Just exactly where can we draw the line between human and animal, man and beast, and exactly how fuzzy (or furry?) is that line? How has our understanding of movement across that line changed over time? And what about those beings, those creatures that have been understood, or imagined to stand somewhere in between? These are the kinds of questions that Austrian writer and visual artist, Teresa Präauer, entertains in her charming, yet focused philosophical and cultural essay, Becoming Animal. The terrain she explores is one populated by a host of liminal creatures—hybrids, monsters, and chimeras— the sort of beings that have continued to inspire both our scientific and artistic imaginations from Antiquity through to the present.
Präauer begins with the harpy, one of the most distinctive figures to appear time and again in early efforts to catalogue all known living beings—factual, mythological, and “exotic” alike—that occupied artists and thinkers from the Medieval era on into the Age of Discovery.
In the Historia naturalis animalism, a seventeenth-century treatise on natural history by John Johnston, there is a bird-like creature with a human head. This ‘Harpyie’ or ‘Harpyia’ has a sceptical, not unfriendly face and long, flowing locks that are gently tucked behind one ear and extend halfway down her body—a bird’s body, of course—the plumage growing thicker and darker towards the back. Compact like a small chicken, the harpy sits atop a pair of enormous talons that could just as easily support a bird of prey.
It’s not her first appearance in natural histories, she has been depicted and evolving for a century. From our scientifically “sophisticated” vantage point today though, such a creature and many of her companions depicted in such volumes seem fanciful, but were they any more so than the angels and demons that also figured in many hierarchical systems? And early Modern scholars often had to work from accounts and drawings made by those with direct experience of the animals in question, as well as reports from travellers often carried second or third hand over time or distance, as they strived to catalogue and categorize all forms of life—mineral, vegetable, animal, and magical. Many of these life forms sat on the edge of classifiably, “pretty monsters” like the harpy and, as time went on and naturalists became more rigorous in their efforts, the fanciful creatures began to be weeded out, but others, like humans with hirsutism, found themselves defined as distinct from their hairless brethren, but like all humans, still very different from other primates. Yet, now, with the ability to study DNA, we know we share 99% of our genes with chimps and bonobos and suddenly the need to once again draw a clear boundary between ourselves and animals has become more important—and more difficult to maintain.
A relatively brief work, only 96 pages long, Becoming Animal is not a chronological survey of the development of taxonomical conventions—although Linnaeus makes more than one appearance—but rather a varied account that moves back and forth, from Michelangelo to contemporary literary theorists, from prehistoric cave paintings to “furries.” It is an engaging flow of ideas that pulls in scientific elements along with literary sources such as Ovid, Kafka, Nabokov, and Inger Christensen to explore the many facets of our connection with and within the natural world. It is the kind of entertaining exercise that can’t quite be pinned down, but Präauer’s primary interest ultimately lies in the space between human and animal, a space that can be approached from either direction. It is a space of movement. She notes that French theorists Deleuze and Guattari, when speaking of “becoming-animal,” perceived it as one of many forms of being, as a “demand for a mode of writing that moves within transitions and liminalities,” however:
Becoming is a verb, a doing that does not mean being. I write ‘becoming animal’ as two separate words, not joined by a hyphen. Animal is noun, and becoming is a verb. When I am becoming animal, I am not an animal. I am in transition. An animal that is becoming human is also in such a transition, albeit in a different way.
This thoughtful essay ends, as it opened, with the author observing the myriad forms of life visible from her window, leaving her reader with much to contemplate about this world in which we are just one element of a much larger whole.
Becoming Animal by Teresa Präauer is translated from the German by Kári Driscoll and published by Seagull Books.
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