Motamedi Fraser, Review of Baratay Writing on the Animal’s Side Mariam Motamedi Fraser Review of: Éric Baratay, Animal Biographies: Toward a History of Individuals. Translated by Lindsay Turner. Animal Voices / Animal Worlds. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2022. 240 pp. $28.95 (pb) Mariam Motamedi Fraser is a Reader in Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London. Email: m.motamedi-fraser@ gold.ac.uk Book Review mailto:m.motamedi-fraser@gold.ac.uk mailto:m.motamedi-fraser@gold.ac.uk In Animal Biographies: Toward a History of Individuals, historian Éric Baratay harnesses biography as form and method in order to “truly cross over to the animal’s side, overturning previous sources, discourses, and perspectives” (15). The book is com- prised of a short, dense, introduction, four parts, and a conclusion. Each of the parts contains at least two animal biographies, and two commentaries (one that precedes the biographies, and one that fol- lows). The parts demonstrate what biography as a form can achieve with regard to recognizing and understanding something of an indi- vidual animal’s life, how that life is shaped by the era in which the an- imal lives, and by the social and cultural generations to which they belong. It is an absorbing and affecting book, politically ambitious, and empirically challenging. Political, because this is what “deny[ing] or grant[ing] a history to the Other” is (190); and challenging, because as Lindsay Turner observes in her translator’s note, “the history of animal–human relationships has been rife with misunderstandings; it is, in a way, a history of failed translation” (xv). Baratay’s answer to that failure is to work harder — which means working more experi- mentally — at achieving the “scientific goal” (xviii) of imagining what it feels like to live an animal’s life. Science, imagination, animal ex- perience. Bringing together this unlikely trio is the daunting task that Baratay sets himself in this book. To be clear: there are no caveats here with regard to accessing an an- imal’s feelings, as one finds, for example, in André Krebber and Mieke Roscher’s Animal Biography: Re-Framing Animal Lives. Where Krebber and Roscher propose that the aim of animal biography is “to account for [animals’] individuality without having to read their minds, recon- struct their feelings or infer their intentions”,1 Baratay argues by con- trast that this is precisely the aspiration: to adopt the individual an- imal’s “point of view” and “to understand what it lives, experiences, and feels” as such (8). He calls this process “restoring existence”. It means illustrating what the biography of an individual animal’s ex- istence would look like when it is no longer “simply [a pretext] for talking about humans” (15), as it often is in official historical sources. 1 André Krebber and Mieke Roscher, eds., Animal Biography: Re-Framing Animal Lives (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 2. Copyright © 2023 Mariam Motamedi Fraser This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. Humanimalia 14, no. 1 (2023): 409–418. Doi: 10.52537/humanimalia.16417 http://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.16417 Motamedi Fraser, Review of Baratay | 411 Humanimalia 14.1 (2023) In the first part of the book, those sources are various kinds of re- cords pertaining to the lives of two animals: an unnamed giraffe who was gifted to King Charles X from Muhammad Ali of Egypt in 1825; and Warrior, a horse whose service in World War I ensured that he became “one of the most celebrated equines of the British world” (35). Both times, after reading Baratay’s summaries of these animals’ lives as they are portrayed in historical documents (and, in Warrior’s case, memoirs), I believed I had learned something genuine about them. Both times, I was wrong. Baratay’s restitution of the giraffe’s and of Warrior’s experiences renders transparent the role played by official documents in erasing individual animal lives, not least by ex- purgating the reality of what they endure in service of more flatter- ing portraits of their conditions, and of their relations with their hu- man handlers: the physical and emotional constraints and coercions, the boredom, the casual disregard, the numerous implications that flow from human ignorance, incomprehensibility, and lack of com- passion and empathy. It makes for grim reading. Violence is laid bare here not in the abstract, or at the level of the collective, but in the concrete reality of an individual animal’s experiences. How to experience these animal experiences? Key among the tools that Baratay has at his disposal is writing itself, in both its linguis- tic and visual dimensions. With regard to the former: in a fascinat- ing discussion (which deserves further exploration), Baratay argues that language must be transformed so radically that it no longer supports the bifurcation of the world into the “human actor” on the one hand, and “the rest as object” (13) on the other. Baratay’s use of the word “actor” is intriguing, because it implies that his primary goal is to identify animal agency. Yet nearly all the biographies bear testimony to the fragility of the animals’ possibilities and choices in the face of the almost limitless power that humans wield over them. Moreover, Baratay is critical of what he describes as “the cur- rent spread of concepts of animal agents and agency forged in the Anglo-American world […which] justifies