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Animal mirrorsMichael Ziser aa Department of English, University of California, Davis , OneShields Avenue, Davis, CA 95616, USA E-mail:Published online: 27 Aug 2010.

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ANGELAKIjournal of the theoretical humanitiesvolume 12 number 3 december 2007

To me a painted paroquet

Hath been – a most familiar bird –

Taught me my alphabet to say –

To lisp my very earliest word.

Edgar Allan Poe, ‘‘Romance,’’ Poetry and

Tales 53

Logographical necessity (anangke

logographike) ought to be analogous to

biological, or rather zoological necessity.

Jacques Derrida, Dissemination 79

In a strange but consistent form of looking

backward to look forward, literary theorists

from Baudelaire to Lacan to Derrida have used

the writings of Edgar Allan Poe as the pretext for

what they themselves are on the verge of

articulating. To understand pure poetry or the

play of the letter in the unconscious or the abyssal

structure of interpretation, they reflect, one must

look back at Poe.1 The present essay will parrot

this strategy of Poevian retrospection to formu-

late (and locate in both nineteenth-century

American cultural history and twentieth-century

poststructuralist theory) a new, strongly ecocri-

tical claim: that human psychological and

linguistic structures arise through an openness

to and repetition of the ‘‘languages’’ – the

meaning of the scare-quotes will become apparent

below – of non-human animals that, in Jacques

Derrida’s words, ‘‘do not merely encompass

[them] but mark [them] irreducibly from the

inside’’ (‘‘‘Eating Well’’’ 116). Poe’s writings

inaugurate an ecocritical tradition – distinct from

the established discourses of animal rights and

sociobiology – that repositions questions about

human subjects, language, and artifacts within a

traversing and circumjacent world of biological

signification, the zoosemiosphere.2

The most concentrated expression of this

transspecific ecology of the letter is Poe’s

well-worn poem ‘‘The Raven,’’ a poetic treatise

on – and instance of – zoosemiotics, the

‘‘systematic investigation of how human language

relates to other modes of symbolic communica-

tion and to the properties displayed by animal

communicative systems’’ (Sebeok 8). Poe’s

investment in the transspecific linguistic quand-

ary is not exhausted by this single poem, however,

nor can the consequences of his response to it be

confined to the sources, contexts, and influences

of his era. Understanding the full ecotheoretical

implications of Poe’s zoopoetics requires a much

wider ranging exploration of his depictions of the

non-human other as they appear in his original

texts and reappear in the influential

Lacanian critical discourse built atop them. In

the first section below, I will provide the

michael ziser

ANIMAL MIRRORSpoe, lacan, von uexku« ll,and audubon in thezoosemiosphere

ISSN 0969-725X print/ISSN1469-2899 online/07/030011^23� 2007 Taylor & Francis and the Editors of AngelakiDOI:10.1080/09697250802041004

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theoretical framing required to reclaim both

Poe and Lacan for second-wave ecocriticism by

working though the complex relationship between

Poe’s writings and those of his most influential

reader, which provide both aid and resistance to

the articulation of a transspecific ecology of the

letter. In the second part, I will elaborate the

specific historical grounds for my zoosemiotic and

ecocritical reading of Poe’s most famous poem by

detailing the significance of its debt to the

extensive ornithological literature of the

antebellum period, most crucially John James

Audubon’s public lectures, private journals,

and remarkable Ornithological Biographies

(1831–39).

the apprentissage of poe and lacan

Poe’s testy relationship with the

Transcendentalist mainline of American nature

writers, his taste for the pseudoscientific and the

artificial, and his association with (apparently)

non-environmental genres (gothic, detective fic-

tion, and surrealism) have combined to keep him

out of the first ranks of the ecocritical canon.3

Compounding matters, the influential set of

discussions initiated by Jacques Lacan’s reading

of ‘‘The Purloined Letter’’ identified Poe with a

structuralist-linguistic interpretation of the

human unconscious and drew attention away

from his possible environmental entanglements,

an oversight not remedied in the more recent

historicist approaches to his work. Lacan’s

suspicion of natural history and biological

approaches to human psychology, and his

ultimate idiomatic alliance with abiological

sciences – game theory, formal cybernetics,

mathematics, and topology – is a well-known

chapter in the history of psychoanalysis. Post-

Lacanian psychoanalyst Andre Green puts the

matter as concisely as possible: ‘‘Freud was for

continuity [between biology and human psychol-

ogy]; Lacan for separation’’ (262). For all of his

subversion of certain conventions of rationalized

psychoanalysis, Lacan never questioned what this

essay will dispute: the opposability of biologism

and symbolic structuralism. ‘‘Allow me to

laugh,’’ he writes in ‘‘The Function and Field

of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis,’’

‘‘if [my] remarks are accused of turning Freud’s

work away from the biological foundations he

would have wished for it towards the cultural

references with which it is rife’’ (Ecrits 264).

Lacan’s discontinuism was imbibed from his

major non-Freudian sources – Descartes, Kant,

Hegel, and Saussure – for whom such a turn away

from the claims of the life sciences was de

rigueur. Henri Wallon’s insistence on disconti-

nuity over organicism in human psychological

processes and Alexandre Kojeve’s notion of a

‘‘nonbiological I’’ likely played the most immedi-

ate and decisive roles in this regard. The

generalized ‘‘Animal’’ that populates Kojeve’s

writings does gain some specificity in the bestiary

of Lacan’s teachings, which nevertheless retain

the Hegelian commitment to the refutation of any

and all continuist claims emanating from the

natural sciences. As Green notes, Lacan’s writings

and seminars are in large part shaped and

punctuated by these turns away from the

biological – in the form of curt asides (a dismissal

of the honeybee ‘‘language’’ reported by von

Frisch), negative examples (the birds that prove

the inferiority of animal vision to the expressly

human gaze), and direct philosophical statements

(the abyss separating the human from the ape).4

The attunement to the linguistic that accompa-

nies and underwrites the turn away from bio- and

zoo-logical continuism is, for obvious reasons,

precisely what has attracted literary scholars to

Lacan, and it is this anthropolinguistic version of

Lacan that has been elaborated and applied to

readings of Poe and other writers. In tandem with

Poe’s own well-advertised interest in riddles,

codes, and hoaxes, it has directed critical

methodologies to the play of Saussurian linguistic

deferral in a poststructuralist psychoanalytic

idiom.5 Missing from this interpretive tradition

is any sense of an accompanying grotesque – to

use the telling word from the title of Poe’s first

collection of stories – encounter with the animal

other as staged in the natural sciences or the

literary arts. As I will detail below, however, the

thought of both Poe and Lacan is historically and

logically dependent on a large body of zoological

research and animal engagement. These primary

and secondary texts converge on moments

of intense encounter between human and

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non-human animals. Analytically, they converge

on an originary moment in which the speaking

human subject emerges from zooscopic reflection;

historically, they converge on the closely related

practices of apprentissage and dressage (the

confinement, training, and exhibition of animals

for scientific and entertainment purposes) that

make such reflection possible.6

When Lacan was persuaded to publish his

works in 1966, he opened the Ecrits with the

‘‘Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter,’’’ a highly

technical presentation of his insights into the

underlying structure of the unconscious, occa-

sioned by a detective tale of Poe’s that is itself

notable for its insularity and hyperanalytic

character. One could hardly ask for materials

further removed from the zoological situation of

humankind. In the seminar, Lacan famously

notes the way that Poe’s story involves successive

iterations of a hierarchy of knowledge made up of

three positions: he who does not see (the Real); he

who sees that the other does not see (the

Imaginary); and, finally, he who sees that the

partial seeing of the second person leaves him

vulnerable to manipulation (the Symbolic). As

Lacan analyzes the story, characters in the tale –

and all human subjects – rotate through each of

these positions: in the first iteration, the King

does not see the Queen with the incriminating

letter, which she hides in plain view, and the

Minister sees this situation and turns it to his

advantage; in the second, the Prefect of the

Parisian police doesn’t see the letter in the

possession of the Minister, who leaves it in plain

view, and Dupin sees that he has done this; and in

the third, the Minister does not see the new,

replacement letter left by Dupin, who leaves it

exposed to Lacan, who now can place Dupin

under his interpretive power.

Attentive and sympathetic readers, whose

number has included both Jacques Derrida and

Barbara Johnson, will here naturally and auto-

matically desire to continue Lacan’s argument by

insisting on a fourth rotation: Dupin, living up to

the dupe and the double in his patronym, allies

himself with the imbecilic King-who-doesn’t-see

when he styles himself an avenging Atreus, thus

shifting the psychoanalytic detective (Lacan) into

the Imaginary and placing us (Lacan’s readers)

temporarily in the position of those who can

witness Lacan succumb to the inexorable slide

from symbolic analyst to the imbecilic object that

he himself has imagined.7 There is, in Lacan’s

view, no metalanguage – not even the metalan-

guage of a psychoanalytic epilogue – within which

the analyst might find refuge. But Lacan, acting

out the blindness he has previously seen so

clearly, goes on to offer what seems to be a highly

technical and illuminating postscript to the

seminar, patiently explaining his attempt to

exemplify the process of symbolic substitution

that underlies the human subject formation, a

process of one-upmanship in which transcenden-

tal laws are produced and absorbed. Precisely at

the moment that Lacan comes most surely into

his own voice – his tone towards Poe and Dupin,

his erstwhile masters, now assuredly metacritical

– he begins to inhabit the analytic blindness

represented before him by the King, the Prefect,

and Dupin. Like those earlier figures, Lacan has

left something right out in the open for us to

view, though he cannot himself call attention to

it: that the abiological mathematical and symbolic

methodology that would come to form the basis

and law of Lacan’s future work is established at

the moment of catastrophic blindness.

