Ironic Animals: Bestiaries, Moral Harmonies, and the ‘Ridiculous’ Source of Natural Rights

Abstract

The Bible recounts that in Eden, Adam gives names to all the animals. But those names are not only representations of the animals’ nature, rather they shape and constitute it. The naming by Adam contains in itself the divide between the human and non-human. Then, there is the Fall: Adam falls and forgets Being. Though he may still remember the names he gave to the animals in Eden, he is no longer sure about their meaning. Adam will have to try to remember his own intentions. Through this effort he can also become aware of how he thinks, who he is, and what was the natural order he knew before the Fall. Medieval bestiaries tell us this story. Bestiaries are works of word play populated by animal figures. They depend on back-and-forth anthropomorphization, or circular metaphor. Animal figures are portrayed as both a mirror of human nature and a window on it. Bestiaries served as means for the moral education of human beings and, at the same time, a way to criticize the current state of humanity, including political and ethical habits. Within the moral irony of medieval bestiaries we can find the origin of the invented nature that modernity will try, subsequently, to insert into natural rights discourse through the teleological oxymoron of their naturalized and naturalizing counter-factuality (natural rights will be simultaneously “being” and “ought,” nature and values/ends). I will propose a historical-semiotic journey through the ironic representations of the human-beasts from the ancient world to contemporaneity. The proposal resulting from this cultural excursion is that the words included in the many national and international Rights declarations operate much like the names Adam gave to the animals and still more as they were re-read in medieval bestiaries, both textual and musical. So, can the words of Rights still serve as musical scores, open to an infinite play of re-signification? If we were able to overcome the modern culture/nature and human being/animal dualisms, we could cast, today as in the past, a zoological gaze on human rights by means of contemporary bestiaries and, in this way, perhaps find the gist of rights’ names and our ever regained and ever lost again humanity.

1 Humankind and Animals as a Whole: Medieval Bestiaries and the Renaissance of the Ancient World’s “Zoological Ethics”

In Middle Ages moral theology and the bestiaries can be considered as a whole. This literary genre deeply influenced the social imagery of the time, although its dissemination increased notably only from the twelfth century onwards. Bestiaries iconized animal features and characteristics to use them as metaphorical representations of human behavior, including its vices and virtues. Placing human attitudes in animal forms served as a moral pantograph that drew a map of creation, and then used it as a guide to discern genuine human “substance.” This entailed a holistic view of nature, which in turn relied upon the common ancestry of the world, originating with God and his creative impulse. Moreover, the medieval cosmos of European humans living in twelfth century Europe emerged from a quasi-Platonist derivation of Being from Ought: the whole order of creation was imagined as directly derived from the Holy Father’s Will. Any distinction between humankind and the animal kingdom, even if manifestly present in the medieval mind, was infused by an all-encompassing continuum between these two ontological domains.¹

The idea of an inner continuity in the architecture of the whole of creation represented a sort of revolution in the understanding of human–animal relationships, very much in opposition to that intended by the early Christian Church Fathers, above all Origen and Augustine. The founders of Christian theological thought drew a clear dividing-line between human beings and animals. They considered beasts to lack rational faculties, intellect, and thereby any possibility for sustaining a moral attitude. Surprisingly, this distinction was not founded on Adam’s power over creation, as granted by God according to the Biblical tradition; rather, the use of reason and language was behind the erection of an insuperable divide between the two domains of living creatures. Reason and language confirmed that human creatures were shaped in the image and likeness of God, and only they were endowed with this genetic privilege of divine origin.

The conceptual revolution that took place in the late Middle Ages is not to be considered absolute or radical, as if it were a dialectical polarization.² The influence of the early Church Fathers, however, still echoed in the ideas of many authors, among whom Thomas Aquinas stood out, apparently immune to the fanciful-moral imagination that nurtured the literary bestiaries.³ Speculative thought and theological-moral literature likely run along different, even if concurrent, lines of late-medieval culture. It should also be taken into account that in the highest echelons of the social hierarchy there was, in all likelihood, a significant historical awareness of pre-Christian paradigms concerning the relationships between human and animal universes.⁴ This last remark allows and, in a sense, compels me to go backward in Western history,⁵ a journey which cannot conclude anywhere if not with Aesop.

2 Aesop’s Grin

Aesop’s world does not seem to make a clear distinction between humans and animals. Instead, the non-human characters of his fables are depicted to show both the negative and the positive inclinations of human beings, while pinning them to a sort of invincible natural doom. This is the grassroots ethics of the Aesopic world, in some respects close to Hesiod’s, and for the same reason quite opposite to the aristocratic moral universe portrayed by Homer (even if with different nuances in the Iliad and the Odyssey, respectively). In Aesop’s tales, the continuum uniting the human and animal worlds often takes on a sneering attitude by making explicit in the animals and their dialogues what could not be said directly about human beings without committing political suicide. This mirthful attitude is fully exemplified in the tale entitled, Prometheus and Human Beings:

Prometheus and Human Beings

Prometheus makes animals and humans on Zeus’s order. But, then, Zeus realized that there were more animals than human beings. So, for the proportions to be rebalanced, He ordered Prometheus to turn some of the animals into people. Prometheus obeyed. This is why those who had not from the very beginning human fashion now have human bodies but beasts’ souls.

In the above tale, the natural (or inter-natural) continuum is employed by Aesop almost to cast a grinning gaze on humankind and its pretentions to self-edification.⁶ The ontology of the “human,” one that could be potentially and entelechistically positive, appears to be parodied. Precisely because human beings are close to animals, the different forms of humanity and the related attitudes can be involved in a process of polarization, that is, can be put critically against the Other than Self. Even Phaedrus found this kind of political-moral significance in the Aesop’s fables. According to the Latin storyteller, the Greek writer put in the mouths of animals what he could not safely say directly about humans. On the other hand, it was most likely not a coincidence that Aesop, in the tradition, was tragically struck down in Delphi because he was found guilty of having disputed the veracity of the oracle and ridiculed the credulity of those who consulted it.⁷

“Unveiling humans:” this is the crucial role of Aesop’s animal characters. This activity unifies and, at the same time, differentiates humans from animals. It transforms animal nature into an exemplum by means of a metaphorical inversion that draws a divide between what human beings—precisely as humans—could be, and what they are, and actually show themselves to be through their bestial conduct. The metaphorically humanized, in turn, becomes a source for a backward metaphor of the actual “human” and hence for an implicit evocation of the possible “human.”⁸

This double metaphorical shifting mirrors the socio-political condition in which Aesop lived. He was—according to tradition—an emancipated slave, who migrated to Athens in the ranks of the supporters of Pisistratus and eventually became a critic and opponent of its tyranny. He witnessed the historical–political period from which Athenian democracy developed, and served as an interpreter of popular culture (also in a literary sense), as such in opposition to aristocratic culture. By means of animal metaphor, Aesop shapes the prototype of a cognitive/political reflexive movement that would subsequently accompany Western history as a trans-epochal constant of all the social predicaments fuelling criticism against the established institution or, more simply, the actual order of things.

