Each of the texts discussed here employs its own distinctive style of anti-anthropocentrism, governed mainly by the modes of equality it utilises. Aristotle's Scala Naturae, the Descartian view of non-human animals as soulless automata; the traditional position of Judaeo-Christianity and western philosophy on animal-human relationships each relies upon a firm demarcation between the animal and the human. Each of the texts rejects that opposition, and in deconstructing it, establishes one or more fundamental modes of equality - linguistic, physical, spiritual, emotional or civic - in which the human and canine characters interact as equals. In this chapter each of these modes is discussed in turn, focusing on how each modality brings to light the text's egalitarianism, and its resistance to the species barriers maintained by majoratarian anthropocentric culture.
Sylvia is the only one of the texts in which human and canine actually speak to each other, and is also the only text which employs language as an egalitarian mode. The way in which this operates is not straightforward. As suggested in chapter two, the play - on paper, if not in performance - is deliberately ambiguous about what is actually happening when Greg, Sylvia and Kate 'speak' to each other. I suggested that at times Sylvia's lines may represent Greg's interior monologue, and that much of what is said between man and dog amounts to a verbal representation of non-verbal communication. Whatever the modality at the root of Greg's and Sylvia's dialogue, the important fact in this context is that it is presented as a true dialogue, under whose terms Greg does not possess some linguistic or intellectual advantage over Sylvia. Whether the mode of the transmission of these communiqu�s is meant to be taken literally or as a symbolic representation of non-verbal interaction, man and dog are represented participating in a mode of exchange in which they are equally skilled, and which levels many important differences between them. It is the single aspect of Sylvia which contains the greatest subversive potential: the presentation of a dog who possesses an equal franchise upon the mode of communication most traditionally posited as proof of human uniqueness and supremacy.
When Greg tells Sylvia he has agreed to send her away, she responds by saying, "Jesus, you're something, Greg. You really are. You bring me home, you get me all dependent on you...", and goes on to add, "You had me spayed Greg. You destroyed my womanhood!" (123) The manipulation of language in this exchange is particularly sophisticated and subversive. Sylvia's use of the word 'womanhood' means that she colludes in her own anthropomorphisisation, demanding that the human characters and the audience regard her as an equal. She possesses human language and employs it as a weapon. This effect can only be intensified by the fact that Sylvia of course, appears to be a woman - which constitutes Sylvia's second means of removing species barriers. The play employs a physical mode of equality, by turning a dog into a woman; reducing canine and human to a common physical type or template.
The physical mode is more subtle insofar as its effects on an audience is concerned. There is no attempt to 'disguise' the actor as a dog, in the sense of makeup or costume. The physical impression of caninity is achieved solely through her use of body language. It is clear from reviews of Sylvia that the sheer iconic presence of a human being being a dog is compelling. Vincent Canby of The New York Times, reviewing the Manhattan Theatre Club's production, with Sarah Jessica Parker as Sylvia, writes:
Forget Lassie, Lad, Rin Tin Tin, Benjy, Asta and ever-
reliable old Nana. I've never seen a dog portrait in films
or on the stage that quite match the truth and wit of
Ms. Parker's performance... How she does it, I'm not
quite sure. She certainly doesn't look like a dog...
Robin Usher of The Herald Sun, reviewing the Melbourne Theatre Company's production, agrees that given the absence of any attempt to make Sylvia look canine, Rachel Grifiths 'could never be a dog', and yet the effect is 'magic'. Writing in The Australian, Helen Thomson agrees: 'it is impossible to take your eyes off her whenever she is on stage.'
The most audacious, subversive and above all the most successful aspect of Sylvia's representation of hybridity is that it eschews any attempt to mimic caninity through gross physical transformation, but relies entirely on the deeper psychic transformation suggested by the actor's performance itself. The illusion is maintained precisely because there is no illusion to see through; there is only behaviour, and behaviour is, in a sense, irreducibly real. You cannot 'see through' an action. By making its human and canine characters physically identical at the level of species, Sylvia focuses on qualities rather than on forms. It suggests that a human and a dog are defined in terms of what they do, and that when true communication exists between human and canine, to borrow a phrase from a 19th century zoology text, 'the thing species does not exist'. The homogeneity of forms presented in Sylvia posits a daring type of egalitarianism. The physical dimensions of the romantic triangle which the play constructs between Sylvia, Greg and Kate are equilateral.
Whereas Sylvia employs physical identity as a device for dismantling barriers between human and non-human, the essence of Fluke's attack on cultural anthropocentrism is that species is irrelevant.
Fluke's governing mode is that of spiritual equality, or at least of spiritual continuity, and consequently the text is more directly religious in its iconoclasm. As noted already, Fluke effectively inverts the Judaeo-Christian Scala Naturae along an axis reminiscent of Deleuze and Guattari's sequence of Becomings. The inversion is not however an exact mirror-image of the Aristotelian model, because it erodes the distinction between human and non-human animals, making species more like points along a continuum, rather than discrete, digital, Darwinian entities.
