Why the (Animal) Essay Matters

What, If Anything, Is an Animal Essay? Literary animals are peculiarly unstable and iridescent, unabashedly uninterested in settling down so that writers may take their pictures, let alone make their faithfully scripted portraits of them. As far as literary nonfiction is concerned, their appearances possess what we might call a biological vividness, a sort of zoological residue rendered particularly interesting by the peculiar status of literary nonfiction, being a borderline realm between fiction and faithfulness to facts. To call a literary item an ‘animal essay’ does not need particular explanation other than to point out, of course, that it is not mere animal presence that distinguishes an essay as such. Since the essay configured itself, in its secular history, as the genre through which a writer can ‘[say] almost everything about almost anything’, the choice of talking about an animal must in a certain sense harness tightly to the essay’s constituent features in order to be so categorized. It is this sort of essay that will be explored in the first segment of this chapter. Human–animal encounters provide a suitable terrain for the essay since they appeal to the genre’s constitutive in-betweennessand hybrid nature, loitering at the crossroads between Kunst and Wissenschaft. As a form benefiting (in theory) from critical approaches proper to both poles, the essay can uncover the substantial consonance between human and nonhuman which (in practice) could cease to be considered two dichotomic entities but enjoy instead a relationship more akin to a superimposition of ‘tectonic plates with multiple, variable, unpredictable, even seismic movements between – and within – them’. When facing an animal, essayists are interested in a Baconian advancement of learning that, although starting from ascertainable facts, relies primarily on a particular human involvement with (and within) the natural world. Rather than the pile of quantifiable findings, they are keener on retracing the threads of their own experience during their natural raids into the foreign. The duality of the knowledge offered by an animal essay can be read against the backdrop of David Hume’s famous image of the essayist as ‘a kind of resident or ambassador from the dominions of learning to those of conversation’. Freed from the bounds of zoological objective research, the essay’s hybrid treatment of a hybrid matter celebrates the explorative spirit recognized as the hallmark nd historiographic inheritance of the essay as a genre since its birth in Renaissance France. Without the encumbrance of detailed and branched displays of data, the essay metamorphoses the animal into a sort of metaphorical ‘foreign country’ that needs charting, in a manner similar to that ‘home cosmography’ that was so peculiar to the genre’s early modern practitioners. The preliminary focus of this chapter will be a literary outline of the animal essay starting from a theoretical reflection on how two of the most recognizable features of the genre are affected by the encounter with the radical alterity of the animal. This is followed by an examination of three contemporary attitudes adopted by contemporary essayists towards the animal world.