the observation of inter- actions to see what effect animals have on humans but does not require going much further in the study of these animals” (6–7). As I understand it, “going much further” means conceiving of animals Humanimalia 14.1 (2023) 412 | Motamedi Fraser, Review of Baratay as individuals, persons, subjects (8) who, because they are subjects and not objects (to return to the issue of the bifurcation of nature in language), have experiences and feelings which are significant in their own right, and which actively include experiences and feelings of things being done to them. Therefore, in an effort to avoid descrip- tions which erase the experience of the animal, Baratay creates lin- guistic constructions “in which the animal ‘sees themselves’ or ‘feels themselves’ shot, struck, or taken, instead of ‘being’ shot, struck, or taken — the form to which we are more accustomed but which puts the human in the active tense and the animal in the passive” (13–14). Both the translator and the author are sensitive, perhaps over-sensi- tive, to these constructions, nodding in agreement with an imaginary reader that yes, yes, this is odd indeed, odd to the eye and to the ear in the mind, but let us assure you, you will quickly become accus- tomed to this, will come even to appreciate it. Which, in fact, I did. The technique works most powerfully in the first two parts of the book, “Restoring Existence” and “Sensing Experiences”, in which Baratay helps the reader to “sense […] sensings” (54, original em- phasis). This is especially important, Baratay writes, because it is humans’ systematic inattention to, and even denial of, such sens- ings — sensings “triggered by sight, hearing, touch, and smell and expressed by quivers, sensations, images, and mental associations” (53) — that has enabled us to “treat animals however we like” (53). It is as well to be forewarned that this is so, as Baratay reconstitutes the sensings of the donkey Modestine over the miserable twelve days she spent with the writer Robert Louis Stevenson, and the sensings of the bull Islero, in his final deathly fight with the torero Manolete. In Modestine’s biography, Baratay translates Stevenson’s “day-by-day — even sometimes hour-by-hour” (56) account of his travels through France into a granular, exacting account of Modestine’s sensings. The analysis could not be more careful, or finely wrought. Baratay includes, for example, the implications, for Modestine, of the gradi- ent of the hills she has to ascend or descend — “16 percent incline, 1 km” (57, original emphasis) — while at the same time battling with her fatigue, trying to balance and rebalance the packs with which she is overloaded, struggling with the pain in her hooves and, above all, Motamedi Fraser, Review of Baratay | 413 Humanimalia 14.1 (2023) the torment of the streaming wounds inflicted by Stevenson’s blows. Modestine “concentrates on the agony of her effort” and for this rea- son “probably,” Baratay writes, “can barely pay attention to the smell of the fresh grasses […] to the birdsongs and musical sounds rising from an open building (the church of Saint-Martin-de-Fugères)” (58). As for the sensings of Islero, this is an account of the bull’s terrifying, sickening, last minutes: … return of predator [Manolete] … charging towards the wid- est and most agitated part, head lower and lower, heavier and heavier … passing of predator above … impossible to raise head, even horizontally, to leap in order to gore … difficult to brake, to go in the other direction … movements, automatic … several times, same thing … stop … foggy perception of uproars (79). The dots serve to break up the already short phrases that Baratay deploys in order to suggest “the necessary haste of perceptions, emotions, and actions in the face of danger, but without asserting any basic mindset” (72). This then is the second dimension of writ- ing that Baratay exploits: writing in its visual, typographical, aspect, and it does a lot of work in this book. For Islero’s biography, Baratay weaves among these short phrases his own explanations, which ap- pear in brackets, in a smaller and different font, as well as the reac- tions of the bullfighter Manolete, his team, and the public, which also appear in smaller type, in block quotations. It makes for a rather in- timidating page, but perhaps that is the point: the ugliness of the bullfight is deepened by the stop start stuttering contrasts (espe- cially between Islero’s and human perspectives) that are captured in the layout of the text. “Readers can let themselves be carried along with Islero” (72). These three words, “can let themselves”, are revealing. Inadvertently, they capture the tension that lies at the heart of Baratay’s biogra- phies, and which amounts to more than a balancing act between being scientific but not reductive, imaginative but not literary, an- thropomorphic without idealizing or romanticizing (13). It is the ten- sion between Baratay’s acknowledgment that any interpretation Humanimalia 14.1 (2023) 414 | Motamedi Fraser, Review of Baratay is necessarily limited by embodied human subjectivity — “our gaze is partial and relative” (12) — and his critique, developed more fully elsewhere, of “a certain scholarly infatuation with cultural studies since the 1980s.”2 This infatuation has led humanities and social sciences methodologies to be reduced to “an exercise in deconstruc- tion and close examination of social discourses” and, more