What is the positive content of this blindness?

As Barbara Johnson – the most brilliant reader of

Poe’s tale, Lacan’s seminar, and Derrida’s

critique – has demonstrated, the theoretical one-

upmanship in the discussion of Poe’s text would

seem both to re-enact Poe’s own prefatory

remarks in ‘‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’’

about the game of even and odd and bear out

Lacan’s ultimate insistence that linguistic and

psychological processes are fundamentally mat-

ters of repetition (the Wiederholungszwang

originally described by Freud). On this view,

even Lacan’s own discourse – and Johnson’s – is

not immune from the compulsion to repeat:

‘‘psychoanalysis is the repetition of the structure

which it tries to untie.’’ For Johnson, the

particular value in Lacan’s work (and her own)

lies in the way it momentarily captures – or seems

to capture – the deferral of the letter-in-flight

through the use of a mise en abyme, a formal

transgression of formal logic that allows Lacan his

simultaneous turn at the end of the seminar as the

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insightful analyst and mystified analysand and

Johnson her own recontainment of Derrida and

Lacan from within their writings. The endpoint of

this line of thinking, now familiar from many

poststructuralist deployments, would seem to lie

in Lacan’s and Johnson’s preferred figure for

enframed and abyssal repetition, the mirror,

which serves as the abiological foundation of

the Lacanian subject.

But does the antifoundationalist line of

Lacanian psychoanalysis end here, in a form of

symbolic absolute speculation? Johnson, it is vital

to note, is far too canny a thinker to allow her

exertions on behalf of this abyssal structure to

settle into such machinic complacency, and she

ends her piece with the thought that ‘‘the true

otherness of the purloined letter of literature has

perhaps in no way been accounted for’’ (‘‘Frame

of Reference’’ 250). There is a sense, as there was

at the end of Lacan’s seminar, that Johnson’s talk

of mirrors and mises en abyme has left something

out in the open for us to find and articulate.

Accepting her tacit invitation, I will argue that

such ‘‘true otherness’’ is the challenging other-

ness of animal language to which Lacanian

psychoanalysis (and poststructuralist thought in

general), with its anthropolinguistic assumptions

about subject-formation and its operation in

language, is necessarily and revealingly blind.

Furthermore, and more provocatively, I argue

that the otherness of animal language is not just

another in the chain of others that emerge and are

absorbed in the process of subjectivization, but

that it is the otherness whose uncanny reappear-

ance, as Freud’s essay on the subject suggests,

structures the human unconscious.8 While pre-

serving some of Lacan’s insights into the

operation of language and the unconscious, I

would therefore like also to preserve his blindness

– specifically, the notion that the inhuman

dimension of human language belongs solely to

the inanimate world of symbolic formulae rather

than the rich world of animal sign systems (the

zoosemiosphere). This is an attempt by no means

to ground poststructuralism in an empirical

scientism, but rather to allow it to overrun its

unspoken anthropological bounds by restoring

the apparently structural figure of the mirror to

its historical and zoological context. A careful

reading of Lacan and Poe reveals that the path of

reflection through the mirror of the human

subject originates in the animal.

By an apparently uncanny coincidence, ‘‘The

Murders in the Rue Morgue’’ – the inaugural tale

in Poe’s three-part series of detective stories and

the harbinger of ‘‘The Purloined Letter’’ – begins

with the captivity, self-regard in the mirror,

escape (through a problematically open window

frame), and recapture of a simian culprit whose

literal otherness makes its identity indecipherable

(and its location undiscoverable) to the police.9

The work of Dupin in the later tale (and the long

chain of twentieth-century critical speculation

engendered by it) thus appears to have been

anticipated by ‘‘The Murders in the Rue

Morgue,’’ a notion quite in keeping with the

Lacanian presumption of a pervasive

Wiederholungszwang.10 Accordingly, it is

worth reading the earlier story not merely as

the inaugural exhibition of C. Auguste Dupin’s

analytic brilliance, but simultaneously as a

proleptic indication of his blindness. For Dupin

is in fact structurally blind to several key clues to

the mystery that Poe’s earlier tale exposes to the

reader during an opening sequence intended to

serve as an introduction to Dupin’s stupendous

powers of ratiocination. Tracing his companion’s

thoughts through a variety of apparently arbitrary

associations, Dupin deploys natural history terms

(genus, species) that serve as clues to the

taxonomic denouement (403). Or rather, the

narrator deploys them through Dupin, for they

enter the story before the nature of the crime has

been revealed, and hence lie outside of Dupin’s

diegetic horizon and awareness of the specifics of

the case. Dupin is therefore mouthing the

solution to the crime before he has even

become aware of it. The curious textual outcome

of this zoographic anticipation is that the

narrator, despite apparently lagging behind

the brilliant Dupin, has actually beaten him to

the troubled animal difference at the heart of the

story and can even articulate it (albeit without

being aware of doing so). This peculiarity results

in the narrator describing his efforts at compre-

hending Dupin’s clues not as a failure of

projective imagination but as an effort of

remembrance (421). Dupin’s later condescending

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hints about the criminal’s identity – who, he tells

the uncomprehending narrator, displays

an agility astounding, a strength superhuman,

a ferocity brutal, a butchery without motive,

a grotesquerie in horror absolutely alien from

humanity, and a voice foreign in tone to the

ears of men of many different nations, and

devoid of all distinct or intelligible

syllabification

– do not so much cement his claim to analytic

mastery over the orangutan as highlight the prior

inhabitation of his own discourse by an unnamed

but recognizable animal other (423). From this

point of view, the narrator’s deafness to – or

unwillingness to concede – Dupin’s allusions to a

clear difference between human and animal takes

on the quality of mockery of Dupin’s claims to

transcendental reason; the narrator’s interjection

‘‘a madman!’’ both an ironic hypothesis about the

killer and a gentle reminder of the narrator’s

earlier admission that he and Dupin might have

‘‘been regarded as madmen’’ by the rest of the

world.

Transspecific anticipation occurs even before

the text of ‘‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’’

proper. In that story, the subject of Dupin’s

initial demonstration of his intellect is the

talentless actor Chantilly, who ‘‘had attempted

the role of Xerxes’’ in the tragedy of the same

name by Prosper Jolyot de Crebillon. Xerxes

(1714) supplies the epigraph for the most

explicitly grotesque of Poe’s short stories,

‘‘Four Beasts in One – The Homo-

Cameleopard’’ (1840), which features the

Seleucid king, Antiochus Epiphanes, drunkenly

inhabiting the form of a giraffe and demonstrat-

ing his ‘‘super-human agility’’ and apparent

‘‘madness’’ (188, 186). This intertext places the

transspecific context of ‘‘The Murders in the Rue

Morgue’’ beyond the purview of even the narrator

and helps complete the circuit between the

animal in that text and the unseeing sovereign

in ‘‘The Purloined Letter.’’ If there were any

doubt that the chain of signification for Poe is in

fact a kind of circle (or better, a Mobius strip)

uniting the animal with the symbolic, it is

dispelled by the narrator’s curious assertion that

the Semitic god of fate, Ashimah, is an ape, a

connection he justifies on the grounds of a

fanciful etymological connection between

‘‘Ashimah’’ and ‘‘Simia.’’ The only distinct

phrases heard by witnesses to the crime on the

Rue Morgue, uttered by the Maltese sailor upon

finding his orangutan on a murderous

rampage, are ‘‘sacre,’’ ‘‘diable,’’ and ‘‘mon

Dieu!’’ (407–09).

Such a cynical view of human intelligence is

characteristic of Poe, who was fond of pointing

out the connection between the most highly

refined human reason and the ‘‘brute instinct’’

exhibited by animal life:

The line which demarcates the instinct of the

brute creation from the boasted reason of man,

is, beyond doubt, of the most shadowy and

unsatisfactory character – a boundary line far

more difficult to settle than even the North-

Eastern or the Oregon. The question, whether

the lower animals do or do not reason, will

possibly never be decided – certainly never in

our present condition of knowledge. While the

self-love and arrogance of man will persist in

denying the reflective power to beasts, because

the granting it seems to derogate from his own

vaunted supremacy, he yet perpetually finds

himself involved in the paradox of decrying

instinct as an inferior faculty, while he is

forced to admit its infinite superiority, in a

thousand cases, over the very reason which he

claims exclusively as his own. Instinct, so far

from being an inferior reason, is perhaps the

most exacted intellect of all.11

Lacan is likewise caught up in a kind of

anthropocentric knowingness that is betrayed by

its own words: the text of his essay on ‘‘The

Purloined Letter’’ is littered with references to

the animal other that has been elided from the

main discourse, particularly on the ‘‘ostrich’’

(10), the ‘‘creature’’ (29), and the ‘‘tracks’’ (15).

Most notable is his identification of the analyst

with the ‘‘rex et augur’’ (27), the king who

anticipates events by examining the behavior and

anatomy of birds (augur, from av- (bird) and gar-

(speech)). He comes closest to articulating the

connection towards the close of his seminar, when

he describes the human subject of a determining

symbolic order as an animal: ‘‘The audacious

creature is, of course, reduced here to the state of

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imbecilic blindness in which man finds himself in

relation to the wall-like letters that dictate his

destiny’’ (29–30). What remains unspeakable for

both Dupin and Lacan, even when they explicitly

take up the animal as an object, is the zoological

force that always preconditions their utterances.

