How does Cohn suggest we write about animals? First, through “lyrical description,” which helps “reframe our understanding of belonging in a time of exigency.” Novelists may be catching up to what poets have long known: that lyric, as a less anthropocentric mode, might hold capacities that traditional narration lacks. Lyric, with its vividness, concreteness, and immanence, dodges the usual pitfalls of writing about animals and gets us out of the unfortunate maze of individualism. Cohn’s emphasis on lyric made me wonder why the novel, as opposed to the lyric poem, forms her main case study. After all, poets have made good-faith attempts to depict animals in all their animality, without turning them into mere props for human experience. Life of Pi may be more popular than the animal poems of Ted Hughes, Sharon Olds, and D. H. Lawrence, yet lyric poets like them have long known how to pay attention to nonhuman forms of life and modes of perception.
Cohn’s next point is that we should avoid allegory—some of the time, anyway. By Cohn’s lights, allegory “captures” animals as mere figures for human experience and emotion. It is a reductive way of treating animals: the fairy tale, the fable, the nursery rhyme, all fall prey to it. Cohn cautions us against using allegory to equate humans with livestock and beasts of burden, which tends to degrade humans and animals alike. As she comments, “to take animals as figures for Blackness is violence.” This point is, I think, indisputable—likening humans to animals is usually a way of demeaning them.
“[W]e must insist on the lived reality of the animals we encounter,” writes Cohn, “and thus resist turning them into figures, abstractions, or concepts.” Yet I did wonder about this “must.” Is nothing to be gained by treating animals as figures? Is allegory merely a “conceptual reduction”? After all, allegory can do things that realist narrative can’t. There is a difference, for example, between saying “bad company corrupts good morals” and “if you lie down with dogs, you’ll get up with fleas.
Complicating matters, Cohn adds that allegory can undergird a logic of “capture” but can also—sometimes—undermine it. In chapter two, “Speaking Otherwise,” Cohn argues that “allegorical novels centering animal voice demonstrate ambivalence toward character itself.” In certain cases, “allegory unexpectedly leads away from merely reinforcing or reinventing human interiority.” Books like Yoko Tawada’s Memoirs of a Polar Bear (2011) and NoViolet Bulawayo’s Glory (2022) “reimagin[e] a transnational public sphere as a shared milieu, rather than a site of individual validation.” I appreciate Cohn’s willingness to defend allegory’s usefulnessin some cases, but it gives her study a case-by-case quality. Is allegory good, bad, indifferent? Does it simply depend on how well it is used by a given author? In that case, it doesn’t seem appreciably different from any aesthetic technique. And if allegory is value-neutral, then there’s no normative claim to be made.
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I teach a course called “How to Think About Animals,” in which we read T.H. Huxley’s classic paper “On the Hypothesis That Animals Are Automata and Its History,” published in the journal Nature in 1874. Huxley (1825–1895), nicknamed Darwin’s Bulldog for his fierce defense of Natural Selection against the counter-tide of Victorian sentiment, recounts sympathetically how one of the greatest scientists of the seventeenth century, René Descartes (1596–1650), could have come to the unfortunate conclusion that animals are nothing more than unconscious machines.
Anthropomorphism also needs to be distinguished from anthropocentrism. In its most general sense, anthropocentrism refers to a bias that leads us to consider our own species as the center of the universe. It’s the tendency to think that, given that we are the most important thing from our perspective, we must be the most important thing in general.