urgently, to an eclipse of analyses of real animals by that of representations.3 If Baratay’s readers can allow themselves to be “carried along with Is- lero”, this is because, regardless of the very different epistemological statuses of the wide range of sources on which Baratay draws,4 all are based on direct observation. Hearsay is rejected (199n4). The cri- teria for qualification as a source, or “[w]hat is necessary,” as Baratay puts it, “is human interest in real facts and gestures, human atten- tion to them, and then representation in a way that does not com- pletely obscure them beneath subjective interpretation” (12). To so- cial scientists and humanities scholars who intuitively baulk at this notion of “real facts and gestures,” Baratay replies: “[o]ur obvious limits must not lead to the lazy declaration that the search for exte- rior realities is impossible […]. Our surrounding environment is not reducible to our perceptions” (12). Baratay is certainly not lazy when it comes to searching for exterior realities. The stories that his sources tell are all cross-referenced with, and augmented by, further relevant information. By the “geographi- cal guides and topographical maps” (56) of the day in the biography of Modestine, for example; by physiology, neurology, and biochem- istry in the biography of Islero; by details of the hunting cultures of France and Britain in the biography of the dog Pritchard, who, in moving between them, was obliged to work out and to adapt to their different traditions and expectations. Baratay also makes use of the “richest contemporary ethological knowledge or hypotheses” (12) not only to better convey to his reader what a particular individual 2 Éric Baratay, “Building an Animal History”, trans. Stephanie Posthumus, in French Think- ing about Animals, ed. Louisa Mackenzie and Stephanie Posthumus (East Lansing: Mich- igan State University Press, 2015), 3. 3 Baratay, “Animal History”, 4. 4 Including literary sources, letters, correspondences, memoirs, biographies, diaries and journals, academic articles, obituaries, local papers, cartoons, photographs, and a film. Motamedi Fraser, Review of Baratay | 415 Humanimalia 14.1 (2023) might have experienced in particular situation given their corpo- reality and capabilities — we understand, for example, the physio- logical and emotional misery that followed for the giraffe when her food was placed on the ground (27) — but also to question and, of- ten, correct the interpretations and explanations of his sources. In the summer of 1915, for instance, while Warrior was waiting for his owner Jack Seely to return, “he is shaken by the noise of a shell that has just split open the horse next to him” (45). But Warrior does not run. “Was this absolute serenity, as Jack assumes upon his return, or was Warrior rather glued in place by shock?” (46). It is a good ques- tion, and one that Baratay asks several times of Warrior. It stands in sharp contradistinction to both the official accounts of the time and the celebrations of Warrior since, many of which have a class inter- est in portraying this particular horse as imperturbable. I noted earlier that Baratay considers his book to be political be- cause these biographies are histories of “the other”. But one might also identify its politics in its attention to singular individuals, which goes against the routine numbering-up of animals, and the per- ceived “eternality” of species. If Baratay barely recognizes this, it is because he considers “the advent of the individual” in science, which he dates from the 1950s, to have “overturned existing ethology com- pletely” (6). Since I am not convinced that the individual has over- turned anything much at all in science, and especially not the cat- egory of species (although their relation may be being refigured), I greatly welcomed Baratay’s work in the third and fourth parts of his book, in which the empirical histories he brings to the study of indi- vidual animals offers a substantive challenge to the idea that a spe- cies of animal remains the same over time. In the third part of the book, Baratay describes the era, from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries, during which chimpanzees were subject to “humanization” (84) — which means “Westernization” (91). He explores how this defined the lives and capabilities of Consul, who lived at Manchester’s Belle Vue Zoological Gardens from 1893 to 1894, and of Meshie, who lived in the house (or rather, often, in a cage in the base- ment of the house) of the naturalist Henry Cushier Raven from 1930 to 1934. Baratay demonstrates both how overdetermined Consul’s Humanimalia 14.1 (2023) 416 | Motamedi Fraser, Review of Baratay and Meshie’s opportunities were by this agenda, and also how they were on occasion able to overturn it, either by understanding what was required of them and exploiting it, or by trying to escape. In the fourth part of the book, Baratay offers his reader a master- class in the denaturalization of animals, by way of the historiciza- tion of dogs’ behaviours and cultures. This is necessary, because although geography — and, one might add, ecology — encourage ethologists to be attentive to how animal behaviours are influenced by environments (and vice versa), history and biography, with their temporal dimensions, are “assumed to be reserved for humans” (12). In Baratay’s view, experiments in ethology, prior to the 1960s, fail to show evidence of the