That force, embodied in the ‘‘Rue Morgue’’

narrator’s combination of knowingness and

ignorance, ultimately obliges Dupin to shave

closer to the empirical and present the one piece

of supplemental physical evidence (concealed

from the police and the reader) that he has used

to crack the case: a tuft of hair left at the scene,

which the narrator finally recognizes as non-

human. The entirety of Dupin’s positive identi-

fication thus comes down to a discrimination

between the hair of humans and orangutans, a fall

into the empirical that represents quite a come-

down from Dupin’s pretensions to recherche

analysis. More importantly, Dupin’s triumphal

seizure of the hair echoes the original murder

scene, in which the excited orangutan grasps,

examines, and rips out tresses of Madame

L’Espanaye’s hair. Detective work, like psycho-

analysis, reties the knot it tries to untie.

‘‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’’ thus

exhibits the primordial form of the same

rotational methodology Lacan pointed out in the

‘‘The Purloined Letter.’’ In the former story,

however, the speculative process of symbolic

repetition continues across the species line and

terminates not in a technical mise en abyme but

in a complex transspecific encounter before a

mirror. If we trace back the motivations for the

murder – which is, so to speak, the life of the

story – as far as they will go, we eventually arrive

at a primal scene in which a penned ape desires to

mimic the actions of his captor as he shaves the

beard from his face in front of a mirror. ‘‘Razor

in hand, and fully lathered, it was sitting before a

looking-glass, attempting the operation of shav-

ing, in which it had no doubt previously watched

its master through the keyhole of the closet’’

(428–29).

Although Lacan’s writings about ‘‘The

Purloined Letter’’ appear designed to conceal

this zoological speculative terminus, some of his

other writings serve to confirm it. The curious act

of identification with the reflection of the human

other through the repetition of a ritual of self-

difference (the shaving) that inaugurates ‘‘The

Murders in the Rue Morgue’’ presciently

sketched the unhappy process of human sub-

ject-formation described in Lacan’s essay on ‘‘The

Mirror Stage,’’ which launched him on his public

career and with which he opened the first

English-language selection of his Ecrits. For

Lacan the crucial moment in childhood develop-

ment comes when the child substitutes an

imagined figure of organic wholeness for his

previous experience of physical and psychological

dependence and disintegration. This substitution,

which Lacan imagines through the metaphor of

the mirror, allows the child to attribute an

integral self to a previously dissociated bundle

of perceptions. The self produced by this act is, as

it were, constitutively aware of its factitiousness,

and the resultant sense of lack creates the appetite

for wholeness that the self will henceforth seek

from the big Other (the overarching cultural

system from which the self borrows complete-

ness) and one or more small others (objects the

separation from which defines the self’s

wholeness).

Lacan, as I have already indicated, explicitly

rejects the possible transspecific qualities of the

mirror stage, and among Lacanian scholars the

discontinuist reading of ‘‘The Mirror Stage’’ is

the standard and, given Lacan’s other disconti-

nuist statements and the anthropological habits of

the philosophical tradition in which he works,

probably the responsible one. Here, however,

I would like to elaborate another possible reading

of this key text in the ignition system of Lacan’s

anthropological machine, one that relies on both a

careful close reading and reference to an under-

emphasized archival source for Lacan’s ideas.

Though the Descartes–Kant–Hegel–Kojeve lin-

eage of Lacan has attracted most of the scholarly

attention, the relatively sparse documentary

record of Lacan’s early education also reveals a

great number of prominent biologists whose work

Lacan studied closely during his medical training

and for some years after as he was establishing his

psychoanalytic practice. What is worth under-

scoring – though it can hardly be surprising –

about this reading list is the predominance of

ethologists, animal psychologists, and

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comparative psychologists. Included are: George

Romanes, whose collation of anecdotes about

animal behavior – Mental Evolution in Animals

(1883) – provided the spur to golden-age ethology

in both its behaviorist (Skinnerian) and ratioci-

native (Lorenzian) guises; the studies of animal

social organization carried out by Alfred Espinas

(Des societes animales, 1878) and Francois

Picard (Les Phenomenes sociaux chez les ani-

maux, 1933); the animal psychology of Frederik

Buytendijk (translated into French as

Psychologie des animaux, 1928); the compara-

tive primatology of Wolfgang Kohler

(Intelligenzprufungen an Menschenaffen, 1921)

and Winthrop and Luella Kellogg (The Ape and

the Child, 1933); and the biological philosophy of

Jakob von Uexkull (Umwelt und Innenwelt der

Tiere, 1909) (Roudinesco 1990, 1997). These

ethological sources, far from representing a

credulous biologism that is superseded by

Lacanian theory, provide a richly ecocentric

intellectual context for that theory. This is clear

from the very opening of the essay on the mirror

stage:

Some of you may recall the behavioral

characteristic I begin with that is explained

by a fact of comparative psychology: the

human child, at an age when he is for a

short while, but for a while nevertheless,

outdone by the chimpanzee in instrumental

intelligence, can already recognize his own

image as such in a mirror. This recognition is

indicated by the illustrative mimicry of the

Aha-Erlebnis which Kohler considers to

express situational apperception, an essential

moment in the act of intelligence.

Indeed, this act, far from exhausting itself,

as in the case of a monkey, in eventually

acquired control over the uselessness of the

image, immediately gives rise in a child to a

series of gestures in which he playfully

experiences the relationship between the

movements made and the reflected environ-

ment, and between this virtual complex and

the reality it duplicates – namely, the child’s

own body, and the persons and even things

around him. (75)

The ape here, on the standard reading, is

fleetingly invoked as the negative ground against

which the positive form of the human subject can

be imagined. A rhetorical feint seems to imply

that the distinction between child and chimpan-

zee lies in the child’s ability to recognize its image

in the mirror only to concede in the following

paragraph that the chimpanzee, as clinical

observation has established, does in fact possess

such imagistic self-recognition. Lacan then places

the dividing line between ape and child at a

further remove: while the consciousness of the

ape ends with recognition and ‘‘finding empty’’ of

the imago – an astounding intellectual feat that

might serve well as a description of Saussurian

insistence on the arbitrary nature of the signifier

– that of the human subject develops out of the

repetition of that mastered imago. The echo of

this misrecognition (meconnaisance) constitutes

the subject of man. It is therefore easy to read

this as it is usually read: a displacement of the

human into a speculative void that remains

anthropocentric.

But if we look back at Lacan’s main source for

his information on chimpanzees and their

responses to their own reflections – primatologist

and Gestalt psychologist Wolfgang Kohler’s

description of the Aha-Erlebnis in The

Mentality of Apes – it is clear that even this

more delicate formulation will not hold. Far from

justifying Lacan’s surmise about species differ-

ence indicated by apes’ relative lack of interest in

their reflections, the original source contains an

extended description of the absorption of the

chimpanzees in their images:

When we gave the chimpanzees a hand-mirror

for the first time, they looked into it and at

once became intensely interested [. . .] They

dispensed with the human implement; having

once had their attention drawn to it, they

mirrored themselves in anything at all avail-

able for the purpose: in bright pieces of tin, in

polished potsherds, in tiny glass splinters, for

which their hands provided the background,

and, above all, in pools of rain water. I have

often observed Tschego for a long time sunk in

contemplation of her own reflection in a pool.

She played with it: bent far over it and drew

back slowly, shook her head backwards and

forwards, and made all kinds of grimaces, over

and over again. Finally, she dipped her great

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hand into the puddle, shaking and wagging her

head, and let the water trickle back onto the

picture in the water. As the creatures were

constantly looking at themselves, using even

tiny surfaces, which we humans would never

have thought of for using for this purpose,

they developed a pleasant and interesting

extension of their play. They slowly turned

the reflecting surface, or moved their heads to

one side, so that they could no longer see

themselves, but continued to look into it,

examining the images of one object in the

room after another, with unabated interest,

and it could constantly be observed that as

they turned the ‘‘mirror’’ they glanced quickly

from time to time towards the real, and, of

course, familiar, everyday objects that had just

appeared behind it [. . .] When they retired to

rest at night, their urine was often deposited

on the flat floor, where it formed shallow

puddles. As soon as this occurred, one or other

of the anthropoids could be observed bending

sideways, with eyes fixed on the liquid, and

moving his head slowly to and fro in order to

catch the reflection of objects from outside the

window. Other animals soon lose interest in

the reflections when non-optical measures

prove their ‘‘unreality’’ and ‘‘unsubstanti-

ality.’’ What strange beings are the chimpan-

zees, to be permanently attracted by the

contemplation of such phenomena, which can

bring them not the least tangible benefit.

(Mentality 329–31)

More than simply misrepresenting a primary

source, Lacan has adopted Kohler’s description of

the chimpanzees’ permanent attraction to reflec-

tions even after they prove unreal and unsub-

stantial as a description of a specifically human

characteristic. In attempting to draw an analytic

line between man and ape, Lacan has actually

founded his theory on evidence of their identity.

