Beast Literature

By Kaori Nagai

8 April 2024

 

 

One of the joys of running the ‘Rethinking Fables in the Age of Global Environmental Crisis’ network is that it gives me an excuse to ask everyone I meet if they are interested in fables. Usually, people’s initial reaction is that they have never thought about it. Nevertheless, they are bound to know a fable or two, and very often have an intriguing take on then, or a fable-themed anecdote to share with me. I have made many delightful discoveries since starting this project last summer.

Recently, I had the good fortune to edit a collection titled Maritime Animals (2023) for Animalibus: Of Animals and Cultures – a prestigious animal studies series at Penn State University Press. After its publication, I wrote to Prof. Nigel Rothfels, the series editor, to thank him for all his support. Of course, I took the opportunity to mention ‘Rethinking Fables’ as my next project, asking – just in case –  if he had worked on fables at all. He replied, ‘Actually, I have’, and told me that when he was a graduate student at Harvard University, he was the head teaching fellow for Professor Jan Ziolkowski’s ‘Beast Literature’ course.

Nigel’s answer thrilled me. Jan Ziolkowski is the Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor of Medieval Latin at Harvard University, and I knew him to be an important writer and theorist of the fable genre. His book Talking Animals: Medieval Latin Beast Poetry, 750-1150 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993) together with Jill Mann’s From Aesop to Reynard: Beast Literature in Medieval Britain (Oxford UP, 2009) were among the first books I looked at when I started researching on the fable genre; they include brilliant discussions of the fable as a literary form. I first discovered Ziolkowski’s work through a great article of his called ‘The Form and Spirit of Beast Fable’ (1990), collected in the journal Bestia: Yearbook of the Beast Fable Society (1989-1994, 6vols). It mentions the ‘Beast Literature’ course he was teaching at the time of writing the article – and Nigel was part of his team!!  I found it amazing and serendipitous to know somebody personally who was part of the fable history I had been researching.

I must have come across as super-excited, because Nigel very kindly volunteered to locate the course’s syllabus, which he thought should still be in his office. Soon afterwards I received a PDF file of an extract from ‘Literature and Arts A-31: Beast Literature. Fall Term 1989’. The whole thing, including the course reading materials, consists of about 470 pages – Nigel scanned the first 93 pages, which include the syllabus, assignments, section questions, suggested essay topics, and study materials for the final exam, which he thought I would find interesting.  And I certainly did!

In ‘The Form and Spirit of Beast Fable’ (1990), Ziolkowski points out that the term ‘beast fable’ is ‘at once very broad and very narrow’: broad in the sense that it is customarily used to cover ‘any and every tale about animals with human traits’, while the fable as a literary form can be narrowly defined and is distinguishable from others such as poetry, epic, novel, etc. However, in the English language, ‘beast fable’ is virtually the only literary-critical term which designates literature in which animals appear; it is used to cover all animal stories, ‘far beyond the limitations of form that give it its specificity’. Ziolkowski argues that we need new more inclusive terms for fable-like animal stories, and he suggests the term ‘beast literature’.[1] His course, bearing this name, includes animal stories in various literary forms, while using the beast fable, defined in its narrow sense, as the key reference point.

The organisation of the ‘Beast Literature’ course is fantastic.  It is definitely a forerunner of our animal literature courses, covering many of the topics and texts we still teach; but it was designed when animal studies as a discipline was yet to be established. The cutting-edge nature of the course can be seen from this note for the students: ‘Do not enroll in this course if you cannot attend lectures; because the nature of the course is unusual, you will not be able to substitute reading material for lectures’.[2]  Prof. Ziolkowski’s erudition and depth of understanding of literary forms and their histories permeate the design of each week.

The course consists of 14 weeks, with two lectures every week except on public holidays and the final revision week. It starts with American beast literature: ‘The Coyote Stories’, with required reading of Barry Lopez’s Giving Birth to Thunder (week 1) and Brer Rabbit tales, with Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus stories (week 2). Week 3 is dedicated to the fable, with a lecture entitled ‘Introduction to the fable’ and another on the fables of Phaedrus. After this, the course is chronologically arranged, from ancient Greece to the present day, and it draws on various literary forms and European traditions. For instance, it covers texts such as Batrachomyomachia (‘Battle of the Frogs and the Mice’) and Reynard the Fox as prime examples of the beast epic, and Cervantes’s talking-dog story ‘The Dogs’ Colloquy’ is studied in the week entitled ‘A Renaissance Beast Dialogue’.

As expected from the convenor’s expertise, the sections on classical Latin and medieval literature are wonderfully rich. One week focuses on the figure of the Ass-Man and The Golden Ass, and another week on Medieval fables, covering works by Marie de France, Robert Henryson and some religious fables. I was particularly excited by the week entitled ‘Medieval views on animals’; it seems to be all about verminous and naughty creatures, the reading materials for which includes ‘A Middle English rat-rhyme’, ‘The Excommunication of a Jackdaw’ and ‘A death-sentence pronounced against a pig’. Moving on chronologically, two weeks are on ‘The Beast in Philosophy and Literature at the Age of Reason’, discussing topics such as ‘Theriophily vs. the Beast-Machine’, drawing on Montaigne, Swift, and Jean de la Fontaine. It is delightful to see Kipling’s Jungle Books taught alongside Jack London’s The Call of the Wild in the ‘nineteenth-century literature’ week. The final week is entitled ‘The Political Animal’, featuring Kafka’s fables, including ‘A Report to an Academy’ and Orwell’s Animal Farm.

