'Darwin in Arcadia: Brute Being and the Human Animal Dance from Gilgamesh to Virginia Woolf' in...

Darwin in Arcadia: Brute Being and the Human Animal Dance from Gilgamesh to Virginia Woolf

by Louise Westling, University of Oregon

Abstract

This essay considers the impact of evolutionary biology on the concept of pastoral and

surveys selected literary works from ancient to modern, to indicate the long history

of anxiety about the relation of humans to other animals. Ecocriticism has been

closely associated with literary pastoral since its beginnings but has come under

criticism for this focus in the past few years. The pastoral has traditionally

concerned itself with peaceful green spaces of natural purity where harassed urban

dwellers retreat to restore themselves, but critics have exposed naiveté, escapism,

and privilege at the heart of this literary mode. Such a dualistic, anthropocentric

attitude toward the natural world is disastrously inaccurate in terms of evolutionary

biology’s demonstration of human enmeshment within the whole community of life on the

planet. Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s concept of brute Being, embracing the philosophical

implications of evolution, offers theoretical grounding for ecocritical analysis of

literature that is congruent with the findings of evolutionary biology, ethology, and

other life sciences.

Placing Darwin in Arcadia explodes the static concept of

pastoral and exposes the dynamic evolutionary history of the

natural world, grounded in what Maurice Merleau-Ponty called

brute or wild being .1 The classic pastoral setting established 1Maurice Merleau-Ponty. The Visible and the Invisible. trans. Alphonso

by Theocritus and peopled by shepherds, was “a conventional,

closed landscape . . . where water peacefully flows, [and] the

foliage of the trees rustles, . . .” Idyllic modulation between

the contemporary and the mythic in such places allows imaginative

escape from cities to natural tranquility and simplicity.2

Since the Renaissance this conventional space of nature has been

expanded to include forests and gardens, and after Kant and the

Romantic Sublime, much wilder scenes. But always nature has been

understood as a separate sphere which humans visit for temporary

respite. “At the root of pastoral,” explains Greg Garrard, “is

the idea of nature as a stable, enduring counterpoint to the

disruptive energy and change of human societies.”3 Seen in

evolutionary terms, however, pastoral space opens out to include

Lingus. (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1973) 117, 168. Subsequent

citations refer to this edition.

2Oxford Classical Dictionary, ed. N.G.L. Hammond and H. H.

Scullard. Second Edition (Oxford: Oxford at the Clarendon Press,

1970) 787.

3Greg Garrard. Ecocriticism (London: Routledge, 2004) 56.

all of the earth, not separate from homo sapiens. According to

biologist E. O. Wilson,

For more than 99 percent of human history people have lived in hunter-gatherer

bands totally and intimately involved with other organisms. During this period

of deep history, and still farther back, into paleohominid times, they depended

on an exact learned knowledge of crucial aspects of natural history. That much

is true even of chimpanzees today, who use primitive tools and have a practical

knowledge of plants and animals. As language and culture expanded, humans also

used living organisms of diverse kinds as a principal source of metaphor and

myth. In short, the brain evolved in a biocentric world, not a machine-

regulated world. It would be therefore quite extraordinary to find that all

learning rules related to that world have been erased in a few thousand years,

even in the tiny minority of peoples who have existed for more than one or two

generations in wholly urban environments.4

The most ancient literatures express a sense of this immersion in

the natural world in kinship with other organisms, as Lawrence

Buell remarks5. In almost every culture the earliest writings

4Edward O. Wilson, “Biophilia and the Conservation Ethic,”

in The Biophilia Hypothesis ed. Stephen R. Kellert and Edward O. Wilson

(Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1993) 32.

5Lawrence Buell, The Future of Environmental Criticism (Oxford:

Blackwell, 2005) 1-2.

are concerned with the creation of plants and animals, and the

oral traditions which preceded ancient literature and still

linger in some parts of the globe posit kinship, shape-shifting,

and dialogue between humans and the other creatures around them.

From its beginnings ecocriticism has been associated

with pastoral scholarship,6 and has been sharply criticized by

mainstream scholars as sentimental escapism from the harsh

demands of the Postmodern world. In The Truth of Ecology, Dana

Phillips castigated ecocritics, calling them reactionaries with a

“fundamentalist fixation on literal representation” in their

advocacy of nature writing, and he charged them with almost total

ignorance of the science of ecology as the latter has developed

6 See, for example, Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology

and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York: Oxford, 1964); Raymond

Williams, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford, 1973); Lawrence

Buell, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation

of American Culture (Cambridge: Harvard, 1995); Terry Gifford, Pastoral

(London: Routledge, 1999); and Garrard’s discussion in Ecocriticism

(London: Routledge, 2004) 33-58.

since its origins in the last decades of the nineteenth century.7

But his attack chooses only the earliest and weakest elements of

ecocriticism for its focus, and it inaccurately caricatures some

of the foundational works in the field in order to make them look

ridiculous.

Other recent works evaluating the present state of

ecocriticism more accurately describe the movement as an

increasingly sophisticated and heterogeneous contemporary

reassessment of literary traditions associating human affairs

with the wider natural community on earth. The most recent of

these is Lawrence Buell’s The Future of Environmental Criticism, which

asserts that ecocriticism has reached a second stage of

development as a field of literary study. Even though it is only

a little over a decade old as an explicit literary movement,

environmental criticism has already experienced a dynamic

metamorphosis from its original focus on British Romanticism and

7Dana Phillips, The Truth of Ecology (New York: Oxford, 2003) xi,

3, 7, 185-239.

the American nature writing tradition initiated by Thoreau.8 By

now environmental criticism includes post-humanist and

ecofeminist perspectives, engages poststructural theory and

environmental justice, and tests out alliances with various

scientific fields and critical science studies in an increasingly

international context. Two other descriptions of ecocriticism’s

present state indicate this range: Glen Love’s Practical Ecocriticism:

Literature, Biology, and the Environment, the work of an Americanist

seeking to ground environmental literature in the life sciences;9

and Greg Garrard’s Ecocriticism in the Routledge New Critical Idiom

Series, providing an Anglo-American perspective focused upon what

he sees as major concepts occupying ecocritics (e.g. pollution,

apocalypse, dwelling, animals).10 All acknowledge the deep ties

of ecocritical scholarship with the European pastoral. Glen Love

85-13.

9 Glen Love, Practical Ecocriticism: Literature,

Biology, and the Environment

(Charlottesville: Virginia, 2003).

10Garrard, 2004.

is distinctive among them in reconsidering Arcadian tropes from

evolutionary perspectives that help to explain why most human

cultures are deeply attracted to green places of repose and

natural abundance. He advocates the application of E.O. Wilson’s

concepts of biophilia and consilience —indeed sociobiology—to literary

environmentalism.11 While I am not so confident about the

efficacy of sociobiology, I do think Love’s and Phillips’s

emphasis on biological literacy for ecocritics needs to be taken

seriously. I would like to consider Darwinian perspectives on

the pastoral in what I hope is a complementary way to Love’s

work, by examining representative literary examples from

Gilgamesh to Virginia Woolf---the oldest known literary works to

the modern era---to show how anxiety about the relation of humans

to other animals and the wild energies of the animate world

haunts some of the most important ancient texts, and then after

several millennia of Humanist arrogance, returns with Darwin’s

influence to the forefront of literary consciousness in the works

of some twentieth-century writers. Such an overview will suggest

11Love 2003, 70, 76.

how a twenty-first-century ecocritical Auerbach might anatomize

the long literary history of environmental consciousness as it

grows more urgent in our own time.

Taking seriously what Darwin’s legacy means for our

assumptions about the natural world means rethinking Arcadia as a

co-evolving tangle of beings and forms that covers the planet.

