Andrew Linzey (ed), The Link Between Animal Abuse and Human Violence (2014)

Andrew Linzey is one of the more famous figures in 'animal rights' discourses: an Anglican priest and theologian who has argued across many books (amongst them Animal Rights: A Christian Perspective (1976), Christianity and the Rights of Animals (1987), Animal Theology (1994) and Why Animal Suffering Matters: Philosophy, Theology, and Practical Ethics (2009)) that humans have a divinely sanctioned duty of care to regard animals as innocent beings-in-the-world, to avoid causing them suffering and what's more to adopt a fundamentally Kantian ethical position in regard to them: to treat them as ends in themselves and not means to an end. Wikipedia quotes a few representative positions: 'Animals are God's creatures, not human property, nor utilities, nor resources, nor commodities, but precious beings in God's sight. ... Christians whose eyes are fixed on the awfulness of crucifixion are in a special position to understand the awfulness of innocent suffering. The Cross of Christ is God's absolute identification with the weak, the powerless, and the vulnerable, but most of all with unprotected, undefended, innocent suffering.' He also believes that 'Christians haven’t got much further than thinking that the whole world was made for us, with the result that animals are only seen in an instrumental way as objects, machines, tools, and commodities, rather than fellow creatures.'

This latest collection is true to its, we can be honest, tendentious title: it aims to show that people who are cruel to animals are more likely to be violent to other people. Linzey discusses some of the broader framing of this in his introduction, from two perspectives (one 'from the "human" side' that belongs to those who argue some people who abuse children can be very caring where their pets are concerned, which Linzey simply doesn't believe; the other 'from some animal advocates who fear that the focus on the link [between animals abuse and human violence] obscures the moral case for animals. Animal abuse should be regarded as wrong in itself, they claim, regardless of its adverse effects on human beings' [4-5]). But this doesn't go very far. Mostly the book simply presents papers that in turn present data as evidence for the claim that the kind of people who abuse animals are more likely to be the kind of people who hurt other people. This is pretty convincing, not least because it chimes with common sense. We're all aware of the cliché of the serial killer who learns his trade by torturing cats and so on. Turns out that's not so much a cliché as it is an actual fact in the world. It's worth noting that the sample sizes here are not especially large, mostly. Still: 'of 429 adult inpatient admissions to psychiatric hospital divided into aggressive and non-aggressive samples, 23% killed dogs and cats and 18% tortured dogs and cats (aggressive sample) and 10% killed and 5% tortured dogs and cats (non-aggressive sample) [1979]'; 'of 28 sexual homicide perpetrators, 36% committed acts of animal cruelty in childhood and 46% in adolescence' and so on [31-34]. I can believe it.

There are 27 separate articles in this anthology, not including Linzey's introduction (plus extra introductions to the eight sections into which the collection is disposed): and most of them repeat this point with varying degrees of statistically meaningful evidence bases. The social science idiom of these pieces has the smack of precision about it, but there are larger vaguenesses in the volume that trouble me. One is the core definition of 'animal'. Almost all the papers refer to 'animal abuse'; very few actually define what they mean by animal ('abuse' is more precisely defined). The volume kicks off with an epigraph by R D Laing, quoted approvingly by Andrew Linzey: 'it is quite clear that in abusing animals we abuse our relationship with animals, and that we abuse ourselves. We become less human to the extent that we treat any living beings as things.' It's the sort of hugely over-reaching assertion to which Laing was sometimes prone, and it doesn't stand up very well to hard thought. Any living being? Really? I treat the yeast that turns my mash into beer as a means to an end rather than an end in itself; this hardly diminishes my humanity. I treat my gut flora the same way. This is to make the extreme point, of course; but the case studies of animal abuse in the book as a whole in fact detail a remarkably narrow set of examples: dogs and cats, smaller pets like hamsters, horses and some other farm animals. Mary Louise Petersen and David P Farrington ('Measuring Animal Cruelty and Case Histories') confess that they are concerned with 'domesticated' animals; 'cruelty to other species (insects, fish, etc.) is excluded' [15]. Several essays specify that cruelty entails intentional violence and cruelty towards 'companion animals' and pets: 'given the broad-ranging utilitarian attitudes towards non-human animals (eg farming and husbandry practices), conceptualising behaviours serving a purely instrumental goal in the absence of intention to harm as examples of aggression would clearly be problematic' [Eleonora Gullone, 'A Lifespan Perspective on Human Aggression and Animal Abuse', 39]. But that's a very large tranche of sentient beasts to exclude from your theory. And limiting yourself, as almost all the essays here draw on pet abuse, implies a blurring of the core thesis: is it that people who abuse pets are more likely to abuse animals because abusing pets has that effect because of the pets, or because of the violation of the quasi-familial place pets have in human groups? It's an important distinction, I think. A group of essays (in 'Part V: Ethical Perspectives on Human-Animal Relations', 173-220) do discuss broader ethical questions, but without expanding the discussion very far. At the same time, Linzey certainly wants to cast the net of human moral delinquency wider:

