"Metaphorizing Animals": An Essay by Heather King (Keywords: Animals; Art; Literature; Selfhood)

From The Philosopher, vol. 112, no. 2 ("Violence")

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Last week, on my university campus in Houston, I attended a talk by Maggie Nelson, author of a great variety of award-winning books, poems, and essay collections.  She was invited to speak to the theme of repair. Couched in a discussion of the so-called “politics of care” she asked the audience, quoting Juliana Spahr, “what sort of selves [do] literary works create?” Nelson ultimately wanted to query Spahr’s answer, which was that we ought specifically to “value works that encourage connection.” Nelson instead emphasized the importance of exploring the multiplicity of intentions and impacts that an artist’s work can communicate. Whilst I agree with the problematizing of Spahr’s answer, her initial question stuck with me.  What sort of selves do literary works create? More broadly still, what kinds of selves does any manner of artwork create? Nelson went on to describe and warn against what she termed “concept creep,” the movement of a term from one domain of thought (e.g. law) into another (e.g. society). This movement is the force which allows for the formation of metaphors and analogies, to say x is y despite their obvious differences: “time is money,” “knowledge is power” being two commonly used, colloquial examples. I too share Nelson’s concern with such metaphorical equivalences, and wondered: Is this concern indelibly linked to Spahr’s question? How can metaphoricity alter the kinds of selves that artistic works create? What do we stand to lose when employing analogies and metaphors?

What sort of selves do literary works create? More broadly still, what kinds of selves does any manner of artwork create?

There is one vast and heterogeneous group of beings, represented within art forms from literature to cinema, which lend themselves to such a discussion. That is, the nebulous and elusive animal. Much of my work attempts to think through our affectual relationships to, and with, non-human animals. In other words, I am interested in how we influence, care for, love, and shape each other, within and beyond species demarcations. Something that has captured my attention ever since I first engaged in such research is the ease with which animals become metaphorized in interpretations and analyses of art.

Picture the last film you watched or novel you read, and consider the characters played by non-human animals. Personally, I recently rewatched the Oscar-winning drama Anatomy of a Fall (2023) staring Sandra Hüller. The film is an intense rumination on a failing relationship, opening with Sandra’s husband, Samuel, falling to his death out of an upstairs window. The remainder of the film follows Sandra’s subsequent legal battle to prove this was not an act of murder. Their son, Daniel, along with his canine companion, Snoop, are central to this battle, with Daniel giving a last-minute testimony that suggests his father warned him of his plans to commit suicide. This comes in the form of a flashback, where we see Samuel lecturing his son about Snoop:

He’s not so young in dog years. Can you imagine his life? He’s not just any dog. He’s a great dog. An outstanding dog. Think about it. He anticipates your needs, foresees your movements, keeps you safe from danger. He spends his life imagining your needs, thinking about what you can’t see. Maybe he’s tired. Always caring for others. Maybe one day, he’ll be done. That could happen…when it’s time for him to go, he’ll go.

As Daniel summarizes in court, “he meant himself;” Samuel is referring to his own life through this identification with Snoop, and in this sense, Snoop acts as a metaphor for Samuel’s life. However, the character of Snoop is much more than a reference for a human referent, more than an analogous stand-in for Samuel’s life. Snoop is Daniel’s primary interlocutor and companion throughout the traumatic ordeal of losing his father, and whilst coming to terms with the possibility that his mother is a murderer. Snoop is also a character whose existence demands care. For example, to encourage a grieving Daniel out of bed, Sandra urges “It’s beautiful out. Snoop needs to go out too,” attempting to lessen her son’s grief by articulating his intimate, caring, and duty-bound relationship with Snoop. Formally too, the camera occasionally identifies with Snoop’s gaze. Navigating the chaos of police, forensic teams, and family members present in the home immediately after Samuel’s death, the camera tracks Snoop from behind, from a height resembling that of his line of sight. The audience is guided through this scene by Snoop, demanding that we identify with this non-human animal and his experience. As Justine Triet, the film’s director, comments in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Snoop “was not just another character or some animal running around [but] as much a part of the film’s ensemble as any of the other actors.”

However, in discussions and interpretations surrounding the film, we see Snoop understood solely as a metaphor for human characters’ interiority and actions. Popular movie site Film Colossus, in their “Anatomy of a Fall explained,” have filed Snoop under a heading entitled “Important motifs in Anatomy of a Fall,” along with “storytelling” and “P.I.M.P by 50 Cent,” the music that is playing as Samuel falls to his death. We can see here the disjunct between the intent of the artist and their art’s reception, interpretation, and analysis. To paraphrase Sarah Stanbury, in her review article on animal metaphoricity, if we read the animal, in this case, Snoop, “as sign, that is in part because we do not know what to do with…[him] as a beast that walks by [himself].” The decision to read Snoop as a semiotic and metaphorical sign “rests itself on a set of assumptions, not the least of which is the premise that animals are likely to function as signs, and chiefly signs of human behaviors and traits.”

