Towards a Modernist Humanism

1This article plays on the two possible senses of the word “renaissance.” As is well-known, the term suggests both the fact of being born again, and that period in European history of an artistic revival, achieved under the influence of classical models. My ambition is to read Virginia Woolf’s Flush through the lens of the fruitful ambiguity sketched by the term: a return to classical models as the key to an artistic resurrection. I wish therefore to go beyond the Deleuzian approach that has prevailed in the past few years, according to which Flush is a narrative of the “becoming-animal” of the Modernist artist. On the contrary, my central argument is that Woolf’s narrative gesture remains profoundly, although paradoxically, human, even as it is threatened by its own animality; that the purpose of the Modernist experience of “becoming-animal” is in fact to rediscover and redefine the meaning of being human.

2By coming back to the fundamental categories of Aristotelian philosophy, while supporting my argument with detailed narratological analyses of Woolf’s narrative, I contend therefore that Flush should not be read as an auto/biography, even a satirical one, where the “anthropological machine” – i.e. the various strategies used by man to produce itself through the man/animal divide (Agamben 2004, 37) – would be still running, but as a fable of the Modernist artist’s rebirth. I claim, in other words, that Flush is evidence of a “Modernist humanism” (Sicari 2011), a humanism regenerated, however, by the woman writer’s rediscovery of her own linguistic infancy, i.e. of her own animality.

3In 1933, Woolf published Flush, the comic fictional “biography” of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s cocker spaniel. The book was an attempt to resurrect the great poetess’s dog, taking him – for Flush was a he – from his puppy years in the country to an invalid woman’s bedroom in Wimpole Street, from a dark cellar in Whitechapel – after being dognapped – abroad to Italy and Florence, until his death on his mistress’s lap. Published by The Hogarth Press, this crossover of fiction and non-fiction included four original drawings by Woolf’s sister Vanessa Bell, and six other illustrations. Particularly interesting to the point I wish to make, two photographs of Woolf’s own dog, Pinka, were also displayed, one on the book cover, the other as frontispiece.

4A purebred black cocker spaniel, Pinka had been gifted to the Woolfs by Vita Sackville-West, exactly as Flush had been a gift to Miss Barrett, a similarity which seems to suggest strong parallelisms between Flush and Pinka, and, inevitably, between Barrett and Woolf. The photograph frontispiece depicts Pinka as Flush sitting on the lap of a woman dressed in the Victorian fashion, whose head remains nevertheless invisible but whose hands might well be those of Woolf disguised as Queen Victoria (Humm 2008).

5What this seems to suggest is that the author’s decision to present pictures of a real-life writer’s pet was also a way of inviting her readers to penetrate into the privacy of the highest stratum of English intellectual society and, by the same token, to identify with the two writers, in a community of pet-loving alter egos made equal through a shared sympathy for their devoted canine companions. The furry creatures were to be stroked as well as written about – animal lives to sympathize with, animal lives to be written about.

6The book, published shortly after The Waves (1931) – the novel which had established Woolf’s reputation as an experimental Modernist artist – was not taken seriously. Flush was received rather as a source of puzzlement and even of deep misunderstanding (Ryan 2013a, 132-170). However, recent academic fields such as “Animal Studies” and “Ecofeminism” (Sultzbach 2016; Rubenstein and Neuman 2020) have encouraged critics to reconsider Flush’s status, not just in the Anglophone world but in France as well, where a number of recent thought-provoking essays (Macadré 2018; Reviron-Piégay 2018) have come as sure signs of a global renewal of interest. It will come as no surprise, therefore, that the philosophical – rather than satirical – dimension of the novel is now given central importance.

7Indeed, if, since Socrates at least, the fundamental categories of Western philosophy have always relied on the basic structure of a binary, hierarchical opposition between man and animal, culture and nature, then a woman’s decision to write the “biography” of a dog in August 1931 (Woolf 1979-1985, vol. 4, 40) should no longer be seen as “a joke,” “an escapade” (Woolf’s own, half-serious comments [Woolf 1975-1980, vol. 5, 161-162]), or even a mere commercial stunt (Caughie 1991, 52). A radical contestation of the most fundamental divides structuring cultural edifices (from which both women and animals were still violently excluded in the 1930’s), Woolf’s gesture should be considered rather as a truly revolutionary move – political, philosophical and aesthetic.

8The point started to be put forward ten years ago, when Derek Ryan, inspired by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of “becoming-animal” (Ryan 2013b), forcefully argued that Virginia Woolf’s writing was primarily concerned with “the connections between human and nonhuman, embodiments and environment, culture and nature, life and matter” (Ryan 2013a, 3). Woolf’s “materiality,” he added, forces us to shift our focus “from language and discourse to questions concerning materiality and ontology; or, put another way, from the primacy of culture to its entanglement with nature” (Ryan 2013a, 3). A critical revolution was definitely under way, in resonance with more general concerns expressed by a generation of academics worried about the generalized capture, or “striation” as Deleuze and Guattari put it, of life by State politics, and who perceived the concept of “becoming-animal” as the promise of a “life free(d) from politics” (Goh 2009, 38).

9And indeed, the questions addressed by Flush force Woolf’s readers to explore realms of thinking and feeling that the Renaissance period and its triumphant Humanism had decided to ignore, if not to obliterate altogether. By granting pride of place to man’s capacity for subjective rational thought, had not Renaissance Humanism tended to relegate the rest of creation to the margins of objective reality? Woolf’s “escapade” was also an escapade into the history of philosophy, an investigation into the Greek and Aristotelian origins of humanness and selfhood. But, in the same gesture, Flush’s “life” conceived of itself as an incitement for its reader to explore grey zones of undecidability, to penetrate the unstable frontier between man (anthropos) and animal (zoon), or, as we shall see later on, between language (logos) and voice (phone). Woolf’s revolutionary experiment in life-writing was a way of exploring the fragile structure of difference assumed to enable humans to draw a clear demarcation line between what the Greek language would have construed as two modes of life: zoe – the mere fact of living – and bios – the manner in which life is lived (Dubreuil and Eagle 2006).

10That the ancient Greeks had different words for what in contemporary European languages is simply referred to as “life” had certainly not escaped Woolf’s attention, as manifested by the very contradiction tucked between the two segments of the book’s title – Flush, A Biography. In classical culture, no animal could possibly be granted the dignity of having a bios, i.e. a life worth being written down. Of course, the author of “On Not Knowing Greek” (Woolf 1925) did know Greek herself, “the perfect language” (Woolf 1917, 7). What recurrently drew Woolf back to the Greeks and their language was a feeling that the mystery of humanness was there to decipher: “the stable, the permanent, the original human being is to be found there” (Woolf 1925, 45).

