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Humor and Politics through the Animal in Cervantes and Leopold

2013; Penn State University Press; Volume: 50; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/complitstudies.50.1.0043

1528-4212

John Beusterien, J. Baird Callicott,

Seventeenth-Century Political and Philosophical Thought

Part of Thomas Hobbes's argument for the need for a social contract, enforced by a sovereign power, depends on a mistaken notion about the human animal. Hobbes thought that the original “natural” state of humanity was a purely animal existence. People once lived like wolves among one another—homo lupus homini—until the accession of a sovereign who then imposed a “civilizing” order.1 Hobbes thus proffers a fundamental misconception about the natural state of humanity: that we lived like animals prior to the signing of a “social contract” ceding absolute power to a sovereign who establishes and enforces a civil order and thus provides a political space in which our potential “humanity” can come to light.Hobbes also proffers a fundamental misconception about animals: that they—one and all—live in a social vacuum. The choice of wolves as a metaphor for the supposed animal-like human existence in the “state of nature” is stunningly ironic. Wolves are quintessential social animals. They hunt cooperatively and share their kills; they rear their young cooperatively; and each pack is ruled by a sovereign, the alpha male.2 Indeed the absolute monarchy that Hobbes believed to be the best form of government more nearly exemplifies homo lupus homini than the “state of nature,” as he imagined it to exist, in which humans lived a “brutish” (that is, animal-like) life that was “solitary” as well as “poor, nasty … and short.”3Extending Karl Marx's critique of Hobbes's brutal assessment of human nature, Giorgio Agamben perceptively underlines the fallacy of the Hobbesian position on political sovereignty with respect to the animal.4 In Agamben's hand, Marx's Homo faber becomes Homo sacer. As Agamben explains, this concept too goes back to Roman law and refers to the man who is ostracized from society, stripped of all civil rights, and legally killable—except not as a religious sacrifice. No civilized state came to exist a posteriori to a state in which humans lived in a constant state of animal-like war—supposing, for the sake of argument, that animals themselves live in a constant state of war with one another. As Michel Serres points out, “war” presupposes a social contract—it is something declared and is often conducted according to “rules of engagement” and “Geneva conventions.” “By definition,” Serres writes, “war is a legal state”; the state of nature is one, rather, of “objective violence.”5In Agamben's analysis, in any case, the animal-human counterpositioning in Hobbes's argument makes no sense. As a matter of anthropological fact, humans never emerged into civilized order out of a social vacuum.6 The advanced civil order envisioned by Hobbes emerged from a more primitive human social order, which emerged in turn from an even more primitive prehuman primate social order. For Agamben, it is necessary to recognize the falsity of this foreshortened Hobbesian chronology of solitary animal existence, instantaneously morphing into an advanced human civil order with the accession of a sovereign. A reconceptualized post-Hobbesian political theory, Agamben argues, must include a radical rethinking of the animal in relation to the human.Agamben argues that the genealogy of the animal needs to be understood differently from the way it is represented in the Hobbesian model. That is, we need to rethink the existence of an animality within the human that preceded the emergence of sovereign states. Agamben offers the notion of “bare life” as a way to articulate his rejection of the idea of a saltatory animal-to-human chronology and suggests a chiasmic coeval interval between the animal and the human that is neither animal nor human. Agamben is not the first European political philosopher to theorize the “bare life,” any more than he is the first to challenge Hobbes's brutal representation of the human state of nature. Walter Benjamin introduces the concept toward the end of his Critique of Violence, while Agamben foregrounds it.7 “Bare life” (Benjamin's bloss leben, Agamben's vita nuda) is a conceptual threshold between the human and the animal and also between life and death. The abyss of incomprehensibility that separates the human and the animal is likened to the human incomprehensibility of death, and both notions are ways of expressing the bare life. And, in an attempt to move beyond the Hobbesian model, Agamben argues for a political model that does not ignore the bare life. Only through bare life can theory and practice be realized at a “messianic banquet of the righteous,” whereat “the relations between animals and men will take on a new form” and whereat “man himself will be reconciled with his animal nature”—outside of the combined