This exploitation of the human/animal continuum, part of the heritage of all western storytellers, reiterates the moralistic opposition that Hesiod, in his Erga kai Emerai, had already used in a seminal way to criticize the immorality and ethical–political condition of people in the Boeotia of his time. The evidence of Hesiod’s legacy is supplied by the same poet’s voice in the following short extract from “The Works and Days,” in which he reproaches his brother for his arrogance, which was nothing but the consequence of the judges’ corruption:

But you, Perses, lay up these things within your heart and listen now to right, ceasing altogether to think of violence. For the son of Cronos has ordained this law for men, that fishes and beasts and winged fowls should devour one another, for right is not in them; but to mankind he gave right which proves far the best. (Hesiod, Works and Days, vv. 274 ff.).⁹

Hesiod draws the line between human beings and beasts apparently opposite to Aesop. And yet, he leverages, nevertheless, the other universe of living beings to outline, claim, and ultimately mold that fictional, invented social universe which is the world of law and life, legally ordered. In other words, although the human is molded by the ought, this can only be recognized by focusing on the Other-than-Self, namely, the beast: the same beast that is, however, already inside humans and must be first recognized and then ejected from their psycho-social universe (or, alternatively, the beast that is outside them, but who must be averted to prevent contamination).

This implies, however, that in order to be correctly defined, the divide between humans and animals must first be crossed. But such a crossing requires a concurrent redefinition of both realms. This is because acts of differentiation or opposition are never neutral, just as the synthesis inherent in metaphorical inversion can never be semantically neutral. Once the metaphor has taken its shape, the categorical domains involved in its creation will cease to be the same (at least within a context that recognizes the specific metaphorical use and its novelty). The comparison between Hesiod and Aesop, only apparently dialectical, allows us, now, to return with more insight to the imaginative world of medieval bestiaries, and better understand their differences from the ethical-theriomorphic tradition—as it were—of ancient Greek culture.

The Christian cosmos spills out from a sort of palingenetic renewal in Augustine’s interpretation of Genesis.¹⁰ According to this reading, Adam is not an animal among other animals, precisely because God give him the task of naming them. In the Garden of Eden, Adam gives a name to all the (other) animals, and those names are not only the representation of the individual nature of each beast, but also determine their essential features. The difference between the “human” and “non-human” is, in this way, already substantiated. The word and its use are the source of Adam’s lordship over Earth and the animal realm. This expression of this power is coextensive with Being. Adam’s word “is,” it functions like the Logos, God’s word. This is why it is capable of immediately shaping the essence of each living entity.

In Eden, however, Adam does not name himself. The only way that would be possible would be if Adam split in two, gained knowledge of himself from the outside, and so became self-aware. He is instead not yet self-aware because it is impossible to know oneself without first having lost innocence and embodied the rift between Being and Ought, existence and possibility, which is, at the same time, a consequence of having experienced evil and the root of conscious knowledge. Thus, Adam eats from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and falls from Paradise, having been thrown out of Eden by God. Because of the Fall, he will forget both Being and Essences. His memory, however, will retain the names. Adam, notwithstanding his sinful fall, will not lose the power of speech: Genesis does not say anything about such a loss, it is not part of Adam’s punishment—on the contrary, the use of words will be fundamental to his trans-epochal path toward the expiation of sin, and his final redemption. Nonetheless, Adam will lose his certainty about the meaning of words. He will have to re-discover them and try to understand why he himself gave the animals their names. In this way, he will seek to understand who he is, how he thinks, and what the natural order was before the fall. From this point forward, names can only be signs.

The human/animal divide, as drawn by Augustine, transforms the fallen Adam into the archetype of semioticians. The cognitive attitude enabled by words gives human beings a life function ruled by more than merely instinct, which is instead (in the imagery of the times) the existential destiny of animals. Through this understanding of the world, the human race becomes aware of the “divine” that dwells inside each mind and soul precisely because, through thought and words, human beings can attempt the task of grasping the order of creation, in some sense a destined task, because human beings are made in the image and likeness of the creative Source.

It is somehow along such a semiotic path that the human being is called upon to re-discover himself, and hence engender a just social order, which is, in turn, distilled from knowledge of the world and control over the instinct-driven impulses that characterize the animal realm. Augustine is aligned, in this view, with another Church Father, precisely Origen, who saw in the animal figures the metaphorical equivalent of human passions and impulses, namely all the psycho-bodily turmoil that the Christian should learn to tame. Lordship over the beasts’ world is framed coextensively with instinct control, nestled inside the human being. Dominion over the world and dominion over the self were considered, in the proto-Christian imagery, two sides of the same coin: they were assumed to be related implications of a well-ordered life in tune with God’s will.

Despite the clear proto-Christian demarcation line between humans and animals, due also to the need to distinguish the Christian faith from Greek–Latin culture and all related forms of theriomorphism (deemed idolatrous), such differentiation is nevertheless modeled against the background of a holistic universe. Again, “Being” is a consequence of “Ought”: which is, in turn, the motor and origin of creation, and coincides with God’s will. Still, from a cognitive-anthropic point of view, the order of knowledge is oriented to the “good,” even if it includes what could—phenomenally—appear to be evil, vice, and all that is not worthy of a creature made in the image and likeness of God. Holistic creation, with an inner harmony granted by God’s infinite goodness and omniscience, and the interpretation of signs that lead to an understanding of the world—precisely the destiny of humankind—is thus a hallmark of Christian imagery, even if an ambiguous one (albeit, something similar can also be traced in Hesiod’s cosmic vision). Along its centuries-old path we can also find Isidore of Seville, with his attempts (sometimes borderline ravings, at least to modern eyes) to construe etymological cosmogonical genealogies. It matters little whether these are unrealistic, empirically baseless, and crammed with superstitions completely divorced from even a marginally accurate interpretation of experience. Their main purpose is not a description of the world but rather the unveiling of its deep meaning, corresponding to the underlying divine order of creation. True or imagined, real or fabulously re-shaped, each animal “etymologically processed” is just because it makes sense and conveys human understanding or, better yet, an order of sense inside which (also) the “human” can be included and recognized as such.¹¹