11The point I wish to make is that Woolf’s knowledge of Greek – a phrase I understand as meaning the ability to read and understand ancient Greek literature and philosophy, but also the knowledge to be drawn from the Greek language – was most probably the decisive impetus to her decision to write a dog’s life. It may even be argued that the jump backwards into classical ways of seeing and saying things was, paradoxically, what helped Woolf jump forwards, project herself into the future of European literature, and design her own avant-garde mindscapes. Such knowledge of the subtleties of the Greek language of ancient philosophy was crucial in challenging the unacknowledged ideological assumptions subtending the Western representations of life as either zoe or bios.

12Was it not the Modernist’s task to contest the dominant metaphysics of being? To challenge the classic distribution of life on earth into two strictly ontologically-defined categories? Was it not the avant-garde’s task to undertake to lend a human voice to animal life? To contemplate the possibility of a dog’s voice being no longer presented as a purely physical phenomenon expressing fear, anger, pain, or pleasure – as when a dog howls, growls or barks – , but expressing personality and opinion? Was it not “modern fiction”’s task to contemplate the possibility of such a chiasmus: of a woman writer becoming a dog, and of a dog becoming a character – a truly biographical character – whose voice, phone, torn from non-existence, could at long last materialize through the written sign, the letter, gramma – handwriting remaining the prerogative of humans, it should be remembered?

13In short, was not Flush an attempt at resuscitating animal life, excavating it from the non-existence of non-speaking creatures? Or rather, at precipitating a “renaissance” of zoe as bios? Only an implicit knowledge of such linguistic and philosophical issues could incite Woolf to formulate her project, which was to design what one might call Modernism’s zoo, the fictional theatre on which bringing the animal within the precincts of the city could be made into a reality.

14Using the conceptual framework of “minoritarian becoming-other” provided by Deleuze and Guattari (who did indeed see in “Modernist” literature – Joyce, Kafka, and Artaud, among others – the perfect materialization of their concepts), Ryan convincingly suggested that the “becoming-other” to which writing subjected Woolf’s subjectivity produced an embodied, materialist, nomadic agency, privileging new modes of relationality, challenging the boundaries between human and nonhuman (Ryan 2013a, 75). This is definitely a line of thought in which I want to place my own argument.

15The “Greek” perspective I want to adopt, however, requires that I also study the linguistic, and inevitably enunciative and narratological, dimensions of such questions: how are voice (phone) and language (logos) distributed in such a redefinition of the man/animal divide? How do grammata, the written signs used by the narrator, manage to lend speech to a dog, while also being careful to deprive him of it? And what happens to the author/narrator pair in the process? What happens when author, narrator, and dog are made to share an experience based no longer on man’s negation of animality, but on a form of indeterminacy between bios and zoe? Does this shared ontological indeterminacy constitute the very engine of the textual machine designed by Woolf to explode the “anthropological machine”? Or, does the text use this shared indeterminacy to trigger a process of regeneration of humanness?

16I see Flush as a kind of British sphinx that is half human and half dog (the Egyptian sphinx, by contrast, would have been half lion). What Flush definitely suggests to me is that its author’s fictional “joke” probably consisted in adding a coded corollary to her famous definition of “androgyny”: “It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple; one must be woman-manly or man-womanly” (Woolf 1929, 136). Flush seems to imply that it is equally fatal to be pure man (or woman) – pure anthropos – or pure animal (zoon). Perhaps, Flush the dog whispers, one must be dog-manly or man-dogly. Perhaps, Flush the book whispers, gender relationships should be further deconstructed, to include an intersectionality of fates between woman and dog, and writing consequently turned from an androgynous machine to what one may call an anthropozoological machine: a machine that brings about a suspension of the man/dog divide and, more importantly, a suspension of the rift between the great artist – the (wo)man of “genius” – and the animal.

17Such a path was first explored, it seems to me, by Jane Goldman (Goldman 2007, 55; Goldman 2013) and my paper is heavily indebted to her ground-breaking insights. My main debt, however, is to Giorgio Agamben, perhaps the most “Greek” of all late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century philosophers. More precisely, my central references will be to two of Agamben’s lesser-known essays, one on man and animal, the other on infancy and history. I want to claim that Modernist life-writing remains a profoundly humanist enterprise inasmuch as it does not ambition to abolish the gulf between man and animal; its aim is not so much to smash the anthropological machine as to disrupt it – and such a disruption is precisely what defines Modernist art in its relation to language. Put differently, Flush seeks not to collapse the structure of difference: it seeks to span the difference, to measure the distance between animalness and humanness, doing so by hand. A nomadic hand but still, a hand, “the essential distinction of man” (Heidegger 1992, 80-81).

From Cobbe to Woolf: the Emergence of Transspecies Sympathies

18The importance of animals, and of dogs in particular, in Woolf’s personal and writer’s lives is well documented and, on the whole, has been studied in the perspective of feminist Modernism (Squier 1985, 127; Duchêne 2020, 115). In such works, penetrating and imitating a dog’s consciousness is assumed to be an attempt on the narrator’s part at freeing oneself of the male, humanist point of view, and at redescribing the world and the human relationships therein through the filter of a multi-dimensional consciousness. The dog is summoned by the female narrator to voice what has been left both unsaid and unseen – repressed into both invisibility and inaudibility – by the dominant codes of representation. By merging animal and human agencies, Woolf’s writing would seek to explore “raw, unfiltered sensations,” thus sketching a world estranged from the universally accepted norms of intelligibility (Macadré 2018, 2-3).

19Once again, I readily make mine such analyses, if only to provocatively reintroduce the question of Flush’s humanism. Still, another question keeps nagging at me: I can’t help asking myself whether the Modernist attitude towards non-human species was really new, and whether solidly contextualizing the discussion might not help us better understand the philosophical field into which Woolf was stepping.

20As a point of fact, Woolf’s gesture took place in an already well-trodden landscape: the field was that of “sympathy,” as is made clear, incidentally, by Woolf’s narrator from the very start of the narrative, when she claims that “Spaniels are by nature sympathetic” (Woolf 1977a, 12).

22The problem of such references, useful as they are, is that they seem to rest on three ideological assumptions: firstly, that the great philosophers of sympathy must have been male philosophers exclusively (Darwin, Bentham, Mill); secondly, that whenever women were involved in writing animals’ lives, their contributions should be placed in the category of children’s literature (Sewell); lastly, that the most immediate literary influences on Woolf will in fact boil down to the production of a minor Dutch/English dramatist (Besier), whose only major success was that play on Barrett and Browning’s courtship.

23But there is an even more questionable common denominator to such choices: each of them prevents us from taking into account the importance of the deep philosophical current that had been agitating the scene of British political life from the 1860s to the 1930s, one that did indeed intersect the animal question with the woman question. For the philosophical question of sympathy between animals and men had, by the end of the Victorian period, indeed become a woman question.