Then we begin to see that the human species is intrinsically

wild, as Gary Snyder has suggested, or grounded in brute

existence, in Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s terms. “Our bodies are

wild,” says Snyder. “The involuntary quick turn of the head at a

shout, the vertigo at looking off a precipice, the heart-in-the-

throat in a moment of danger, the catch of the breath, the quiet

moments relaxing, staring, reflecting—all universal responses of

this mammal body.”12 Merleau-Ponty puts it more abstractly:

“This environment of brute existence and essence is not something

mysterious: we never quit it, we have no other environment,”13

12Gary Snyder, The Practice of the Wild (New York: North Point,

1990) 16.

13Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible. trans.

John Dewey suggested that modern civilization has frozen the

basic disorder underlying the institutional life of humanity into

static formal divisions.

The institutional life of mankind is marked by disorganization. This disorder

is often disguised by the fact that it takes the form of static division into

classes, and this static separation is accepted as the very essence of order as

long as it is so fixed and so accepted as not to generate open conflict.”14

When such forms are disrupted or broken apart during natural

disasters such as the recent tsunami in Indonesia, the

dissolution of political structures in Baghdad after the fall of

Saddam Hussein, or the collapse of public institutions in New

Orleans after a hurricane, we see anarchy and open conflict

erupt. For Dewey, such wild behaviors are part of our kinship

with all other living beings, and our long history together.

While man is other than bird and beast, he shares basic vital functions with

them and has to make the same basal adjustments if he is to continue the process

of living. Having the same vital needs, man derives the means by which he

breathes, moves, looks, and listens, the very brain with which he coordinates

Alphonso Lingus. (Evanston: Northwestern, 1973) 117.

14John Dewey, Art as Experience 1934. (New York: Perigee, 1980)

20.

his senses and his movements, from his animal forbears. The organs with which

he maintains himself in being are not of himself alone, but by the grace of

struggles and achievements of a long line of animal ancestry.15

15Dewey 1980, 13.

Westling---Darwin in Arcadia

To understand the wild or brute existence of which homo

sapiens remains an integral part, we have to acknowledge our

animal selves, reexamining relationships with other animals,

and by implication the places where we all live. Thus we

return to the perspectives Charles Darwin expressed in The Origin

of Species and The Descent of Man. He insisted that “there is no

fundamental difference between man and the higher mammals in

their mental faculties.”16 He found similar emotions and

behaviors among ants as among humans.17 He painstakingly

itemized the structural homologies between humans and other

mammals, as well as pointing out parallels in embryonic

development.18 And he credited other animals with cultural

behaviors, reasoning abilities, and abilities to communicate in

complex ways. A return to such ideas has been gathering

momentum recently in ethology, primatology, and other animal 16Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex

(New York: Humboldt, 1885) 35.

17Darwin 1885, 79-80.

18Darwin 1885, 5-14.

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studies, cultural studies, and critical theory.19

I hope it is obvious, however, that these debts to

Darwin’s thought are far from what Steven Rose calls “ultra-

Darwinism,” a sort of Hobbesian vision of ruthless struggle for

reproductive success and adaptation at the level of the

“selfish gene” that renders organisms mere robots.20 This kind

of thinking oversimplifies Darwin’s picture of evolution, and

much evolutionary biology of the past century has added further19A few of many possible examples are Allison Jolly, Lucy’s

Legacy: Sex and Intelligence in Human Evolution (Cambridge: Harvard, 1999);

Frans De Waal, The Ape and the Sushi Master: Cultural Reflections of a

Primatologist (New York: Basic Books, 2001); Barbara Smuts, Sex

and Friendship in Baboons (New York: Aldine, 1985); Sonja Yoerg,

Clever as a Fox: Animal Intelligence and What it Can Teach Us About Ourselves (New

York: Bloomsbury, 2001); and Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson and

Susan McCarthy, When Elephants Weep: The Emotional Lives of Animals (New

York: Delacourte, 1995).

20Steven Rose, Lifelines: Biology, Freedom, Deteerminism (London:

Penguin, 1998) 209-214.

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nuances and complications to the picture of how living

creatures developed in new forms over the millions of years of

planetary life.21 One of the most powerful challenges to the

caricature of survival of the fittest through relentless

competition is Lynn Margulis’s theory of symbiogenesis, which

once seemed heretical but “has now become the conventional

wisdom of the textbooks,” according to Rose.22 Margulis’s

theory suggests that “symbiosis, beginning as an uneasy

alliance of distinct life-forms, may underlie the origin of

major evolutionary novelty.”23 Explanations of punctuated

equilibrium, the fact that many evolutionary events seemed to

happen in sudden leaps rather than gradual adaptive

development, also indicate other forces at work than mere

competition for survival.24

21Rose 1998, 215-249.

22Rose 1998, 229.

23Lynn Margulis, Symbiotic Planet: A New View of Evolution (New York:

Basic Books, 1998) 20.

24Rose 1998, 224; Jolly 1999, 128-129.

13


In cultural studies, increasing attention is focusing on

the question of human/animal relationships, viewed from the

perspectives of many disciplines. Indeed the most influential

arbiter of postructural theory, Jacques Derrida, had been

working on this subject for more than a decade when he died in

2004, leaving an 800-page manuscript yet to be published.25 Cary

Wolfe’s Zoontologies and Animal Rites bring together a representative

sample of recent interdisciplinary work on the question of the

animal, and Greg Garrard has devoted a chapter to “Animals” in

Ecocriticism.26 Ironically, as species extinction intensifies 25See Jacques Derrida, “The Animal that therefore I Am

(More to Follow).” Trans. David Wills. Critical Inquiry 28 (Winter

2002): 369–418; and “Geschlecht II: Heidegger’s Hand” in

Deconstruction and Philosophy: The Texts of Jacques Derrida. Ed. John Sallis.

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987) 161-196.

26Cary Wolfe, Animal Rites (Chicago: Chicago, 2003);

Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal (Minneapolis: Minnesota, 2003);

and Garrard 2004.

14


around the globe, we turn to recognize the ways in which humans

have always been dancing in a communal embrace with millions of

others, many of them in our bodies. Individual human bodies

turn out themselves to be far from discrete entities but rather

cavorting alliances of creatures in intricately choreographed

patterns, as Margulis explains in Symbiotic Planet.

We are a kind of baroque edifice, . . . rebuilt every two decades or so by

fused and mutating symbiotic bacteria. Our bodies are built from protoctist

sex cells that clone themselves by mitosis. Symbiotic interaction is the

stuff of life on a crowded planet. Our symbiogenetic composite core is far

older than the recent innovation we call the individual human. Our strong

sense of difference from any other life-form, our sense of species

superiority, is a delusion of grandeur.27

All around us are other living beings and forces whose

worlds intersect or overlap with ours, as Jakob Von Uexküll

explained in A Stroll Through the Worlds of Animals and Men. These

environments or umwelten differ from each other at the same time

that they interweave, because each creature subjectively

creates its own environment, or umwelt, through the perceptions

27Margulis 1998, 98.

15


which its sense organs allow it to experience.28 Von Uexküll’s

original contribution of the subjective umwelt concept to

evolutionary biology richly complicated its philosophical

implications, because the notion of multiple coexisting umwelten

constitutes a kind of biological analogue to General Relativity

and literally reveals the simultaneous existence of multiple

realities. The subjective significances of the world that can

be experienced in each of these realities determines the very

shape of each creature within it. Von Uexküll likened the

motivating, shaping force of each distinctive cell to a chime,

and that of an organ or organism to a melody which cannot be

explained mechanically but which follow their own laws of

growth in a participatory relationship with the world around

28Jacob Von Uexküll, A Stroll Through the Worlds of Animals and Men.

trans. by Claire H. Schiller in Instinctive Behavior (New York:

International Universities, 1957) 72. [Orig. Streifzüge durch die

umwelten von tieren und menschen; ein bilderbuch unsichtbarer welten. Berlin:

Georg Kriszat, 1934.]

