was of value to animals themselves and what they might have dreamed of. 92 BIBLIOGRAPHY 93 BIBLIOGRAPHY “15 Monkeys in Circus Are Eaten by Lions.” The Washington Post, June 8, 1944. Abraham, Julie L. “‘Woman Remember You’: Djuna Barnes and History. In Silence and Power: A Reevaluation of Djuna Barnes, edited by Mary Lynn Broe. 252-268. Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991. 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