24I am thinking here of the largely underestimated role of Frances Power Cobbe in the history of British intellectual life. Not the Cobbe who had famously published the feminist tract “Criminals, Idiots, Women, and Minors” in 1868, but the Cobbe who had written The Confessions of a Lost Dog in 1867, the Cobbe interested in “The Consciousness of Dogs” in 1872. As early as 1863, Cobbe had indeed turned away from the “difference feminism” – the main point of this current being that there exist distinctly female forms of genius – which she had supported and contributed to so far (Cobbe 1862), to dedicate the rest of her public life to animal welfare. Cobbe’s new passion was triggered by reports concerning the French use of vivisection – dissection and experimentation on live animals – at the Veterinary College in Alfort near Paris where horses underwent eight-hour long operations without anaesthetics, which left them mangled creatures, while affording “a subject of merriment to the horde of students” (Cobbe 1894, vol. 2, 247).

26Thirty years later, however, Cobbe came to criticize her earlier theory, which implicitly posited that vivisection was permissible under certain conditions, and radically altered her perspective: animal ethics needed to start from feelings; it is the lack of sympathy for animals that allows humans to mistreat animals (Cobbe 1894, vol. 2, 247-248). For Cobbe, the complete extension of sympathy, in particular to animals, had been an evolutionary process due mainly to Christianity and the spirit of agape (i.e the highest form of love in the Bible). The great hope of the human race was not the conquest of nature, but the triumph of organized charity, to be extended to the abolition of “wife-torture” and cruelty to animals: “the blessedness of man will be the gradual dying of his tiger passions” (Cobbe 1874, 218). A parallel was thus drawn between vivisectors and violent husbands (Cobbe 1878; Dardenne 2005), and the anti-vivisection movement eventually hybridized with other currents, notably suffragism.

27In the Edwardian period, vivisection had become “one of the most contentious issues of the time” (Stone 2022, 54). A few years after Cobbe’s death, in 1907 – Virginia Stephen was then 25, had begun on The Voyage Out, and two years earlier had published “On a Faithful Friend,” a long obituary of the family dog Shag in The Guardian (Woolf 1977b) – hundreds of medical students protested in London against a memorial that had been erected to a terrier vivisected in the laboratories of University College, starting a string of riots and trials remembered as the Brown Dog Riots. The possible links between the “little brown dog affair” and Flush did not of course escape Jane Goldman’s sagacity (Goldman 2010).

28Between 1907 and 1910, the “Brown Dog Affair,” as it was also called, caused serious political unrest and international concern, involving famous feminists and socialists opposed to vivisection. As early as 1985, Coral Lansbury suggested that if such levels of passions were reached, it is also because, in the wake of Josephine Butler’s crusade against the Contagious Diseases Acts (1874-1894), the vivisected dog’s image had come to be superimposed with that of women forcefully strapped into the gynaecologist’s chair as objects of study by male medical students (Lansbury 1985). And, as we know, only five years after the publication of Flush, in Three Guineas (1938), Woolf would make Josephine Butler – another of those neglected political thinkers of British intellectual and feminist history – a major reference in her personal pantheon (Black 2004, 134-137).

29This brief historical enquiry into the emergence of transspecies sympathy in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain brings undeniable evidence that writing a story from the perspective of a dog’s consciousness in 1931 could certainly not be reduced to “a joke,” even less to an attempt at writing a children’s book. Bowing down to the dazzling technicity of Modernist satirical life-writing would be another way of bypassing the central issues raised by Flush. Nor should this canine biography be seen simply as being emblematic of an intersectional statement on the similarity of treatment reserved to animals and women. In the wake of the immensely popular concern for the welfare of animals, in a context of philosophical questioning concerning the importance of sympathy in the construction of the political community, Flush obviously lent itself to being read as a profound meditation on anthropozoological relationships.

30But Woolf’s approach rests not on some kind of abstract sympathy between human and unhuman creatures: she definitely turns Cobbe’s philosophical idea of transspecies feelings into a concrete Modernist experiment in life-writing, seeking to lend a voice to the dog, one that is made audible, however, only insofar as it is couched in the materiality of writing. What makes Woolf’s book even more interesting, it seems to me, is that the question raised by her narrative is not to know ultimately on which side one situates oneself as a reader – on the side of animals and women, or on the side of humans and husbands. What makes for the specificity of Flush is that it is a tale about the impossibility of maintaining a difference between humanity and animality, and a tale about the inevitability of having to reinscribe that unavoidable difference.

31In The Open, Agamben meditates upon Alexandre Kojève’s famous quote, “L’Homme est une maladie mortelle de l’animal” (“Man is a fatal disease of the animal”), which summarizes the Hegelian idea that the negation of animality within explains man’s passion for domination and destruction (Agamben 2004, 12). He later quotes from Heidegger’s 1929-1930 course on the fundamental concepts of metaphysics, in which the animal is characterized by its Benommenheit or “stupor” (the English translation says “captivation”), a stupidity which explains why the animal can never open itself to the world, contrary to active human being who constitutes him/herself as a subject in relation to the external world. Agamben comes to the conclusion that Heidegger himself, like Hegel and Husserl before him, is thus caught in the age-old gesture that keeps repeating itself, the gesture of desperately clinging to the necessity of a separation between man and animal (Agamben 2004, 52-56).

32That is definitely the war which a book like Flush seems anxious to end, as Woolf’s narrator undertakes to adopt simultaneously two theoretically irreconcilable points of view, the unhuman and the human. As a matter of fact, the author’s stance itself seems to be irresolute, as if Woolf had chosen not to choose between petting the dog and wielding the pen, to wonder on the contrary whether peace-making did not in fact consist in wandering to and fro from fur to page, and vice versa.

33I am coming here to my central argument. The question should no longer be whether Woolf’s narrator actually managed to “revolutionize” the writer’s – and reader’s – perspective so that the book may indeed be said to conflate feminism (politics), sympathy to animals (ethics) and Modernism (aesthetics). Rather, the question should be made to bear on how the text runs along the edge of difference, disrupts the “anthropological machine,” and uses the codes of auto/biography to produce an unidentified literary object: a kind of anthropozoological artefact, with a biozoelogical creature as its main character, a character whose life is unhuman and yet becomes narratable. The narrative’s purpose is not therefore to reflect on anthropozoological relationships; it is to materially textualize a choreography of human and animal the outcome of which is to problematize the difference. Flush endlessly defers the moment of its stabilization, making identity the object not of any fixity, but of an incessant process of displacement and differentiation. I also claim, however, that by leaving the question of the man/animal divide open, Woolf’s narrative paradoxically feeds new energy into the “anthropological machine,” while at the same time threatening to close the throttle of its engine. It is therefore high time we looked more closely under the bonnet and studied the inner workings of this textual machine.