16


them.29 The example of the octopus reveals this

interrelationship:

The rule that governs the properties of sea-water acts

upon the composition of the living chime of the cells of

protoplasm of the octopus embryo. It shapes the melody of

the development of the octopus form to express the

properties of sea-water in a counterpoint; first and

foremost, an organ is produced whose muscular walls force

the water in and out. The rule of meaning that joins

point and counterpoint is expressed in the action of

swimming.30

Traditional peoples used to understand the intertwining of

creatures with their environments or umwelten and with each

other, though they would have described that understanding in

rather different terms than ours. Oral traditions from all

over the world tell stories of humans conversing with other 29Jakob Von Uexküll, The Theory of Meaning in Semiotica 42-1

(1982): 25-82. Pp. 34, 37.

30Von Uexküll 1982, 53.

17


animals as relatives, being aided by them or tricked by them,

and always remaining closely associated in a shared world even

though each may experience it in quite different ways. Acoma

Pueblo Indian people of the American Southwest believe that

their ancestors emerged from underground, aided by a wise

spider and a locust.31 People of my Pacific Northwest region

tell stories of a woman who married a bear and turned into

one,32 of another woman who made fun of frogs and was forced to

marry one,33 of trickster heroes Coyote or Raven who intervene

in human and other creatures’ affairs.34 Ancient Celts in

Ireland believed that humans could turn into swans.35 The 31Richard Erdoes and Alfonso Ortiz, eds. American Indian Myths

and Legends (NewYork: Pantheon, 1984) 97-105.

32Erdoes and Ortiz 1984, 419-423

33Frederick W. Turner, III, editor, The Portable North American

Indian Reader (New York: Penguin, 1974) 217-218.

34Erdoes and Ortiz 1984, 171-172, 318-319, 344-346.

35Kenneth Hurlstone Jackson, ed. A Celtic Miscellany

(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971) 93-97.

18


development of agriculture and urban civilizations eroded that

sense through a long, gradual process, but the earliest

literatures are haunted by fears of what happens when humans

try to set themselves outside or above these wider kinships.

Let us now turn back to several of the earliest literary works

documenting the uneasy sense of human animal intertwining

during the Bronze Age when agriculture and cities were well-

established. These are the Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh and “The

Lament for Akkad,” and Euripides’s Bakkhai. Then we will leap

forward to Virginia Woolf’s final novel to see how those

concerns have returned since Darwin and his colleagues began

wakening Western thinkers and writers from the Renaissance and

Enlightenment dream of human transcendence.

Gilgamesh

The Epic of Gilgamesh is the oldest known extended written

narrative, a product of the complex agricultural civilization

of Sumer whose extensive walled cities and irrigation systems

19


once dominated what is now the desertified landscape of Iraq.

The power and appeal of Sumerian culture can be seen in the

long life of the epic, which existed in Akkadian, Babylonian,

and Hittite versions for 1,500 years before the cuneiform

libraries of clay tablets were lost beneath the sands until

nineteenth-century British archaeologists recovered them.36 The

fate of the rich world that produced the epic hints at the

ecological problems encoded in it. And now, of course, those

problems are doubly poignant as we watch what was left of

Iraq’s fertile landscapes blown to pieces by bombs and tanks.

In Pan’s Travail, J. Donald Hughes surveys the changed

relationship between human beings and the environment in

ancient Mesopotamia as the plow and systematic large-scale

irrigation gave rise to the first great cities. The

respectful, attentive attitudes of hunter-gatherers, early

farmers, and herders toward the natural environment began to

disappear. “It as if the barrier of city walls and the 36Maureen Gallery Kovacs, The Epic of Gilgamesh (Stanford:

Stanford, 1985) 29.

20


rectilinear pattern of canals had divided urban human beings

from wild nature and substituted an attitude of confrontation

for the earlier feeling of cooperation,” he writes.37 In The Epic

of Gilgamesh one can see this process symbolically enacted in a

strange, dream-like narrative of gigantic appetites, arrogant

determination, and defiance of the sacred powers of the earth.

The standard interpretations of the epic refer to deeds of

courage and strength, battles with monsters, and themes like

“grief and fear of death, “love and vulnerability and the quest

for wisdom.”38 But it is really a tale of ecological tragedy.

Gilgamesh and his companion Enkidu arrogantly attack the powers

of the natural world, figured as a huge cedar forest that is

the dwelling place of the gods and location of the throne of

Ishtar. The forest is guarded by the monster Humbaba, who

personifies the energies of animal and plant life. Ishtar 37J. Donald Hughes, Pan’s Travail: Environmental Problems of the Ancient

Greeks and Romans (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1994) 32-33.

38Stephen Mitchell, Gilgamesh: A New English Version (New York:

Free Press, 2004) 1-2.

21


(Sumerian Inanna) herself is a great goddess of fertility and

war, who is also the Mistress of Animals. She was celebrated

by an ancient cycle of Sumerian hymns and by the most sacred

religious holiday of the Mesopotamian world. The Gilgamesh

epic both begins and ends in paeans to her. It is very odd

that the epic claims Gilgamesh’s devotion to her and brags

about his construction of her great temple, yet at the heart of

the narrative, he contemptuously rejects and insults her. What

this contradiction suggests is that Mesopotamian culture

simultaneously revered her powers and gloried in the heroic

king who dared to challenge her and set human will above

Nature. The tragic consequences of that challenge provide the

epic’s dramatic and emotive force.

Central to the meaning of Gilgamesh and Enkidu’s actions

and fate, are their complex symbolic relations with other

animals. Before Enkidu enters Gilgamesh’s life and accompanies

him on the heroic journey to the Cedar Forest, we are told a

troubling story about young king, one that questions where

22


wildness resides, and how the boundaries from wild to tame,

human to other animals, indeed male to female, can be blurred,

crossed, policed, erased, restored. This introductory tale

includes a kind of evolutionary movement from protohuman to

civilized man, but in the end that supposed progression is

profoundly questioned.39 39It is important to understand the fragmented state of the

text, which provides only 2/3 of the narrative in clay tablets

from a number of different languages, with some key passages

missing. The historical King Gilgamesh lived around 2,700 BCE,

and the earliest written epics about him were produced about

2,000 BCE, based on oral traditions (Kovacs xxi-xxiii). The

languages and cultures encoded in the surviving texts are very

different from our own, functioning according to symbolic

economies and iconographies little understood in the modern

era. Thus attempts at translation and interpretation will

always be somewhat tentative. Primarily I will quote from the

1989 translation by Maureen Kovacs, a recent poetic effort to

capture the meaning of the “Standard Version”—the 11 tablets of

23


As this introductory narrative opens the epic, we learn

that young King Gilgamesh’s behavior is so wild that it is

devastating the city he is supposed to keep in order.

Supposedly two-thirds god and one-third human, he is both

“Mighty net, protector of his people” and “raging flood-wave

who destroys even walls of stone.”

He walks around in the enclosure of Uruk,

like a wild bull he makes himself mighty, head raised

(over others).

There is no rival who can raise his weapon against him

(Kovacs 4).

The citizens of Uruk are oppressed by his outrageous energies

and beg the gods for help, for “Gilgamesh does not leave a son

to his father;” “Gilgamesh does not leave a girl to her

mother.” How can this raging wild bull of a king be “the

shepherd of Uruk, . . . . bold, knowing, and wise” (Kovacs 5)?