straightjacket of the historical task and the anthropocentric machine.8 Agamben insists on the bare life in order to arrive at a new politics: “Until a new politics—that is, a politics no longer founded on the exceptio of naked life—is at hand, every theory and every praxis will remain imprisoned and immobile.”9The first part of this article argues that the story of Sancho Panza and his donkey in part 2 of Don Quijote communicates Agamben's notion of the “bare life.” Specifically, Sancho's relationship with his donkey in the moments after they fall into a pit reveals what Agamben means by the incomprehensibility, but necessity, of the animal-human relationship. What we propose to add to Agamben's thesis is a description of a uniquely Cervantine humorous method in communicating this animal-human relationship. We suggest that Cervantes provides the key to understanding Agamben's message. Cervantine humor, we argue, is the best way to explicate Agamben's notion of the bare life to the reading public. The second part of this article argues that in A Sand County Almanac, Aldo Leopold develops the animal-human relationship prefigured in Don Quijote by means of the same method—humor.Our project may also be seen as a contribution to posthumanism. The metaphysical divide segregating the human—as Cartesian cogito and autonomous Kantian rational being—and the purely physical animal life is challenged both by Cervantes and Leopold. Cervantes was born in the same decade in which Nicholas Copernicus's De revolutionibus was published, and he was an older contemporary of René Descartes. Cervantes critically anticipates the emergence of humanism and presciently mocks it.10 Leopold's masterpiece was published at the midpoint of the twentieth century and may be considered a posthumanist classic. He too mocks the hallmark of humanism, the metaphysical chasm distancing the human from the animal. Both Cervantes and Leopold achieve their critical ends through humor, although their styles of humor are profoundly different. There is a cutting, almost Rabelaisian, edge to Cervantes' satire; Leopold's contains more erudite allusions, is more circumspect, and often is self-disparaging.The use of the Don Quijote in this context needs no justification. It is unquestionably the greatest piece of literature in the Spanish language; some might argue the greatest in any language. But why pair it with an obscure little book by a twentieth-century author whose only other monograph was a 1933 textbook titled Game Management? Published in 1949, A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There was, during its first decade in print, just a cult classic in the insular community of ecologists and conservationists. It garnered a much wider audience in the 1960s, when its capstone essay, “The Land Ethic,” was routinely proffered as a remedy to the “environmental crisis.” Thus the book took its place in the library of the nascent environmental movement of the 1960s and '70s alongside Silent Spring by Rachel Carson and The Quiet Crisis by Stewart Udall. During the 1980s, “The Land Ethic” became the seminal text for the new field of environmental ethics in the discipline of philosophy, while the rest of the essay's literary context—the preceding forty essays—largely went ignored and unexplored. When the field of ecocriticism in the discipline of English literature emerged in the 1990s, the whole of A Sand County Almanac came to be treated as “nature writing,” and as such the book took its place alongside such classic “cabin narratives” as Walden by Henry David Thoreau and The Outermost House by Henry Beston.We contend that the revolutionary, genre-bending core of A Sand County Almanac has still not been fully appreciated. It should be read as a foundational text in the “posthumanist” turn in literary criticism (which includes ecocriticism), feminist studies, culture studies, systems theory, and material culture studies and, as we do here more specifically, as a foundational text in the posthumanist politics of Giorgio Agamben. Leopold puts flesh, as it were, on the bare abstract bones provided by Agamben. Leopold, that is, fleshes out just how “the relations between animals and men will take on a new form,” whereby “man himself will be reconciled with his animal nature.” Looking to continental philosophy for inspiration, self-styled American posthumanists such as Cary Wolfe, Stacy Alaimo, and Jane Bennett have so far neglected the rich literary and philosophical resource Leopold represents.11 By connecting Leopold's A Sand County Almanac with a classic like the Quijote and with the posthumanist political philosophy of Agamben, we hope to remedy that.In part 2 of Don Quijote, Sancho Panza takes on the role of sovereign. As an elaborate practical joke, Don Quijote's proudly illiterate and intemperate “squire” is appointed “governor” of the “island” of Barataria. Despite bad advice on governance from his book-addled knight errant and despite mean tricks played on him by his “subjects” he manages to govern well