Language, Infancy, Animality

34Aristotle’s Politics had been translated into English as early as 1885 by Benjamin Jowett, one of the greatest nineteenth-century teachers and translators of Greek philosophers (notably Plato, Thucydides, and Aristotle) and it is quite likely that the educated British population of the first half of the twentieth century, including those with no knowledge of Greek, would have kept at the back of their minds Aristotle’s principal tenets concerning the difference between humans and animals: what is shared by all living creatures is voice (phone), which Aristotle defines as the mode of expression of sensation, such as pain, or pleasure; but man (anthropos) is the only living creature to use language (logos) (Aristotle 1885, 1253a).

35Woolf’s dog is quite obviously an illustration of this fundamental divide. His realm is indeed exclusively that of phone – not logos – and Woolf’s narrator is very careful to establish such a distinction between the unhuman and the human. During the first months of the pup’s life passed at Three Mile Cross, Flush’s animal status is clearly underscored, notably when Miss Mitford takes him for walks across the fields:

Then what a variety of smells interwoven in subtlest combination thrilled his nostrils; strong smells of earth, sweet smells of flowers; nameless smells of leaf and bramble; sour smells as they crossed the road; pungent smells as they entered bean-fields. But suddenly down the wind came tearing a smell sharper, stronger, more lacerating than any – a smell that ripped across his brain stirring a thousand instincts, releasing a million memories – the smell of hare, the smell of fox. Off he flashed like a fish drawn in a rush through water further and further. He forgot his mistress; he forgot all human kind. (Woolf 1977a, 13)

36In such instances, the animal is clearly made to represent the non-human. Flush’s life is driven solely by sensation, instinct and urges, and the time in which he lives is that of the immediate satisfaction of his desires:

The hunting horn roused deeper instincts, summoned wilder and stronger emotions that transcended memory and obliterated grass, trees, hare, rabbit, fox in one wild shout of ecstasy. Love blazed her torch in his eyes; he heard the hunting horn of Venus. Before he was well out of his puppyhood, Flush was a father. (Woolf 1977a, 13)

37The stylistic features of such passages – notably parataxis and asyndeton – are meant to express an erratic form of inner life, one that is entirely dependent on external stimuli, reduced therefore to a chaotic succession of atavistic responses.

38As a matter of fact, Flush’s “voice” is not even heard, not until he realizes that his first mistress, Miss Mitford, has deserted him, and he starts howling:

Then such a wave of despair and anguish overwhelmed him, the irrevocableness and implacability of fate so smote him, that he lifted up his head and howled aloud. A voice said “Flush.” He did not hear it. “Flush”; it repeated a second time. (Woolf 1977a, 19)

39The passage dramatizes the central dialectics of the book in eminently Aristotelian terms: the animal will howl, growl, bark; the human (Miss Barrett) will speak, use her voice to call the animal by its name, and try to reason the instinctively panicked animal. Although the rest of the passage describes this first encounter in terms that strongly suggest transspecies sympathy – a proximity that is also suggestive of a primordial union between human and unhuman – , and although the focalisation seems to hesitate between the two perspectives, with the mirroring effect of the face-to-face meeting materializing this oscillation, the conclusion is unambiguous: “She spoke. He was dumb. She was woman; he was dog” (Woolf 1977a, 20). In the passage quoted more extensively:

There was a likeness between them. As they gazed at each other each felt: Here am I – and then each felt: But how different! […] Broken asunder, yet made in the same mould, could it be that each completed what was dormant in the other? She might have been – all that; and he – But no. Between them lay the widest gulf that can separate one being from another. She spoke. He was dumb. She was woman; he was dog. Thus closely united, thus immensely divided, they gazed at each other. (Woolf 1977a, 20)

40There is no question, therefore, that dog and woman are “immensely divided.” Still, a fundamental contradiction determines and shapes the narrative, as it remains the narrator’s task to translate into human terms what remains irreducible to logical, linguistic encoding. Inevitably, therefore, some animal experiences remain wordless, untranslatable, and some comparisons or metaphors are used by the narrator precisely to expose this irrelevance.

41For instance, Flush’s discovery of his future mistress’s bedroom is supposed to be depicted through the dog’s eyes, but the narrator describes items of decoration that no dog would ever be capable of identifying, even less naming: “a curtain of green damask,” “the convolvuluses and the nasturtiums which grew in the window-box,” for instance (Woolf 1977a, 17). The terrifying confusion with which the dog is said to be seized on this occasion is due to the fact that reality is never purely or immediately itself, that “nothing in the room was itself; everything was something else” (18), the very parallelism of the sentence being evidence of the filtering presence of an eminently logical and rational, therefore human, mind.

42A few pages later, the reader is told that “Flush knew before the summer had passed that there is no equality among dogs” (24). The “logical” support behind the dog’s silence is then made particularly conspicuous. Looking at himself in a looking-glass, the cocker spaniel is said to understand that he is “an aristocrat considering his points,” a view which, we are told, contradicts Miss Barrett’s own appreciation of her pet’s posture, thinking him to be “a philosopher […] meditating the difference between appearance and reality” (24). While the mistress thus projects philosophical (Platonic) capacities on her dog, he for his part is assumed by the narrator to have a sociologist’s mind, measuring the complexity of British social codes.

43Sometimes, this multi-vocal, dialogic superposition of contradictory perspectives gives way to a univocal, monologic discourse, as is the case when Flush is dognapped and taken away to Whitechapel. The narrator then assumes authority on her own account to launch into a long meditation on the coexistence within London of two radically opposed socio-economic worlds, Wimpole Street and Whitechapel, the city of London being described as torn between the affluence and beauty characteristic of the aristocratic district, and the filthy ugliness characteristic of the poor quarters (50-53). In such cases, the dimension in which the narrator’s voice expresses itself is quite evidently dependent on the use of logos. Obviously, politics is not for dogs: man (anthropos) is an animal, but a political animal (Aristotle 1885, 1253a).

44The difference is made particularly clear when the narrative is supposedly resumed from the animal’s point of view. Thirst matters then much more for a whimpering Flush (Woolf 1977a, 54), than being able to articulate a discourse on class conflicts, or develop a theory of historical materialism in typically Marxist terms. And yet, the reader is reminded by the narrator that the action takes place in 1846 – a strong insistence is placed on the date (50, 52-53) – , which happens to be the year Marx and Engels completed the manuscript of The German Ideology, the work in which they explained that men distinguish themselves from animals by producing their means of subsistence, and that this feature of human life is what determines historical development and social consciousness (Marx and Engels 1947, 7). Such implicit references are meant to create a “logical” community, if only between author-narrator and reader, from which animals are necessarily excluded. Dogs, for their part, do not engage in history, or politics; they just experience the vulnerability of bare, animal life: Flush’s throat is parched, his nose burns, his coat twitches (Woolf 1977a, 55).