In answer to the prayers of the people of Uruk and the

complaints of the other gods, Anu orders the goddess Aruru, who

24


created mankind, to create another one, a counterpart or double

for Gilgamesh. “Let him be equal to [Gilgamesh’s] stormy

heart/ let them be a match for each other so that Uruk may find

peace.” Aruru washes her hands, pinches off some clay, and

throws it into the wilderness.

In the wilderness (?) she created valiant Enkidu,

born of Silence, endowed with strength by Ninurta.

His whole body was shaggy with hair,

he had a full head of hair like a woman,

his locks billowed in profusion like Ashnan [goddess of

grain].

He knew neither people nor settled living,

but wore a garment like Sumukan [god of wild animals; i.e.

wore animal skins].

He ate grasses with the gazelles,

and jostled at the watering hole with the animals;

as with animals, his thirst was slaked with (mere) water

(Kovacs 6).

25


Enkidu is thus formed in a kind of Eden, as a primal human who

seems to have both male and female qualities. He lives in

harmony with the whole ecosystem of the grasslands around him.

His food and drink are the same as that of the wild creatures,

and he protects them from human trappers. Here, in contrast to

the disruptive behavior of King Gilgamesh, wildness seems

equated with cooperation, nurture, and balance.

Enkidu is domesticated by a priestess of the Temple of

Inanna/Ishtar at the request of a trapper who fears the hairy

protohuman and resents his protection of the wild creatures.

In an episode anticipating the Biblical theft of Samson’s

energy by Delilah, the priestess Shamhat exposes her body to

Enkidu so that he is aroused for six days and spends all his

strength in lovemaking (Kovacs 6-9). The woman plays the

classic mediating role between wildness and civilization which

Donna Haraway has shown to be still operating in popular

culture and in the discourse and semiotics of primatology with

26


figures like Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey.40 His strength

depleted, Enkidu is washed and shorn, given civilized clothing,

and taught to eat and drink human nourishment. His wild animal

companions now flee from him, and instead of their protector he

becomes a guardian of shepherds. Then he travels to Uruk to

meet his destined counterpart.

27


Gilgamesh is about to enter the House of Marriage when

Enkidu finds him at last and blocks his entrance in rage. The

exact meaning of Gilgamesh’s role in the House of Marriage is

unclear, as is Enkidu’s behavior, but it can reasonably be

interpreted as a reference to the ritual hierogamy, sacred in

the Assyrian version of 1100 BCE that is the best-preserved text

available. At some points, however, I will also use N.K.

Sandars’s prose composite version–The Epic of Gilgamesh 1960. (New

York: Penguin, 1972) that pieces a fuller narrative together

from the oldest Sumerian tablets as well as later ones including

the Standard Version. Walter Burkert informs us in Creation of the

Sacred: Tracks of Biology in Early Religions (Harvard, 1996) 60-61), that

recently the older Sumerian version has been edited in full. But

according to Andrew George, even the Sumerian version is still

incomplete, as scholars in various parts of the world continue

working to unite, edit, and translate the hundreds of fragments

in many different countries: The Epic of Gilgamesh: The Babylonian Epic

Poem and Other Texts in Akkadian and Sumerian (London: Allen Lane, 1999)

141. Translations of the major Sumerian texts are published in

28


most Mesopotamian cultures, between the king and a

representative of Inanna/Ishtar. This was the ceremony invoked

in the Sumerian courtship hymns to Inanna and Dumuzi, and

ordinary human procreation was understood to be similarly

sacred, part of the cyclical flow of seasonal fertility among

all animals and plants.41 The Epic of Gilgamesh sets this sacred

ritual in a negative context, with Enkidu moving violently to

prevent Gilgamesh from enacting it. Like wild bulls, the two

grapple together and shake the walls, smashing the doorposts.

Once Gilgamesh triumphs, however, Enkidu vows allegiance to him,

George’s edition, pp. 145-208. In Sumerian versions the goddess

Ishtar bears her earlier name of Inanna, and the monster

guarding the Cedar Forest is Huwawa rather than Humbaba.

Citations and quotations from the epic will subsequently be

included in parentheses in the text of my discussion.

40Donna Haraway, Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of

Modern Science (New York: Routledge, 1989) 133-185.

41Louise Westling, The Green Breast of the New World: Landscape,

Gender, and American Fiction (Athens: Georgia, 1985) 20-21.

29


they kiss each other and become inseparable companions as the

king’s dreams foretold (Kovacs 17-19).

This bond replaces Gilgamesh’s relationship with the

fertile powers that Inanna/Ishtar represents, so that instead of

acting in patterns that parallel the recurring cycles of life in

the land, Gilgamesh sets himself against them. Gilgamesh’s huge

appetites focus upon the ambition to make his name famous in the

land forever, by attacking the great Cedar Forest.42

In this central episode of the narrative a strange

transference occurs between Enkidu and Gilgamesh, in which

Enkidu tries to dissuade his friend from this plan, but then the

roles reverse, with Enkidu urging him on once they have entered

the forest. Enkidu has known the wild forest as one of its

animal inhabitants, and he knows the power of Humbaba, whom the

god Enlil has placed in the forest to guard it from intrusion.

As they travel across the transitional spaces from city to wild

landscape, and Enkidu uses his wilderness expertise to prepare

their camping places, Gigamesh has terrible dreams warning him 42Sandars 1960, 70-72; Burkert 1996, 60; George 1999, 20.

30


about the dangers of trespassing here: mountains fall on him, a

wild bull attacks him, and lightening strikes, turning his

surroundings to ash (Kovacs 27-38). The sacredness of the forest

is clear even to these travelers once they enter its awesome

precincts, but they only pause briefly before rushing on to

attack Humbaba. The monster is in many ways a larger example of

what Enkidu himself had been before he had known human kind; he

has heroic qualities similar to the wild energies of both

Gilgamesh and Enkidu. In the battle with Humbaba, Enkidu and

Gilgamesh trade roles again, as Enkidu is at first terrified,

but then Gilgamesh quails and Enkidu encourages him to attack,

knowing that they must hasten before the gods learn what they

are about and punish their sacrilege (Kovacs 45). This episode

is saturated by a sense of forbidden behavior and certain

retribution.

When Gilgamesh’s axe severs Humbaba’s neck, the forest

trembles; he and Enkidu chop it down, pack up the great timbers

to float down the Euphrates to Uruk. When they present the head

31


of the monster to the gods, the ruling deity Enlil is enraged

that his sacred wilderness and its guardian have been destroyed,

and a council of gods decides that Enkidu must die in recompense

(Sandars 80-84). Thus he and his monstrous wilderness double

both perish as the sacred forest does; their lives were part of

it, as, by symbolic extension of Gilgamesh’s relationship with

Enkidu, his is as well. Gilgamesh lives on, but as a chastened

man whose grief for Enkidu is so devastating, that he is reduced

to a figure very close to what Enkidu was before he traveled to

Uruk. Gilgamesh strips himself of the emblems of his civilized

power and all his clothing (Kovacs 71), reducing himself to the

“poor, bare forked animal” of King Lear’s description of

unaccommodated man, with matted hair wandering in the wilderness

burned by sun and ice, hunting wild creatures and covered with

their skins (Kovacs 91). Though he wanders to the land of the

dead in search of his friend, his impossible quest for eternal

life ends in futility.

In its anguished examination of the shifting, uncertain

32


boundaries between humans and other animals, The Epic of Gilgamesh

demonstrates that their strengths and vitalities are shared and

are part of the sacred energies of the landscape. But human

will cannot apparently be controlled. Gilgamesh’s arrogance

leads him to commit terrible sacrilege, and the gods take their

revenge on those who have devastated the natural world.