3 Giggling Normativities: Humanized Beasts and Animalized Human Beings

The long Middle Ages were far more dynamic and chaotic than modern thought and its narrations have depicted them to be—perhaps due to an inherent need for dialectical opposition. But this is by now well-acknowledged within the history of culture, and it would not make sense to dwell on it. The twelfth century is considered by many medievalists to be a sort of watershed (with all due caution given this macro-periodization). Some scholars use the expression “renaissance of the twelfth century,”¹² emphatically pointing to the invention of a new geography of markets and trade, goods and ideas. These transformations, also related to economic growth, prompted a desire to re-configure the social order. The rediscovery of the Roman legal tradition and its immense influence on the development of the ius commune, namely, common laws for the entire Holy Roman Empire, is a clear indication of the need for new institutions and inter-subjective legal schemes. These efforts reiterated an anthropological-cultural script already interpreted in other regions at other times: the criticism, the dis-composition and re-composition of the extant order rely upon nature, a nature (as always) inevitably invented from the phenomenological interactions of current existential needs, and suitable to legitimate social and institutional change.

The bestiaries and their moral, ethical and political uses, can be understood as operative tools employed in the challenge to overhaul medieval society—even if it was carried out within the framework of anthropogenetic imagery provided by Christian theology. In any case, the social world appeared in need of a reshaping and, with it, also a new way of conceptualizing the human being and her/his place in the world. Despite these exigencies of renewal, the human world still needed to be in tune with the order of creation. This means that the existing categorization schemes could only be remolded through a re-interpretation ab ovo of the same creatural order that might distinguish the “human to be reshaped for the future” from the “human to be left in the past.” In this attempt, the dialectic future/past unfolded along the parallel oppositional axis good/evil. All of creation thus became a map through which human beings could re-discover the true order (actually, a new one, even if thought to be the only one corresponding to God’s eternal project of creation).

Medieval bestiaries recount these endeavors of semantic remapping. Within their plots, the human being makes of himself an animal, so as to realize who he really is. Looking at himself in the mirror of a transfiguring animality, and almost compelled to laugh at himself, he tries to trace the roots, the origin of the natural world. In this way, he hopes to find his true essence, or better an “ought to be” which corresponds to his true nature, but has become unknown to him. Political–social turmoil urges the human being to go after the signs of his Self across a semantic landscape that lies before society and political spaces. In so doing, he hopes to become able to understand the order of “ought” by mining it from that continuum which lies beneath creation and so mirrors God’s will, the true order of Being. For precisely this reason, animals become metaphorical icons of moral sentiments and behavioral habits that function as exemplary figures to be emulated or averted, almost with distaste, in one’s own individual and social conduct. So, the panther, which to us moderns represents the most blind and unbridled ferocity, is represented in these bestiaries as an animal with a seven-color coat, a symbol of perfection, and is even capable of smelling so sweet that he attracts all the other animals. The panther symbolizes Jesus Christ who, through his celestial perfume, summons all humans destined for resurrection. Needless to say, only one animal remains completely indifferent to the panther’s scent: it is the dragon, who is nothing but evil incarnate.¹³

In this example we can see the metaphorical device underlying the educational function of medieval bestiaries. The name “panther” is only a sign, the meaning of which had been lost and hence is to be recovered. In some respects, the authors of bestiaries worked in the footsteps of St. Paul who, in one of his Letters to the Romans, defined animals as children of God, who as such not only belong to the order of creation, but also qualify for salvation and the subsequent resurrection from death.

The true nature of the animal does not lie in its morphological appearance but rather in its capacity for qualitative signification, that is, its ability to be transformed into and used as an icon, a living embodiment and metaphor of virtue or vice. These virtues and vices are shared by human beings and animals, and are to be redefined in both their significance and pragmatic projections. The assumptions on common ways of existing between humans and animals do not erase, however, their differences, and instead transfigures, drawing a divide between humans and inhuman–humans. This further division takes place because after having remembered the meaning of animals’ names, each human being shapes himself through his recovered awareness in his use of the word. Thus does the word become a fundamental building block for the construction of social coexistence, an equivalent of God’s logos and its cosmogonic, world-ordering power. The demarcation between good humans and bad humans, insofar as it stems from the metaphorical mirror of the animal universe, shows the educational function of bestiaries and, at the same time, their ironic and anthropogenetic significance.

Bestiaries are self-ironic journeys that allow human beings to re-discover who they really are through their bestial transfigurations, because these compel them to laugh at themselves, at the actual bestiality of their current lives. This happens because human bestiality is measured by its distance from a genuine nature that—as outlined above—humankind has lost and forgotten, after the fall from Eden. This cognitive play with animal figures offers a kind of reversed, or circular, anthropomorphism. It is so because the human always remains ridiculous in its bestial transfiguration. Accordingly, its animalized representation can serve as a socio-pedagogical guide for living human beings, and therefore as a means of criticizing the extant order of things, including the current political and moral patterns.

The overall process is made possible because all animal names suffer from a semantic deficiency. Precisely, as a consequence of the Fall, they are under-determined in their meaning and through the subsequent forgetfulness of Being, which is nevertheless the very motor of knowledge (as will be shown below, such a forgetfulness is also part and parcel of the zoological imagery of modernity and—not surprisingly—the rhetoric underlying Linnean taxonomy). The nature of animals can become a metaphorical map of an all-encompassing natural order—such as that represented in the bestiaries and inclusive of human beings—precisely because it is under-determined by their names. Actually, the ambiguity of animal names can turn animal nature into a “teaching mirror” for human culture and the social world, as well as a means for critical assessment of current institutions and customs. The irony inherent in reducing human qualities to animal qualities renders all distinctions ambiguous. On the other hand, if we consider the same metaphorical inversion taken in and of itself, we see that it functions by breaking down the barriers between different semantic domains, and thus creating new inter-categorical spaces. Metaphors are often based on personal traits and, as in the case of bestiaries, axiological-moral values. Values, like qualitative and emotional categories, and if compared with empirical or analytical ones, are equipped with a pronounced referential plasticity, or capacity for trans-categorical relevance. If we look at values from a pragmatic perspective, namely as ends, they and the qualitative perceptions and emotions they evoke can be established in a variety of ways. Different situations and contexts, despite their morphologically heterogeneous or even incommensurable attributes, can achieve specific ends, such as particular emotional and/or qualitative responses. But the means become part of the final output, that is, the pursued value or emotional/qualitative response.