Lacan’s other major primatological source, the

Kelloggs’ The Ape and the Child, draws its

conclusions from an experiment in which a nine-

month-old chimpanzee named Gua is raised by

the researcher under the same conditions as his

fourteen-month-old son, Donald. Not only is

there a complex pattern of overlap and discre-

pancy in a variety of physical, linguistic, and

psychological abilities rather than a clear line of

demarcation between the two subjects, but the

influence of ape and child on the development of

one another is not controlled for. The primato-

logical intertext for Lacan’s text thus argues not

that the human subject emerges from an

originary repetition that can be rigorously

differentiated from the non-human, or even that

it emerges from a zoological process that occurs

separately from other forms of life, but that the

originating repetition is produced on the scene of

a zoosemiotic encounter between human and non-

human animals. The point here is not to rake

Lacan over the coals for irresponsible scholarship,

though the purging of his biological sources is

quite telling, or even to take him to task for

drawing an illegitimate line between man and

animal – that anthropological mistake is at the

core of Western philosophy, as Derrida and

Agamben have both recently pointed out. More

interesting is the way that ‘‘The Mirror Stage’’ –

like ‘‘The Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter’’’ –

literally enacts what it disavows at the level of

argument; that is, against all of Lacan’s program-

matic assertions to the contrary, it enacts the

intersubjective transspecific origin of the human

subject. In the scene of reading – Lacan’s best

analogue of the unconscious process of subject-

formation – Lacan’s argument requires illumina-

tion ‘‘from a fact of comparative psychology,’’

making the chimp’s turn before the mirror

literally simultaneous with the appearance of

the image of the child. The actual scene of the

mirror stage, therefore, to recover it from the

camouflage in which Lacan invests it, is not that

of the child gazing at itself in a real or

metaphorical mirror but of a mirror in which

the human and the non-human animal gaze at one

another. Whether this mirror is placed perpendi-

cularly or obliquely to the line of vision – and

hence whether this regard is of a captured animal

other or the self – is the originary question

Lacanian psychoanalysis tries to untie. To adapt

Lacan’s adaptation of Chung Tzu: is the human

subject dreaming he is an ape, or is the ape

dreaming he is a human subject (Four

Fundamental Concepts 76)? ‘‘The Mirror Stage’’

betrays an uncanny – and that word is, as Freud

understood, already bound up with the animal –

predisposition towards the basis of subject

formation in apprentissage and dressage.

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My comments on ‘‘The Mirror Stage’’ and

‘‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’’ have so far

been limited to a zooscopic phase of infant

development, but from the perspective of a post-

Lacanian ecocritical reading of the detective

stories what is most interesting about this

insistent intertextuality are its repercussions for

the theory of language that flows from ‘‘The

Mirror Stage’’ in Lacan’s later writings. For Poe’s

stories do not merely underscore the imagistic

continuity between the human and non-human

animal subjects but also indicate an analogous

transspecific continuity in the signifying chain of

language. The non-linguistic nature of the ape’s

cries in ‘‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue,’’

which are ascribed by different witnesses to

various languages unknown to them, does

nothing to impede the detection of the killer’s

identity. As with the purloined letter, the content

of the ape’s ‘‘language’’ is completely irrelevant

to its communicative function; as with the letter,

the ape is a creature whose ‘‘penning’’ and

subsequent escape into circulation creates the

human drama.12 In one of the clearest literary

examples of what Jacques Derrida has termed

l’animot, the expressly metalinguistic game of

‘‘The Purloined Letter’’ is being folded back

upon the sublinguistic behavior of the orangutan,

and the difference between having the most

refined command of language and having no

recognizable language at all – a difference that

has traditionally provided the most durable

philosophical justification for human–animal

discontinuism – is collapsed (‘‘The Animal’’

409, 415–16). What Poe has done by super-

imposing the two tales is to recast the syntaxless

vocalizations of the animal – for as a matter of

simple definition the orangutan does not and

cannot possess ‘‘human’’ language – alongside the

substanceless formal structures of metalanguage

in a way that reveals their phenomenal identity:

in both cases the sounds or marks made act as

physical rather than symbolic communication.

They act not like the commonsense conception of

language but, across the semantic frame, as

semiotic systems. At the level of analysis

introduced by Poe, then, human and animal

communications – from the recondite allusion to

the howl of excitement – are points along a

zoosemiotic continuum that provides the context

for human linguistic invention. Such radical

continuism is fully compatible with – indeed,

the necessary extension of – Lacan’s insistence on

the materiality of language and the non-avail-

ability of a metalanguage. As Derrida, who has

wrestled more explicitly with the implications of

biology, writes:

The idea according to which man is the only

speaking being, in its traditional form or in its

Heideggerian form, seems to me at once

undisplaceable and highly problematic. Of

course, if one defines language in such a way

that it is reserved for what we call man, what is

there to say? But if one reinscribes language in

a network of possibilities that do not merely

encompass it but mark it irreducibly from the

inside, everything changes. I am thinking in

particular of the mark in general, of the trace,

of iterability, of difference. These possibilities

or necessities, without which there would be

no language, are themselves not only human.

It is not a question of covering up ruptures

and heterogeneities. I would simply contest

that they give rise to a single linear,

indivisible, oppositional limit, to a binary

opposition between the human and the infra-

human. And what I am proposing here should

allow us to take into account scientific knowl-

edge about the complexity of ‘‘animal lan-

guages,’’ genetic coding, all forms of marking

within which so-called human language, as

original as it might be, does not allow us to

‘‘cut’’ once and for all where we would in

general like to cut [. . .] And this also means

that we never know, and never have known,

how to cut up a subject. (‘‘‘Eating Well’’’ 116)

Despite coming in for critique from Derrida on

this subject, Lacan – or Lacan’s text as read – can

be understood to be aware of this continuity. In

‘‘The Mirror Stage,’’ the child’s constitutive

meconnaisance differentiates him or her equally

from both the chimpanzee and analyst, whose

instrumental intelligences unite them in a state of

unarticulated mastery over the signifying chain

through a recognition of its emptiness. The limit

between Lacan’s chimp and psychoanalyst-author

is, like the limit between Poe’s orangutan and his

detective, in the last instance undetectable. The

folding of the animal onto the analyst is

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a fulfillment of Poe’s own comments about the

identity of animal instinct and human reason and

a repetition of the course of his detective trilogy

and related writings, which prolong the undecid-

ability of the human subject. Poe’s writings allow

us to see that Lacan’s understanding of the

unconscious as structured like a language without

meaning (i.e., a symbolic or mathematical

system) opens the human subject not just to the

inhuman system of la langue but also to the

transspecific zoosemiotic environment: the Other

that speaks through the unconscious need not be

human or even humanoid, nor must it speak in

human language. Human beings cannot, of

course, have explicit rational conversations with

animals around them, but their consciousness is

traversed and conditioned by an underlying

unconscious structured by the ‘‘meaningless’’

signifiers circulated by living beings in the

environment.13

According to Thomas Sebeok, the semiotician

responsible for developing the linguistic meta-

field of zoosemiotics, this collapse of the human–

animal distinction into a panzoological semiotic

process can be traced back in the scientific

literature to German zoologist and philosopher

Jakob von Uexkull. Beginning in the first decade

of the twentieth century, von Uexkull wrote a

series of articles and books attempting to

articulate a philosophical basis for the biological

sciences that would be distinct from the kind of

materialism that dominated physics and chem-

istry.14 The search for an ontology adequate to

biology led von Uexkull to the Kantian proposi-

tion that organisms could not be studied simply

as objects in an objective environment – the way

billiard balls are analyzed in classical physics –

but must be regarded in the first instance as

subjects whose physiological organization con-

structs an Umwelt (environment) that is parti-

cular to the individual organism. As von Uexkull

puts it at the outset of his Theoretical Biology:

All reality is subjective appearance. This must

constitute the great, fundamental admission

even of biology. It is utterly vain to go seeking

through the world for causes that are inde-

pendent of the subject; we always come up

against objects, which owe their construction

to the subject. (xv)

Accordingly, ‘‘every animal in a different place

and in a different manner seeks out from the vast

complexity of the inorganic world precisely that

which fits it; that is, it creates its needs itself

corresponding to its own construction type,’’ and

as a simple matter of definition, then ‘‘the

environment consists only of those questions

that the animal can answer’’ (‘‘Environment and

Inner World of Animals’’ 222–45). Life is thus

precisely a matter of the exchange of signs

between the interior world (Innenwelt) and

individual environment (Umwelt) of the organ-

ism, which can be viewed as a sort of subjective

‘‘machine’’ (von Uexkull’s potentially misleading

word, akin to the Deleuzian usage) for informa-

tion processing. As Sebeok and other zoosemio-

ticians underscore, von Uexkull reimagines life as

an explicitly environmental semiotic phenom-

enon (and vice versa – semiotic phenomena can

be considered alive) and insists that all animals,

including human beings, exist in (to use images

from his later writings) a ‘‘life-tunnel’’ or

subjective ‘‘bubble’’ that may or may not overlap

with that of other organisms. Crucially, the

objective world (what von Uexkull derisively

calls the ‘‘environment of stones’’) is thus

inaccessible except as a summation of the

innumerable Umwelten of organisms.15

Lacan, of course, relies very heavily on von

Uexkull’s uncited biophilosophical terminology

in his description of the production of symbolic

edifices that generate the human subject.16

Although Lacan implies that his anthropological

mirror stage is a refinement beyond what von

Uexkull has articulated with regard to the general

class of Innenwelt–Umwelt relationships, von

Uexkull in fact elaborated a theory of the

‘‘mirrored world’’ or ‘‘counterworld’’ that devel-

ops in higher animals (i.e., earthworms and

‘‘above’’) and mediates the relation between

their motor nervous system and the environment.

The reflection, or mirroring, going on here is not

of the optical variety, as in Lacan, but lies in the

correspondence between the spatial arrangement

of stimuli and the spatial organization of the

nervous system. Mirroring is the essence of zoos

for von Uexkull; it is where, to use a phrase from

Merleau-Ponty that has been elaborated by

recent ecophilosophers, the flesh of the world

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folds upon itself.17 Like Dupin, whose exagger-

ated command of the simian ‘‘criminal’’ belied

his own involuntary immersion in and submission

to a prior zoological other, Lacan’s misconstrual

of von Uexkull’s terms and his miscomprehen-

sion of his theory de-emphasizes the embodiment

of the mirroring and its explicitly continuist

zoological context.18 To be clear, that context is

not simply that described by sociobiology – that

the zoological mirror is a primordial determinant

of human consciousness that is shared with a wide

range of related life-forms – but also an

ecohistorical one in which the beginnings and

outlines of the human subject lie not in the

evolutionary past but in the record of human and

animal interaction. Derrida’s recent comments on

his ‘‘zootobibliography’’ (zoo-auto-oto-bio-biblio-

graphy) gesture in this direction, as they turn on

the question of the animal mirror:

Wherever some autobiographical play is being

enacted there has to be a psyche, a mirror that

reflects me naked from head to toe. The same

question then becomes whether I should show

myself but in the process see myself naked

(that is reflect my image in a mirror) when,

concerning me, looking at me, is this living

creature this cat that can find itself caught in

the same mirror? Is there animal narcissism?

