Of Humans, Pigs, Fish and Apes: The Literary Motif of Human-Animal Metamorphosis and its Multiple Functions in Contemporary Fiction

[…] she would try
To stretch her arms, she had no arms to stretch.
Would she complain, a moo came from her throat,
A startling sound—her own voice frightened her.
[…]
Her tears rolled down; if only words would come,
She'd speak her name, tell all, implore their aid.
For words her hoof traced letters in the dust—
I, O—sad tidings of her body's change.²

The story of the beautiful Io, whom Jupiter transforms into a cow to hide his affair with her from his wife Juno and who, shedding bitter tears, manages to reveal her true identity to her father by tracing her name in the ground with her hoof, is just one of many instances of human-animal transformation in Ovid's Metamorphoses. The Metamorphoses, beyond doubt part of the canon of Western literature, has inspired many authors throughout the centuries, and it still constitutes an interesting touchstone for a discussion of literary representations of human-animal transformation in texts written in the second half of the twentieth century. The frequent explicit intertextual references to Ovid in recent literary representations of metamorphoses is evidence of the lasting impact of the Metamorphoses on Western literature and culture.

The depiction of the metamorphosis in the story of Io shares a number of features with the stories about human-animal transformations that we will examine in more detail in this article. Firstly, the tension between radical physical changes on the one hand and the individual's mental and psychological state on the other hand constitutes a focal point of many stories about metamorphoses.³ The being that undergoes a process of transformation may either retain human feelings and thoughts beneath its animal appearance, as Io obviously does, or the metamorphosis may affect the mental level as well, bringing about novel or alien ways of perceiving the world. Secondly, the story of Io, like other stories of human-animal transformation in Ovid's Metamorphoses, suggests that the animal the human being is turned into somehow resembles the individual who has been transformed. Io, for example, apparently retains part of her beauty even as a cow.⁴ Thirdly, Io's attempt to communicate with her father and to let him know what has happened points to difficulties with the use of language, which are often addressed in twentieth-century fiction as one of the consequences of a metamorphosis. In the novels we discuss here, the individual's struggle to explain his or her transformation by means of language either takes place among the characters, that is, on the story level, or is situated on the level of narrative transmission, involving a homodiegetic narrator striving to explain his or her metamorphosis to a narratee.

Above and beyond these three issues associated with the motif of human-animal metamorphosis, a fourth important aspect of this motif is, of course, its potential to raise questions about the relationship between human beings and animals. Involving what is presumably the most intimate connection between human beings and animals imaginable, the depiction of a human-animal transformation is virtually bound to challenge culturally dominant assumptions about animals as the 'other' of humankind. This function is what makes the motif of human-animal metamorphosis particularly interesting from the point of view of current ecocritical approaches. Especially in recent fiction, the transformation of a human being into an animal is not necessarily seen in entirely negative terms, and this has interesting implications as far as the conceptualization of the relationship between human beings and animals, or even nature in general, is concerned. The relationship between human beings and animals has repeatedly been redefined by anthropology and biology. Charles Darwin's writings, for example, challenged the supremacy of man and induced a radical rethinking of the human-animal relationship. Since the 1970s, the ecological movement has contributed to a further fundamental reevaluation of the status of animals in relation to humankind and has in particular brought forth a vision of a fragile interdependence between human culture and non...