Fluke does not do away with physical species. In retains one characteristically Christian, post-Edenic distinction between human and non-human, in that humans appear to be excluded from the universal, telepathic communication which exists between other animal species. Fluke interacts with cats, rats, a fox, a frog and a badger, amongst others. The only time that communication of this sort occurs between human and non-human characters however, is in the context of the narrative itself, related by Fluke to a dying tramp, whose marginal condition has rendered him receptive to animal telepathy: Fluke tells him 'I think your closeness to death has made our communication possible' (188). This statement points toward the egalitarian concept at the core of Fluke - the principal that souls do not possess species, even if bodies do. The badger tells Fluke, "There are no rules as to which species we're born into" (150).
Ackerley employs a similar mode of equality in My Dog Tulip, and to much the same ends, except that, with its emphasis on mortality and the importance of celebrating life, Ackerley's book is entirely secular in approach. Its anti-anthropocentric impetus is channelled via the mode of emotional equality. By the standards of the conservative English morality which Ackerley rejects in celebrating Tulip, however, it is ultimately just as blasphemous and iconoclastic as Fluke.
Ackerley was an atheist, and the egalitarianism which informs My Dog Tulip is not 'spiritual' in the religious sense of the word, however the following passage from a letter Ackerley wrote to E.M. Forster, some months after Queenie's death, shows the type of religious system of Ackerley would have approved:
I wish I believed in an afterlife... that kind of sweet afterlife
believed in by the Hindoos, in which great love brings
souls together again. I would have immolated myself as
a suttee when Queenie died. For no human
being would I ever have done such a thing, but by my
love for Queenie I would have been irresistibly
compelled.
....With open arms I would have cast myself through after
her and our bright spirits, disencumbered by our aged,
hampering bodies, would have bounded off joyfully
together over the Elysian Fields. (379)
The afterlife Ackerley wishes he believed in is one which shares the spiritual mode of equality proposed in Fluke. It is an afterlife in which species does not constitute a barrier between souls. Additionally it is a system in which the motive force is love, which again, operates irrespective of species. Accordingly, the mode of equality Ackerley employed in My Dog Tulip, a text which basically eschews religion and anthropomorphism, is emotion, and specifically, love. In his biography of Ackerley, Peter Parker writes:
'Rosamond Lehmann went straight to the heart of the
relationship between Ackerley and Queenie when she
described My Dog Tulip as 'the only "dog
book" I know to record a human-animal love in terms
of absolute equality between the protagonists.'' (264) (italics in original.)
The emotional egalitarianism of My Dog Tulip impressed Marjorie Garber such that in both her article 'Heavy Petting' and subsequent book 'Dog Love' she refers to it in the context of sexologist Alfred Kinsey's alleged belief 'that a man might fall passionately in love with his dog, and that the affection could be returned in kind' (1996:132) ' "Love" ', she writes, 'is the word invariably used by both Ackerley and his friends to describe his and Queenie's relationship.' (1995: 25)
Ackerley writes In My Dog Tulip: 'this history... concerns itself with the canine heart' (94), and it is true that it is Tulip rather than Ackerley himself who is the principal subject of the text. Nevertheless I have already cited several passages from My Dog Tulip in which the intensity of Ackerley's devotion is clear, and there are further examples: his 'obsessive fear' that he would lose the absolute and singular devotion of his 'savage lover and protector' (26); his acute desire for her to be happy, reiterated frequently in statements such as 'I wish her to have absolutely everything she wants' (131); his comment, ''She is my friend, an honored member of my household. Years of devotion, years of habit, bind us together.' (139), and his admission, when Tulip continually rejects all of her prospective mates: 'I felt, indeed, extremely sympathetic towards Tulip's courtiers (I would have been after the pretty creature myself, I thought, if I had been a dog)' (88) (Of course, Ackerley has already admitted he considers himself 'a proper dog' - and was not being merely flippant. Nearly a decade later he wrote a violently anti-anthropocentric essay for the Japanese magazine Orient/West, entitled 'I am a Beast' (404)). The final mode explored by these texts is that of civic equality, although it is perhaps more accurate to say that both Sylvia, My Dog Tulip and to some extent We Think the World of You posit egalitarian modes which illuminate the absence of canine civil rights in the texts, and in the real world. Again, the topic emerges because of the respective texts' anti-anthropocentric momentum. Dogs are shown as equals in one or more modes, which contrasts with the lack of egalitarianism evidenced by their legal and civil status. In confronting us with this dissonance the texts articulate a contradiction which zoologist James Serpell discusses in In the Company of Animals: that the modern treatment of non-human animals by humans involves a paradoxical regard for them as people on the one hand, and as utilitarian objects on the other.