45Later on, in Florence, the cocker spaniel enjoys the raptures of complete freedom, and “an orgy of pleasure transcending all description,” feeling overwhelmed by “a myriad sensations” (Woolf 1977a, 85). Flush’s freedom, in other words, is to return to a life unfiltered by human language and metaphoricity, a “zoetic” life, therefore, not “submitted to the deformity of words” (85). And yet, as the reader has been warned only two pages earlier, this is not really paradise. For true paradise is in fact linguistic, it can only be constructed symbolically – even, or especially when humans experience a lack of words to render the sublimity of what they see. In Woolf’s narrative, the quest for the perfect description of what nevertheless defies human descriptive powers is what confers beauty on language itself, as may be inferred from the passage preceding the description of Flush’s Florentine raptures, which is the description of a scenery in the Appenines seen through the eyes of Mrs Browning looking out of her carriage window:

She could not find words enough in the whole of the English language to express what she felt. “…the exquisite, almost visionary scenery of the Apennines, the wonderful variety of shape and colour, the sudden transitions and vital individuality of those mountains, the chestnut forests dropping by their own weight into the deep ravines, the rocks cloven and clawed by the living torrents, and the hills, hill above hill, piling up their grand existences, as if they did it themselves, changing colour in the effort” – the beauty of the Apennines brought words to birth in such numbers that they positively crushed each other out of existence. (Woolf 1977a, 82-83)

46There is of course an implicit parallel to be drawn between this exuberance of words under Mrs Browning’s pen (the quotation marks indicate that the narrator is simply borrowing words from the Brownings’ correspondence) and the “myriad sensations” which overwhelm Flush in the streets of Florence. And yet, no trace of Flush is perceptible in the passage, except for a brief mention of him sitting on his mistress’s knee. The message is thus unequivocal: poetic beauty is a human creation, obtained through the trial of language, when words are both exposed as being insufficient to capture the riches of sensation, and yet made necessary to analyse and record the unheard-of beauty of the scenery. And if the narrator delegates the whole responsibility of the enunciation to Mrs Browning’s letter (hence the persistence of the single quotation marks), it is to indicate to her reader that those are words which need to be preserved for their unusual beauty, drawn from the intimacy of private correspondence, and given to read for the intellectual and aesthetic enjoyment of a community of readers, as some kind of retrieved linguistic treasure to be shared.

47In Aristotle’s metaphysics, the distinction between logos and phone intersects with that between zoe and bios, or between “bare life” (Agamben 1998) and a particular mode of life: one that will easily lend itself to being shaped into bio-graphy, a life that can be written down (graphein, to write) – a life that can be both grammaticalized and narrativized. But, from the Aristotelian perspective, life-writing is made possible also because a singular life has shaped itself through a succession of logical decisions, which themselves have been commented on: humans do things, and speak about them, thus engaging in interaction. This is how Hannah Arendt, the most Aristotelian of all early twentieth-century philosophers, understood the function of Aristotelian logos: bios is that form of life which is characterized by the logification, and therefore the politization, of human life; bios is about “the sharing of words and deeds” (Arendt 1998, 196-197).

48That is profoundly why there cannot be, strictly speaking, such a thing as a canine biography, and that is why Flush’s life had to be articulated on the lives of human beings – in particular on the relationship between Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning, but also on the lives of all the other characters with whom their household is made to interact. The animal’s life would not have had a form, had it not been made dependent on human life, notably on the events that shaped and reshaped Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s life, on the multiple decisions she had to make and on the various explanations she had to put forward for such decisions. As an animal, Flush remains utterly unable to construct his own life and speak about it.

49When Mr Browning appears in the life of Miss Barrett, all the dog can do is bite his rival, for which he is, logically, immediately chided and punished (Woolf 1977a, 45). Flush can feel humiliation and jealousy, which suggests a kind of parallel between “the spirit of an ordinary dog” and “the spirit even of an ordinary human being” (44), but such feelings are only lent to him by the narratorial voice – a written voice – which constantly has to anthropologise the dog in order to construct sympathy between human and animal. For instance, the narrative imagines Flush as capable of “resolving” to attack his rival (“he resolved to meet his enemy face to face and alone” [45]) while in fact the dog remains unable to make decisions, even less to speak about them: what dictates Flush’s life, we are constantly reminded, is nothing but instinct and desire.

50More evidence of this is given when, unlike humans, Flush “forgets” to conceal his traces. When he attacks his mistress’s lover, he barks loudly, which is sufficient to alarm the household (Woolf 1977a, 45). Lily Wilson (Miss Barrett’s maid) then beats him, a punishment legitimized by discourse: she uses violence on moral grounds (“because it was right” [46]), language being used, in typically Aristotelian fashion, to distinguish between what is good and what is wrong, acceptable and unacceptable in a community of human beings governed by reason. Such a “political” life is precisely what the dog is expelled from, so that when the narrator explains that Flush is “conscious of the rightness of his cause” (46), the statement is to be taken humorously, the work of humanisation being exposed as a blatantly artificial convention.

51This impossibility for the dog to enter the Aristotelian realm of linguistic and ethical life is constantly emphasized and although the reader is invited to penetrate the consciousness of the dog and gain access to his inward life, what still constitutes Flush as an animal is that he is equipped with a voice that cannot be written down, a phone that remains stubbornly alien to the sophistication of logos:

And as he lay there, exiled on the carpet, he went through one of those whirlpools of tumultuous emotion in which the soul is either dashed upon the rocks and splintered or, finding some tuft of foothold, slowly and painfully pulls itself up, regains dry land, and at last emerges on the top of a ruined universe to survey a world created afresh on a different plan. Which was it to be – destruction or reconstruction? That was the question. The outlines only of his dilemma can be traced here; for his debate was silent. (Woolf 1977a, 46)

52The irresolvable internal contradiction on which the spaniel’s “biography” is constructed, is made particularly conspicuous here: what we are told through the artifice of internal focalization is systematically exposed as a sheer logical impossibility. Flush’s “dilemma” can only be “outlined,” as the dog cannot speak: “his debate was silent.” The illusion of an animal having thoughts is thus “deconstructed”: as a point of fact, even Flush’s silence is always already grammaticalized. It might even be argued that despite what we are told about Flush’s puppy years and growth to maturity, there can be no true infancy of Flush as a character: if the Latin word infans does indeed refer to the one who does not as yet speak (in-fans), Flush cannot possibly exist as an infant dog, i.e. as a living creature engaged in a process of language-learning and about to enter the realm of logos. Flush’s phone cannot lend itself to the trial of grammaticalization, a form of linguistic communication that is constitutive of ethical and political life.