Metaphors exploit the trans-categorical aspects of qualities to induce human minds to remold the semantic borders of empirical—and sometimes even analytical—categories; and this without even considering the argument put forth by scholars such as Quine or Rossi-Landi that every analytical category is, essentially, synthetic. Still further, irony also relies on a process of metaphorical inversion. Laughter is triggered by the bewilderment caused by the re-positioning of a token into an unexpected categorical frame; or, in other words, by the overlapping and blurring of different categorical frames and their cultural ramifications. What drives us to process metaphors—and hence categorical inversions and transfigurations—is the need to renew the repertoire of semantic tools and habits we use to face the ever-new challenges of our experience. In our effort to adapt to the environment, each of us relies upon what he already knows, including pre-acquired schemes of judgment and action; then, we try to dis-compose them into their constituent parts, to find potential bridges to other categories, in all their complexity. Essentially, these efforts constitute a search for connotative continuities (in most cases qualitative ones) that attempts to remember patterns and scripts that might be useful when facing new situations that exceed the existing conceptual schemes or pragmatic instructions provided by a single category or a categorical web.

Nevertheless, it is true that laughing and irony depend on a bewilderment related to oppositional overlapping. Something seems to be out of place, as if it were breaking an archetype or making a habit dysfunctional: such ambiguity elicits a laugh. Sometimes, laughter and irony can also reinforce a previously existing and largely accepted conceptual and pragmatic order, as in the case of (conservative) derision. Things, however, do not always play out in this way.¹⁴

Laughter can come not only from an oppositional positioning, or from a break in communicative context,¹⁵ but also from semantic indeterminacy. In such situations, human beings feel themselves to be bereft of ends, and thereby unable to recognize the scripts, the schemes of action, and the experiences, that each teleological pattern epitomizes through its related chain of means (which are also the connotative elements included in the final pragmatic situation encapsulating the achievement of that teleological pattern). Irony and laughter compel human beings to engage in reconstructive creative activities, provoked by a perception that the previously established semantic categories no longer work. To maintain their power and continue to produce bewilderment, comedy and irony must remain on the threshold of potential access to different semantic orders. Otherwise, as soon as they cross the line moving towards new landscapes of sense, they vanish, become stale or trite, sound like something already heard.

Medieval bestiaries produce a human/animal continuum that offers the blurring necessary for re-defining both the conceptual and social order. In these texts, all living beings are dreamlike. Animals that speak and act as living embodiments of moral rectitude or human evil are like the oneiric entities moving across the Kóra in Plato’s Timaeus. Indeed, the Kóra would seem to be a formless connotative continuum, existing before even the beginning of the cosmos and the birth of ideas, although they too are constituted by connotative sets and therefore cannot “be” without being imbued with that continuum.¹⁶ Plato tells us that the Kóra becomes visible (despite Derrida)¹⁷ under specific circumstances: when things undergo deep change, within human dreams, and when elements transform, such as when water freezes into solid ice or, alternatively, evaporates and returns to its original status. When the Kóra comes to the surface, even if only fleetingly, the shape of the world changes, its forms become blurred and coalesce, so that one thing transfigures into another, unforeseen and yet quite conceivable. This is, on the other hand, the same preposterous plausibility that shapes our role in dreams. Captured by the unfolding of oneiric plots, we may be fully aware of the non-referentiality that affects the subjects and objects we dream of, yet in that dimension we act as if all things really were as they appear to our dreaming eyes.

In the same way, the under-determination of names somehow makes us search for meaning through a book of nature that must not only be read but also re- and co-invented as we try to interpret it. But that book includes us, and is, in a sense, self-contained in the outcomes of our reading. If we consider the medieval bestiaries as readings of nature—a nature that also includes human beings—then they become a symbolic channel enabling absolute metaphors,¹⁸ imaginative spaces of absolute creativity. Such creativity, in turn, is connoted by something deeply religious and original,¹⁹ to the extent that it seems to neutralize any charges of anthropomorphism. Actually, in the bestiaries’ symbolic universe, the human being re-defines and understands himself from inside the qualitative/moral continuum that conjoins him to the animal realm.²⁰

The Otherness of the “human” with respect to the “animal”—which should be the resulting moral lesson of bestiaries—is the final product of a sort of waking dream experience, because it is nothing but a categorical re-mapping produced by the metaphorical use of qualitative categories, emotions, values, and moral sentiments. Medieval western culture seems to be in constant search of more powerful vehicles to promote processes of moral re-categorization that might reduce the gap between Heaven and Earth caused by Adam’s Fall. In that endeavor, the medieval imagination even resorted to music, thus creating the musical bestiaries genre. And indeed, it is difficult to think of something more functional than musical bestiaries to fuel that specific kind of irony that develops a new lexicon of human “ought to be” intended as the figuration of the “unknown” but original essence of humanity. So, these fictional beasts sing, and through their songs give shape to musical effects, emotional shades and evocations, a timber palette that serves as a spiritual guide, and whose changing colors become powerful pedagogical icons.²¹ The emotions elicited by musical language enhance, in turn, the qualitative intensity of the metaphorical ground underlying the translational human-animal-human sequence, and thereby the retention of the moral directives the bestiaries should provide. The under-determination of the animals’ names which Adam remembers after the Fall, is mirrored and amplified by the constitutive under-determination of musical language, since it is entirely devoid of any empirical referentiality and so remains constitutively non-representational. On the other side, such lack of precise references in the “world of things” makes musical expressions semantically plastic, and infinitively able to generate sense (…and dreams). Bestiaries host a morally ironic musicality. But precisely there we can find the origin of the invented and ever re-invented nature which modernity will then try to encapsulate in the human/natural rights discourse, in the oxymoron of their naturalized and re-naturing (from the philosophical Latin: naturante) counter-factuality.²²

4 Harmonic/Ironic Taxonomies: the “Ridiculous” Source of Natural Rights

The chronicles of the time record the fact that the public reception of Jean-Philippe Rameau’s Les Indes Galantes was rather lukewarm. What unexpectedly improved the prospects of this Opera seems to have been the later inclusion of “Les Sauvages”: a piece arranged as a dance that reproduced the moves of two Native Americans who some time before had been brought into the Court of Louis XV. The re-invention of Act IV around this dance assured that the Opera enjoyed a staggering public success.

