This is a review, written by Peter Mason,
of The Frog King by Boria Sax, which appeared in Anthrozoos,
vol. IV, #2 (1991), p. 132-133.
The Frog King: On Legends, Fables, Fairy
Tales and Anecdotes of Animals. Boria Sax.
THE
This
grandiloquent text is taken from the frontispiece of the
late-nineteenth-century animal encyclopedia and reproduced--along with a
splendid portrait of Mrs. Frank Leslie herself-on page 80 of Boria Sax's recent
volume, The Frog King: On Legends, Fables, Fairy Tales and Anecdotes of
Animals. Against such claims, any present day publication pales to
insignificance. All the same, if encounters with animals really do compel us to
question what it means to be human, there might be something to be said for
imposing modesty on the scope of the inquiry and on our claims to know much at
all about what it means to be human.
Boria
Sax's book is a success on both these counts. The scope of the volume is
modest, as a brief glance at the contents shows. Most of the sources are taken
from eighteenth and nineteenth century books and magazines of popular zoology,
with an emphasis on North American publications, that the author scrutinized for stories
about animals. Without claiming to be exhaustive, Sax treats us to discussions
of the frog prince, the beaver, the elephant, and the stag without in any way
forcing the material to fit a preconceived theory. But before moving on to what
is presumably the duty of every reviewer-some kind of assessment of the
academic value of the work in question-1 must note the endearing style in which
Sax writes, a paragon of modesty that invites sympathy as well as agreement.
Rather
than going through the work chapter by chapter, I shall pick out three themes
that permeate the book and emerge at various points: the relations between
animals and class, race, and human society, respectively.
First, animals and
class. We see this as an issue in the question of stag
hunting (p. 132ff.). The deer was an animal identified with the monarch, and
deer hunting was an aristocratic privilege, how could the lower classes be
allowed to commit what was tantamount to symbolic regicide? However, during the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the British gentry turned from deer
hunting to fox hunting, a shift at the symbolic level as well, for the animal
now being hunted has been identified with the peasantry from the medieval cycle
of Reynard the Fox on.
Once
this shift took place, Sax argues, deer hunting and fox hunting became the
arena of a class struggle. While peasants often pursued deer with a vehemence
that reflected centuries of frustration when that privilege was denied them,
fox hunting by the gentry was a symbolic act of revenge against the lower
classes.
Sax also sees a social code in the figure of the
beaver (p. 95ff.). As a model of concerted industry, the beaver is no
aristocrat but instead the contented artisan, resembling Homo faber. Many other features of the folklore associated
with beavers--their hard line on nonconformists, for instance, or their spirit
of mutual friendship and benevolence-also echo European visions of Utopia.
The
contrast between the individual cunning of the fox and the sense of civic
responsibility of the beaver is analogous to the distinction that Sax draws
between fairy tales and fables. While fables suggest a sort of laissez-faire
capitalism by depicting life as a Hobbesian
competitive struggle, socialist thinkers like Ernst Bloch have viewed the
idealized world of fairy tales as anticipating a harmonious society of the
future (p. 30).
Second, animals and
race. Sax sees one of the results of Darwinism as its
provision of a framework in which large groups of humanity could be deprived of
human status and relegated to a place somewhere between humans and animals (p.
82ff.). Though he follows Keith Thomas in arguing that doctrines of racial
superiority did not emerge until the late eighteenth century, Sax reproduces on
page 82 what he labels as *the earliest extant anti-Semitic broadside,"
dating from 1475. This leads him to the claim that the Nazi holocaust was less
an aberration than a natural development of tendencies rooted in Western
culture.
An
offshoot of this depreciation of certain sectors of humanity is a reversal of
the usual hierarchy to establish a system in which animals are supposed to be
superior to certain humans. S. G. Goodrich, for example, the author of a
popular encyclopedia on animal life first published in 1859, humanizes the
monkey to such an extent that he visualizes a mass meeting of the howler monkey
holding debates on “Moral Estimates of Man from a Monkey Point of View"
(p. 76). On the other hand, the same Goodrich asks: “Can any one call the name of a single pure Indian of the barbarous tribes, who-except in
death, like a wild-cat-has done any thing worthy of remembrance?"
(p. 167). One does not have to go very far to find a parallel to this view in
the Nazi attitude to the protection of animals, for while there was a strict
prohibition on vivisection, all kinds of inhuman experiments were carried out
on human victims in the concentration camps (pp. 15-16). This is certainly a
topic that, however unpleasant it may be, deserves
fuller research.
Third, animals and human
society as a whole. To take the case of Goodrich again,
he assumes that animal perceptions are structured like those of human beings.
Sax argues that the rise of Darwinism meant a reduction in anthropomorphism (p.
84). Of equal importance in this connection is Buffon's
discovery that the wildlife of the New World was biologically and zoologically
distinct from that of the Old World (p. 68), since this made it difficult to
identify the new fauna and flora with the kinds mentioned in antiquity by
writers like Pliny (who wrote in the first century A.D.pace
Sax, p. 106). Despite these changes, however, it remains doubtful whether
anthropomorphism can ever to be eradicated fully. In this respect, with the
statement “the fascination with animals is similar to that often evoked by the
insane, by the retarded, by primitive people and even young children" (p.
2), Sax is treading on thin ice; in fact, few anthropologists today would
accept this late nineteenth-century equation of "primitive" people
with children or the mentally retarded. Hence, the further claim that "the
dog can put me in contact with modes of perception that are less elaborately
structured than my own" (p. 3) is an a priori statement based on both
anthropomorphism and anthropocentrism-how can we presume to assess canine
mental states as less elaborate than ours? And how can the imputation of modes
of perception at all be rid of its obvious projection of human values onto
animal subjects?
Some
of the other psychological assertions that Sax makes are equally questionable.
In my opinion, he is on much firmer ground when he sticks to the relations
between humans and animals in terms of social (symbolic) codes. These
relations, he argues, have been negotiated over centuries. Although the
relations are primarily determined by humanity, they must be consistent with
the nature of the animal in question (p. 141)-in other words, ethology imposes limits on (ethno)zoology.
Of course, this stress on thought about the animal world as social thought runs
the risk of not paying enough attention to the specifically animal component,
but, in Sax's hands, this risk is at any rate minimalized
as he takes the reader through the intricacies of animal folklore.
The
issues Sax raises in this refreshing volume are important. In raising questions
about the frailty of our categories of human and animal, it raises questions
about the definition of the human and natural sciences. And ethical questions
about our place in the world. ..
Peter Mason
Lauriergracht
116
1016 RR