But cannot this cat also be, deep in her eyes,

my primary mirror? (‘‘The Animal That

Therefore I Am (More to Follow)’’ 418)

This banal, everyday scene – the household pet

looking at its owner – underlies modern under-

standings of the operation of the human subject.

Behind the Lacanian matheme (‘‘all head and no

stamen’’) lie the continuist texts of Poe, Kohler,

and von Uexkull; behind the continuist texts

themselves a transspecific communication

between men, and apes, and birds, and insects;

behind that communication a scene of orthopedic

anthropogenesis, with all of its protocols of

imprisonment and observation, by which man

captures and ‘‘pens’’ his zoological self. Lacan’s

theory of subject-formation not only provides a

way of understanding how the unconscious

operates as a historical register of signs, including

those not human in origin or destination, but it

also acts as a blind record of a specific non-human

sign system: the ape, in the cage, using the mirror

to look at the world outside. There are thoughts

of a once-penned ape – the Kelloggs’ little Gua,

or perhaps Rana or Tschego or one of the other

chimps kept at Kohler’s primate research center

on the island of Tenerife – circulating through

Lacanian psychoanalysis, just as there is a

misrecognized orangutan on the loose on the

Rue Morgue.

la lettre vole¤ e, volante

Thus far I have been tracking a number of

zoological repetitions within and between the

writings of Lacan and Poe. Within Lacan, I have

noted his repetition of ‘‘The Mirror Stage’’ in the

seminar on ‘‘The Purloined Letter,’’ his repeti-

tion of continuist biological research in ‘‘The

Mirror Stage,’’ and his repetition of the scene of

apprentissage in the biologists from whom he

draws. Within Poe: the mirroring of ‘‘The

Murders in the Rue Morgue’’ in ‘‘The

Purloined Letter,’’ and the literal mirroring of

the anthropoid in the former story. Between

them, I have remarked the fact that Lacan’s

encrypted musings on the animal repeat those

found in Poe; and, further, that Lacan’s repeti-

tion of his inquiry into animals (in ‘‘The Mirror

Stage’’ and ‘‘Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter’’’)

is itself a repetition of Poe’s own double-take in

the first and third of his detective stories. I would

like now to come full circle by returning to the

literal meaning of Baudelaire’s translation of

Poe’s ‘‘Purloined Letter,’’ ‘‘La Lettre volee’’ (the

letter flown, not the flightless ostrich of Lacan’s

seminar). That title literalizes the zoological

context I have recreated for both Poe and

Lacan, and suggests that ‘‘flying letters’’ form a

very long and complex literary chain that reaches

back into the era, just before Poe’s major

writings, in which American writers rendered

their contacts with the bodies and voices of birds.

What follows is my own repetition of the inquiry

into the zooscopic and zoosemiotic origins of the

human subject in a historical register, once again

using a text from Edgar Allan Poe, ‘‘The Raven,’’

this time placed alongside not twentieth-century

theory but, in a bit of strategic literal-mindedness

that would do Dupin proud, contemporary

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popular American ornithological texts that center

on the capture and display of animal others.

The bird life of the New World had long been

the subject of intense interest by European

explorers and settlers. During the Harriot

expedition to Roanoke in 1585, John White

made a number of watercolors of indigenous

birds, and by the seventeenth century it was

practically mandatory that exploration reports

begin with a description of the hummingbird. In

the eighteenth century, British naturalist Mark

Catesby began painting sophisticated and beauti-

ful birds from habitats all along the Atlantic coast

south to the Bahamas. In the early 1800s,

Alexander Wilson, a Scottish immigrant and

popular poet, produced the first systematic

treatment of American birds, The American

Ornithology, to great acclaim from European

and American natural scientists. But the acknowl-

edged king of American ornithology is John

James Audubon, whose massive Birds of America

(made up of 435 plates bound in four double

elephant folios) subsumed all precursors and set

the standard for all ornithologists to come,

certainly in America and perhaps the world

over. The ravishing engravings were coordinated

with another publication, The Ornithological

Biographies, in which Audubon narrated his

own encounters with each bird species and

provided scientific descriptions. Affordable com-

bined editions of his original work were published

in large quantities starting with the royal octavo

edition of 1839–44. It is to the painterly and

verbal world of Audubon that any ornithological

consideration of Poe must turn.

There may be a specific point of intertextual

connection between Poe’s zoosemiotic tales,

Lacan’s Ecrits, and an account of the inaugural

moment of American ornithology’s most famous

career. Audubon described his first involvement

with birds in words that anticipate some of the

details of Poe’s first detective tale:

One incident which is as perfect in my

memory as if it had occurred this very day,

I have thought of thousands of times since,

and will now put on paper as one of the

curious things which perhaps did lead me in

after times to love birds, and to finally study

them with pleasure infinite. My mother had

several beautiful parrots and some monkeys,

one of the latter was a full-grown male of a

very large species. One morning, while the

servants were engaged in arranging the room I

was in, ‘‘Pretty Polly’’ asking for her breakfast

as usual, ‘‘Du pain au lait pour le perroquet

Mignonne,’’ the man of the woods probably

thought the bird presuming upon his rights in

the scale of nature; be this as it may, he

certainly showed his supremacy in strength

over the denizen of the air, for, walking

deliberately and uprightly toward the poor

bird, he at once killed it, with unnatural

composure. The sensations of my infant heart

at this cruel sight were agony to me. I prayed

the servant to beat the monkey, but he, who

for some reason preferred the monkey to the

parrot, refused. I uttered long and piercing

cries, my mother rushed into the room, I was

tranquillized, the monkey was forever after-

ward chained, and Mignonne was buried with

all the pomp of a cherished love one.19

Although ‘‘Myself’’ was not published until fifty

years after the ‘‘Murders in the Rue Morgue’’ and

there is no existing record in Poe’s biographies or

the Poe log of the two men ever having crossed

paths, the possibility of a direct historical

connection between Audubon’s ‘‘man of the

woods’’ and Poe’s orangutan (literally ‘‘man of

the forest’’) or between the ‘‘Du pain’’ of

Audubon’s parrot and Dupin (whose seal is

made ‘‘of bread’’) cannot be entirely ruled out.

Audubon embarked on a tour in 1839 promoting

the publication of the inexpensive octavo edition

of the Birds of America, traveling through

Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore,

and Charlestown before the 1841 publication of

‘‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue.’’ Poe was in

Philadelphia through 1841, and might have heard

Audubon deliver the story about the ape and the

parrot in one of his public appearances in that

city, or he might have got the story from one of

his literary colleagues, who were acquainted with

Poe’s longstanding interest in parrots (Mabbott 1:

353–54). The chain that extends through Poe to

the Lacanian matheme may thus have begun in

the mouth of Audubon’s parrot, the augur that

could well have been the first to speak the

analyst’s name. Beyond this speculative historical

connection, Audubon’s anecdote can serve as a

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Lacanian fable about infantile investment in the

linguistic competence of a parrot against the

oppressive physical coordination of an ape.

Audubon is in this text himself a kind of

parrot: as a languageless infant, he can only

reproduce the direct speech of another (in this

case, the parrot). The passage into the orthopedic

domain of language is understood not as a

decenterment into the symbolic but as a passage

from inarticulate anthropoid to avian songster.

In Audubon’s telling of the tale, his career as

an ornithological scientist and illustrator is a

compensation for this original powerlessness to

prevent violence against birds. Given the popular

conception of Audubon as a benign pastoralist

and eloquent spokesman for the conservationist

viewpoint espoused by the society that now bears

his name, however, it is possible to miss the full

significance of this biographical anecdote. Far

from simply avenging or undoing the original

anthropoid violence to the voice of birds,

Audubon’s artistic practice repeated it again

and again. His written works reveal the deep

connection in his mind between painting and

killing. Audubon was an avid hunter, and his

journals are filled with long lists of the animals

sacrificed to his extreme scientific and artistic

ambitions: the first significant mention of bird

life in his Mississippi River Journal, for example,

reads: ‘‘We shot thirty partridges – 1 Wood Cock

– 27 Grey Squirels – a Barn Owl – a Young

Turkey Buzzard and an autumnal warbler.’’20

Nearly every journal entry that follows includes

such catalogs of slaughter.

Death in Audubon’s works is present not as a

hidden, vitiating subtext of historical violence but

rather as an emphatically present point of

reference from which the condition of mortality,

shared by bird and man, as enabling subjective

perception is acknowledged and evaluated

through the scene of apprentissage. It is more

than a curious fact that, even though he did a fair

amount of his own hunting, Audubon rarely used

the pronoun ‘‘I’’ with the verbs ‘‘killed’’ or ‘‘shot’’

in his journal, preferring either ‘‘we’’ or no

pronoun at all. This is true, at least, when the

animal killed is an insectivore or herbivore. When

a raptor or carrion feeder is involved, however,

Audubon does tend to use the ‘‘I.’’ In the first ten

entries of his Mississippi Journal, for instance,

‘‘I’’ appears with the words ‘‘shot’’ or ‘‘killed’’

only in relation to fish hawks, buzzards, turkey

vultures, and a thrush (the one exception), even

though the total list of birds killed by the party in

the same interval includes more than a dozen non-

carnivorous species. Audubon’s personhood is

only called forth when it finds in its prey an

analogue to its own tendency to predation. The

pronoun I, which usually functions as the most

economical way of naming the subject/object split

in English, becomes available to Audubon only as

a conflation of those two categories. The function

of the I in ornithological discourse, to adapt the

full title of Lacan’s essay on the mirror stage, is for

Audubon a way to commemorate a transspecific

repetition.