The plot of this Opera-dance unfolds as a journey into an exotic world. The main theme is love, today as always, recognized as a bridge between different worlds and powerful force unsettling social conventions and established orders. The action develops through a quadruple geo-cultural excursion. The titles of the acts draw an itinerary of sorts across faraway locations: Act I: Le Turc généreux, Act II: Les Incas du Perou; Act III: Les Fleurs, set in Persia; Act IV: Les Sauvages, in North America.

There is nothing in Rameau that reflects today’s anthropological insights. Perhaps in his Jesuitical education there was something resilient that echoed Montaigne’s criticism of colonial “deeds” and their pedagogical assumptions which, even at that time, some considered mere alibis to dissimulate the endless European thirst for conquest and the subjugation of native peoples.²³ Diderot, author of a well-known pamphlet titled Rameau’s Nephew, also followed Montaigne’s lesson in his other works by blaming the feral cruelty of colonizers and the inconsistency between their mystified civilizing mission and the ideals of the Enlightenment, especially the professed struggle for freedom on behalf of all human beings. However, the plot of Act IV, precisely Les Sauvages, contains something critical of colonial domination, somehow leveraging the power of love. The story is about two contenders, one Spanish, one French, who fight over the love of Zima, a North American native woman. The action ends with the unfortunate failure of both lovers because Zima, despite their aspirations, falls in love with a young man from her own tribe. In the face of her choice, however reluctantly, the European contenders can only accept their fate.

The message of Rameau’s opera seems ambiguous. On one side, it seems to emphasize the incommensurability of different cultures and worlds, somehow decreeing in this way their ineluctable separation. On the other side, it appears to reiterate, instead, the literary topos that love can bridge any distance, and function as a psychological device for intercultural translation, to the point where male colonial lovers feel obliged to respect the free choice of a sauvage woman, even in the face of their own defeat. The other humanity, come to the fore with the discovery of the New World, is instead portrayed ambivalently. It seems distant from European-Christian cultural schemes, but, at the same time, close to them. Love, in this case, works as a metaphorical ground making the exotic relatable, while also bringing the unveiling wonder that the metaphor, taken in and of itself, is capable of eliciting—to quote Aristotle. In summary, Les Sauvages functions, even more than the previous acts included in Les Indes Galantes, exactly like a medieval bestiary. The European “human” sees himself mirrored in his Native American doppelgänger, and from this vision he turns back to look inward. Rousseau took on the legacy of such reflections, and develops on that foundation the ethics of the Noble Savage. As we know, it is an ethics utterly made up by himself, ethnographically unfounded, and consisting in nothing but an inverted image of his criticism against the European social world. For this very reason, Rousseau’s portrayal of Otherness becomes, in some sense, even more stigmatizing than the horrified gaze of the early colonizers and missionaries when they looked upon the cannibalistic practices or human sacrifices carried out by natives. So, again, from the continuum a new divide arises: it is the same sequence traced in the didacticism of the medieval bestiaries.

Once the dialectic opposition between the “bestial” and the “human order” (the true moral and legal order) has been re-shaped, then the continuum with Otherness, be it animal or sauvage, loses its significance, becomes invisible and, finally, is completely silenced.²⁴ Such processes are both cognitive and political. This is because knowledge and politics are twins when the human mind has to face conditions of social turmoil, deep cultural change, or other predicaments. Then, disorientation wakes in human beings the urge to order the cosmos in part by resetting the words they use. Times of deep social or cultural crisis were interpreted and lived by the western traditional imagery as a new Fall from Eden, and were tackled by devising symbolic and pragmatic strategies to pave the way to new beginnings.

It is not difficult, at the dawn of the modern age, to see Francis Bacon at work, trying once again to put in motion just such a metaphorical-theatrical-semantic machine. In his Novun Organon, the British philosopher asserts:

And therefore it is not the pleasure of curiosity, nor the quiet of resolution, nor the raising of the spirit, nor victory of wit, nor faculty of speech, nor lucre of profession, nor ambition of honour or fame, nor inablement for business, that are the true ends of knowledge; some of these being more worthy than other, though all inferior and degenerate: but it is a restitution and reinvesting (in great part) of man to the sovereignty and power (for whensoever he shall be able to call the creatures by their true names he shall again command them) which he had in his first state of creation.” Bacon, Valerius Terminus, 1.²⁵

Francis Bacon’s legacy was taken on during the eighteenth century by Linnaeus, who aims, through his taxonomic methodology, to assume the role of a new Adam, able to restore humankind as lord and master of the animal realm by giving human beings the primeval innocence of a gaze capable of grasping the true and absolute essence of all the creatures.²⁶ Linnaeus’ overall cognitive project is to be seen against a theological backdrop, and yet reveals quite a different inspiration in comparison with the aims of medieval bestiaries. In the times of the great Swedish taxonomist, the Western axes underpinning the reading of the world were shifting, as the Christian faith underwent a de-legitimation from its previous status as the universal code for understanding nature. In the view of both Bacon and Linnaeus, Being does not derive from Ought. The animal “created” by a naturalistic taxonomy and consequently re-classified and categorized, is true for what it empirically is, and no longer for its moral, aesthetic, ethical, political, or symbolic signification. Medieval bestiaries could indulge in variations and contradictions in characterizing the different species, and this was considered legitimate precisely because the meaning and purpose of such readings was dependent on the cosmological context of signification, namely a divine cosmogony. At the other extreme, the Linnean taxonomy could not endure internal inconsistencies. When it was unable to solve them, it tried to dissimulate their occurrence or, alternatively, entrust their resolution to the future progress of knowledge (which was substantially nothing but an act of another faith).²⁷

Such a quest for objectivity does not in any way mean that the order and classification of the animal world as described by Linneaus do not simultaneously, even if indirectly, define the place of humans in the universe. The laws of nature and the scientific understanding of them inevitably affirm something about their discoverer, as well, he who is able to read the book of nature. The alleged accuracy and objectivity of such a reading, proudly claimed as a prerogative of the modern approach to knowledge, ends up, however, making invisible the relationships and thereby the bi-directional (mind-world, subject-object) transformations underlying them.²⁸

With Linneaus, laughter leaves the scene. In a sense, indeed, his alethic-scientific claims kill any possibility to laugh at nature, be it human or animal, unless we consider the laughter and irony intentionally arising from the cognitive context of the time. It cannot be excluded, however, that an outside gaze might trigger them. Besides, it is enough to look with our twenty-first century eyes at the cover of Systema naturae published in 1760 to recognize in the figure of Adam, captured while naming animals, the features of a transfigured Linneaus… and, in this role, utterly ridiculous because of the absolute cognitive pretensions that such a metaphorical representation tries to make credible.