simply by means of his innate common sense and a native sense of justice. Nonetheless, he abandons his governorship. Upon leaving Barataria, Sancho immediately seeks out the companionship of his beloved animal, a donkey.Scholars often comment on Sancho's donkey from a textual perspective that concerns itself with dating early printed editions. The donkey scene in part 1 aids in dating printed editions since the mysterious disappearance of the donkey in chapter 23 and its mysterious reappearance in chapter 30 in the first 1605 printing of part 1 of Don Quijote is explained in the 1615 edition with extra narrative.12 No scholar, however, has extensively paid close attention to the nature of Sancho's relationship with the animal when he falls in a pit with the donkey in part 2 of Don Quijote.13 After Sancho leaves his post as governor, he returns to his donkey, embraces him and gives him a kiss of peace on the forehead, saying: Venid vos acá, compañero mío y amigo mío, y conllevador de mis trabajos y miserias: cuando yo me avenía con vos y no tenía otros pensamientos que los que me daban los cuidados de remendar vuestros aparejos y de sustentar vuestro corpezuelo, dichosas eran mis horas, mis días y mis años; pero después que os dejé y me subí sobre las torres de la ambición y de la soberbia, se me han entrado por el alma adentro mil miserias, mil trabajos y cuantro mil desasosiegos.(Come here, my companion and friend, comrade in all my sufferings and woes: when I spent time with you and had no other thoughts but mending your harness and feeding your body, then my hours, my days and my years were happy, but after I left you and climbed the towers of ambition and pride, a thousand miseries, a thousand troubles, and four thousand worries have entered deep into my soul.)14 The reader is meant to laugh at Sancho's overly sentimental and heartfelt address to his donkey; he even uses the word “corpezuelo,” a diminutive form of “cuerpo” or “body,” to give the address a heightened sense of the comic endearment he showers on the animal. The reader is also meant to laugh at Cervantine exaggeration—the thousands upon thousands of woes that Sancho experienced as governor. Nonetheless, Cervantes still develops a serious message—that in the past, Sancho only has truly lived when he understood his animal as having been “comrade” to all these sufferings.After the failed experiment of Sancho as governor and his return to his donkey, the animal companion leads him on a path to apparent death. Together they fall into a pit that Sancho imagines will be his tomb: “Aquí habremos de parecer de hambre yo y mi jumento, si no nos morimos antes, él de molido y quebrantado, y yo de pesaroso” (965) (“Here my donkey and I will starve to death, if we don't die first, he because he's bruised and broken, and me because I'm full of grief” [818]). They spend their first night in the pit, after which Sancho despairs even more: Vio Sancho que era imposible de toda imposibilidad salir de aquel pozo sin ser ayudado, y comenzó a lamentarse y dar voces, por ver si alguno le oía; pero todas sus voces eran dadas en desierto, pues por todos aquellos contornos no había persona que pudiese escucharle, y entonces se acabó de dar por muerto. (966)(Sancho saw that it was utterly impossible to get out of the pit without help, and he began to lament and cry out, to see if anyone heard him, but all his shouts were cries in the wilderness, because there was no one to hear him anywhere in the vicinity, and then he began to think of himself as dead. [818]) At this moment of complete lost hope, Cervantes has Sancho employ a comic redundancy: Sancho saw that all chance of leaving the pit was “imposible de toda imposibilidad,” that it was “impossible of all impossibility.” The pleonasm, the superfluous use of the word “impossible,” is not captured in the English translation and brings humor to what appears a deathly serious scene.The humor in the scene highlights an important aspect of recognizing bare life: it is not only a matter of accepting the incomprehensibility of the animal but also of accepting the incomprehensibility of death. One knows that to know the animal is as impossible as the impossibility of knowing death. If Quijote saw visions of his beloved Dulcinea and the characters from his readings in his own experience in a dark pit (the famous account of Don Quijote in the Cave of Montesinos appears a few chapters before Sancho's own cave experience), Sancho sees nothing but death awaiting him. The animal's presence makes Sancho understand approaching death in the sense that it makes Sancho self-aware in the face of his nakedness and barrenness—his “vita nuda,” his bare life. Without the animal, Quijote imaginatively fabricates artificial visions in the Cave of Montesinos; when trapped in his cave Sancho, in contrast, in the presence of his animal, only recognizes death. Sancho does not want to be remembered as governor of Barataria, or even squire of Don Quijote, but for the fact that he died in the company of