Probably the inconsistencies and conflicting divine figures in

the epic reflect conflicting cultural forces within ancient

Sumerian and Babylonian and Assyrian societies, including some

traditions that urge careful behavior within the natural

environment that sustains all living things, and some supporting

human exploitation of the landscape and its creatures. What is

certain, however, is that the environment of ancient Mesopotamia

changed disastrously as soils became salinated by intensive

irrigation (Diamond 48), forests were cut down for the building

of enormous cities, wild creatures pushed out of their habitats

by human activities, and the landscape progressively

impoverished. Somehow, in spite of the celebration of Gilgamesh

33


and his marvelous city of Uruk, the epic understands the tragedy

of human separation from the wider animal and plant community.

We now know that Mesopotamian civilizations suffered

catastrophic destruction from climate change and environmental

degradation by humans. In Collapse, Jared Diamond has examined a

series of similar ecological disasters in other parts of the

globe, caused by climate change in ancient times. Elizabeth

Kolbert also describes the effects of climate change on many

ancient societies but specifically focuses upon the same world

that produced The Epic of Gilgamesh. Clay tablets from the city of

Akkad, just south of present-day Baghdad, preserve a lamentation

called “The Curse of Akkad” describing the fall of a magnificent

empire caused by impious behavior much like Gilgamesh’s attack

against the sacred cedar forest. Enlil, the god of winds and

storms who punishes Enkidu in the Gilgamesh epic, is also the

main deity in “The Curse of Akkad.” He destroys King Naram-sin

and all his people, who lived around 2200 BCE, some five hundred

years after the historical King Gilgamesh. The lament describes

34


how the fields produced no grain, the irrigated ponds no fish,

and the irrigated orchards no syrup or wine. Clouds gathered,

but no rain fell. “He who slept on the roof, died on the roof,/

He who slept in the house, had no burial,/ People were flailing

at themselves from hunger.”43 Archaeological excavations at the

site of ancient Akkad, together with soil samples taken from the

site, show that about 2200 BCE a drought of terrible proportions

coincided with the abandonment of human habitations and death of

the very soil. Even earthworms died out.44 This was also the

time when the Old Kingdom of Egypt collapsed and villages in

ancient Palestine were abandoned. It corresponds with a cold

snap that drastically changed global climates, reducing rainfall

in dry areas so severely that many forms of life simply

disappeared for a time.45 The emerging historical record of

human societies on the changing landscape of our planet begins 43Elizabeth Kolbert, “The Climate of Man–II,” in The New

Yorker (May 2, 2005): 64-66.

44Kolbert 2005, 66.

45Kolbert 2005, 72.

35


to show that Nature is far more dynamic and dangerous than

nostalgic or escapist pastoral habits might lull us into

thinking. The Epic of Gilgamesh and “The Lament for Akkad” express a

grim Darwinian understanding that violent change and death are

central to the natural world, and that we humans must respect

our fragile membership within it.46

The Bakkhai of Euripides

Two thousand years after the life of the historical King

Gilgamesh, Greek playwright Euripides wrote his version of an

ancient tragedy that shares with the Gilgamesh epic many

anxieties about human/animal relationships and the tragic

consequences of pretending that they do not exist. 47 The story 46See Love 2003, 83-88; and Diamond 2005.

47E. R. Dodds, Euripides Bacchae 1944 (Oxford: Clarendon,

1960). In the introduction to his 1944 edition of the text,

Dodds explains that the formal qualities of this late play of

Euripides are unusually archaic, marking it as the most ancient

material the poet ever reshaped (xxxvi-xxxvii). The traditional

36


of King Pentheus’s demise also involves an arrogant young king

who tries to impose human will upon nature, an epicene

doppleganger who is closely associated with wild animals,

shifting boundaries between human and non-human forms, and death

as the consequence for defying the sacred powers of the natural

world.

Friedrich Nietzsche, at least in part under the influence

of Darwinian thought,48 identified Dionysos with natural forces

and implied that Pentheus’s efforts to resist his divine cousin

and enforce his will upon these energies exemplified an

nature of many scenes is attested on vase paintings that long

predate Euripides (xxxiii-xxvi). It was one of the playwright’s

final works, written sometime between 408 BCE and his death in

406 (xxxix).] ..

48For a closely reasoned evaluation of Nietzsche’s debt to

Darwin, as well as his challenges to some Darwinian principles,

see John Richardson, Nietzsche’s New Darwinism (New York: Oxford,

2004).

37


Apollonian extreme.49 But The Birth of Tragedy looks rather quaint

in its rhapsodic appeal to an opposition that isn’t an explicit

part of Euripedes’s text, a text in which Apollo is only

mentioned once. Instead, a close examination of the tragedy

reveals that both Pentheus and Dionysos are intimately animal,

both having strange genealogies including snaky, bovine, and

leonine forbears, both metamorphosing into some of these

different species at given points in the play. Boundaries and

distinctions among species are not at all secure in this strange

world. The tragedy that reenacts the sacrifice by which

Dionysos is torn to pieces in some versions of his myths comes

about because Pentheus refuses to acknowledge his own animality

and the wild forces embodied in and manipulated by his divine

double. Translator Robert Bagg describes “Euripides’s bitter

vision of an implacable divine presence not outside, but within

our nature, a presence utterly hostile to what we uneasily call

49Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy. 1872. trans.Walter

Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1967) 37, 59;46-47.

38


our humanity.”50 One could qualify Bagg’s point, however, by

suggesting that the only reason this divine presence becomes so

implacable and violent in the events we witness is that Pentheus

enrages the god by refusing to worship him.

Pentheus and Dionysos (or Bakkhus) are about the same age

and look similar, except that Dionysos has flowing hair and

almost feminine features, while Pentheus is a hypermasculine

military man determined to condemn the god’s worship in his city

of Thebes. The Chorus of Maenad worshipers informs the audience

that Dionysos was born bull-headed and writhing with snakes in

Crete. He is also associated with twining ivy, leopards and

lions, and of course with the grape.51 But Pentheus himself is

the son of a man whose name Echion means “snake” and who sprang

up from the earth when Kadmos, the slayer of a mighty serpent

sowed the monster’s teeth in the earth.52 The Chorus informs the50Robert Bagg, trans. The Bakkhai by Euripides

(Amherst:Massachusetts, 1978) 14.

51Dodds 1960, 76-79.

52Bagg 1978, 8, 28.

39


audience:

There is evil in Pentheus’s blood—

the bestial earth blazes in his face,

an inhuman snake face

like those his giant fathers had,

those butchers who were beaten

when they tried to fight gods.53

Kadmos is Pentheus’s grandfather, whose daughter Agave married

this serpent’s offspring, and Dionysos announces at the end of

the play that he will turn Kadmos and his daughter into serpents

to punish them for their impiety.54

This genealogy remains just under the surface of the play’s

action but is hinted frequently by puns and choral epithets for

the god, as both E.L. Dodds and Robert Bagg make clear in their

introductions to the text, and the Greek audience would have

been fully attuned to these uncanny associations. But Pentheus

is so determined to maintain his rational, human control of

53 Bagg 1978, 37.

54Bagg 1978, 66-67; Oxford Classical Dictionary 1970, 187.

40


himself and his kingdom that he has buried them far from his

consciousness. When he confronts the young stranger who is

Dionysos in disguise, he is alternately attracted and infuriated

by him. He tries to chain him up and throw him in prison, but

the stranger turns into a wild bull and cannot be held by his

jailers. Pentheus’s sacrilege is punished by earthquake and

fire, but the young king refuses to understand.55 Finally,

Dionysos so befuddles him that he agrees to dress in women’s

clothes and go to spy on the Bakkhic worship performed by his

mother and the other women, outside the city in the pastoral

space of wild meadows and hills. By this point Pentheus’ vision

is blurred, so that when he looks at the magical stranger, he

sees him trotting like a bull, with horns sprouting from his

head. Pentheus wonders whether he is seeing distortions and

asks Dionysos, “were you always . . . animal?/ There’s no

question you’re a bull now.”56

The fatal climax happens offstage, when the worshipers see 55 Bagg 1978, 40-41.