And then there is the phenomenon of "denial" which functions as a way of pushing aside uncomfortable moral reality. What might be called a mechanism of "willed ignorance", of looking the other way, of moral pretence. As T. S. Eliot once remarked: "Mankind can bear little realty." Most of us are animal abuse deniers in that sense; we have some inkling that—for example—the products we buy and our food preferences have some costs to the animals involved, but we push such reality aside. [7]

This passage annoyed me, if I'm honest. In part it's the mangling misquotation of Eliot; partly its a simple disagreement that there is such a thing as 'moral reality'; but mostly its the 'animal abuse deniers' phrase, coined presumably on the model of 'Holocaust deniers'. A number of animal rights thinkers make the comparison between factory farming and mass butchery of edible animals on the one hand and the Holocaust on the other. It nonplusses me. Complicity with the Shoah is one of the gravest moral delinquencies its possible to imagine; it's hard to believe people truly believe that living in a country that ran multiple abattoirs is precisely equivalent to this, morally. Perhaps they do. It's hard to think it possible to believe that, in one's heart, except that one would then do everything in one's power to bring it to an end. But here the problematic rears its head. European Jewry existed before Hitler was born: and would have existed, living, working, raising families, telling stories and so on, had he never come into the world. Cows, pigs, chickens and sheep exist in prodigious numbers in the world today because we raise them for food, and for no other reason. A world in which the entire population converted to vegetarianism would be a world in which these creatures wouldn't exist, because there would be no economic reason to grow them. The claim that non-existence is morally preferable to an existence that terminates in a premature abattoir death seems to me, at the very least, a dubitable proposition. It's one thing to agree that farm animals should not be subject to egregious cruelty; it's quite another to argue that it's better they not exist in the first place.

Cynthia Willett, Interspecies Ethics (2014)

I thought it would be an idea to read through Willett's latest book and notate some responses, aiming not at comprehensiveness of reaction (yet), but only an initial bounce-off. The worry, of course, is that such an approach will tend towards the unconsidered, and that would be unfair to Willett, who (though I cannot claim to be an expert in her thought) is very evidently a deeply-considered philosopher of intersectionality, ethics-diversity and environmental responsibility. So, when the book opens:

Low-level warfare has been raging across Africa, India and parts of South-east Asia for decades ... adolescent males alone or in gangs have been attacking villages and plowing under swaths of crops in retaliation for the murder of their families and the destruction of their tribal land. The rogue males terrorising African parks and jungles are not the orphaned youths of the Lord's Resistance Army, those kidnapped children pressed into service for the Ugandan revels. However, like child soldiers, those adolescents too are caught in downward spirals of destruction and self-injury triggered by decades of violence. They are among the last surviving members of the elephants of Uganda. [1]

...and my temptation is to make a sort of tch! noise, I need to take care. The aim is, presumably, rhetorical force and vehemence, but this seems to me to strike a tendentious note, already assuming what the book need to show, the ethical equivalence of animal and people: that elephant behaviour is straightforwardly equivalent to human behaviour (they wage war; they feel the injustice of their territorial situation, they are exactly like 'child soldiers' and so on). This is a position that sets out to recruit our sympathy for the plight of the elephants by assuring us that we must feel for them as we would for any human faced with the same situation. I remain, so far, unrecruited.