What the verbal and intellectual modes of equality which govern Sylvia highlight is that Greg and Kate possess a social and even a legal advantage over Sylvia; one which remains unaltered from the 'real world'. Sylvia's fate is something which is ultimately sorted out by the human characters alone, and her tenuous ability to influence it resides solely in her capacity to become emotionally indispensable to Greg. The modes of equality which Sylvia adopts create a potentially disturbing question about the status of dogs in the world of the play, and in our own world. In Sylvia dogs essentially qualify as 'people' in the same sense that humans do: humans and dogs are portrayed as mentally equal, and are shown engaging in intimate verbal communication, yet the dogs in Sylvia remain legally subject to the whim of their owners. This dissonance generally remains low-key; it is not elevated to a thematic level, but its presence is reinforced by sequences such as this, where Greg is trying to talk Kate into keeping Sylvia:
GREG
(calling to KATE)
Think of her as an American, Kate!
(to Sylvia)
Canus Americanus, that's Sylvia.
SYLVIA
I pledge allegiance
(Brooklyn accent)
I solemnly swear. (15)
Whether or not an audience thinks this scene is funny, it presents them with an appealing and fully sentient character who is capable of swearing allegiance to the flag; capable of satisfying one of the widely-known requirements of American citizenship. Having suggested to its audience, by use of this emotionally loaded image, that Sylvia deserves the same civil rights as any American human, the abuse of those rights later in the play has a considerable capacity to shock. Greg becomes jealous when Sylvia has sex with Tom's dog Bowser, and she is sent away to be sterilised, without even being consulted, and without being told the specific nature of the operation. Greg tells her, 'Jesus you're a slut, Sylvia. You're a promiscuous slut. It's under the knife for you, kid. First thing.' (95) The scene which shows her recovering from the effects of the operation, where she complains, 'I feel like a gutted turkey', and Tells Greg, 'I wish I knew what you did to me, you prick' (96) , while he and Kate discuss what else is to be done with her, is genuinely disturbing. No amount of contextual comedy can wholly undercut the guilt, betrayal and injustice which the scene evokes. Similarly, if we accept that Sylvia is a sapient being, her claim of what goes at the dog pound connotes the horror of a concentration camp. She tells Kate, 'They don't broadcast it, but... if someone doesn't bail you out, normally within five working days, then they put you to sleep.... They do! They kill you!' (22)
The potency of these scenes derives from the canine-human equality established at the verbal and intellectual level, and the fact that this is not translated into legal egalitarianism, or canine civil rights. Again it is the levelling effect of the play's physical and linguistic modes of equality which set up this dissonance, by investing Sylvia with every apparent pre-requisite of citizenship and civil rights, and then withholding those rights, turning her back into an object; a sentient possession.
The dissonance which informs this scene from Sylvia is representative of the rising status of canines as people in modern animal texts, and perhaps the fact that, as Garber puts it, 'the social integration of dogs into human culture is at an all time high'. The moral dilemma which surrounds Greg's treatment of Sylvia mirrors the real-life moral and ethical arguments about pet ownership currently being espoused by groups such as PETA. The same concerns are addressed by Ackerley in My Dog Tulip.
Unlike Sylvia, My Dog Tulip does not deploy verbal language or intelligence as modes of equality. The narrative reflects Ackerley's desire to depict the un-anthropomorphised 'beastliness' of dogs - and yet it is a book which, even by comparison with the other texts considered here, is much concerned with the civil rights of dogs: its appendix, with its advocacy of canine sexual freedom is almost wholly concerned with the subject.
Ackerley suggests from the outset that Tulip deserves to be granted the same sorts of rights as any human, and provides repeated images of those rights being violated, typically by authority figures of various kinds, from the bus conductor in 'The Turn of the Screw', to the 'ex-Army man, a Major', in the first chapter, who demonstrates 'dashing military tactics' when Tulip fails to co-operate in a vet's surgery. He 'swooped upon her and beat her about the body with his bare hands' (13). Shortly afterwards Ackerley relates another traumatic episode during which another vet tapes Tulip's mouth shut. Ackerley's describes this aggressive act as cutting off 'her powers of speech' - a rare anthropomorphic image, and one clearly designed to activate the same connotations of human civil rights that Sylvia's pledge of allegiance deploys.
The political and anti-anthropocentric aspects of My Dog Tulip were not altogether lost on critics at the time of its first publication. Punch described the book in their 1956 review as 'amongst other things, a beautiful plea for the understanding of the sexual nature of bitches' (Parker: 327), and the publishers included a blurb warning that My Dog Tulip was 'a book likely to offend those who care more for themselves than their dogs.' What makes My Dog Tulip's defence of canine rights radical is that Ackerley's appeals are delivered without any attempt to justify Tulip on human terms. The text rejoices in Tulip's Otherness, and its governing mode of equality is that of emotional affiliation between a human and a beast who remains emphatically beastly; who refuses, as E.M. Forster puts it, to be 'an appendage of man.' This defiant anti-anthropocentrism is addressed in detail in the final chapter, which deals with the iconoclastic material presented by each of the texts.