56Bagg 1978, 50.

41


Pentheus spying from his hiding place in a tree, tear it down

and rip him to pieces in the ritual practices of sparagmos and

omophagia central to ancient Dionysian worship–the tearing to

pieces of a live animal and the eating of its raw flesh.57 The

women think they have captured a lion, and Pentheus’s mother

Agave proudly displays his head as they come in triumph back to

Thebes. “I took this yearling lion/ without ropes. Look at

him!!” she cries to the Chorus.58 Although this instance of the

god’s worship is particularly gruesome, it implies a general

truth, that there is no resisting the metamorphosis of animal

forms, of which humans are only a temporary manifestation.

Eating and drinking, the nourishing of human bodies, requires

violent tearing of other bodies, and ingesting their flesh.

Because Pentheus and his mother refused to acknowledge their

subordinate part in this sacrificial economy and their

dependence upon the powers of the natural world which Dionysos

represents, they become sacrificial victims themselves. The 57 Dodds 1960, xvi-xix; Bagg 1978, 56-57.

58 Bagg 1978, 58.

42


Chorus has forewarned of such retribution for human arrogance in

the face of Nature’s power.

The gods work slowly,

but you can trust them—

their power breaks all

mad arrogant men

who love foolishness

and pay no mind to the gods—

but the gods are devious

and in no hurry—

they put

an impious man at his ease, then

hunt him down.

43


. . . . . . . .

It costs little to believe,

that, whatever divinity is,

it is power;

which time seasons, strengthens

and lets stand—

such laws are Nature herself

coming to flower.59

The moral structures of Euripides’s play are complex and

confusing, but at its heart is the insistence on human kinship

with all other life in both harmonious and violent relationships

which cannot long be denied or resisted.

Both The Epic of Gilgamesh and The Bakkhai are very ancient

literary works, liminal in their attempts to rationalize

traditional beliefs about human relationships with other animals

and the wild energies Merleau-Ponty associated with the Brute

being that permeates all life, while also retaining deep fears

about the costs of civilization with its presumptions of

separation from nature and all other animals. Examples of other

such ancient works can be multiplied from many cultures, but 59Bagg 1978, 48-49.

44


those I have chosen to discuss are demonstrable predecessors of

our own European/Mediterranean background. In the millennia that

have intervened since they were written, anxieties about human

membership in the larger biotic community seem gradually to have

ebbed, as the apparent control of the nonhuman world and other

animals by our species increased. Since the Industrial

Revolution of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, developing

technologies have seemed to prove the superiority of homo sapiens

over all others.

As Arthur Lovejoy established long ago, the patterns of

dualistic thought in European culture which separate humans from

nature and other animals, mind from body, and spirit from matter

can be traced back in strong, explicit written form at least as

far as Plato.60 But such views remained a sort of otherworldly

“official philosophy” which did not fully engage the popular

mind. That is because “most men, however much they may have

professed to accept it, . . . have never quite believed it, 60Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an

Idea. (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard, 1936) 24-66.

45


since they have never been able to deny to the things disclosed

by the senses a genuine and imposing and highly important kind of

realness, . . .” Indeed most people have “manifestly continued

to find something very solid and engrossing in the world in which

[their] own constitution was so deeply rooted and with which it

was so intimately interwoven . . . .”61 Thus in spite of the

dualism inherent in Christianity, many older forms of animism

were absorbed into Northern European practices of the faith, most

notably in Celtic reverence for sacred springs and groves and

relationships with animals in poetry, saints’ lives, and popular

legends found in Ireland, Cornwall, Wales, and Brittany.62

Medieval bestiaries also continued long habits of associations

between people and the living communities around them, though

framed in allegorical Christian terms. With Renaissance Humanism,

Enlightenment optimism, and the triumph of scientific thought,

however, such attitudes went into eclipse for several hundred 61Lovejoy 1936, 26-27.

62 Kenneth Hurlstone Jackson, A Celtic Miscellany (Harmondsworth:

Penguin, 1951) 277-305.

46


years.

Pico della Mirandola provided one of the most extreme

formulations of Humanism in his Oration on the Dignity of Man of 1486.

There he described man as an amphibian who can move at will up

and down the hierarchy of nature, with the power to transcend the

flesh, the earth, and even the position of the angels. As a free

and proud agent, man can shape his own being, descending “to the

lower, brutish forms of life” or rising to the superior, divine

orders as “a pure contemplator, unmindful of the body, wholly

withdrawn into the chambers of the mind . . . [a creature neither

] of earth nor a heavenly creature, but some higher divinity,

clothed with human flesh.”63 However, skeptics such as Michel de

Montaigne and William Shakespeare disputed this kind of

complacency. Montaigne’s “Apology for Raymond Sebond” is

primarily a sustained attack on the notion that humans are

superior to other animals. 63Pico della Mirandola, Oration on the Dignity of Man, tr. A.

Robert Caponigri (South Bend: Indiana, Regenry/Gateway, 1956) 7-

11.

47


The most vulnerable and frail of all creatures is man, and at the same time the

most arrogant. . . . [By the vanity of his imagination] he equals himself to

God, attributes to himself divine characteristics, picks himself out and

separates himself from the horde of other creatures, carves out their shares to

his fellows and companions the animals, and distributes among them such portions

of faculties and powers as he sees fit.64

As Darwin would do four hundred years later, Montaigne asserted

that animals reason and feel emotions, communicate with those of

their own species and also with those of different species, and

make their way through the world as active and capable agents

just as humans do.65 In pastoral comedies such as A Midsummer

Night’s Dream and As You Like It, Shakespeare satirized the

conventional poses of courtly folk pretending to be shepherds,

using forest settings to expose human folly and weakness in

contrast to natural forces and to suggest closer relationships to

other animals than Humanist assumptions presumed. In Hamlet,

Shakespeare began to show clear Montaignian influences, and

64Frame, Donald, trans. The Complete Essays of Montaigne (Stanford:

Stanford, 1965) 330-331.

65Frame 1965, 331-358.

48


scholars have long associated Hamlet’s anguished probing of human

nature in the famous soliloquies with Montaigne’s Essays.66 But

the anti-pastoral King Lear brings us closest to Montaigne’s

picture of humanity in “The Apology for Raymond Sebond.” When

the old king has defied his cruel daughters and run out of the

shelter of the human community, into the storm on the heath, at

last he abandons his arrogance and comes to see himself as

“unaccommodated man” like Tom O’Bedlam, “a poor, bare, fork’d

animal.”67

Such skepticism was pushed to the edges of European thought

by the determined quest for certainty of Newton and Descartes in

the early decades of the seventeenth century. According to

Carolyn Merchant, Montaigne and Shakespeare’s contemporary 66F. E. Halliday, A Shakespeare Companion (Baltimore: Penguin,

1964) 321; see, for example Hamlet in The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G.

Blakemore Evans, et al (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974) IV, iv 32-

39.

67The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans, et al (Boston:

Houghton Mifflin, 1974) III, iv 107-108.