I should, of course, register the preconceptions (if you like: the biases, the horizons of closure of my mind) with which I sit down to read a book like this. Naturally I hope to open the arthritic portals of my brain sufficiently to read it fairly, and without prejudice; but we work with what we're given, and it's less dishonest to acknowledge one's ideological structures of thought at the get go. Let's talk about 'animal rights'. So, I am committed (I guess) to a model of rights as simultaneously inalienable and as defined by their reciprocal relationship to social duties. I'm not sure I can make sense of a concept of 'rights' that doesn't include a concept of 'responsibilities'. My rights are the limit cases of how society must treat me; my responsibilities are the structures of obligation I owe to society; the two necessarily go together. I would say my rights are larger than my responsibilities, and I'm very comfortable with that asymmetry. It is entailed, I think, by the fundamental disclosure of being alive at all, the inherent dignity and sanctity of life as such, as against the often restrictive and sometimes petty nature of responsibilities. But surely rights can never be one-sided. When it comes to animal rights I wonder: if an animal has rights, what are its concomitant responsibilities? If a lion has the right not to be hunted to death by humans, does it also have the responsibility not to eat me? That would be the Millesque liberal model of ethical interchange, and the problem is I don't trust the lion to keep up his half of the deal. Or if lions (as per Willett's opening gambit, noted above) are too tendentiously 'majestic' an example, let's try: if rats have the right to be left in peace do they also have the responsibility not to spread disease and wreck our sewage system? If the smallpox bacillus has the right not to be exterminated completely, does it not also have the responsibility to abstain from killing off human beings, as it has been doing since prehistoric times, with a death toll that almost certainly exceeds a billion (up to 500 million died of the disease in the 20th-century alone)?

OK, now I'm being tendentious myself. Of course elephants (16 references in Willett's index, many of them stretching over multiple pages) are large and noble animals; of course the smallpox bacillus (no references in Willett's index) is small and horrid. But if 'interspecies' is to mean more than intramammalian we need surely to open to the larger issue. The elephant in this room (sorry about that) is political; and the question about how far Green politics' progressive commitment to ideas of social justice, equality and respect marry-up with a fundamentally small-c, and sometimes large-C, conservative vision of a social paradigm based on traditional communities, village life, old-fashioned, small-scale interactions and so on. The people who enjoy such life nowadays are the very rich; most of the poor live in cities not through choice but by economic necessity. When Willett writes that

Moral philosophy has much to learn from ancient wisdom traditions ... [5]

the snarky part of me wants to retort: 'what, wise old ancient moral traditions like slavery and exposing unwanted babies on the hillside to die?' If Willett thinks a sustainable future can only happen via a retreat to the deep past ('until the recent past, small-scale human and elephant societies passed on ethical practices that sustained their cohabitation') then she'll need to convince me there's a way to turn the inescapably large-scale needs of today's heptabillion population into a small-scale solution that doesn't involve simply annihilating the vast majority of people now alive. This is not a question the book Interspecies Ethics addresses.

But then it's clear, I think, that Willett and I have a different sense of the possibility of community in the 21st-century world as it is constituted. She says

Today new technologies of electronic media and social networking (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc.) promise to recharge communal-based networks. However, pressured by our entrepreneurial culture, the new social media may just as likely shift humans further away from that communitarian ethos that characterized our species along with elephants and other mammals for eons. [3]

It seems to me that 'may', there, is a doing a lot of work. Maybe they will; but then again maybe they won't, and that Willett has no time for the latter and much more optimistic possibility seems to me a weakness in her book.


:1:

I start by wanting to nit-pick, and that's probably not healthy. Willett's fundamental ethical frame finds value in community, hospitality to others, laughter (especially the laughter of the subaltern), and I consider all those things to be very good things. But when she talks of 'hubris' I fear she doesn't know what she is talking about. The emphatic italics in the first sentence here are hers:

Ancient drama depicts hubris as an assault and an insult on selves-in-communitis [sic] by the powerful. This drama warns of the excess of power and privilege accumulated by elites in a social realm warped by conflict and power differentials. In contrast, modern liberal law, by aiming for a formal equality, abstracts from, rather than confronting, the sharp gradients in power that are ever the tragic source of blind arrogance. Ancient codes against hubris impose restraints on the asymmetries of power and provide rituals for reconciling differences through mourning and forgiveness, in this way differing from modern legal codes backed up by prison systems. [25]

