Memorializing Animals during the Romantic Period by Chase Pielak (review)

“Beasts matter,” announces Chase Pielak in the first pages of his deeply textured Memorializing Animals during the Romantic Period. Beasts, or nonhuman animals, as Pielak defines them, indeed deserve reexamination. While deploying the animal as a means to reveal what constitutes the human is not novel per se (arguably, it is in vogue in contemporary studies of Romanticism), the angle of approach taken by Pielak exposes heretofore buried critiques on some of the most familiar Romantic-era works. “It is from the grave that this animal investigation begins” (Pielak 5). Using Derrida and Agamben as well as Akira Lippit and Ron Broglio as theoretical touchstones, Memorializing Animals studies both dead and deadly beasts—from Byron’s iconic Newfoundland dog and the weighty albatross of Coleridge, to the more pastoral animalia found in the poetry of Clare and Lamb, and on to the seductive horrors of Keats’s “ Lamia” and “Geraldine.” Pielak effectively narrows our focus onto a very specific and, until now, largely unstudied type of animal material, in order to exhume (as he calls it) a broader view of its effect on our interpretations of Romanticism, its writers, and its audiences past and present.

This book convincingly reveals that, yes, beasts matter. They clearly must be exhumed in the Romantic mode, given a second look in order to comprehend the crucial role such animals play in the construction and preservation of both the human and human memory (4). On the one hand, animals present an insurmountable physicality. Meaning, several of the nonhuman animals covered in this work were in fact once-living companion animals and enclosed domestic labor, or they were distilled from wild, chance encounters. This very real status cannot be ignored, and consequently forces another reassessment of the value of biographical and historical data in light of creative (re)production. More importantly, such insistent physicality begs the reader to encounter the matter of animals as “meaning-making surfaces”—and, in turn, just as reflective of the beasts inside us as those that litter (quite literally) the literary ground of Romanticism (11). On the other hand, such re-presented animals can only ever be constructions, memorials “twice over” because always already shaped by the author-poet, who by definition must also be an observer (135). Cause and effect become fairly well entangled, so that the animal is both producer and product, the muse and its inspired work. Agency becomes as convoluted as the voice that heralds it. While formal distinctions can be (and are) made by Pielak between the voice of the narrator and the voice of a poem’s participants, as he memorably describes in Coleridge’s “To a Young Ass,” for example, attempting to separate the action in the poem versus the action of the poem discloses language as the necessary mechanism of contagion: “We, the captive spectators, are to turn, to embrace life—having engaged the deadly beast” through the language of the poem (85). In other words, the animal is pivotal to the construction of certain works of Romantic poetry because it is at once an actualized thing (even if such actualization is revealed through absence) and a marker of this selfsame thing’s contingent relationship with the poet-creator. Thus in Wordsworth’s “Fidelity,” as Pielak argues in the book’s final chapter, “the poet tells a story about the words themselves that tell of the dog. ‘Fidelity’ turns out to be an obituary about the dog, all the while telling the story of a now long-dead and yet nevertheless speaking poet” (135).

Memorializing Animals is an important book about the stakes of language, of poetic construction, and accordingly about the powerful acts of speech that serve to cast up monuments of ourselves through the animals we share our place with. Pielak reenergizes conversations about animal husbandry, the ethics of dependence, encounter, and our anxieties therewith, and the roles that death, the dead, and our burial practices play in compositions of remembrance—in the...