49


Francis Bacon transformed tendencies already extant in his own

society into a total program advocating the control of nature for

human benefit” through science.68 In France René Descartes

engaged in a similar movement away from Montaignian skepticism,

introducing a mechanistic view of the world “as an antidote to

intellectual uncertainty and as a new rational basis for social

stability.” 69 Descartes believed that “All knowledge is certain

and evident cognition,” and therefore that doubting is the same

as ignorance.70 He firmly situated humans outside an essentially

inert, mechanical Nature, by virtue of disembodied Mind which

links our species with the divine order through the clear

language of mathematics. In contrast to humans, animals “have no

intelligence at all, and . . . it is nature which acts in them 68Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the

Scientific Revolution. (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1980) 164.

69Merchant 1980, 194.

70 René Descartes, Discourse on the Method. in Descartes: Selected

Philosophical Writings, ed. John Cottingham, et al (New York:

Cambridge, 1988) 9.

50


according to the disposition of their organs,” Descartes

explained, “in the same way a clock, consisting only of wheels

and springs,” can register accurate time.71 Isaac Newton fully

realized the kind of vision Descartes espoused by providing what

Merchant calls “the most powerful synthesis of the new

mathematical philosophy” in his Principia Mathematica of 1687, thus

epitomizing the “dead world resulting from mechanism.”72 As we

can see in retrospect, the Cartesian-Newtonian picture of human

existence outside a mechanistic, static natural world prevailed

for at least two hundred years until its certainties began to be

destabilized by nineteenth-century natural science and

mathematics.

Perhaps as part of a reaction against Enlightenment reason,

or the blight of industrial cities, certainly in part as a

product of imperialism which sent Europeans off on exotic natural

history quests all over the globe, in the nineteenth century a

renewed fascination with the animal world and the planet’s 71Descartes 1988, 45.

72Merchant 1980, 26.

51


history gave birth to a wave of new life sciences among which

Darwin’s work was a climactic breakthrough. In a sense, everyone

in Western intellectual life has been a Darwinian since the ideas

published in the Origin of Species and The Descent of Man began to

overwhelm resistance in the last decades of the nineteenth

century. But at the same time, modern urban life and its

increasing technological sophistication have allowed popular

culture and much of intellectual life to continue thinking in

Enlightenment terms about human superiority to all other life,

and essential separation from it. Recent work in evolutionary

biology by scientists like Lynn Margulis makes such presumptions

ridiculous. As we have seen, Margulis has explained why

symbiosis in the evolution of life forms makes it is impossible

to think of our kind as the summit of creation, outside of the

wild swamp of life around us. “We need to be freed from our

species specific arrogance,” she writes. “No evidence exists that

we are ‘chosen,’ the unique species for which all the others are

made. . . . Our tenacious illusion of special dispensation

52


belies our true status as upright mammalian weeds.”73 Frans de

Waal agrees, having concluded from a career of studying the

culture of chimpanzees and other primates:

The time has come to define the human species against the backdrop of the vast

common ground we share with other life forms. Instead of being tied to how we

are unlike any animal, human identity should be built around how we are animals

that have taken certain capacities a significant step farther. We and other

animals are both similar and different, and the former is the only sensible

framework within which to flesh out the latter.74

Virginia Woolf would have been delighted by such

conclusions, because she spent much of her life thinking about

the immersion of humans within the much wider realm of life on

earth. Brought up among Darwinian free-thinkers, she pondered

the human/animal dance in much of her writing, from her earliest

stories and novels to her last. Her father Leslie Stephen is

noted approvingly by Darwin in The Descent of Man (2nd ed. of 1874) ,

for having written in 1873, “It is difficult to understand how

73Margulis 1998, 119.

74Frans De Waal, The Ape and the Sushi Master: Cultural Reflections of a

Primatologist (New York: Basic Books, 2001) 362.

53


anybody who has ever kept a dog, or seen an elephant, can have

any doubt as to an animal’s power of performing the essential

processes of reasoning.”75 Leslie Stephen guided his daughter’s

unusual education at home, where she had the run of his

remarkable library. Gillian Beer explains how saturated with

Darwin young Virginia Stephen’s world was. Clearly she had read

and been deeply marked by The Voyage of the Beagle as a beginning

writer, because her first novel The Voyage Out echoes and parallels

narrative patterns, themes and even particular passages from

Darwin’s book.76 Beer has richly explored Darwin’s influence on

Woolf’s work, though she has not exhausted the subject in any

sense because his thought so permeates Woolf’s view of the world,

her epistemology, and her narrative explorations of experience.

One thinks of short stories like “Kew Gardens” or essays like the75Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex

1885, note 29 on p. 43.

76Gillian Beer, “Virginia Woolf and Prehistory,”in Virginia

Woolf: The Common Ground; Essays by Gillian Beer (Ann Arbor: Michigan,

1996) 13-16.

54


amazing “Death of the Moth” where a few minutes’ struggle of a

dying moth on a windowsill takes on the profound drama of all

life. Or the experimental “Time Passes” section of To the

Lighthouse comes to mind, in which ten years of nonhuman forces

and beings are described in a house absent of human life. But

here we have time for only a quick glimpse at her final novel

Between the Acts, written in 1940 as the European war began to

engulf the British Isles and apocalypse threatened. Mindful of

the extreme situation in which she and her compatriots found

themselves, her novel questions the very meaning of human history

and culture. Carole Cantrell and I have both previously

discussed some of the ways in which Woolf describes the

human/animal intertwining in the world of this novel.77 She

posits nonhuman forces and beings as crucial players in the human77Carol Cantrell, “ ‘The Locus of Compossibility’: Virginia

Woolf, Modernism, and Place,” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and

Environment 5 (Summer 1998) 25-40; and Louise Westling, “Virginia

Woolf and the Flesh of the World,” New Literary History 30 (Autumn

1999) 855-875.

55


drama, both in the village pageant performed at the country house

where the novel is set, and in the world of the audience that

includes the Oliver family who live in the house, and most of the

village population as well. Swallows, butterflies, trees, cows,

clouds, and rain interweave with people’s activities and are

shown to be especially important in the pageant’s performance.

Woolf has made clear from the novel’s prelude that these

presences are integral to the conversations of her human

characters, and we see the many animal lives intersecting,

paralleling, supporting, and competing with each other throughout

the events of the day in June 1939 which the narrative recounts.

One character is particularly linked to the Darwinian vision

of Between the Acts. That is Lucy Swithin, the elderly sister of

Bart Oliver, the patriarch of the household. Although she is

derided by most of the other characters in the novel, Lucy

Swithin is actually the central, defining presence in the

narrative, whose apparently vague musings on evolutionary history

create a meaningful context for the events of that June day.

56


These ruminations also anticipate the narrator's final

description of primal conflict between Isa and Giles Oliver, when

the trappings of human distinction from other animals drop away.

As the day begins, Lucy lies in bed with her favorite reading, an

Outline of History,

and had spent the hours between three and five thinking of rhododendron forests

in Piccadilly; when the entire continent, not then, she understood, divided by a

channel, was all one; populated, she understood, by elephant-bodied, seal-

necked, heaving, surging, slowly writhing, and, she supposed, barking monsters;

the iguanodon, the mammoth, and the mastodon; from whom presumably, she thought,

jerking the window open, we descend.78

Woolf merged H.G. Well’s Outline of History with G.M. Trevelyan’s

History of England in this reference.79 A few pages later she

identifies other sources for Lucy’s (and the narrator’s)

understanding of the human place in the cosmos by references to

Darwin, Jeans, and Eddington, whose books are in the Oliver

78 Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts, ed. Stella McNichol with

notes by Gillian Beer (London: Penguin, 1992) 8.

79Gillian Beer, note 4 in Between the Acts 1992, 131.

57


library.80 Thus she connects Lucy Swithin’s musings with the new

physics of relativity and quantum theory explained by James Jeans

and Arthur Eddington’s works, as well as with Darwin’s

understanding of the kinship of humans and all other living

beings who co-evolved from scarcely imaginable earlier worlds.

