Rational Elephants or Hominoid Apes: Which is Early Modern?

This perspective on the term "early modern" as it is used in literary studies is based on two assumptions. The first one is that the term strongly privileges modernity, either by pointing forward toward modernity on behalf of the literary culture of the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, or by using key categories associated with modernity to understand those earlier periods. Second, the discussion here assumes that concrete literary cultural phenomena that demonstrate either proximity or distance between modernity and the so-called "early modern period" are strategically useful in gauging the relevance of the phrase that we are seeking to evaluate.

What are the key connections that underlie the privileging of modernity from the perspective of the category "early modern"? Most frequently, the literary culture of the earlier periods in question is drawn into the purview of modernity through its imaginative engagement with one or more of the major historical shifts that distinguish the medieval from the modern period—the political, social, and economic changes evident in the rise of enclosure, agricultural innovation, mercantile capitalism, imperialism, slavery, private property, credit, consumption, commodification, and nationalism, to name a few. This historical context, and the argument that these changes lead directly to modernity, have exerted a powerful shaping force on the development of the category of the early modern. Thus Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse characterize this period as an era of "startling and profound" transformations that create a connection between "intellectual and artistic practice" (7) and "the onset of modernity" (23).

The term "early modern," then, reflects an engagement with change on the part of literary studies, and in turn pushes the analysis of the literary culture of this period toward the discovery of revolution or novelty. The human-animal relation offers a focal point for a practical trial of this engagement with revolution. In intellectual history, questions about the definition of the human parallel those political, social, and economic changes that have come to shape the definition of the early modern. These questions emerge pointedly in connection with ideas about and representations of animals in imaginative literature. As historians have recently demonstrated, the so-called "early modern period" can be shown to contain fundamental shifts in the perception of the natural world that are based on new developments in natural history, empirical science, and biological classification, and include, in Keith Thomas's words, a "narrowing gap" (117) between human and animal, which in turn shapes some of the key ontological debates of modernity. Each of the two test cases that follow takes the imaginative representation of animals as an exemplary thesis—a concrete exploration of what is at stake in the use of the concept of early modern to describe the past.

I

The paradigm for the human-animal relation in the period from 1550 to 1750 differs sharply from the modern paradigm in two major ways. First, it uses narratives of magical transformations in order to compare humans with animals and to challenge common conceptions of human nature. Second, earlier writers view a variety of non-apes, including the elephant, pig, and horse, as crucial figures for defining human nature. To understand the human-animal relation in this period, modern readers must leave behind Darwinian notions about the transformation of species and the special status of the ape as the closest relative of the human. Since the term "early modern" might obscure these differences, "pre-modern" may be a more effective category for the human-animal relation in this period.

The pre-modern tradition of transformation narratives adapts a dialogue by Plutarch; this recursion to a classical model attests to the enduring value of concepts such as "Renaissance" and "Neo-Classical," which describe these particular narratives more accurately than "early modern" would. Plutarch's dialogue "Bruta Animalia Ratione Uti" is itself an adaptation of the Circe episode from Homer's Odyssey.¹ In Plutarch's innovative re-telling, a character named Gryllus, who has been transformed from a human into a pig, temporarily regains the capacity for speech. Although Odysseus attempts to persuade Gryllus to accept...