his dear animal, who also had agency in the sense that the animal also chose Sancho's companionship: “De aquí sacarán mis huesos, cuando el cielo sea servido que me descubran, mondos, blancos y raídos, y los de mi buen rucio con ellos, por donde quizá se echará de ver quién somos, a lo menos, de los que tuvieren noticia que nunca Sancho Panza se apartó de su asno, ni su asno de Sancho Panza” (965) (“They'll take my bones out of here, smooth, white, and scraped bare, and those of my good donkey with them, and maybe that, at least, will let them know who we are if they've heard that Sancho Panza was never parted from his donkey, or his donkey from Sancho Panza” [818]).Sancho's choice for his legacy—his bones mixed with that of a donkey—is intended to be comic. Cervantes plays on the humble, indeed hyperbolically base memorial—one that would contrast with the great legacies of the knights and even squires from the classic chivalric novel. There is also humor in the fact that he chooses to remember his donkey, not his wife, in the epitaph for his tomb, a comic play on Sancho's zoophilia that links to his desire to be by his animal's corpezuelo again.But something quite serious is also at play in Sancho's desire never to be parted from his donkey. The donkey chooses to stay by the human until his death as companion, and Sancho now realizes he never sufficiently appreciated this companionship: “¡Oh compañero y amigo mío, qué mal pago te he dado de tus buenos servicios” (965) (“Oh, my companion and friend, how badly I've paid you for your good service!” [818]). Despite the gravity of the scene with its allusions to death and despair, Cervantes is first and foremost deftly comic. Sancho pleads with his donkey: “Perdóname y pide a la fortuna, en el major modo que supieres, que nos saque deste miserable trabajo en que estamos puestos los dos; que yo prometo de ponerte una corona de laurel en la cabeza, que no parezcas sino un laureado poeta, y de darte los piensos doblados” (965) (“Forgive me, and ask Fortune, in the best way you know how, to take us out of this terrible trouble and I promise to crown your head with laurel so you'll look exactly like a poet laureate, and to give you double rations” [818]). The narrator participates in Sancho's ironic humor by suggesting that the animal would have spoken if Sancho had not crushed his own spirit with his despair: “Desta manera se lamentaba Sancho Panza, y su jumento le escuchaba sin reponderle palabra alguna: tal era el aprieto y angustia en que el pobre se hallaba” (966–67) (“Sancho lamented in this fashion, and his donkey listened without saying a single word in response: such was the distress and anguish in which the poor creature found himself” [818]).The ironic power of these passages derives from the fact that the reader knows that the animal will not speak in a language Sancho will understand, let alone write poetry. Nonetheless, despite the humorous jibe on the impossibility of human-animal union through language, Sancho treats the animal as a beloved companion—although not a human one—on two occasions in the pit. First, he gives it bread when it seems like it is about to die: Estaba el rucio boca arriba, y Sancho Panza le acomodó de modo que le puso en pie, que apenas se podía tener; y sacando de las alforjas, que también habían corrido la mesma fortuna de la caída, un pedazo de pan, lo dio a su jumento, que no le supo mal, y díjole Sancho, como si lo entendiera: “Todos los duelos con pan son buenos.” (966)(The gray was lying on his back, and Sancho Panza moved him around until he had him on his feet, though he could barely stand; he took a piece of bread out of the saddlebags, which had experienced the same unfortunate fall, and gave it to his donkey, who thought it did not taste bad, and Sancho said to him, as if he could understand: “Griefs are better with bread.” [818]) Comically, the bread has experienced a terrible fall, just like Sancho and his donkey. The gray is also humorously anthropomorphized in his response to the bread. The comic anthropomorphizing trope—that is, “not tasting bad”—indicates that the donkey gobbled up the bread. Moreover, Sancho understands that the animal experiences grief—the same sadness in the face of imminent death—just as he does.Sancho pulls out the food to give to the animal at a moment when he also sees himself as potentially starving to death. In this way, Cervantes inverts a long tradition in which the man who faced imminent death from starvation killed and ate his companion animal. In Spain, stories describe Spanish adventurers in the Americas who were forced to kill and eat their horses or dogs in order to survive. Historia de la Nueva México (The History of New Mexico), an epic published in 1610, five years before Don Quijote, records a soldier in New Mexico who tries to kill his dog with the intention of eating it and ends up leaving the dying animal behind.15 Other popular stories from the period not only describe the eating of animals but also of humans. Most famously