Linneaus was, however, a contemporary of Rameau, and the ambiguity of his discourse, halfway between theological narration and scientific rationality, reiterates the schemes of judgment that marked the discovery of the New World and the naturalistic analysis that Europeans carried out on the “human” they encountered in the other worlds of the Americas. The construction of Other than Self encapsulated, in turn, an ironic device, satirical and mocking, through which Europeans viewed themselves, inside and out. Well into the nineteenth century, Locke was still claiming that American natives lived in another room of time—which made him a sort of echoing counterpoint (even if unwillingly) of the Les Sauvages dance. The natives were simultaneously bestial and human, and this made it reasonable to cast a zoological–anthropological gaze on them. But what pops up in these kinds of statements is also the inner irony that nestles inside a scientific reading of the world. The definition of the Other than Self is simultaneously a pre-requisite of objective knowledge, to be intended as a form of representation of the world out there (Descartes, Kant), but also a motor for irony and the inevitable cosmic grin (take the case of Montaigne who, in his geniality, was a pioneer in smiling disparagingly upon the conquest of the New World).

This strange and silent search for objectivity and irony can also be traced to the dawn of modern political science, in its attempt to answer the socio-anthropological turmoil of Europe in the 1500’s. And what else if not the Florentine wit could serve as an icon of this merry attitude’s penetration of the quest for knowledge?

Be it known, then, that there are two ways of contending, one in accordance with the laws, the other by force; the first of which is proper to men, the second to beasts. But since the first method is often ineffectual, it becomes necessary to resort to the second. A Prince should, therefore, understand how to use well both the man and the beast. And this lesson has been covertly taught by the ancient writers, who relate how Achilles and many others of these old Princes were given over to be brought up and trained by Chiron the Centaur; since the only meaning of their having for instructor one who was half man and half beast is, that it is necessary for a Prince to know how to use both natures, and that the one without the other has no stability. Machiavelli, Il principe, XVIII, 2.²⁹

The cultural jump from Machiavelli to Hobbes is very small. Leviathan’s incipit—as is well-known—portrays humankind fallen into the feral condition par excellence (at least according to European symbolism). Human beings are equated to wolves. Few have recognized the line of derision and irony in this metaphorical representation, the same that three centuries later we find in Kafka’s bestial transfigurations of the human. The rhetorical mechanism is always the same: taking bestiality as authentic human nature to dialectically construe from this assumption another nature, the genuineness of which is engendered and granted by irony. After all, the Hobbesian wolf is a lycanthrope, a hybrid creature, both human and beast. If it were not, if that wild creature did not hold at least a few seeds of human rationality, it would never denounce its lupine condition as unbearable. Leviathan’s semi-bestial protagonist is, moreover, the same being portrayed in De Cive: the creature endowed with the ability to know natural law and its rational principles.³⁰ But this takes us to the proto-genesis of the modern legal universe. The fight against the beast, which is the other side of the discovery of true human nature, continues along an evolving and educational pathway originating in Aristotle and conveyed to modernity through the Second Scholasticism. The legal champion of this cultural enterprise is Hugo Grotius,³¹ the real founding father of western (secularized) natural law.

5 If Animals Could Sing of Rights…: The Ecological Implications of Un-conceptuality

Accompanied by the final notes of Les Sauvages, Western culture began a long path that led it to self-define “the” culture of rights: subjective rights, citizen’s rights, human rights, fundamental rights, minority rights, children’s rights, cultural rights, and so on. The gradual establishing of rights discourse and, subsequently, the institutionalization of their naturalistic legitimation, was followed by the ascent of their universalistic normativity and then their criticism in the name of anthropological difference and anti-post-colonialism. All these steps taken together draw a trajectory of decline for human beings’ ability to laugh at themselves. Though the continuum between the animal realm and the human universe still lies under the cultural surface, western thought ended up embracing the divide between the two worlds even more strongly than at the time of proto-Christianity. This is also due to the all-encompassing dualism that pervades modern imagery. Even Darwin’s evolutionism, and the endless series of appeals against the temptation to anthropomorphize animals, rely upon that dualism or, at least, are unable to unseat it from the leading position it holds in the western worldview. In accordance with their universality, (alleged) rational self-evidence, and even ethical analyticity (even if this sounds rather oxymoronic), rights are also recognized for the Other, who is embodied in turn by people from different cultures, women, children… and animals. However, the more cultural leaders reiterate that the white western male cannot serve as a model for the conceptualization of human rights, the more he seems to be unconsciously reaffirmed, despite exhortations to reconstruct subjectivity dialogically, in tune with Other’s differences. This is probably the most ridiculous trait of the contemporary age with its emphatic concern for both animal needs and anyone who is Other than… a Self no longer assumed in its absoluteness, but just for this reason silently reinstated in its prototypical value. So it is that all the power of the politically incorrect, the corrosiveness of the fiercest (and socially suicidal) satire is needed to trigger a critical grin even vaguely resembling the moral laughter medieval bestiaries aroused.

Music, once again, could still provide—through its non-referentiality and the semantic fluidity of its emotional timbres—a renewed chance to produce dreams conveying irony and unveiling what human beings hide from themselves. For this purpose, we could restart precisely from Rameau—but there are many other examples—and his ability to convey rational ambiguity through the cognitively emancipatory power of music. Consider La Poule, a lovely piece for the harpsichord, eminently onomatopoeic and, at the same time, imbued with moral intent. Rameau uses this instrument to produce an imitation of the hen. He obtains this effect by means of the repeated ringing out of a note (G) which begins the composition, followed by the repetition of the same note about six times, and then a rapid, capricious arpeggio. However, today (and maybe also in Rameau’s day), there is no one who does not recognize in the imitation of the hen an evocation (not even so subtle) of a chattering woman; one that then becomes two, three… through the canonical per imitationem structure of the piece. It seems a contemptible portrayal of one of the worst stereotypes of western male chauvinist imagery. Once one has listened to this music and read it in misogynistic terms, it can no longer be forgotten or overlooked. The question is, if we see La Poule in a historical light, who should laugh at this imitation and learn a lesson from it? Men? Women? Either way, ambiguity remains, and serves as a trail open to unpredictable experiences of signification. This, too, is modernity, even if a kind of modernity that exploits the ambivalence of categorizations and so keeps them open for a future that they themselves will forge, by means of their own self-transformations. To be sure: this is not Cartesian modernity nor the encyclopedic one outlined by Leibniz. Moreover, there is nothing in it of the obsession with all-including “museification” for which Nietzsche reproached modern thinkers, but not even the post-modern complacent, pulviscular, fragmentation of sense, and the belief that it is impossible to make sense of something. Rameau, the modern, still tries to laugh and make us follow him; on the contrary, the post-modern annihilation of categorizations and their normativity prevents the arousal of any laughter or irony.