This I think abstracts a 'pure' form of ὕβρις as an embodiment of the wisdom of ancient moral codes that has very little to do with the way ὕβρις actually figured in ancient Greece; and as such it seems to me dangerously symptomatic of a tendency to procede from an idealisation of a notionally more-harmonious past. For the Greeks, hubris was closely bound up with concepts of honour (τιμή, which could be as arrogant and vaunting as you like without sacrificing its honourableness) and shame (αἰδώς, which exists in a zero-sum relation to τιμή). Hubris defined actions that shamed victim and therefore abuser, and could only be applied in a situation where rightful vengeance was not the proper response. Revenge is fine, more or less; hubris is not. It comes clearer when you consider the examples of hubris in Athenian legal speechifying: in Against Midias Demosthenes accuses Midias of hubris for slapping him (Demosthenes) in the face in the theatre for no better reason than that they had certain political differences. And in Aeschines' Against Timarchus, Timarchus is accused of hubris, and therefore unfitness for public office, insofar as he submitted himself to passive anal intercourse with a variety of men (active anal intercourse would have been fine). Aeschines' arguments succeeded, and Timarchus was barred from political office. I do not believe that Willett has this form of hubris in mind when she valorises opposing it as a contemporary moral salient. I wonder if she is aware of it at all, actually.

Shame is certainly part of the (watch out! scare quotes!) 'wisdom' of ancient ethics, and Willett discusses it with a kind of tentative positivity: 'modern moral theory asserts sharp distinctions between so-called primitive shame culture and guilt culture. But these distinctions may break down when moral phenomena are reinterpreted in terms of their bio-social significance for social animals ... shame may be more telling than modern theories of individual guilt for understanding the symbolic impact and social relevance of crimes and moral violations ... shame and moral disgust share a visceral component that could well function in trans-species ethics' [115-17]. I really don't think this is right. Shame is surely very much more destructive than it is constructive. I also tend to think it's out of step with modern progressive understandings of ethics (though that in itself doesn't disqualify it, of course), where 'shaming' is positioned as a way of enforcing social conformity and normativity in those areas where the law does not provide disapprovers with the traction to do anything official about it: so it is that sexually promiscuous women are 'slut-shamed', overweight women are 'fat-shamed' and so on. Modern progressives tend to see this as a bad thing, and I tend to think they're right to do so. In a very particular sense, Aeschines' Against Timarchus is a successful example of faggot-shaming.

After a lengthy introduction we get to chapter 1, 'Can the Animal Subaltern Laugh?', and another chime from my pedantry alarm. I'm with Willett when she says that 'subaltern studies have established that ridicule and other forms of humor serve not only as accessories of cruelty and props of power but also provide discourses and technologies of reversal, levelling hierarchies by turning stratified structures upside down' [30] (well: I'm with her up to the last eight words, where I part company). But the question of whether and which animals laugh happens to be an area in which I've read quite widely, and I cannot agree with the sentence that follows: 'animal studies have begun to document the capacity for laughter in primates, dogs, and even in the chirping of mice' [30-31]. That 'even in the' phrase is there to gesture in an open-handed way: it used to be thought that only humans laugh, but now it seems that all these other animals—and who knows maybe all animals?—laugh as well. Therefore laughter enables 'an infrapolitics of cross-species outrage and solidarity'. Willett's footnote to her 'chimps, dogs and mice all laugh' claim cites Frans De Waal's The Age of Empathy (2010) and Robert Provine's Laughter: a Scientific Investigation (2000) but the first is by no means a scientific study of laughter and the latter deals only with humans and chimps. In fact scientific research suggests that 'laughter' is only found in three species: humans, chimps and rats. Not dogs, and certainly not all the animals in the world: the sound hyenas make might sound like laughter but is not. Horses do not laugh, and neither do bees. Indeed, the sense I have is that what makes us, chimps and rats unique in the laughter game is that (like horses and bees) we live in heirarchised social groups, but (unlike horses and bees) those hierarchies are relatively fluid, or at least not fixed. When we interact with a new individual we don't at first know whether we stand in a superior or an inferior relationship to them, where the pecking order it concerned; and laughter, in its many forms, is one of the ways we negotiate that anxious uncertainty. That's why it can be both the superior mocking put down (Nelson from The Simpsons: ha-ha!) and the subaltern snicker and subversion of authority: it lubricates the social interaction and micro-adjustments of behaviour both up and down. I daresay Willett would not agree, and of course she's under no obligation to; but this model strikes me as much less empowering than is compatible with the argument she advances here.