Ugolino, who is in the lowest reaches of Dante's pit-like inferno, consumes his four small children and then dies of hunger.But such sacrifice of the companion's body never even occurs to Sancho; for Sancho, eating the beloved donkey is out of the question. In this way, Cervantes, in a comic scene, raises his reader's awareness of a deeply serious issue: Sancho has abandoned political power as governor for the relationship with an animal. Agamben is principally concerned with the power of sovereigns to declare a state of emergency and suspend the rule of law by stripping away the civil rights of certain persons, declaring them to be, in effect, Homo sacer and thus reducing them to bare life. This is what the Nazis did to those whom they sent to concentration camps, and this is what the Bush administration did to “enemy combatants” (Homo sacer in other words) whom it sent to Guantánamo—a stateless zone, a true, if dystopian Erewhon. We may read the Quijote through the lens of Agamben's political philosophy and regard Sancho as making a statement of human solidarity with the animal, thus prefiguring posthumanism, when he abandons his sovereignty as governor and joins his animal in the bare life.The second occasion on which Sancho thinks about the animal's welfare on par with his own is when he finds a hole in the pit only big enough for a man to fit through: En esto, descubrió a un lado de la sima un agujero, capaz de caber por él una persona, si se agobiaba y encogía. Acudió a él Sancho Panza, y agazapándose se entró por él y vio que por de dentro era espacioso y largo…. Viendo lo cual volvió a salir adonde estaba el jumento, y con una piedra comenzó a desmoronar la tierra del agujero, de modo que en poco espacio hizo lugar donde con facilidad pudiese entrar el asno, como lo hizo. (966)(And then Sancho discovered that on one side of the pit there was a hole big enough for a person to fit into if he stooped and bent over. Sancho Panza went over to it, crouched down, went in, and saw that on the other side it was spacious and long…. When he saw this he returned to the donkey and with a stone began to dig the earth away from the hole; in a short while he made it large enough for the donkey to pass through, which he did. [818–19]) Although the new passage in the pit that Sancho digs out does not gain them freedom, Sancho has thought once again about the welfare of his animal when he makes a hole large enough for the donkey to pass through. Indeed, Sancho and his gray's relationship repeatedly serves as a humorous focal point. The final scene in the pit occurs when Quijote arrives to the top of the pit and hears a voice coming from the darkness below. Characteristically living in a fantasy world of fiction—grand biblical fiction in this instance—he assumes that it is the voice of a tormented soul in purgatory. Sancho however assures Quijote that he has never died “en todos los días” (968) (“in all the days” [821]) of his life and that the donkey is the proof that he is not dead: “Anoche caí en esta sima donde yago, el rucio conmigo, que no me dejará mentir, pues, por más señas, está aquí conmigo” (968) (“Last night I fell into this pit where I'm lying now, and the gray with me, and he won't let me tell a lie, to be specific, he's here with me now” [821]). The narrator adds: Que no parece sino que el jumento entendió lo que Sancho dijo, porque al momento comenzó a rebuznar, tan recio, que toda la cuerva retumbaba.—¡Famoso testigo! –dijo don Quijote—. El rebuzno conozco, como si le pariera. (968)(It seems as if the donkey understood exactly what Sancho said, because he immediately began to bray, and so loudly that the entire cave resonated.“A famous witness!” said Don Quixote. “I recognize the bray as if it were my own.” [821]) Once again, Cervantes uses the trope of the speaking animal to create humor. Moreover, the sound of the donkey in this scene links to another scene in part 2 when two warring towns literally bray at each other like donkeys. It also connects to the scene at the beginning of part 2 when Sancho and Quijote leave home and Sancho's donkey makes a sighing sound, a euphemism for flatulence like the expression “breaking wind.”16 In this scene, humor is not only based on the debasing sound of the donkey but also on Christian stories of purgatory. Of course the soul of a donkey could not be in purgatory, because Christian anthropocentrism does not recognize the existence of animal souls—proof enough that the human voice is not emanating from purgatory and that if it was Sancho's, then he must not be dead. Despite a passage filled with comic power, Cervantes also returns to the serious question of the animal, its relationship to death, and its relationship to language. It is the animal that delivers Sancho from his death-like state on earth, and his relationship to his animal is Sancho's true governorship, his political model of choice.Sancho Panza is endowed with many characteristics that associate him with the classic medieval caricature of the gluttonous