53If Woolf’s canine “biography” can be seen as an “attempt to represent a non-human subject” (Smith 2002, 359), and if what constitutes the dog’s subjectivity relies indeed on a blurring of difference between animal life (zoe) and human life (bios), that bridging remains intensively dialectical, as logos is systematically granted primacy in the order of representation. Flush is not therefore a “biography”; it is much more fundamentally a linguistic fable – a term I will ultimately justify in my conclusion – , a fable of the coming of age of a writer whose own animality, or in-fancy, is dramatized and internalized. That is profoundly why, I suspect, Flush has remained a source of fascination for generations of readers of such diverse educational backgrounds and artistic potentials: this is a tale of the animal within; the imagined dog’s psyche that we are invited to enter into is in fact a figuration of the author-narrator’s own “infancy.”

54Woolf’s narrative should therefore be read as the story of a never-ending open-endedness, the story of a Modernist woman writer’s constant, desperate effort to extirpate herself from her own infancy and animality – from her own linguistic “madness” (Ferrer 1990) – , while at the same time being anxious to accommodate that animality in the narratological and enunciative machinery of her narrative. What is operated, by the same token, is some form of continuity between animal and human life, the book’s working system offering a dialectical model that is fundamentally opposed to the “anthropological machine” and its classic structure of hierarchical differentiation.

55David Herman suggests that Modernist approaches of that kind place the non-human at the heart of a renaissance of art that is fundamentally concerned with what he calls a “zoonarratology” (Herman 2013, 562); my own concern is with the location of Modernism’s zoo. And the point I have been trying to make is that the Modernist zoon is not without but within. Flush may have existed as a real dog in the real Mrs Browning’s life, but once processed, and internalized by Woolf’s narrative’s machinery, the dog ceases to be a real animal, the mimesis of a trustworthy representative of the canine species, one of those “comforting creatures” the Victorian period had been so fond of (Thornton and Roussillon-Constanti, 2018). The animal becomes a figure of the self, almost a double of the Modernist artist, therefore a dialectical mirror image of the infant artist – as is clearly suggested by the quotation given above: “As they gazed at each other each felt: Here am I – and then each felt: But how different!” (Woolf 1977a, 20).

56Agonized with doubts as to their own animality, poised between self-destruction and self-reconstruction (“Which was it to be – destruction or reconstruction? That was the question,” as quoted above [46]), the animal-artist is neither the one nor the other but a constant vacillation between the two; ultimately, it is by becoming animal that she becomes herself, a Modernist woman writer. Flush is a book that precipitates the artist’s return to animal infancy. Paradoxically, it is also a book that reclaims her from this zoo, to propel her into her own inescapable humanness – her hand, that very concrete token of her difference, spanning the distance between pet and pen, running along the edge between animality and humanity, and eventually inscribing the fundamental divide between dog and woman.

A Linguistic “[C]himeric [M]onster”

57Imagine, then, a celebrated writer, the exhausted, ghostly author of The Waves (published in October 1931), desperately seeking to catch her breath and be reborn out of a sea of depression. Imagine her bending over her desk in August of that same year. Her hand is holding a pen – again, her hand, this very symbol of humanness according to Heidegger (see also Derrida 1987, 178) – and, in order to resuscitate, she resurrects a real-life dead animal, a real-life twice-silenced dog – silenced as an animal, silenced as a dead creature.

58The woman writer’s hand undertakes to lend not a bare sort of a life to the dead dog, but a form of life: a life that thinks, feels, remembers, anticipates, loves, and hates; a life that, like hers, shapes itself dialectically through various historical experiences and phases of social interaction. In order to grasp the full scope of Woolf’s act of “manuscripture” – a word coined by Derrida to underline the materiality of handwriting, its proximity with the voice and the body of the writer (Derrida 2003, 53-54) – , it is also necessary to remember that in Aristotelian thought, what characterizes animal or vegetal life (zoe) is that it is wholly predictable, caught between a beginning and an end, between birth and death; whereas what characterizes bios is that it remains incalculable, unpredictable, due notably to the contingency of human agency, to the fact that human beings are caught in action and interaction (Arendt 1998, 22-23).

59Imagine, then, what this acclaimed novelist and essayist does – stepping away from the limelight, withdrawing from all the artifices of fame, and putting her hand in the service of a radical deconstruction of the separation of humanity from animality, allowing her hand to reopen a frontier within. Imagination is definitely in order here, as one must imagine a human hand allowing itself to be contaminated by the virus of cynicism – cynicism as the result of being infected by the “cynic” virus (from the Greek kyon, kynikos: the dog), a virus which makes you dog-like, a kind of fictional, hybrid creature that is not so much a cynophalus (the dog-headed creature of mythology, such as the Egyptian figure of Anubis, which keeps intact the separation between anthropos and zoon by displaying a coexistence of human and animal form) as a cynanthropos, a dogman.

60To be even more accurate, the mixed textual creature precipitates the collapse of man, woman, and dog, and would therefore be better described as a cynegynanthropos (gyne, woman in Greek). What Woolf’s hand brings back to life in that summer of 1931 is indeed something like a sphinx – that typical emblem of the Renaissance – who, we should remember, was a female creature assumed in Greek mythology to know the secret of humanness.

61For the twenty-first-century critic, Woolf’s cynegynanthropos may also appear as a prefiguration of Donna Haraway’s “reinvention of nature” (Haraway 1991). Let me, however, put a caveat here: this is not my way of taking part in the controversy triggered by Haraway’s indictment of Deleuze’s conceptual framework, including the process of “becoming-animal” (Ryan 2013b, 537-538). Perhaps Haraway should have remembered that, as one of the foremost authorities on Deleuze puts it, “becoming-animal” means in fact “becoming anomal” (Sauvagnargues 2004, 150), i.e. escaping the codes, norms, and laws of political authority (nomos, or arbitrary social conventions, being opposed in Greek philosophy to physis, or nature). Still, it seems to me that Flush can be considered as a kind of pioneering, fictional “cyborg manifesto” insofar as it does indeed promote a hybridity between machine and organism (Haraway 1991, 149), or between a real, zoological dog’s life and its artificial, textual reelaboration. And, like Haraway’s cyborg, Flush may be said to be a political construction, which deconstructs binary categories and postulates that the human/nonhuman divide is a cultural convention, or that gender issues intersect with ecological ones (a new relationship to the environment is indeed made palpable throughout Flush).