Because Mrs. Swithin is habitually “increasing the bounds of the

moment by flights into past or future” she looks strangely at the

maid who enters her room with her breakfast, for her divided

glance is “half meant for a beast in a swamp, half for a maid in

a print frock and white apron.”81 At the same time that she

thinks about evolutionary history and the kinship of modern

people with Egyptian pharaohs, she contemplates the migrations of

swallows and is attuned to the lives of the many other creatures

around her. She is also religious, fingering the cross about her

neck whenever she is nervous, and laughed at for her vagueness

and her faith.

Though she may be somewhat comical, Lucy enacts a 80Woolf, BTA 1992, 14.

81Woolf, BTA 1992, 8.

58


sacramental communion with the world of other animal and plant

lives around and intertwining with human affairs. Her vision is

supported by the overall pattern of the novel, which includes

violence and the murmurings of war in the distance. Her

relationship with other creatures may seem distracted, but in

fact she is a healing presence, generous to all she encounters,

prescient in her anticipation of the coming war's demolition of

civilization's pretenses, and hopefully suggestive of humanity's

possible reintegration into a balanced coexistence with the rest

of the living world after another episode of military cataclysm.

When Lucy seeks and finds the great reclusive goldfish in

the lily pond after the pageant is over, echoes of Gerard Manley

Hopkins's "Pied Beauty" indicate her uncanny ability to commune

with the realm of animals which has been suggested by the

swallows, mice, cows, and other creatures whose flights and

voices and presences have been interwoven with human actions

throughout the novel. Woolf prepares us to understand the

meaning of Lucy’s encounter with the goldfish by describing the

59


carnivalesque confusion of people, historical times, classes, and

species in the pageant’s finale: And Lord! The jangle and the

din! The very cows joined in Walloping, tail lashing, the

reticence of nature was undone, and the barriers which should

divide Man the master from the Brute were dissolved. Then the

dogs joined in.” The whole scene dissolves in confusion and

hilarity, but what the audience has been shown is “ourselves.”

“The hands of the clock had stopped at the present moment. It was

now. Ourselves.”82

Lucy moves off alone to the lily pond as the crowd

disperses, and gazes into its waters. Throughout the novel this

pond has been linked with the image of a cesspool and the muddy

matrix of creation where decay is synonymous with transformation

that stimulates regeneration. Local legend has it that a woman

drowned in the pond, but instead of death, Lucy searches for

signs of her favorite goldfish.

“All gone,” she murmured, “under the leaves.” Scared by shadows passing,

the fish had withdrawn. She gazed at the water. Perfunctorily she caressed her

82 Woolf, BTA 1992, 109-110.

60


cross. But her eyes went water searching, looking for fish. The lilies were

shutting; the red lily, the white lily, each on its plate of leaf. Above, the

air rushed; beneath was water. She stood between two fluidities, caressing her

cross. . . .[A few vagrant thoughts float across her mind.]

Then something moved in the water; her favourite fantail. The golden

orfe followed. Then she had a glimpse of silver–the great carp himself, who

came to the surface so very seldom. They slid on, in and out between the

stalks, silver, pink; gold; splashed; streaked; pied.

“Ourselves,” she murmured. And retrieving some glint of faith from the

grey waters, hopefully, without much help from reason, she followed the fish;

the speckled, streaked, and blotched, seeing in that vision beauty, power, and

glory in ourselves.83

Woolf’s description of the fish faintly echoes Gerard Manley

Hopkins’ “Pied Beauty” which begins, “Glory be to God for dappled

things.” It ends praising the transcendent God beyond the flawed

mortal world of change, but that is the opposite of Virginia

Woolf’s point.84 Instead through Lucy Swithin, Woolf celebrates

the motley array of earth’s life, and the way we can see 83Woolf, BTA 1992, 121.

84Gerard Manley Hopkins, “Pied Beauty,” Gerard Manley Hopkins: A

Selection of his Poems and Prose, ed. W. H. Gardner (Harmondsworth:

Penguin, 1953) 30-31.

61


ourselves in the speckled, streaked, and blotched forms of the

graceful fish gliding through their watery, leafy, muddy,

splashing realm.

The novel ends in increasing darkness, with Lucy’s return

to her reading of the Outline of History before going to bed.

“England was then a swamp. Thick forests covered the land. On

the top of their matted branches birds sang . . . Prehistoric

man, half-human, half-ape, roused himself from his semi-crouching

position and raised great stones.” Finally when she and her

brother retire, leaving the young married couple alone, Bart’s

son Giles and his wife Isa are returned to that prehistoric world

in the darkness.

Alone, enmity was bared; also love. Before they slept, they must fight; after

they had fought, they would embrace. From that embrace another life might be

born. But first they must fight, as the dog fox fights with the vixen, in the

heart of darkness, in the fields of night. . . . The window was all sky without

colour. The house had lost its shelter. It was night before roads were made,

or houses. It was the night that dwellers in caves had watched from some high

place among the rocks.85

85Woolf, BTA 1992, 129-130.

62


In Between the Acts Virginia Woolf anticipated developments in

philosophy and ecology that would only come half century after

her death. She links the Oliver family with all people, who are

in most respects the same as our Paleolithic and Neolithic

ancestors, and with what we would now call all the other members

of their ecosystem. The novel is quite pastoral, though

certainly not in a static sense, for it describes a landscape

much like that of rural Sussex where Virginia and Leonard Woolf

had retreated to their country cottage to wait out the war.

Although it is a place of retreat, textual anticipations of

coming war such as loud flights of warplanes interrupting the

pageant festivities indicate that the countryside will see its

share of destruction and deprivation, as well as the cities.

The rural landscape around Pointz Hall is the kind of place most

humans have lived for the past several thousand years. In such

a village community supported by surrounding farms, human/animal

interactions are clearly visible in a wider environment of plant

life and migrating wild populations of birds as the seasons

63


change. Thus the pastoral became for her the central stage of

the drama of history, a landscape saturated with the lives of

myriad creatures, marked by the plough from the time of Romans

and the Napoleanic wars, but also literally formed of the

residue of bodies and waste materials from the lives of all the

creatures of thousands of years. The discovery that 9,000 year-

old Cheddar Man, a skeleton found in a cave near the village of

Cheddar, has a direct descendent in that town at the present

time,86 shows that Virginia Woolf was right. We, like the Oliver

family, are not very different from our ancestors 9,000 or even

30,000 years ago.

The distinctive ancient fears about the consequences of

denying human intertwining and metamorphosis with kindred

animals and the animate forces of the planet are returning to

the forefront of literary consciousness at the beginning of this

new millennium, gravely challenging the arrogant elevation of

humanity.87 The sense of environmental peril that has grown 86South Coast Today, March 9, 1997.

87See David Ehrenfeld, The Arrogance of Humanism (New York:

64


upon the developed nations of the world in the past several

decades has sharpened the sense of urgency with which the

human/animal question has been addressed in literature. Woolf

made the pastoral a vehicle for raising it in the most urgent

way, against the backdrop of evolutionary history and

approaching apocalypse. She could not have foreseen the

environmental challenges of the twenty-first century, or the

developments in biology, ethology, and earth sciences of the

past fifty years, but her concerns were fully congruent with

them. Since her death, other writers have pursued many of the

same questions much more explicitly as the understanding of

climate change and the human destruction of natural systems has

grown more acute. Octavia Butler’s Dawn, Linda Hogan’s Solar

Storms, Don DeLillo’s White Noise, and Yann Martel’s Life of Pi are

only a few examples of how the pastoral mode continues to serve

contemporary writers for radical explorations of the

human/animal dance within the Brute being of Gaian life, but

they are subjects for another investigation.

Oxford, 1978).

65


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