During recent decades literary representations of human-canine relationships have been caught up in a re-evaluation which has occurred across numerous scientific, semi-scientific and philosophical discourses, the general characteristics of which include a rejection of the traditional anthropocentric Judaeo-Christian concept of human uniqueness and supremacy, and an erosion of the barriers between human and non-human animals.
In her article 'Heavy Petting' Marjorie Garber writes: 'In literature and popular culture, psychology, animal behaviour and fashion, 1994 was clearly The Year of the Dog.' (11) This trend has only escalated over the past several years. Dogs are emphatically the most common animal species to be utilised in crossover texts of the kind examined here.
This essay examines three post-war texts, each of which posits a fundamental mode of equality between the principal human and canine characters. J.R. Ackerley's autobiographical My Dog Tulip (1956), based on his relationship with his dog Queenie, features a type of emotional egalitarianism, and a passionate concern for canine civil rights (discussion is occasionally focused on Ackerley's subsequent novel We Think the World of You, which is based largely on the same autobiographical material.) James Herbert's novel Fluke (1977), whose narrator is a human reincarnated as a dog, subverts religious anthropocentrism, and posits a spiritual mode of equality between human and non-human animals. Lastly, A.R. Gurney's play Sylvia (1995) uses verbal language as an egalitarian mode: its canine protagonist interacts verbally with the humans in the play. These are the primary modes of the respective texts, but each modality is represented to a greater or lesser extent in every text.
Sylvia, My Dog Tulip and Fluke each contain iconoclastic, anti-anthropocentric themes, and, in the tradition of Call of the Wild represent canines as a conduit for instinctual perceptions, and as a symbol of natural forces. In each of these texts a human character participates in a species-blurring process of affiliation, which involves a rejection of majoratorian ethics, and a personal transformation or liberation. In certain important respects these transformations are consistent with Deleuze and Guattari's concept of Becoming-animal - a philosophical idea which is in itself intrinsically anti-anthropocentric.
The original publication of these texts ranges across 38 years. With the exception of the episodic, essay-styled My Dog Tulip, each has been adapted to film within the past decade, recruited to satisfy an ever-increasing demand for human-canine crossover narratives. We Think the World of You was filmed in 1989, Fluke in 1995, and Gurney is presently preparing a movie script of Sylvia for a production featuring Steve Martin and Sarah Jessica Parker. Attention will be concentrated on the original versions of each text, which employ a radicalness of approach and a capacity to shock which has been somewhat ameliorated in the film adaptations to date.
The reason for the overwhelming popularity of canines in crossover texts of the kind examined here might lie in the associations of hybridity which surround the domestic canine. White Fang; half dog, half wolf, is perhaps the most widely known or archetypal hybrid canine in literature, but as the animal which has accompanied us most closely on our journey of domestication, the domestic dog is inscribed with notions of marginality and hybridity; between human and wolf, between civilisation and wilderness, and between the verbal and the pre-linguistic.
In positing modes of equality between their human and canine characters, recent texts mirror an increasingly egalitarian social attitude towards dogs and animals in general. As Marjorie Garber puts it, 'The social integration of dogs into human culture is at an all time high' (1995, 23). The post-Darwinian dog is converging upon the post-modern human, and the process has given rise to a genre of narratives which challenge the classical Scala Naturae, or 'ladder of nature'; set in a zone where the edifice of species as an affiliative barrier is becoming unstable.
An analogous process is detectable in a number of other discourses and disciplines. Over the past two decades the question of whether non-human animals possess human-like consciousness has become a contentious ethical issue in the field of animal research. The debates surrounding this issue have produced a very large, and steadily growing body of articles which could be categorised as anti-anthropocentric. For example, primate researcher Frans de Waal recently published an article which asks 'Are we in Anthropo-denial?' He defines this phrase as 'a blindness to the humanlike characteristics of other animals, or the animal-like characteristics of ourselves' (53).
A similar tendency has become apparent in recent decades in non-scientific or semi-scientific writing about animals. Whereas clinical researchers are questioning the idea of a human monopoly on consciousness, naturalists and nature writers are beginning to subvert the absoluteness of genetic barriers. They have begun to concentrate on mutual characteristics and behaviours which connect humans with other animal species, irrespective of the genetic disparity involved. This approach is used perhaps most frequently when comparing humans with wild canines. Peter Steinhardt, a columnist for Audoubon, and author of numerous wildlife books, believes that in several fundamental respects humans are more similar to wolves than to their own ancestors. In his 1995 book The Company of Wolves he claims: 'long ago we diverged from chimpanzees and gorillas, and we have been shaped by different habits.' We evolved, Steinhardt says, like wolves, and we are drawn to them 'because no other animal is so like us'. (xvi) Even Konrad Lorenz, who elsewhere declares the inordinate esteem of non-human animals to be 'satanic' and 'sheer blasphemy' (68), admits that 'In a certain respect, the dog is more 'human' than the cleverest monkey' (137).
The tendency to focus on mutual characteristics rather than exclusively upon species and physical forms has a philosophical analog in Deleuze and Guattari's concept of Becomings-animal. In A Thousand Plateaus they state: .
'The rat and the man are in no way the same thing, but
Being expresses them both in a single meaning in a
language that is no longer of words, in a matter that is
no longer of forms, in an affectability that is no longer
that of subjects. Unnatural participation.' (258)
With its blasphemous, anti-humanist and anti-anthropocentric connotations, the idea of 'unnatural participation' is a recurring theme in the discussion of the animal-human relationships presented by Fluke, My Dog Tulip, and Sylvia.