transformation of animal behaviours and cultures over time because they are “limited by the remoteness of the issues, and more importantly by the false certainty of fixed be- haviors.”5 With regard to dogs specifically, canine scientists “quickly transformed [contemporary domestic dogs] into the universal, time- less, ‘natural’ dog.”6 I would support and extend Baratay’s case here by noting, first, that when it comes to canine ethology, “usable experiments” (i.e. experi- ments which illustrate that behaviours are not fixed) date not to the 1960s but to the late 1990s.7 And, second, that the consequences of this lengthy omission have been exacerbated by the concentration of the major part of canine research, today, on domesticated dogs who live and / or work in the Global North. What is the defining char- acteristic of the “timeless” dog in this majoritarian canine ethology? I have argued that it is their supposed orientation towards humans.8 Although Baratay never says this himself, the value of his four biog- raphies of dogs lies precisely in their challenge to this assumption. Thus, the reader can identify in Baratay’s biographies a clear con- trast between three late-nineteenth-century dogs (who are Bummer, 5 Baratay, “Animal History”, 13. 6 Baratay, “Animal History”, 9. 7 Baratay, “Animal History”, 13. 8 See Mariam Motamedi Fraser, Dog Politics: Species Stories and the Animal Sciences (Man- chester: Manchester University Press, 2024), especially chapters four and five. Motamedi Fraser, Review of Baratay | 417 Humanimalia 14.1 (2023) Lazarus, and Pritchard), whose lives appear to have been more or less their own, and the lives of Thomas Mann’s dog, Bauschan (or, in English translations, Bashan; 1915–1920), and Colette Audry’s dog, Douchka (1954–1960), whose lives depend very much on the humans with whom they cohabit. Although Bauschan did not ex- actly live with the Manns, he did live in parallel with them, and ex- perienced, according to Baratay, the “reciprocal sociality” (154–55) that is often said to define dog–human relations today. Thirty-five years later, that sociality has morphed into a form of life so intol- erable that a dog must be drugged, as was Douchka, in order to endure it. None of these generations of dogs, Baratay reminds his reader, are more essential or more authentic or more real than any other (as some ecological behaviourists would claim of today’s street dogs, for example); rather, it is “a matter of adaptation” (190). Or not. Douchka “suffers a separation anxiety that few dogs in previous gen- erations lived” (172). In his conclusion, which brings the book up to the present day, Baratay warns that such is the fate that now threat- ens cats, or rather “dogcats” like Jonah (2008–), who are becom- ing increasingly like dogs (186): jealous, lonely, anxious, stressed. So much for reciprocity. Does Baratay’s experiment, especially his experimental mode of writing, work? Not always. One of the most jarring moments in the book for me was Baratay’s description of how Consul the chimpan- zee “saw himself euthanized on Saturday, November 24, toward the end of the afternoon, with a chloroformed handkerchief that put him to sleep and then stopped his breath” (99). Perhaps death is a sensing too far. Or perhaps the rendering of animal experiences into human language, and then from French into English, is a trans- lation too far. The question “does this experiment work?” is impor- tant, though, because convincing his reader not only that these an- imals have points of view, but that this is what their points of view feel like, is, for Baratay, an exercise in science, by which he means an exercise in clarifying, without simplifying, complexity (xviii). Cross- ing over to the animal’s side, Baratay writes, is “justified and it is sci- entific, in that it allows us to understand what was previously hid- den, to better understand animals, and to ask new questions” (10). Humanimalia 14.1 (2023) 418 | Motamedi Fraser, Review of Baratay By this definition, Baratay nearly always succeeds, and in this book, “nearly” is of considerable political and ethical import. From the ep- igraph onwards, reservations, provisos, and qualifications with re- gard to the aims, methods, and achievements of Animal Biographies abound. Why? Because modesty, I think, is a necessary part of the book’s ambition (and therefore, presumably, a necessary part of its science). “There is no question that we must cross over to the an- imal’s side,” Baratay writes, before adding, touchingly, “yet we are only humans” (9). We cannot stop being human, he acknowledges, and any access to otherness that we have, as humans, is limited. But for Baratay this represents “neither an impossibility nor a reason to give up” (9). Indeed most valuable about this book, or “[t]his quest” (9) as Baratay puts it, is the effort itself: [The quest for animal points of view] is first and foremost an intention, a method that would help us decenter ourselves and approach the animal, demonstrating both empathy (a capaci- ty to perceive the animal’s state) and sympathy, not foreclos- ing any possibility in advance. And this must all happen in the knowledge, even as we push against barriers, that actually en- tering different worlds remains a horizon (9). Baratay’s quest, through which optimistic pragmatism runs like a silver thread, is defined by its generosity of heart and spirit. This book is an invitation to its reader to have the courage to match it.