Audubon’s emphasis on transspecific recipro-

city can be traced all the way back to the

technical breakthrough that allowed him to

develop from provincial painting instructor to

world-famous artist. His technique was to sketch

birds not from life or from stuffed and mounted

specimens, as many of his contemporaries had

done, but from freshly killed birds that were

posed in lifelike attitudes by running sharpened

wires through their still warm bodies. It is a

gruesome technique, but Audubon’s description

of his first experiments in this direction makes it

clear that to him it represented a kind of intimacy

with rather than mastery over the birds. The

passage in which Audubon first describes his

breakthrough is full of substitutions of man for

bird and bird for man, the net effect of which is

to make the moment of encounter as riveting for

the artist and spectator as it is for the bird:

Young as I was, my impatience to obtain my

desire filled my brains with different places –

nay I not unfrequently dreamt that I had made

a New discovery, and long before day one

morning I leaped out of bed fully persuaded

that I had attained my object. – I ordered a

horse to be sadled and without answering to

any of the various questions put to me,

mounted and moved off at a hard Gallop

toward the then little Village of Noristown

distant about Five Miles. – on arriving there

not a door was open – nay It was not yet day

light – I therefore rode toward the River took a

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bath and in time returned to the Town and

entered the first oppened Shop – Enquired for

Wire of different sizes, bought some, Leaped

on my Steed and was at Mill Grove again in a

very Short time. – the wife of my Tenant

I really believe thought that I was mad, as on

offering me Breakfast, I told her I wanted my

Gun and a curious scene ensued about this

which is not worth your while to hear – off to

the Creek and down with the first Kings Fisher

I met! I picked the bird up and carried it home

by the bill, I sent for the Miller and made him

fetch me a piece of soft board, – when he

returned he found me filing into Sharp points

pieces of my Wire, and proud to Show him the

substance of my discovery, for a discovery

I had now in my brains, I pierced the body of

the Fishing bird and fixed it on the board –

another Wire passed above his upper Mandible

was made to hold the head in a pretty fair

attitude, Smaller Skewers fixed the feet

according to my notions, and even common

pins came to my assistance in placing the legs

and feet. – the least Wire proved a delightful

elevator to the Bird’s Tail and at Last there

Stood before me the real Mankin of a King’s

Fisher. (761)

There is a very odd homology between

Audubon’s fisherman-like baiting of the wire

hooks and the bird that he selects as his

representative victim in this retrospective recon-

struction – the King’s Fisher – a homology played

up by Audubon’s awkward and vague reference to

‘‘the Fishing bird.’’ As if to make this subtle point

explicit, Audubon refers to his posed bird as a

Mankin, or little Man. The moment of his great

artistic vision is presented through the bemused

eyes of the local miller, a narrative triangulation

that repeats – or is repeated by – the structure of

the anecdote about the death of Mignonne, this

time with Audubon in the place of the ornitho-

cidal ape and the Miller in the place of the silent

human witness.

Audubon wraps up his miniature

Kunstlerroman with this sentence:

Reader this was what I Shall ever call my first

attempt at Drawing actually from Nature, for

then Even the eye of the Kings fisher was as if

full of Life before me whenever I pressed its

Lids aside with a finger. (761)

Audubon may mean that the freshly killed and

posed bird looked alive when its eyelids were

propped open, but he might also mean that that

the bird’s eye looked upon Audubon in this

moment as if he were alive. In Audubon’s eye and

hand the bird seems to live; in consenting to the

presence of the bird – in coming in contact with

the bird – Audubon as a man registers as if full of

life. Audubon’s practice is an explicit instance of

the orthopedic transspecific intersubjectivity that

Lacan enacts but cannot bring himself to identify.

Such textual and historical indications of the

transspecific intersubjective origin of the human

self are carried throughout Audubon’s work, but

nowhere more so than in his depiction of the

black vulture, the most important bird in the

Birds of America. Although the prominence of

vultures at the opening of Birds of America is

due in the first place to the ordering of Aves

established by Cuvier, Audubon’s acknowledged

scientific precursor, Audubon had an underlying

fascination with vultures. The facts of Audubon’s

life reveal that he actually pursued intimacy with

vultures; he kept vultures as pets. He devoted

more pages in his Ornithological Biographies to

the black vulture than to any other bird. His

images of the carrion feeders are among the first

images of the first volume of Birds of America.

And his major contribution to the ethology of

birds was his experimentally tested hypothesis

that vultures find their food by sight rather than

by smell, as had long been supposed.

When Audubon was making the original

sketches for his painting of the vulture, he

recorded the process in his journal. ‘‘Drawing all

day, I finished the carrion crow, it stunk so

intolerably, and Looked so disgusting that I was

very glad when I through it over Board’’

(Writings and Drawings 55). At first glance,

this journal entry seems to offer more fodder for

critics who fault Audubon for predicating the

artistic finish of his portraits on the ‘‘finishing

off’’ of his subjects. But even though the spirit of

the sentence is to refuse the contiguity of artist

and subject, the protagonists of the sentence, man

and bird, do not maintain a stable relationship as

grammatical subject and object over its course.

This may seem to be a minor point, but multiply

it by the several hundred times such a structure

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occurs in Audubon’s journal and some light is

shed on the way this eccentric man habitually

thought of subjects and objects. In light of this

blending of agency, the double meaning of

‘‘carrion crow’’ (Audubon’s name for the black

vulture) becomes strangely significant. Originally

so called because it is a crow that ate carrion, this

bird is now a crow that is carrion: that is, at death

its relationship to carrion has changed from one

of predator and prey to simple identity. If we

want to describe it fully, we could say it is a

carrion carrion crow. At the same time, Audubon

himself has assumed the position of predator with

relationship to the dead vulture: he is himself a

sort of carrion crow crow. Indeed, his language

has a bit of beak in it: he ‘‘finished’’ the carrion

crow even though it ‘‘looked disgusting.’’ The

absorbing blackness with which Audubon has

painted his vulture requires us to squint our eyes

and crane our necks in a vulturine scrutiny of the

bird’s interior spaces. Carrion carrion crow and

carrion crow crow: if we carry out the logic of a

situation in which Audubon becomes a crow and

a crow becomes carrion, there’s no avoiding the

implication that a second casualty of the painting

is Audubon himself: he becomes a carrion carrion

crow crow.

This might be dismissed as a poor sort of

algebra except for the fact that such an uncanny

doubling is visualized strikingly in Audubon’s

one other portrait of the black vulture

(see Fig. 1). Two heads seem to emerge from

one feathered body; or perhaps they are super-

imposed images of the same head at different

times: once as the object of the painter’s gaze,

once as the painterly appraiser. The ecology of

vision in this painting is crucial: one vulture

looks into the dead deer’s eyes (preparing for the

customary first course); we look expectantly into

the eyes of the second vulture, our prey; and as

that vulture peers back at our eyes, we are

ourselves cast as prey (vultures being one of the

few birds capable of consuming human beings).

The relations between hunter and hunted, viewer

and viewed, have been dissolved by Audubon in a

synoptic representation of intersubjectivity.

If Audubon’s fascinated doubling of the

vulture is the result of his need to reconcile his

Fig. 1. John James Audubon, Black Vulture. Bird on left and deer’s head painted c.1829; second bird added later.Watercolor, pastel, graphite, and collage on paper, 2338�36 in.Collection of the New-York Historical Society.

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destruction and consumption of birds with his

equally powerful identification with and depen-

dence on them, the raven represents an avian

alterity that resists this annihilating embrace. In

early American nature writing, the raven repre-

sents a bridge between the intense intersubjective

lesson of the mute vultures and the garrulousness

of the songbirds.21 Credited even in the nine-

teenth century with a high degree of

intelligence, a tendency to invade human terri-

tory, a high level of conjugal fidelity among

mated pairs, an ability to mimic the human voice,

and a consuming passion for rotting flesh, the

raven provided the most uncanny zoosemiotic

display of the more-than-human. Audubon’s

biography of the raven, first published 1841,

takes shape against the human efforts to destroy

the bird: first those of the generic farmer, who

comes in for a lecture from Audubon about the

positive services rendered by the raven; then by

Audubon himself, who tries but repeatedly fails

to bring down his required specimens. The latter

half of the account is taken up with anecdotes

about the cleverness of the raven in avoiding

capture and, crucially, in communicating with

one another:

Would that I could describe to you, reader, the

many musical inflections by means of which

they hold converse during these amatory

excursions! These sounds doubtless express

their pure conjugal feelings, confirmed and

rendered more intense by long years of

happiness in each other’s society. In this

manner they may recall the pleasing remem-

brance of their youthful days, recount the

events of their life, and express the pleasure

they enjoy. (79–80)

Of most interest is what Audubon, following the

custom established by earlier bird writers, has to

say about the raven’s insinuative and imitative

abilities:

When domesticated, and treated with kind-

ness, it becomes attached to its owner, and will

follow him about with all the familiarity of a

confiding friend. It is capable of imitating the

human voice, so that individuals have some-

times been taught to enunciate a few words

with great distinctness. (82)

Poe’s own explanation for the presence of the

raven in his eponymous poem (1845) has little to

do with contemporary ornithological considera-

tions of the roosting habits and call of Corvus

corax, nor does he confirm the scholarly

conjecture that he lifted it from Charles

Dickens’s fictionalization, in Barnaby Rudge, of

his two pet ravens (Grip and Grip II).22 In ‘‘The

Philosophy of Composition,’’ his notorious retro-

spective account of the composition of the poem,

Poe claims that the titular figure appeared only

belatedly as a delivery vehicle for the refrain

‘‘nevermore,’’ which is itself a mere carrier of the

‘‘sonorous’’ o and ‘‘producible’’ r that Poe wished

to introduce into his musical score. In need of a

‘‘non-reasoning creature capable of speech,’’ Poe

at first hit upon a parrot before substituting the

tonally more appropriate raven (Essays and

Reviews 18). Poe’s self-pronouncements – like

those of the King, Dupin, and Lacan – would

seem to lead away from any specifiable zoological

referent and towards a wholly formal under-

standing of language and logic – the precise

identity of the bird a matter of absolutely no

consequence for the poem’s music. The parrot, as

we have seen, has its own set of complicating

intertextual and biographical entanglements for

Poe, and its mention multiplies rather than

eliminates his blindness to the zoosemiotic

context of human language and psychology.

