A Rhetorical Bestiary

Rhetoric has always been bestial. The horse, Polos, bucks against decorous Aristotelian rhetoric (Sutton, “The Taming”). Octopi model an Odyssean mêtis (Hawhee, Bodily Arts 57), Korax—that infamous blackbird—caws dissent (Olbrys Gencarella), and George A. Kennedy’s Aristotelian crows incite deliberation (“A Hoot in the Dark”). The clipped wings of Jane Sutton’s peacock help to ground rhetoric’s historical consciousness (Sutton, “Haunted by a Peacock”). A trapped bird teaches us about “the definition of man” and conveys an example of “tropism” (Burke, “Definition of Man” 3–4). Kenneth Burke’s own “jungle book” of rhetoric’s feral side anticipates George A. Kennedy’s observation that “what we call ‘rhetoric’ can be traced back to the natural instinct to survive and to control our environment” (Hawhee, “Kenneth Burke’s Jungle Book”; Kennedy, A New History 3).

Concurrently, in the midst of impending ecological catastrophe, evidenced by global climate change and biodiversity loss, rhetoric manifests itself in the survival instincts of animals¹ who face ravaged ecosystems and the existential threat of mass extinction. As a result, it behooves rhetoricians to attune their scholarship to this “natural instinct to survive” by joining eco-cultural and intercultural communication scholars who recognize nature’s “voice” and acknowledge nonhuman agency (Kennedy, New History, 3; Peeples and Depoe). The impulse to rhetorically control our environment is manifest in the cataloging, organizing, and constituting of spaces for life to flourish. Rhetoric benefits from a variety of eco-cultural approaches, with which it shares a willingness to engage in the study of communicative practices present in the natural world.² Alex C. Parrish’s Foreword sets the tone for this special issue with a playful exploration of the lively crossings between animal and humans at a linguistic level, which provides theoretical overview of rhetoric and animal studies.

The overlapping work on rhetoric and eco-cultural criticism suggests that rhetorical theorists are still developing ways of rhetorical thinking that recognize contingency in various ecosystems or that perform a way of writing that understands animals themselves as rhetorically savvy. We, the guest editors, suggest that what we want (and what all rhetorical theorists should want) is a kind of critical elasticity that balances the “control of our environment” with the dialogic responsibility we all have to our wilder kin. Therefore, the contributors for this special issue have striven to entangle their scholarly habits with a performative intertwining of and experimentation with human and nonhuman animal relationships in a rhetorical bestiary. This work is carried out by crafting bestiary “entries,” rather than traditional essays, in an attempt to discern how animals contribute to rhetorical theory. To understand the distinction between entry and essay, as we see it, a brief history of the bestiary is in order.³

The bestiary genre is itself, no doubt, rhetorical. But the emergence of an animal rhetoric—one that embraces a discursive ecosystem composed of animal lives and mingles humanism with species of wisdom that are not our own—necessitates the contemporary special issue you are about to read. As an evolving form for understanding animals, bestiaries unfold in the exercise of observation, speculation, and imagination.⁴ In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, medieval bestiaries relied on animals as figures to help advance religious teaching and record tales of morality. By the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, bestiaries shifted toward empirical observation and the more “rational” organization of scientific taxonomies. Interestingly, this shift referenced natural histories from pre-modern eras in ancient Greece and Rome, both of which frequently valorized perception and observation for understanding the animal world. In the fifteenth century, bestiary literature was even further secularized, having not only evolved into a more scientific genre but also into narratives that conveyed lessons in profane or courtly styles. Finally, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, there was yet another resurgence in bestiary literature during the age of exploration, which exported wondrous encounters from the New World in first-hand accounts with an “other” natural world.

Historians who specialize in the study of bestiary literature will likely find this shorthand historical overview to be flawed, since confining genres to distinct conventions and limiting them to particular centuries rarely accounts for how those genres truly evolve. We, of course, recognize that any “evolution” is a complex and complicated process. But our main intention with this broad knowledge of bestiary literature is to stress an important feature of this special issue—that the expansive evolution of the bestiary over the span of many centuries supplies a thematic and stylistic range of overlapping and intersecting modes of storytelling, fable-making, scientific reasoning, and moral wisdom. When eco-cultural scholars and rhetoricians ponder: “What kind of judgment is needed now in the midst of extinction, habitat destruction, and animal suffering?,” we present the following collection to suggest that one answer lies in the historical amalgam of the bestiary form itself, since it provides the kind of innovative, free ranging capacity for recognizing and recording an animal rhetoric.