It is truly a fantastic course, and one highlight for me is ‘the fable assignment’ at the end of week 3: as part of its assessments, the students were asked to ‘write a beast fable’, the instructions for which reads:

The fable must not be long (1/2 to 1 ½ typed pages in length) …. You may create a fable entirely of your own making. Alternatively, you may refashion a fable that appears in the works of Babrius or Phaedrus, in the index at the back of the volume, or in the fables of another author. You may use the story part of a fable and change the moral, or take the moral and change the story part.

The two most important considerations are 1) that the fable be well written and 2) that it reflect an understanding of the four criteria. Additionally, as a matter of courtesy to the person reading the fable, you should try to prevent liveliness from turning into tastelessness: avoid dead baby fables, and feel no compulsion to emulate the coyote folktales in obscenity and scatology. (47)

Note that the students, in taking on this assignment, have to meet ‘the four criteria’, or the four defining features of the fable discussed in the lecture, drawing on the definitions put forward by the American fable authority Ben Edwin Perry. Firstly, the beast fable needs to be fictitious. Secondly, it should contain a single action, chain of actions, or speech, which happened in the past (which distinguishes the fable from the proverb with no mention of the actions, or the novel with multiple actions). Thirdly, the fable features specific characters, rather than an allegorical embodiment of some abstract idea. And lastly, it needs to have a moral.[3] Overall, the assignment instructions are ingeniously designed to help the students to understand what the fable is and how it is different from other literary forms (we should all try this with our students next time we teach fables).

Looking through the course materials was ‘quite the trip down memory lane’ for Nigel. He recalled that it was ‘a large course (300+ students) with a chunk of teaching fellows’, and a great pleasure to work with Professor Ziolkowski: ‘he was an AMAZING teacher. Whenever he detected any inattention in the students to his lectures, he would reel off a string of animal puns relating to the theme of his presentation!’ Responding my query as to  whether Prof. Ziolkowski is still working on beast literature, Nigel mentioned that, soon after he completed his PhD, Prof. Ziolkowski moved on to become the director of the Dumbarton Oaks Library in Washington. He was therefore not sure if he still works on the fable, but suggested that I should certainly reach out to him.

So I wrote to Prof. Jan Ziolkowski, and I am glad I did. He kindly responded to my message and inquiry about how he came to design the beast fable course. According to him, his appointment was evenly split between Comparative Literature and Classics, two departments which were ‘utterly different’, but the ‘talking animals’ angle allowed him to bring together both his interests (he designed the ‘beast literature’ course as an offering for comparative literature, which explains the highly interdisciplinary and European nature of the course). The idea came to him while he was in Rome; ‘I sat down and scribbled – and, honestly, it was on a napkin – all the titles of great books centered on animals that came to mind. Then I began shuffling them into different categories and trying to work out a course.’  On returning to the US, he ‘batted around further ideas’ with his father, the late Theodore J. Ziolkowski, a renowned authority on German and European literature, who suggested to him that he include Cervantes’ The Dogs’ Colloquy’.

so much of beast literature – even more broadly than the fabular alone – vacillates between pervasive anthropomorphism and less common but still detectable attention to animals as animals.

I already heard from Nigel that it was a large course, but Prof. Ziolkowski’s account of this was amazing.

At that time Harvard had absolutely no pre-registration. When I showed up for the first class, there was an enrollment of 88. The course worked out and developed a cult following. It was recruited for the Literature and Arts section of the then-new Core Curriculum, where I offered it four times. The enrollment soared each time: though the last instantiation had to be capped at a few hundred for reasons of teaching staff, lecture hall space, and other classrooms, it had attracted 780 students to the first lecture.

He stopped teaching the course at that point, because ‘he felt that [he] had become more of a course administrator than an instructor’. Nevertheless, he loved teaching the course, and, ‘though [he has] not written on beast fables lately, the literature continues to fascinate him’. The ‘Rethinking fables’ project, with a strong focus on nonhuman animals, made sense to him, as ‘so much of beast literature – even more broadly than the fabular alone – vacillates between pervasive anthropomorphism and less common but still detectable attention to animals as animals.’

It is truly remarkable that 780 students wanted to take the course; it clearly earned a reputation for its brilliance and engaging content. Equally, it is wonderful that so many students were interested in studying animal literature, when it was still an unusual subject to teach. What is more, I’m thrilled to imagine three hundred plus students, each writing a fable following the instructions – it is incredible and I wish I had been there to take the course. These chance encounters and conversations with Profs Jan Ziolkowski and Nigel Rothfels made me realise just how fundamental fables are in our thinking and dealing with nonhuman animals. Without knowing it, we are interconnected with them and with each other through hidden threads of fables. I feel fortunate to be in a position to lead the ‘Rethinking fables’ network, and I am hopeful that I will uncover even more connections in the future.

 

 

Bibliography

Perry, Ben Edwin. ‘The Fable’, Studium Generale 12 (1955): 103-15.

Ziolkowski, Jan. ‘The Form and Spirit of Beast Fable’, Bestia: Yearbook of the Beast Fable Society 2 (1990): 4-18.

—. Talking Animals: Medieval Latin Beast Poetry, 750-1150 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993)

—. ‘Literature and Arts A-31: Beast Literature’ (Fall Term 1989), Harvard University.

 

Notes

My sincere thanks to Professors Jan Ziolkowski and Nigel Rothfels for granting permission to quote from our email correspondence and for their support in writing this blog post. I am also grateful to Professor Ziolkowski for permitting me to reproduce the cover image of the prospectus.

[1] Jan Ziolkowski, ‘The Form and Spirit of Beast Fable’, Bestia: Yearbook of the Beast Fable Society 2 (1990): 4, 16.

[2] Jan Ziolkowski, ‘Literature and Arts A-31: Beast Literature’. Fall Term 1989, Harvard University, page 1.

[3] Ziolkowski, ‘Beast Literature’, 10; ‘The Form and Spirit of Beast Fable’, 7, 8-10.