John Simons. Animal Rights and the Politics of Literary Representation.
Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002

 Robert McKay , University of Sheffield

The study of literature from a pro-nonhuman animal perspective is fledgling at best, and John Simons has made an important and timely addition to it. In this eminently readable book, full of pathos and impassioned thought, Simons claims that the failure of academic literary criticism to engage with animal rights is symptomatic of its more profound failure to assume a politically engaged position in society as a whole. To counteract this, he aims to offer textual analyses that will bring into view the ways that literary texts can help us to “think ourselves into a position which might break us free from the terrible treatment of animals that has marred most of histories” (p. x). In conjoining these two broad directions of his work, Simons looks for a delicate balance between polemic (for animals’ rights and for an academia that engages with society at large) and more conventional criticism that reads literature closely and as if animals mattered.

In this sense, this book as a whole is aimed implicitly at a select readership: those who have an interest in the politics of the literary academy and in literature about animals but have not necessarily accepted the claim for animal rights. This is not to say that parts of it will not be of interest to a less specialist constituency or to those who already agree with Simons’s animal politics. In this regard, Simons’s simply stated and, in the main, self-explanatory chapter titles, will be particularly valuable, though a detailed subject-index would have granted such readers quicker access to the ideas here. The book falls into eight well-distinguished chapters, the first three of which are self-consciously introductory and aimed at explaining the context of the literary-critical discussion that forms the remainder of the book.

The first chapter offers the author’s thoughts in answer to The Big Question: “What is an animal?” Although Simons is clearly aware of the enormity of the debate occasioned by such a question, his decision not to engage in any sustained philosophical disputation exemplifies from the outset the conversational and, at times, declamatory tone of the book. This means that any readers hoping to be guided through the range of answers to the question instead will find thoughts that are simply and eloquently stated rather than strictly argued. In general, Simons is aware of the difficulties for humans in truly knowing animals, but he puts them in abeyance to insist that animals are “real” and to find ways to condemn the “exploitative and degrading nature” of many representations of them. It is this position that allows him to claim, contentiously, that “there is a transhistorical dimension to the human/non-human relationship and that this conditions cultural production across very wide time frames” (p. 12). It is on meeting claims such as these that one laments the lack of extended argument or engagement with current academic debates that are a result of the book’s polemical style.

The next two chapters briefly survey some well-known thinkers, recent and historical, about animal rights (Singer, Regan, Clark, Linzey, Adams/ Primatt, Gompertz, Salt). In keeping with his “transhistorical” approach, Simons’s discussion centers on the trajectory of pro-animal thought, and so the socio-historical conditions that would give it much more meaning are not addressed at length. In the fourth chapter, which presumes contextual knowledge as much as the preceding two do ignorance, Simons sets his sights on the academic establishment and its use of “theory” (the French philosopher Lyotard is his signal example) that has led to its withdrawal from ethical dialogue with society. This is a lively and erudite sparring session, in which Simons serves up some important reminders to cultural critics about the gulf between the ivory tower and the ivory trade. As elsewhere, though, this chapter might have more effect on its intended readers were it to debate at length the relative merits of other scholarly positions.

The book’s literary analyses are contained in the next three chapters, which discuss animals as symbols, animals as anthropomorphic representations of humans, narratives of metamorphosis from human into animal, and vice versa. It is when Simons claims, “all other modes of representation are variants on these” (p. 85) that one hopes for interrogation of (at the very least) the two other recent books of pro-animal literary criticism that attest to very different patterns of meaning: the discussion of animal sacrifice in Scholtmeijer (1993) and of animal entrapment in Malamud (1999). Assured of the consistency of his themes, however, Simons ranges widely in time (and literary quality) to glean his textual examples. It is not unusual to find a brief discussion of Gulliver’s Travels juxtaposed with one of Greyfriar’s Bobby and of the recent film Babe or Self’s 1997 novel Great Apes up against Apuleius’s The Golden Ass (c. 197) and Milton’s Samson Agonistes in a matter of pages. Among other writers discussed with equal brevity are Sidney, Spenser, Melville, and Coetzee. Simons’s thematic approach in the main does find a coherent path through this disparate array of texts. Yet for all his valuable disquiet about academia, this reader would have preferred here, as in the rest of the book, a more sustained and conventionally scholarly discussion of a smaller selection. For by this, rather than polemic, might literature’s ability to stimulate ethical thought have been brought to bear more convincingly.


References

Malamud, R. (1999) Reading zoos. Basingstoke: Macmillan.

Scholtmeijer, M. (1993) Animal victims in modern fiction: From sanctity to sacrifice. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.



 

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