What does critical interpretation bound by the metaphor mean for the formation of multispecies relationships and more-than-human connection?

To return to Nelson, to ask what kinds of literary or, in this case, cinematic, selves a piece of art gives rise to, both within and outside of the world it creates, we must also situate the art in its historical, critical moment. Thinking, as Spahr does, of art that “encourage[s] connection,” what does critical interpretation bound by the metaphor mean for the formation of multispecies relationships and more-than-human connection? What kinds of selves does the readily available metaphoricity of the non-human create? What kinds does it hinder? Does our reading of Snoop as a motif or metaphor obfuscate our understanding of him as a character, and therefore obscure the intimate multispecies relationships of which he is a part?

Rejecting a simplistic figuration of the animal in art, or at least, insisting that the animal necessarily always exceeds mere metaphors or motifs, may require a (re)turn to the animals themselves, not as artistic devices but, as Juno Salazar Parreñas puts it, “real, fleshy, and material bodies.” In such a pursuit, it strikes me as obvious that to alter or supplement how we read and analyze the animal in works of art, we must also struggle to reconfigure societal attitudes to animals more broadly, difficult in a world in which the animal is reduced to bare corporeality, subsumed into commodities to sell in the marketplace. How can we move towards such a reconfiguration?

One move in the right direction can be found in work that highlights the intentional agency of non-human animals. As animal studies scholars Charlotte Blattner, Sue Donaldson, and Ryan Wilcox note,

[Animals] are subject to extreme confinement, deprivation, and violence that profoundly limits their opportunities to act as agents, and this lack of realized agency is then turned around to dismiss them as fungible entities of limited potential for agency or individuality, thereby rationalizing their continued oppression.

In other words, the social and political position of so many animals in our societies, in unimaginably violent and constrained contexts ranging from factory farms to puppy mills, situates them in our collective consciousness as beings that a priori lack agency, individuality, sociality, and character. We have muddled our a priori and our a posteriori, and assign these ‘lacks’ to the nature of the specific animal, rather than to the nature of the limiting conditions they are often subjected to. So many animals in our societies are materially instrumentalized within sites of production and consumption, and when looking at the figurative animal, we see a similar logic of instrumentalization at play in their metaphorization, only this time in a discursive and rhetorical fashion. When attempting to understand dominant interpretations and analyses of animals in art, such social and political context is indispensable, and highlights, as Stanbury writes, that “‘reading animals figuratively’ is in part a learned critical practice.” Because of this, it can be probed, unlearned, questioned, interrogated, and importantly, situated within the broader historical and political moment.

We have muddled our a priori and our a posteriori, and assign these ‘lacks’ to the nature of the specific animal, rather than to the nature of the limiting conditions they are often subjected to.

However, is there anything to be gained from readings that readily metaphorize the animal? Perhaps in the service of multispecies community? I think perhaps there might be, but only if we understand devices such as metaphors as whole discursive ecosystems. In the Film Colossus example mentioned earlier, the writer notes that Snoop “serves as a metaphor for Samuel,” firstly in the story that Daniel tells the court, and secondly, later in the film, “when Sandra curls up in Samuel’s bed and Snoop joins her, taking the place of Samuel.” The referent here is Samuel, the reference is Snoop. The metaphor this rests upon is ‘Samuel is Snoop.’ Even within this reductive reading of the multifaceted character of Snoop, can we understand this simple discursive move as one characterized by intimacy? Perhaps, if we understand it as an imaginative ‘holding together’ of a human and an animal, an equivalence that may, as Stanbury notes, forge “a kind of merger practice or becoming-animal.” However, I believe that this prospective multispecies, even posthuman, intimacy must accompany non-metaphorical readings of animal characters in works of art. Readings which take seriously the fully embodied, affectual, communal, and individual animals who, whilst surely available to be employed as figurative rhetorical devices, must also be respected as characters of their own, as beings worthy of our analysis.

Heather King is a PhD student in the English department at Rice University in Houston, Texas. Her research focuses on human-animal relationships in contemporary cinematic and literary texts, Marxist theory, and questions of care, intimacy, desire, and affect. She holds an MSc in Political Theory from the London School of Economics and Political Science, and is an Editorial Board member at The Philosopher.

Website: https://profiles.rice.edu/student/heather-king

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From The Philosopher, vol. 112, no. 2 ("Violence")

If you enjoy reading this, please consider becoming a patron or making a small donation.

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