Just to follow Rameau’s trail and the insolence accorded to mimic the gait of his hen, it might be interesting (and pleasantly irritating) to point out how early claims for the recognition of women rights in the twentieth century went, oddly enough, but not excessively, hand in hand with the rise of animal rights activism. Even from the nineteenth century, on the other hand, the first protests against animal vivisection were carried out by the very female writers that led the way to the recognition of gender rights, which gradually took root in the Western cultural and social conscience.³² A master of cruel satire, Karl Kraus shows an astounding ability to use his spiteful pen to cast a disconcerting light on this coincidence. His collections of aphorisms were bluntly provocative and rigidly intolerant of any form of trendy thinking or political correctness. One these works, Spräche und Widerspräche,³³ includes two piercing gems, packed with vitriol:

‘Women’s rights are men’s duties.³⁴

Fornicating with animals is forbidden, but slaughtering animals is permitted. Has it occurred to anyone yet that slaughter might be a sex crime?’³⁵

Through the absurdity of the obvious opposition between male/female genders and between human/animal species, Kraus tears into the fixity of abstract thought. He shows its inability to traverse categorical borders ironically, to re-conceive the human subject with an intellectual insight on origin, which is only possible through a renewed holistic approach—in this sense, aligned with the medieval bestiaries. The claim for justice from which the original discourse on natural human rights originated, has become abstract nomos or, at most, some sort of “regulative ideal”; its normativity is self-referential and, for this reason, deceitfully passed of as universal. Absent are the ties with dike, the dreaming, metaphorical interpretation of the cosmos and an ecological thought resulting from a symbolic creativity still connected to the world of all living creatures.

Two other aphorisms by Kraus explicit the need for a comprehensive reinvention of the sense of cosmos betrayed by the search for objectivity and the rationality of the discourse on rights or its feminist and animalist declinations.

In the art of language use, metaphor is what is ‘not used in the proper meaning of the term.’ Therefore, metaphors are perversions of language and perversions are metaphors of love.³⁶

Antithesis is not included in creation. Inside it, all is without contradiction and not comparable. Only the departure of the world from its creator gives room to the frenzy of finding for each opposite its lost image.³⁷

As long as we continue to recognize the rights of an Other-than-Us by identifying her/him/it as the dialectical opposite of the Western human-male-adult and emphasizing her/his/its difference in terms of race, gender, and/or species, those rights cannot be inclusively universal, nor can they semantically host differences by continually renewing their core meaning and the anthropological gist of equality as well as freedom—as it should be. If the words of rights do not become music, which has the power to set aside any pretensions of essentialism and aprioristic universality, irony and laughter will not succeed in regenerating meaning and disengaging it from the fetish of human lordship over nature. More specifically, the words of rights alone cannot serve as the cornerstone of an ecological re-thinking, sufficiently radical and emancipatory to progress hand in hand with an ongoing exercise of self-critical laughter. Without such an exercise, rights will be used, instead, as instruments to control and domesticate political turmoil and the claims of the weakest people, absorbing them and neutralizing their potential criticisms of prevailing anthropological and anthropocentric paradigms.

Paradoxical though it may sound, through the mirror of Kraus’s provocations, words on rights could assume a cultural-regenerative function to the extent that, like bestiaries, they support a zoological, or better yet a zoological–anthropological view of society and politics. Along these lines, we could also consider the tragic and desperate response to the Nazi experience and nuclear nightmare, coeval with the contemporary age of rights, that emerges from Canetti’s aphorisms and quasi-aphorisms³⁸:

We could disassemble each human being into his animal parts, and in so doing find total peaceful agreement with them. (from the Human Province, written in 1943).³⁹

Human beings and animals have nothing else so much in common as love (from the Human Province, written in 1968).

I believe this will be the last, the very last thing in my life that still makes an impression on me: animals. I have never been anything but astonished by them. I have never comprehended them. I always knew: I am that, and yet each time it was something else. (The Secret Heart of the Clock, written in 1980.)⁴⁰

The forms of animals as forms of thought. The forms of animals define him. He does not know their meaning. Excited, he walks about in the zoo, assembling his scattered parts.—The Secret Heart of the Clock, written in 1980⁴¹

He thinks through animals, as well as other concepts. (The Agony of Flies, 1994.)⁴²

The force of dreams is linked to the wide variety of animal species. Along with their estinction also dreams also dreams are doomed to vanish. (The Agony of Flies, 1992.)⁴³

The world’s progress is due to the fact that we keep alive the largest possible number of animals. And those we do not need for practical purposes are the most important. Each animal species that goes extinct will make our continued existence less likely. Only in the presence of their forms and voices can we remain human. Our metamorphoses fade when their source dies. (The Agony of Flies, 1994.)⁴⁴

As we swim in the words of Canetti, we might wonder whether the Nuremberg Trials—set up by humans to judge other humans, rather than the only true subject of accusation, that is, Humankind—could find an adequate place within a bestiary. We need, perhaps, a salvific untruth, a dis-ordering, anti-systemic fiction almost like the Pinocchio’s lies, if rights are to recover the force of dreams, and so function as chisels to reshape (our idea of) nature. Collodi’s puppet/child was always on the threshold between human and non-human, constantly on the verge of a transfiguration unfolding through dialogues with animal actors, spectators, and judges. Pinocchio at the Nuremberg Trials. That’s right! (…He was there, surely, but undercover, meanwhile he should have been there as the President of the Court). But maybe we will be compelled to re-invent ourselves, in a living cosmos taken in a holistic way, by the rebound effect that the transformation of Earth will produce on the ecological pre-requisites for human life. But this is also the destiny that joins human beings, between global interdependence and catastrophe, to all living creatures on the planet.