The very structure of ‘‘The Raven’’ is a

repetition of this passage into meaning that is

realized as anthropocentrically at the same time it

is grounded in the zoosemiosphere. The poem

consists of a series of descriptions of an

apparently arbitrary physical encounter with an

animal before finally becoming ‘‘distinctly emble-

matical’’ in the final lines. As Poe explains it in

his later essay, the poem’s narrator begins to

invest the bird’s ‘‘little meaning’’ discourse with

his own lugubrious interpretations, until in the

15th and 16th stanzas he poses the questions – ‘‘is

there balm in Gilead?’’ and ‘‘shall [I] clasp a

sainted maiden whom the angels name Lenore’’ –

whose answers must have preceded their framing.

When the raven answers with the anticipated

‘‘nevermore,’’ it is now repeating not just its own

refrain but the unspoken word of the narrator.

The narrator has become the heretofore unknown

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‘‘unhappy master’’ whose initial despairing cry of

‘‘nevermore!’’ established the burden of the

poem. The animal sound and the human sense

of ‘‘nevermore’’ both anticipate and repeat one

another. This circularity is key, as it reveals the

structural necessity of the unmeaning vocal sign –

the signal or the mark – in the development of

the meaningful literary language of the poem. In

exactly the same way that Dupin and Lacan’s

analytical insights are founded in a moment of

panzoological collapse, the decisive move to the

metaphorical metalanguage in the poem occurs

precisely at the moment that the human speaker

is being physically consumed by the raven –

‘‘take thy beak from out my breast’’ – suggesting

that the passage from mimicry to full speech

takes place only at the cost of a clear physical

division between man and animal. Seen from the

other side of the mirror, the ‘‘nevermore’’

‘‘refers’’ to the abandonment of the non-human

by the human, but only and precisely as a kind of

non-linguistic signal. The point of Poe’s zoose-

miotic lesson is that man can have ‘‘full

language’’ only as an animal, and that, as

‘‘man,’’ he can have language only as a chain of

material signs. In both cases, humankind’s

semiotic horizon is necessarily open to the history

and presence of the non-human animal. Poe’s

poem is a transspecific transaction within the

subject in which the anthropoform animal

borrows the language of the avian songster to

prophecy to itself both the silencing of the

meaningful speech of the bird and the disap-

pearance of the inarticulate ape. The answer to

the narrator’s wished-for transumption of his debt

to l’animot, in the wished-for

language of man, is repeated in

our own whispered tracking of

the transspecific letters on the

page: nevermore.23

notesI would like to thank the participants of the‘‘Psychoanalysis and the Human’’ stream of the2006 ACLA conference on ‘‘The Human and ItsOthers,’’ whose helpful reactions to an early ver-sion of my argument have been incorporatedbelow. My first zoosemiotic thoughts were

stimulated by a deceptively simple question thatBarbara Johnson posed tome.

1 Charles Baudelaire found in Poe an uncannyanticipation of his own thoughts and words: ‘‘Thefirst time I opened one of his books I saw, to myamazement and delight, not simply certain sub-jects which I had dreamed of, but sentences whichI had thought out, written by him twenty yearsbefore’’ (qtd in Quinn 15; see also Hyslop andHyslop). Jacques Lacan placed his reading of Poe ^‘‘The Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter’’’ ^ at thehead of his collected writings (E¤ crits11^48). In ‘‘LeFacteur de la ve¤ rite¤ ’’ Jacques Derrida models hisown central critique of the notion of ‘‘full speech’’on Dupin’s signature-within-quotation-marks.

2 The zoological investments of post-phenomen-ological thought have been highlighted in recentyears in a series of monographs, articles, andessay collections on the question of the animal inContinental philosophy and art. See Steeves,Baker, Lippit, Calarco, Wood, Wolfe (Animal Ritesand Zoontologies), Haraway, and Agamben.A representative sample of the crucial work isanthologized in Atterton and Calarco. JacquesDerrida wrote searchingly about the question ofthe animal throughout his career, becomingmoreexplicit in themost recent entries in what he callshis ‘‘zoo-auto-oto-bio-bibliography.’’

3 Poe is not included in any of the major naturewriting anthologies, nor does he play a significantpart in any of the ecocriticalmonographs or essaycollections. Despite this, Poe’s involvement in thenatural-scientific culture of his time ^ as an avidconsumer, reviewer, and producer of scientific(and pseudoscientific) writing, running the gamutfrom seashellmanuals (The Conchologist’s First Book)to arcane tracts on cosmogenesis (Eureka) ^ wasextensive. See Swirski.

4 On Lacan’s intellectual debts to these figures,see Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan 142^43. For adismissal of the ‘‘language’’ of bees, see ‘‘TheFunction and Field of Speech and Language inPsychoanalysis’’ (E¤ crits esp. 245^46); for thedistinction between the animal eye and thehuman gaze, see Lacan’s comments in The FourFundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (102^03,111^12); on the absolute differentiation from apes,see the analysis of ‘‘The Mirror Stage’’ below.Koje' ve’s scholastic use of the animal runs throughhis Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (39^40 andpassim).

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5 On Poe’s riddles, see the astonishing work ofJohn Irwin. Although there have been a handful ofecocritical arguments that make use of Lacaniantheory, I can find none that address, historically oranalytically, the ecocritique that is internal toLacanian thought. Perhaps the best-known appli-cation of Lacanian psychoanalysis to ecologycomes via Slavoj Z› iz› ek in the form of a critique ofthe self-contradictory elements of fantasy inenvironmentalism as an ideology and social move-ment in Enjoy Your Symptom!, which argues that‘‘ecologically oriented ‘decenterment’ relies on asurreptitious teleological subordination of natureto man’’ (185^86). Timothy Morton’s Ecologywithout Nature is a markedly more sophisticateddevelopment of Z› iz› ek’s basic critique from withinthe ecocritical canon.

6 On apprentissage and dressage as high-profilezoosemiotic phenomena in human culture, seeSebeok122^27, andworks by Heini Hediger.

7 This proposed fourth turn has the advantage ofproviding us with the ‘‘four kings’’ in a game ofdraughts that Poe offers as his model of detectionin the peroration to ‘‘The Murders in the RueMorgue’’ (Poetry and Tales 398). It also agrees withthe intertextual connection made below betweenthe detective tales and Poe’s slightly earlier ‘‘FourBeasts in One ^ TheHomo-Cameleopard’’ (Poetryand Tales181^88).

8 In the philological source Freud consults in thecourse of his essay on ‘‘The ‘Uncanny,’’’ theunheimlich is specifically identified with an animalthat is neither domesticated nor wild ^ some-where between captivity and freedom. Section(b) of Freud’s lengthy citation of the word heimlichin Daniel Sander’s Wo« rterbuch der DeutschenSprache reads in part, in the original: ‘‘vonThieren zahm, sich den Menschen traulichanschlie�end. Ggstz.Wild, z. B.: Thier, die wederwild noch heimlich sind, etc.’’ (253). Although thedefinition begins in a conventional oppositionbetween the wild and domesticated, the illustra-tion introduces a mysterious kind of animaldescribed as ‘‘weder wild noch heimlich’’ ^ thatis, neither alien nor familiar ^ that seems per-fectly to embody Freud’s vision of the unfamiliarfamiliarity of the uncanny.

9 Poe’s sources for his orangutan are unclear,though hypotheses apparently include newsaccounts of marauding monkeys, folklore aboutapes, and zoological descriptions from Cuvier and

others. See the head-note on the story inMabbott’s edition of Poe’s works (2: 521^27), andan update by Mitchell. ‘‘The Mystery of MarieRoge“ t,’’ the middle tale in the trilogy, presents aradical meditation on the relationship betweenlanguage and life, both of which are aborted inthe story of a victim of a back-alley operation.Indeed, an entire line of ecofeminist analysis,focused on the relationship between the chimpan-zee’s victims, Marie Roge“ t/Mary Rogers, and theQueen, would be a welcome complement to theargument I am building here. Such an argumentmight resurrect, in ecocritical guise, the psycho-analytic arguments of Marie Bonaparte, Lacan’sspringboard and target in the seminar on Poe’sthird tale, and focus on the parallels betweenwhat Lacan calls the decisive ‘‘foetalization’’ or‘‘specific prematurity of man’’ and the abortionplot and abortive structure of Poe’smiddle tale.