63That is also why Woolf’s tale should not be read as a covert “auto/biography” – a biography of Flush, or of his mistress, an autobiography of the author-narrator. “Auto/biography” is precisely a type of writing that is designed to preserve the integrity of man (anthropos), to sanctify the immunity of the human bios, and ultimately to safeguard the principle of the human self. Whereas Flush thrives because it is infected by the virus of cynicism, classic “auto/biography” is fundamentally concerned with the possibility of self-writing, a concern whose tutelary figure, according to Derrida, should therefore be, not the Sphynx, but Bellerophon, the slayer of Chimera in Greek mythology (Derrida 2008). Flush is neither bio- nor autobiographical for the simple reason that its narrative is fundamentally no longer concerned with the immunity of selves.

64The book is a genetically modified organism, a cross-blend of fiction and non-fiction, but also of archival material and of imaginary reconstruction. As I mentioned earlier, what triggered the idea of this unidentified literary object was Besier’s play The Barretts of Wimpole Street – not the 1930 show in itself but, in its wake, what I call the arrival of the Brownings’ letters. As we know, Woolf then began reading Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s letters and poetry, an event in her life which was to trigger an unexpected movement of inward-outward correspondence, as the incoming letters arrived, reached a new destination, to become outgoing letters, letters incorporated in the new narrative and sent out to new addresses. This postal sorting system is what deeply structures the book, strongly contributing to its “chimeric” dimension.

65Of course, Miss Barrett’s life is deeply altered by the arrival of the dog in her invalid’s bedroom; but what most radically reorientates her dull and repetitive life as an invalid, what instills life back into her vegetative life, what starts “the life of a bird in cage” (Woolf 1977a, 33) into motion, is a second arrival, the sudden arrival of an unexpected letter:

But one night early in January 1845 the postman knocked. Letters fell in the box as usual. Wilson went downstairs to fetch the letters as usual. Everything was as usual – every night the postman knocked, every night Wilson fetched the letters, every night there was a letter for Miss Barrett. But tonight the letter was not the same letter; it was a different letter. (Woolf 1977a, 34)

66The repetitive pattern of Miss Barrett’s life is made manifest by the style of the passage, based on the use of various forms of repetition (epistrophes and anaphoras, notably), culminating in the parallelism between the two final clauses, which highlights the disruptive force of the event that has just taken place. A letter has arrived, a grammatical artefact, which will alter Miss Barrett’s life course for ever and, by extension, Woolf’s writing career. An unexpected letter is delivered in Miss Barrett’s real life; the sum of all the subsequent letters exchanged thereon between Flush’s mistress and Mr Browning accidentally crashes into the author’s life as she attends Besier’s play.

67Inevitably, the dog, as an agrammatical creature, remains marginal to what takes place here. All he can do is witness his mistress’s agitation with anxiety, watch and hear her read the letter, and see her write a letter in return, turn herself into a human postal sorting system, a refined linguistic being, one who exists only through receiving and sending out letters. The dog’s marginality is not only spatial (he is left aside, dismissed, forgotten), it is first and foremost symbolic: the dog is refused entry into the human realm of hand-writing, unable to decipher the grammatical signs, those “strange little abrupt hieroglyphics” (Woolf 1977a, 36) that the two lovers are now communicating through. His mistress’s hand will no longer be busy stroking him; her hand will now be wholly dedicated to the manuscripture of written signs:

He could tell by the touch of Miss Barrett’s fingers that she was waiting for one thing only – for the postman’s knock, for the letter on the tray. She would be stroking him perhaps with a light, regular movement; suddenly – there was the rap – her fingers constricted; he would be held in a vice while Wilson came upstairs. Then she took the letter and he was loosed and forgotten. (Woolf 1977a, 35)

68This series of similar events – the arrival of the hand-written letter, followed by the hand-written response to it – suggest something even more important than the marginalisation of the animal as a speechless, handless creature: love and desire are built through symbolic, hand-written, linguistic exchange; time itself is redefined by the circulation of the letters; love, and life itself, write themselves down. Love does not even exist if it is not lived to the letter, so to speak, made dependent on the written sign – grammaticalized. Such, I argue, was the revelation that so dramatically altered the author’s writing career, and helped her recover from the distressing experience of composing The Waves. And such also was the lesson the narrator incorporated in Flush, the inward-outward circulation of letters as the narrative’s unnatural working principle: its profound, although artificial, rhythm.

69It is not simply that the story of the Brownings’ and their dog’s lives is punctuated by the two lovers’ correspondence; the narrative itself, in its very texture, is at its core a linguistic “chimeric monster,” defined by the arrival and departure of citationality, by the rhythm that is imparted to the narrative by the numerous quotations from the Brownings’ letters, from which and by which the text feeds, is energized, finds an ever-renewed life. Flush’s life, composed as it is by the woman writer’s hand, appears to have always already been written down, “grammaticalized,” couched in hand-written written signs. One might even say that Flush could only come to existence precisely because his animal life had already been made unnatural, made into a textual creature, from the start subjected to the human science of “grammatology” (Derrida 1997).

70Woolf’s text is not therefore content to use quotations to reconstruct Flush’s character and bring him back to life. Flush is thoroughly parasitic, nourished as much as emptied of itself, so to speak, by the Brownings’ correspondence. The book would have no consistence, no bodily life, no material existence whatsoever, were it emptied of its quotations. Hand-copied citationality is in fact Flush’s life principle. Hand-copied quotations are the blood vessels that carry life throughout its body, to such an extent that some passages would have to be cut out altogether, the biography’s body would have to be amputated, were the grafted quotations to be excised, as a short example will show:

[Flush] became overbearing and impudent. “Flush has grown an absolute monarch and barks one distracted when he wants a door opened,” Mrs Browning wrote. “Robert,” she continued, “declares that the said Flush considers him, my husband, to be created for the especial purpose of doing him service, and really it looks rather like it.” (Woolf 1977a, 73)

71Woolf’s narrator quotes from Mrs Browning’s letter, which itself quotes Mr Browning or more exactly records his voice (“Robert […] declares”). It becomes hard to disentangle the phonetic utterance from the written one and the archival document from the fictional reconstruction, each utterance being reiterated and reappropriated in such close intimacy that the narrator’s sentence, although constructed from borrowed and recontextualized items, sounds genuinely like the narrator’s own voice. Quotation in Flush is what unexpectedly arrives and reaches its destination only insofar as it is incorporated by the narrative, a living organism that can thrive and move onwards only through this textual machinery of parasitical exchange.