As such, the framework for a rhetorical bestiary is useful, although still challenging, since it neither succumbs fully to the anthropomorphism common in fables and myths nor defers judgment entirely to the rationalism underlying scientific method or preconceptions of a natural order. Rather, as Medievalist Debra Hassig suggests, it is in the composition of bestiary entries throughout history “that certain creatures are recurrently endowed with new significance, as a result of what can be viewed as a shift in perception” toward the nonhuman (174). Or, to put it another way, “animals work their way into these texts, leading with lessons from their own worlds, inspiring in the theorists who write about them a profound sense of intermixed worlds” (Hawhee, Rhetoric in Tooth and Claw 5). The bestiary is where we can witness more fully what interstitial, other-than-human epistemologies are available and gain new ground from which wild and unexpected voices emerge—where, through the process of composing a bestiary entry, the perception that is shifted might be our own, and the “voices” we hear are those of animals (Peeples and Depoe).

The particular collection of animals herein proposes to advance existing discussions concerning a specifically animal rhetoric and illustrates how various animal bodies, behaviors, and expressions put a creaturely twist on rhetoric itself. The movement toward a “bestial rhetoric” has done much to configure rhetoric’s “wilder” side (Hawhee, “Toward a Bestial Rhetoric” 83) and the contributors to this issue are similarly invested in how creatures can help us to ruffle anthropocentrism, by constituting a space to revise rhetoric’s human-centered tendencies (Hawhee, “Toward” 81–87). As Diane Davis argues, “the presumption of self-knowledge is not an innate quality of ‘the human’ but the already relational condition for any living being” (533, emphasis in the original). Davis brings us closer to the “limit” in her Afterword of this special issue by orienting us toward the inevitable presence and diverse ranges of animal rhetoric. The kind of intellectual projects underpinning work like Hawhee’s and Davis’s posit rhetoric as expandable toward an interspecies variety of rhetorical scholarship, driven toward knowledges expressed by animal self-disclosure, and made possible through the cultivation of an ability to observe, speculate, and imagine.

Bestiaries revel in this triad—observation, speculation, imagination—by affording a space to tell stories about rhetoric that engage in fresh perspectives of and with animals. An entry from Diane M. Keeling initiates us to this intellectual process by giving the rhetorical tradition a “lupine” shake, loosening it from the prime domain of the human. Her entry speculates on the reach of common sense, as a conceivable characteristic present in both human and animal, which she recognizes in instances of feral children raised by wolves. In Keeling’s own observations, the human observers of these “feral children” responded to them by falling back on ancient philosophical arguments about what it means to be rational, all along ignoring rhetoric’s capacity for a common sense of what makes living together possible. Keeling argues not only that animals may exhibit this common sense, but that all species have something to gain from rhetoric’s inherent refusal to be domesticated.

Putting this refusal to be domesticated into practice, Jonathan M. Gray’s entry speculates on what perspectival wisdom can be gained when he literally tries on an animal rhetoric for size in order to interpret the material rhetoric of vultures. His entry thoroughly “scavenges” the bestiary logic through imaginative performances. The entry begins with vultures’ capacity to model and materialize rhetorical practices and morphs into a recorded experience of the author’s own being as a “vulture,” an experience that Gray, himself, stages during an eco-community ritual.

However, such morphology can be a tricky business, since, like any transformation, it runs the risk of understanding animals only in our own image. Therefore, Emily Plec’s penchant for internatural communication⁵ supplies an opportunity to carefully observe the practical wisdom underpinning eudaimonia, which becomes a practice especially vital in contemporary odysseys across endangered ecosystems. For Plec, salmon proclaim, through their movement and migration patterns, the centrality of “home.” With salmon “homing” practices, which can be commonly understood as means for the critical survival for all species, this entry swims upstream and against the current of overly simplified anthropomorphism. Plec and her co-authors, Henry Hughes and Jackson Stalley, hold open the possibility for a rhetorical “scent-ability,” which motivates movement and is discernible in salmon olfactory habits.

But what if an animal has been removed from a familiar ecosystem and “home” is, in reality, a prison? Julie “Madrone” Kalil Schutten and Caitlyn Burford observe how metaphors, or “myths in miniature,” inform modes of spectatorship at marine prison sites, such as SeaWorld. Torn from their families at a young age, submitted to punitive regimens of imprisonment, orca whales are transformed by their conditions into “killers.” As we will see, accenting the prison metaphor prompts visions of orcas as political activists and martyrs.

Some “martyrs” slither in and out of our collective consciousness, our dreams, and individual experiences. By exposing us to a broad range of mythology, religious symbolism, and spiritual worldmaking, Kristin Pomykala’s entry proposes ways that we can begin to reverse and reappropriate perceptions of the snake. With the help of a little serpentine rhetoric, Pomykala extends the mythopoeic mêtis reflected in (and taught by) the lives of snakes, and shows how deep cultural biases have regarded serpentine ways of being with a forked tongue. Her entry (re)imagines a possible kinship with rattlesnakes and narrates the sloughing-off of restrictive attitudes toward snake history.