10 At first glance, this talewould seem to be radi-cally different from the later ‘‘Purloined Letter’’:the latter’s bloodlessly intellectual and diplomaticgame playing out in the insular halls of power, theformer’s brutish andmotiveless violence occurringvery much in public. Yet Poe has clearly gone togreat lengths to make clear that the crimes andtheir solutions are different versions of the sameprocess. The most direct evidence of connectionis the shared scenes of the crime: a hearth withinan apartment building. In ‘‘The Murders in the RueMorgue,’’ the throat of Madame L’Espanaye hasbeen cut so viciously that her head falls off underthe touch of detectives and the strangled corpseof her daughter, Mademoiselle CamilleL’Espanaye, has been stuffed up into the chimneyin a room with an open safe filled with ‘‘a few oldletters’’ (405). These details, along with Dupin’sdiscovery of a ‘‘greasy’’ ribbon (425) used to knotthe ponytail of a Maltese sailor, which leads to hisidentification of the orangutan’s owner, areechoed in the description of the purloined letter

hung dangling by a dirty blue ribbon from alittle brass knob just beneath the middle ofthe mantel-piece [. . .] This last [letter] wasmuch soiled and crumpled. It was tornnearly in two, across the middle ^ as if adesign, in the first instance, hadbeen altered,or stayed, in the second. (695)

Likewise, the refined citation from Cre¤ billon’sAtre¤ e that closes ‘‘The Purloined Letter’’ recallsthe dehumanizing discussion of Chantilly, an actor

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in Cre¤ billon’s Xerxes, in ‘‘The Murders in the RueMorgue’’ (698, 402^04).

11 ‘‘Instinct vs Reason ^ ABlackCat’’ in PoetryandTales 370^72 (370).Poe’s geographical analogydoesnot divide the USA into brute and rational sec-tions (as would an allusion to the Mason^Dixonline, for instance), but takes for granted thatreason resides north of the American border. ForPoe, there is no anthropological metalanguage inthe USA.

12 On Poe’s double use of the verb ‘‘to pen’’with regard to animals, see Stanley Cavell’smusings on ‘‘The Imp of the Perverse’’ and ‘‘TheBlack Cat’’ 3^36.

13 Not all living things and their semiotic systems,of course, but only those that travel in pathwaysthat are available to the human sensorium. ThehistoryofWesternbiological science canbeunder-stood as the extension of the human sensoriumthrough the mediating practices, instruments,and imaging devices of apprentissage and dressage:where the zoosemiotic overlap may once haveprimarily included prey animals and livestock, itnow includes mycoplasmas and mole rats. Goodwarrant, then, for accepting Bruno Latour’sdescription of modern sciences as the ‘‘speechprostheses’’ of provisional objects in the environ-ment, the variety and attunement of which areconstantly growing.

14 The influence of von Uexku« ll is difficult togauge, owing perhaps to his persistent self-conception as an anti-Darwinian biologist (thoughhis theory is better seen as of another orderaltogether than Darwin’s), his flirtation withtheism (a common idealist position sinceBerkeley), his association with the Nazi regime inthe 1930s, and the inadequacy of his prose style(exacerbated by poor translations). In the pasttwo decades, von Uexku« ll has resurfaced as a pre-cursor of: zoosemiotics (see below); first- andsecond-order cybernetics (Maturana and Varela’stheory of autopoiesis); the Artificial Life researchprogram (especially in the writings of RodneyBrooks); and the ecophenomenology founded onthe writings of Merleau-Ponty (see Brown andToadvine). Ira Livingston has recently laid out thestakes of the autopoietic revolution in BetweenScience and Literature.

15 Poe reaches a similarly ecopheno-menological conclusion at the conclusion of

Eureka, though it is couched in the theologicallanguage of his era:

He [the Divine Being] now feels his lifethrough an infinity of imperfect pleasures ^the partial and pain-intertangled pleasuresof those inconceivably numerous thingswhich you designate as his creatures, butwhich are really but infinite individualizationsof Himself. All these creatures ^ all ^ thosewho you term animate, as well as those towhich you deny life for no better reasonthan that you do not behold it in operation^ all these creatures have, in a greater orless degree, a capacity for pleasure and forpain: ^ but the general sum of their sensa-tions is precisely that amount of Happinesswhich appertains by right to the DivineBeing when concentrated within Himself.These creatures are all, too, more or less,and more or less obviously, consciousIntelligences; conscious, first, of a properidentity; conscious, secondly and by faintindeterminate glimpses, of an identity withthe Divine Being of whomwe speak ^ of anidentity withGod.Of the two classes of con-sciousness, fancy that the former will growweaker, the latter stronger, during the longsuccession of ages which must elapse beforethese myriads of individual Intelligencesbecome blended ^ when the bright starsbecome blended ^ into One. (Poetry andTales1358)

Viewing Poe’s religious cosmology as the interiormonologue of an autopoietic zoological processprovides an alternative way of understandingEmerson’s and Poe’s interest in producing a kindofpublic (intersubjective) privacy in their writings,a subject taken up in Louis Renza’s recent book onAmerican privacy (87^103)..

16 In addition to introducing von Uexku« ll’sconcepts of Innenwelt and Umwelt in ‘‘The MirrorStage’’ (1949) and ‘‘The Function and Field ofSpeech and Language in Psychoanalysis’’ (1953,Fink 244), Lacan refers directly to the Umwelt undInnenwelt derTiere in his1932 doctoral dissertation,De la psychose parano|«aque dans ses rapports avec lapersonnalite¤ (337).

17 For von Uexku« ll’s zoological mirror, see‘‘Environment and Inner World of Animals’’ 234.For Merleau-Ponty on the fold, see The Visible andthe Invisible 250. Bernard Stiegler, in contrast,

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views the epiphylogenetic mirroring that propelsthe individual into temporality and community asfundamentally technological (175^79). Stiegler’sanalysis, which will be elaborated in a secondvolume, depends fundamentally on anunderstand-ing of language as definitively divided into animal(‘‘signaling’’) and human (‘‘signifying’’) dimensions,an obvious begging of the question and an avoid-ance of both evidence from the biological sciencesand the critique of metalanguage from Derridaand Lacan.

18 A question now arises as to Lacan’s motives indownplaying or denying the zoological continuismof his thought. Why does he turn instead to thelanguage of mathematics, a historically anthropo-logical kind of non-human semiotics? There is noway to answer this question with any certainty,but one suspects that it may have something todo with the fact that the popular late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century discourse of human^animal continuism was already inhabited by thekind of romantic assumptions concerning humanintention that Lacanwas interested in dismantling.This is particularly true of George Romanes,whose anecdotal and anthropomorphizing workon animal behavior was widely circulated inEurope during Lacan’s education. It is possible,then, to view Lacan as interested in freeing theanimal from its entrapment in the conscioushuman projection of the animal as interlocutor,his failure to cite or fully engagewith the compara-tive psychology of the times constituting not anabandonment of the animal but a recuperation ofit in an authentic form through the backdoor ofmathematicized cybernetic theory.This would be,from an ecocritical point of view, an admirablestrategic abstraction, one that might find somesupport in the gestures towards zoology in theofficial inaugural text of cybernetics,Norbert Wiener’s Cybernetics, and indeed onethat some writers on the posthuman haveadopted in an attempt to unite the zoological andtechnological strands of posthumanism. See Heise59^82.

19 John James Audubon, ‘‘Myself’’ inWritings andDrawings 765^84 (765^66). Curiously, Irmscher’sedition offers a misprint, ‘‘Migonne’’ (me, gone),for the ‘‘Mignonne’’ (‘‘cutie’’) of Maria Audubon’stwo editions of this essay, first published in1893.

20 Audubon 3. There has been a great deal ofwork on Audubon that assesses this associationbetween violence and natural history. Constance

Rourke’s Audubon ascribes violence to the realitiesof frontier life, while Elsa Guerdrum Allen’s scho-larly History of American Ornithology before Audubonattributes it to standard scientific practice.Annette Kolodny argues inThe Lay of the Land thatAudubon’s artistic project was indebted to a nine-teenth-centuryAmericanworldview that equatedknowledge with violence in a national project ofconquest under cover of exploration. For morenuanced views of the relation between art andviolence in Audubon, see New 53^104 andIrmscher188^235.

21 Joel Barlowe’s ‘‘Advice to a Raven in Winter’’(1812) is the best-known example, but there aremanymore ephemeral verses that dwell upon thebird. For one example that closely parallels Poe’slater work, see G.F.W.’s ‘‘The Raven.’’

22 On the sources of ‘‘The Raven,’’ see Mabbott1: 353^74.

23 One way of explaining Poe’s interest in themore-than-human dimension of poetic speech isthrough recourse to the classical topos of arslonga, the notion that a durable poetic actescapes from the conditions of mortality thatdefine the human condition. See Brown’s ‘‘ThePoetics of Extinction.’’ Brown, reiteratingJ. Gerald Kennedy’s argument in Poe, Death, andthe Life of Writing, holds that Poe’s signaturemove is to alienate the specifically anthropoformconsciousness from the human body and thenmemorialize it in the structure of the artwork.Brown’s reading ignores a great deal of the phe-nomenal complexity of Poe’s writing ^ which isclearly embracing extinction as much as tryingto outrun it ^ and too hastily assigns a humanidentity to the ‘‘other minds’’ that form the cen-tral problematic of his work. There is no reasonto assume that all signs of intelligibility in Poenecessarily imply an anthropological foundation,as that is the precise question with which Poealways wrestles. Although Barbara Johnsonmakes no mention of the anthropozoologicalsituation of ‘‘The Raven,’’ her argument thatPoe’s experiment in mechanical languageultimately destroys the distinction betweenmechanism and naturalness so central to basicunderstandings of Romanticism also destroys therationale for distinguishing between the repeti-tive, mechanistic, empty ‘‘languages’’ of animalsand the full language of man. See A World ofDifference.

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Michael Ziser

Department of English

University of California, Davis

One Shields Avenue

Davis, CA 95616

USA

E-mail: mgziser@ucdavis.edu

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