72But perhaps there is no greater event in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s life – and consequently no more threatening incident in the dog’s life – than the unexpected (third) coming that suddenly disrupts the routine of Casa Guidi, the Brownings’ new family home in Florence:

No sooner had Flush abolished “must” and raced free through the emerald grass of the Cascine gardens where the pheasants fluttered red and gold, than he felt a check. Once more he was thrown back on his haunches. At first it was nothing – a hint merely – only that Mrs Browning in the spring of 1849 became busy with her needle. […] The signs of change, as he read them, did not signify escape. They signified, much more mysteriously, expectance. Something, he felt, as he watched Mrs Browning so composedly, yet silently and steadfastly, stitching in her low chair, was coming that was inevitable; yet to be dreaded. (Woolf 1977a, 79)

73In that case, quotation is implicit, a word to be shared among the readers, heavily laden with innumerable connotations. The signs that the animal witness is unable to read correctly become rapidly intelligible to the human reader, precisely because his or her linguistic skills instantly enable them to grasp the meaning of the word “expectance”; from which the reader is also led to assume that the narrator has learnt something in the Brownings’ correspondence that she is now sharing with her readers without explicitly quoting from a specific letter. A baby is coming, the most decisive arrival in Barrett Browning’s “life.”

74Arendt would most certainly see in that baby the very embodiment of the principle of arrival and unexpectedness, of the endlessly renewed promise of an unpredictable future, that is constitutive, according to her, of human life (Arendt 1998, 247). But I suggest to take that third arrival as the final, symbolic embodiment of the principle of arrival and citationality that we have been talking about. Each new citation, be it overt or covert, is like a baby that parasitically grows in the textual womb and is a promise of the continuation of life. Moreover, the arrival of the child may be said to be definitely the most significant event in Flush, insofar as the longed-for continuity between humanity and animality is finally established through this advent, described as a meeting between two fellow creatures (to be compared therefore with the face-to-face confrontation between animal and artist already mentioned above). The scene is perceived through the dog’s eyes:

They entered the bedroom. There was a faint bleating in the shadowed room – something waved on the pillow. It was a live animal. Independently of them all, without the street door being opened, out of herself in the room, alone, Mrs Browning had become two people. The horrid thing waved and mewed by her side. (Woolf 1977a, 81)

75In this passage, the human is made unhuman, described as “something,” “the horrid thing,” which “bleats” and “mews” like “a live animal.” The dog is terrorized, rushes downstairs, and falls into a deep melancholy for six full months (81). But, as the baby starts pulling his ears and Flush starts kissing its “little bare, dimpled feet,” a mutual affection emerges between child and dog (82). While Mrs Browning crosses the Appenines, some form of mute complicity is born between the two creatures, as neither infant nor spaniel find any beauty in the scenery, prefer to sleep, and remain silent. Before she eventually extolls Flush’s olfaction powers (83-84), the narrator introduces a pause in the narrative to meditate on the inadequacy of words to capture the sublime beauty of the mountains, suggesting by the same token that there might exist a secret kinship between those who do not speak or write but feel and smell, living in an altogether different aesthetic dimension, such as dogs and babies: “Mrs Browning was almost beside herself with delight. […] She could not find words enough in the whole of the English language to express what she felt. […] But the baby and Flush felt none of this stimulus, none of this inadequacy. Both were silent” (Woolf 1977a, 82-83).

76Woolf’s text thus finds in the arrival of the baby the secret of an unexpected reconciliation between animality, infancy, and the inevitability of linguistic processing. The contradiction between Woolf’s fascination for animal life (and its world of unnameable sensations) on the one hand, and her awareness of the necessity of the sophistication of human language on the other, seems to be resolved in the coming of the human infant. The baby embodies the promise of a humanity reconciled with its own infancy, i.e. with its own animality. For the baby – that “animal life” delivered from the human’s womb – is evidence of the persistence within the human of an animal presence, of a “zoetic” existence, which, if it has to be transcended for the human subject to construct itself, needs nevertheless to be acknowledged.

77Again, the movement of biographical construction in Flush is not thought of in the form of a progressive, linear development from zoe to bios, from animal or infant life to a life that may be narrativized. The movement is pendular, oscillating between zoe and bios, between unhuman and human, producing the effect we all feel when reading Flush – that of an entanglement of the concrete materiality of animal life on the one hand, and the necessary sophistication of its more abstract, artificial grammaticalization on the other hand. This trapeze-like oscillation between nature and culture or, as Haraway would probably have put it, between organism and machine, is precisely what is represented in the scenes where the artist’s hand wanders from the animal to the pen, from coat-stroking to letter-writing, a mise en abyme of Woolf’s own method of writing. That Woolf’s head should be concealed in the photograph frontispiece so that the viewer’s gaze is redirected towards nothing but the bridgeable gap between the dog’s muzzle and his mistress’s hand, is certainly no coincidence.

A Fable of Artistic Self-Creation

78In Infancy and History, Agamben argues that infancy, which is to say the inability to speak properly, is what must be suppressed for the human subject to construct itself not as zoe but as bios – life with a shape, life to be told, and written about. But, Agamben immediately warns, infancy as a prelinguistic stage should not be thought of as a paradise that we have to leave behind. Suppression is not chronological: silence always coexists with language (Agamben 2007, 48). A fundamental question is thus raised: is such a thing as an infancy of human experience even possible? Is not the absence of language, i.e. infancy as silence or muteness, simply a myth? The experience of humanity – what constitutes mankind in its humanness – should rather be construed as the experience of the dual reality of phone and logos, of both phonetic utterance and rational, grammatical language. In Agamben’s terms, language is the experience of the self’s fall from the infancy of language (Agamben 2007, 50) and speaking human beings are torn between those two dimensions, between their animality and their humanity.

79Agamben then comes to ask himself why two types of narratives, myths and fables, have always appealed to children and at the same time fascinated grown-ups. His suggestion is that, in such narratives, the tension between continuity and discontinuity is overtly dramatized. But there is a fundamental difference between myth and fable. Myths and mysteries deal with what cannot be said, is muted, silent, esoteric – mu, the root of the word “myth,” indicates the moaning sound when the mouth is shut (Agamben 2007, 60). Fables and tales, on the contrary, say something, tell a story, either of human beings reduced to silence or of animals made to speak – the root bha, from which the word “fable” is derived, indicates an open mouth (Agamben 2007, 61). Fables dramatize the initial discontinuity which constitutes humanness, celebrating the triumph of the open mouth over the shut mouth.

80I hope my choice of calling Flush a fable has become clearer: Woolf’s canine “biography” is the fable of an animal-artist, that “cyborg”-like figure, whose wandering hand has resolved not to choose between stroking a pet and holding a pen – maintaining open the unstable space of art’s fundamental hybridity between organism and machine – but still reasserting in that very gesture the profound humanness of writing oneself out of one’s infancy. In Greek and Egyptian mythologies, the sphinx asks travellers to solve a riddle to allow them passage, and that riddle has something to do with the meaning of man (anthropos). The specific answer provided here by the traveller – a time-traveller rediscovering the riches of ancient Greek philosophy while riding the chimeric textual machine of Flush – is that it is vain to reshape life-writing without allowing for a renaissance of animal life, vain also to construct a “life” without allowing for its grammatical artificiality and logical constructedness.