To make a difference, we should begin to use the words of human rights in the same way Adam strove to remember the animal names after the Fall, that is, by accepting his inability to completely know their sense. To put it another way, the hope is that the words of human rights might ring out like a musical score, open to an endless play of re-signification to be carried out with modesty, and without giving into any anti-modern temptations to throw ourselves into anomy or non-sense (even because this would be nothing but the flip side of the same power trip for which post-modernism rebukes modernity). For such a performance to work, it should be imbued with a deep sense of the “Fall,” which, in turn, should be as deep as the abysmal and circular ascent prompted by the divine condemnation to embody a cultural nature.

If we were to go beyond the modern culture/nature and human/animal divides, then we’d need only cast a zoological gaze on human rights, creating a new bestiary of their words, to find their source once again, and, along with it, a humanity ever forgotten, ever lost.

Cane de te ridendo, homo, one might be tempted to say, to emphasize that the possibility of reading ourselves as and through animals, by laughing, still abides in us, notwithstanding the blood-transfused lesson of Linneaus, lurking in the veins of everyone in the Western world. I would like to return to laughter for a moment by means of a very short and silly memory of my school life.

When I was in high school, I had a biology teacher (female), a wise woman who was unfortunately not gifted at science (perhaps no coincidence…). That said, when the time came to address Darwinism, she was intractable:

Listen class, it’s my job to teach you the theory of evolution. But, I have to be straight with you. In my view, the origin of the human being is the human being. Man comes from a man! As for this story that we come from flies, I don’t know about you guys, but it makes me sick!

It’s a funny story. Try asking, however, why the teacher’s negation of her genealogy and connection with the animal realm elicits laughter. One could begin an answer by considering how Rameau would have put my teacher’s nonsense to music. Maybe he would use the figure of an animal wracked with guilt over devouring a human being. The metaphor would work well, even because the teacher simultaneously refuses and implicitly embodies her continuity with the animal world, more precisely with her despised fly, called into play precisely to define her “humanity,” and reject Darwinism. Inside that woman—even if unconsciously, though this aspect makes it even more important—the Middle Ages and Modernity, de Fournival⁴⁵ and Descartes, were living side by side. Rameau might put her into music as a crocodile, which in the traditional imagery tears up after swallowing its own cubs (as we know, it actually puts them very carefully in its mouth, and its eyes water after only to drain the body of excess fluid). Such a metaphorical transposition could appear rather inappropriate or inaccurate in portraying human beings as devoured animal offspring. And yet, this image could convey something profoundly serious. The feeling of guilt with regard to animals is the doorway to the reversed metaphor of an animal devouring a human, as soon as both of them understand how much the (idea of) human depends on the existence and representation of the animal.

Dino Buzzati’s unintentional masterpiece, Il Bestiario, is an anthology of countless accusations against idiotic human cynicism with respect to animals as well as other human beings. In his stories, Buzzati nails us to our existential and representational dependence on the gaze of non-humans.⁴⁶

In a little tale, La città personale, published in the anthology Sessanta racconti,⁴⁷ a man lives in a city that is the projection of his unconscious. The plot describes a day in the life of the author in that city. Many figures populate its spaces until nightfall. The protagonist ends up in the dark, feeling suffocated by an implacable solitude. Then, little by little, from the doorways of the buildings some people from his past begin to emerge. They, however, do not recognize him, and quickly vanish, as inexplicably as inexorably, one after the other. In desperation, he eventually sees Spartaco loping down the street. Spartaco was his dog in days long gone.

It is Spartaco himself, living symbol of seasons past that now seem so happy.

He comes towards me, staring with the deep, heavy eyes of a dog, full of anxieties and reproaches. Soon, I know, he will leap at me, jumping in ecstasy.

When he is five feet away, I reach out my hand to him, but he slips away, like a stranger, and wanders off.

“Spartaco!” I call loudly, “Spartaco!”

But the dog does not answer, nor does he stop or turn his head.

I watch him, black lamb, as he recedes, before and beyond the series of halos surrounding the road lanterns. “Spartaco!” I call again.

Nothing. Troc troc. Now, I can no longer see him.⁴⁸

That is how the story ends, leaving the protagonist abruptly dumbfounded, almost frozen in a vacuum. There he turns out to be alone because he is not recognized, and he vanishes, both from the tale and with it. Spartaco is, in a sense, the inverse image of Argo. An Argo that does not recognize Ulysses, and so ultimately erases him from its past and thereby even from the present of both.

In view of the above remarks, we see that it is a human existential debt with animals that makes us laugh at and, at the same time, regret the biology teacher’s declaration of creationist faith. It is a laughter through tears, that sees danger peeping over the horizon, namely the possibility that humankind could evaporate as a cross-consequence of its negation of the Other and the counter-negation coming from the Other. Music again, and precisely the 2nd movement (Allegro con moto) of Shostakovich’s Quartet no. 8 expresses an absurd and sorrowful sarcasm by evoking, through a theme from Jewish musical traditions, the annihilation of the Other, remorselessly reduced to a beast for slaughter, that humans carried out at Auschwitz and in Stalinist death camps. A hallucinated musical piece gives utterance to this cognitive and sentimental abyss: a piece not by accident echoing the Jewish music that, according to Shostakovich, “can appear to be happy while it is tragic. It is almost always laughter through tears.”

This music seems to also be suitable for the apocalyptic scenario that Günter Grass sets up in his Die Rättin. A female rat celebrates the end of humanity, a final destiny that the humans have inflicted on themselves by exerting, in a self-destructive delirium, their (alleged) Adam’s lordship over creation. In the imagination of Grass, who sets the novel in a dreamed future (which is more of an impending global nightmare) prophesized by an oneiric rat, this novel could be the last bestiary. It is heralded by the visionary rodent (a kind of animal anti-Adam), who pronounces to the dreaming man these words:

Finished! she says. You people used to be, you’re has-beens, a remembered delusion. Never again will you set dates. All your prospects wiped out. You’re washed up. Completely. It was high time.⁴⁹

[…]

Seeing he’s gone out of existence, man should be entitled to go on hoping, to give us rats something to laugh about, if we should dream about you again sometime…

The rest is swallowed up by laughter, which swells into earth-encompassing merriment. Innumerable multitailed litters and litters of litters, whom I provide with entertainment.

Nevertheless, I say, there’s still hope that not you dream creatures,

you rats, but in reality we…

We rats are more real than anything you could dream.

Yet, in spite of everything, there must…

Nothing must, not any more, nothing.

But I want, I want…

What do you want?

Only assuming that we humans are still…

All right. Let’s assume.

…but this time let us live for one another and peacefully, do you

hear, gently and lovingly, as nature made us…

A beautiful dream, said the She-rat, before dissolving.⁵⁰