buffoon, especially in part 1 of the Don Quijote. Superficial interpretations of Sancho and his donkey might say that the donkey represents Sancho's carnivalesque qualities since it was a common figure of ridicule, epitomizing stubbornness and stupidity in the Middle Ages—the punished were often either forced to ride on a donkey or to wear donkey ears in public. But a close reader of Cervantes' masterpiece will recognize how the humor forms part of a serious literary purpose. It is not one of mocking disparagement of Sancho Panza as if he were the object of derision at a carnival scene. Beyond a medieval caricature, Sancho and his donkey are each unique persons. Sancho does not forge a political relationship with the citizens of Barataria but instead bonds with a donkey. This relationship forms part of an alternative political model to Sancho's governorship in Barataria in which the animal plays an important role. Sancho's donkey is not “humanized”—although sometimes Cervantes suggests it, he never actually speaks human language; indeed, he doesn't even have a name.17 Nor is the donkey “animalized”—although the tradition is remembered in the humor, the purpose of that humor is not to degrade the donkey as medieval symbol of stubbornness and stupidity. This man and this animal experience the bare life through the comic genius of Cervantes. In doing so, they arrive at a model of a human-animal relationship that paves the way for a better literary understanding of a theory and praxis that is not imprisoned and rendered immobile by the anthropocentric machine.Cervantes and Leopold flourished at times of momentous cultural transitions in Western civilization. Cervantes lived and worked at the moment when the late medieval era was dying and the early modern era was aborning. The central character of Don Quijote is a man who has, in effect, delusionally time-traveled back to the bygone high medieval age of knights in shining armor. His time machine is à la page literature, the romance novel. Aldo Leopold lived and worked at the moment when the late modern era was dying and the postmodern era was aborning. A new science, ecology, and, more profoundly, the second scientific revolution (1905-15)—with its relativity, uncertainty, and complementarity—had emerged when Leopold was a student at Yale and a tenderfoot employee in the U.S. Forest Service. Leopold looks ahead, not back, and his crystal ball is the “subversive science” of ecology. His goal is nothing short of steering Western civilization onto the path to a postmechanistic evolutionary-ecological worldview and a posthumanist politics in which the human is but a “plain member and citizen” with other species in a “biotic community.”18The simple parables of A Sand County Almanac portray the biotic community of central Wisconsin, where Leopold and his family hunted, fished, and practiced ecological restoration at their “week-end refuge from too much modernity.” They called it “the shack” (vii–viii). These “shack sketches” provide the reader with much ecobiological information, by means of which they might enrich their own experiences of their own environments. But they also subtly portray an intersubjective as well as an objective biotic community. They show the bare life of both the animals and the human. For the world that Leopold reveals is far from the polis; it is the dim world at dawn and at twilight in which the animal and the human shape-shift and merge into one psychic as well as one physical continuum.Leopold had no donkey, nor had he a horse, but he always had a dog for a companion in the chase. In one sketch, “Red Lanterns,” Leopold inverts the human-animal relationship in regard to intelligence: The dog, when he approaches the briars, looks around to make sure that I am within gunshot. Reassured, he advances with stealthy caution, his wet nose screening a hundred scents for that one scent…. He is the prospector of the air, perpetually searching its strata for olfactory gold. Partridge scent is the gold standard that relates his world to mine.My dog, by the way, thinks I have much to learn about partridges, and, being a professional naturalist, I agree. He persists in tutoring me, with the calm patience of a professor of logic, in the art of drawing deductions from an educated nose. I delight in seeing him deduce a conclusion, in the form of a point, from data that are obvious to him, but speculative to my unaided eye. Perhaps he hopes that one day his dull pupil will learn to smell. (63–64) We choose to begin our discussion of Leopold's use of humor as a means by which to collapse the distance between the human and animal with this charming vignette about Leopold's bird dog because the dog, like Sancho Panza's donkey, is a domesticated animal. In this instance, Leopold's humor is of the self-deprecating sort and typically ironic, but very gently so. Leopold himself was in fact a professor. And when he agrees that he has much to learn about partridges, he refers not to the hopeless task of learning to smell them as we