At times these entries will read like the columns of a scientific encyclopedia, at some moments like a fable, seasoned with imaginative and fantastical language, and other moments like sketches that speculate on the shape of an animal rhetoric or the potential wisdom underlying beastly ways of knowing. Yet as readers enter the rhetorical bestiary and take notice of the paradox of how scholarly efforts to advance an animal rhetoric get lured toward habits of anthropomorphism, they should also take comfort in accepting that there may be no sure way out of this paradox. At the very least, negotiating the tension between speaking for nonhumans and speaking with them seems to require expanding what our intellectual writing practices might look, sound, and feel like. Such an expansion might result in writing that appears too feral or that raises the hackles of readers who tend to be irresolute toward such prose. But as Donna Haraway stresses, “storying” human and nonhuman relations is more “idiosyncratic and indicative rather than systematic, tendentious more than judicious” (Companion Species 25). Intellectual engagements that focus too squarely on getting to the “meat” of the matter of animal rhetoric risk sidestepping the kinds of eco-culture that animal rhetorics could cultivate in the sort of ecosystem we believe bestiaries can provide. The overlap between observation, imagination, and speculation throughout this special issue should leave us feeling agile enough to run wild with our “messmates,” whom without we are most liable to overlook opportunities to experience multi-species entanglements and to story more lively encounters with the natural world (Haraway, When Species 15).

Looser modes of engagement to be found in the writing of bestiary entries also stress porous and permeable multi-species boundaries, and animate a continuum of animal rhetoric—and rhetorical theory. If we are to get even a whiff of what animal rhetoric might teach us, vibrant, even excessive playfulness and lived expressions are necessary, particularly those that expand menageries and promote an open-ended range of rhetoric (Massumi). Such attempts to re-territorialize rhetoric according to ecological habitats risk looking and feeling “out of place,” like an invasive species of argument that marks things and then scurries away before they are caught. As such, we request the reader’s patience and openness to the rhetorical bestiary’s presentation of an intellectual style that, at times, may look and feel a-stray.

Setting one’s self up for this kind of openness might best be enhanced by allowing for the “play of signification,” modeled by Natasha Seegert’s coyotes (168). For her, going a-stray suggests that we might find only traces or tracks to follow here and there, just like the traces of a tricky Canus latrans. By nipping at the muzzles of disciplinarity and yipping at attempts to hold that which is human at the center of belonging, the urban coyotes Seegert tracks remind us—as readers and writers—that encounters with animals are often wily and elusive—and that we need theoretical prose to match. The bestiary might be read, then, as coyote-like itself, an animate form that welcomes reflection on academic discourse and excites disruptions in traditional scholarly prose. Or, similarly, the “entries” collected in this special issue might also be likened to Hélène Cixous’s birds, who let fly capacious intellectual forms, carrying us even closer toward more-than-human contributions to rhetoric for eco-cultures now and those yet to come.

Acknowledgments

The editors give special thanks to the following mentors and guides: Peter Simonson, John Lucaites, Robert Terrill, and Chuck Morris. This is not to overlook the diversified intellectual and personal partners who have helped cultivate a rich and dynamic ecology for “animal rhetoric.” Constituting the spaces and places in which rhetoric might run a little “wild” is never without a thriving multitude. The editors are especially grateful to Michelle Ballif for her infinite wisdom and patience throughout the process of this publication. And finally, we wish to dedicate this special issue to the creaturely presences that continue to inspire us and our contributors to pursue this project and never fail in giving us pause/paws.

Notes

¹ Attempts to find a “fitting” grammar for describing human and nonhuman animals is inherently problematic. We will employ “animal” where many signifiers arguably belong, including “nonhuman animals,” “hum-animal,” critters, beasts, and so on. “Animal” is a recognizably problematic, symbolically violent term, particularly given our own alignments with and ways of speaking that situate animality as homogenous. Nevertheless, animals are at the heart of the traditional bestiary. Moreover, we might ask if the term, in its plural form, welcomes the dynamism of difference yet to be domesticated. In short, “animal” is not pejorative here.

² For instance, while Richard A. Rogers is concerned with intercultural and environmental communication, Tema Milstein focuses on nonhuman discourse by exploring whale communication, and Stacy Alaimo aligns with eco-cultural theory and transcorporeality; together these scholars address human and nonhuman relationships through interdisciplinary modes.

³ For a more meticulous history of a specific medieval bestiary, see Debra Hawhee’s Afterword to this special issue.

⁴ Whereas Aristotle introduces “species” of rhetoric (the judicial, deliberative, and the epideictic), the rhetorical bestiary warrants a more expansive ecosystem for additional “species” of rhetoric to emerge from understandings (and misunderstandings) between human and nonhuman animal. For more on the historical development of “species” of rhetoric see Kennedy, A New History of Classical Rhetoric 3.

⁵ In her anthology, Perspectives on Human-Animal Communication: Internatural Communication, Emily Plec explains the need for humans to engage critical anthropological studies along with animal communication (4).