:2:

Chapter 2 is called 'Paleolithic Ethics', and discusses amongst other things the 'left Darwinian' tradition that balances out a sense of 'the natural world' as defined by tooth-and-claw competition with a sense that 'affective networks and social affinities' [61] are also motors of evolution. I don't suppose any Darwinian, left or right, would deny the evolutionary advantage of such strategies; the point surely is that they only work within the group, and provide a tenuous basis for an inter-species ethics. But Willett doesn't think so. She cites De Waal on kindness, Donna Haraway on an 'autre-ethics' and 'autre-mondalisation' (old fashioned utopianism?) and attempts to make an, I thought, unconvincing link between Bakhtin's 'carnivalesque' and what she calls 'carnivore play'. She claims: 'dogs laugh through a dry panting noise' [79] which I fear is simply not true. (Dogs pant through a dry panting noise, and so cool themselves down. This is not laughter in the way true of chimps, rats and humans). She's perfectly correct, of course, that carnivores do sometimes 'play': dogs roll over to expose tender bellies, play-bite and so on; but they do this in an intraspecies way that, when it includes humans, treats humans as other dogs. But carnivores also do rather less fluffy and playful things, including (interspecies-ially) ripping the throats out of prey and eating the dead bodies of their own. Picking and choosing behaviour as the basis for an interspecies ethics seems to me arbitrary and unsustainable.

Chapter 3 ('Discourse ethics across species') argues that some communication between species is possible, which gets no argument from me. But I'd say it leans too heavily on its 'human parents love their children, and chimp parents love their children too, and so we all live in the same ethical cosmos' line. There's a repeat of the earlier 'we modern humans might relearn this older knowledge' [98] gubbins, too. What the chapter doesn't discuss is the Timothy Treadwell misprison of communication, whereby he thought he had established a discursive connection with bears, and the bears thought he looked tasty. The scene in Werner Herzog's excellent Grizzly Man (2008) where the director listens, horrified, to the tape of Treadwell's final minutes of life, which we do not hear, and then turns to Palovak (the owner of the tape) and says ‘you should never listen to it, and you should rather destroy it' is an exceptionally powerful rebuttal to Willett's argument here, I think. Treadwell is not in the index.

Chapter 4, called 'Water and Wing Give Wonder: Meditations on Cosmopolitan Peace', rather rubbed me up the wrong way I'm sorry to say (too gosh-wow and credulous for my admittedly cynical English palate, perhaps) although it does manage some small degree of dialectical turn with a 'digression' on 'the disgusting as the ridiculous'. Chapter 5 is a summary: 'Reflections: A Model and a Vision of Ethical Life', and starts with a koan from Chi Yuan:

How is it
Other Species know courtesy
And limits?

to which the ghost of Thomas Treadwell might respond: 'uh, hello? I'm standing right here!' Sections such as 'Animal Spirituality and Compassion' [pages 141-43] assert rather than demonstrate their concepts; the characterisation of the animal kingdom as defined by play and 'intersubjective atunement' strikes me as so fundamentally one-sided as to be almost mendacious, and nowhere do I find the preconceptions with which I started reading (rights imply responsibilities, why draw our examples from fluffy kittens, happy dogs and noble elephants rather than from rats, cockroaches and the smallpox bacillus?) addressed. On the plus side, there's a pretty well-handled coda which reads Coetzee's Disgrace in interesting ways.

“Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister”: One Last Note

Today I've been thinking a little about Robert Browning “Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister” (1842); and one thing that occurs to me (that never occurred to me before) is that Browning's starting point may have been Thomas à Kempis's Soliloquy of the Soul; and The Garden of Roses. Think of the poem's stress on roses! Think also of Saint Thomas's stress (which Browning's narrator so potently and ironically refutes) on brotherly forgiveness and kindness:

Be kind towards a tempted brother, and pray for an afflicted one as for thyself. Thy good, and my good, are cause of congratulation: thy evil and my evil of compassion. For we are all frail men; and are therefore bound by charity to pray one for another. None can upbraid another with his failings, when he neglects himself. Because when one despises an imperfect brother, it is as if a blind man mocks the blind, a deaf one chides the deaf, and a foolish one scoffs at the foolish. Speak not evil of another, but rather look to thyself, and amend what thou hast done amiss. If thou judgest rightly, and wouldst correct thy neighbour, begin with thyself. And then proceed, not hurriedly, but modestly and discreetly. If thou lovest me sincerely, and as a brother, feel for me, as for thyself, and pray for me. Whoso chides another, and does not pray for and grieve with him, is a cruel enemy, not a good physician, but a troublesome tattler. Whoso prays for another as for himself, doeth a double good. The more he hath of brotherly love, the more willingly does he pray for him, that he may the more perfectly amend, and not offend the eyes of the weak. The more bitterly does he grieve, if he will not hear, and is angry with his adviser. Each one is to another either a fragrant rose, or a piercing thorn.

Hy, Zy, Hine

Browning's "Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister" (1842) ends:

Or, there's Satan!—one might venture
Pledge one's soul to him, yet leave
Such a flaw in the indenture
As he'd miss till, past retrieve,
Blasted lay that rose-acacia
We're so proud of! Hy, Zy, Hine...
'St, there's Vespers! Plena gratia
Ave, Virgo! Gr-r-r—you swine!

Glossing this, Woolford and Karlin (in what is, I think, the best-annotated scholarly edition of Browning) can't resist a little side-swipe at the myriad scholars who have laboured to explain ‘hy, zy, hine’:

Only two of the astonishingly numerous and frequently bizarre accounts of this phrase carry any conviction, those of G Pitts (‘Browning’s “Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister”: Hy, Zy, Hine’ N&Q xiii [1966] 339-40) and J F Loucks (‘“Hy, Zy, Hine” and Peter of Abano’, VP xii [1974] 165-9). Pitts argues that B derived it from a medieval liturgical parody, the Mass of the Ass; Loucks that B. adapted the phrase from a string of nonsense words in a medieval manual of magic formulae, the Heptameron, or Elementa Magica, ascribed to Pietro of Abano (c. 1250- c.1316). Browning was certainly familiar with Abano’s work. [Woolford and Karlin Poems of Browning (1991), 2:171]

The multiplicity (and bizarreness) of interpretation has dried-up in recent years, I think; and a consensus generally arrived at, along the lines Karlin and Woodford indicate: the unnamed speaker of the poem is beginning some kind of Black Mass or evil magic charm to 'blast' Brother Lawrence's 'rose acacias', but, interrupted by the chiming of the vesper bells, the speaker breaks off with a final fist-shake at his blandly unaware fellow monk. That certainly makes sense of the poem's final stanza.

I have re-opened the interpretation box, and wish to propose a new reading of 'Hy, Zy, Hine', one I consider consistent with Browning's poetic practice in the 1830s, as well as plausible for the imagied speaker of the poem. And one, moreover, that fits the sense of the final stanza as well as, or perhaps even better than, the consensus. I agree the words are the start of a magic charm, but rather than macaronic or dog Latin, I think they are dog Greek.

The first thing to note is the convention of recording Greek 'υ' in English as 'y' (in his preface to his much later translation of the Agamemnon, Browning makes mild fun of this odd convention: 'it's a wonder we have escaped "Eyripides"'. But conventional it remains). This in turn leads me to wonder the following:

The phrase cannot be twisted into properly grammatical ancient or koine Greek, it's true. But it is strongly suggestive, in the context of the poem's repeated stress on Brother Lawrence's supposed 'swinishness' (not just the poem's last line, but stanza 2's mocking question at the expense of Brother Lawrence's nose, 'what's the Greek name for "swine's snout"?'). With that in mind, note that:

ὗς ‘hys’ means ‘swine’; and I'd argue 'hy' is plausible as an abbreviated or truncated form of the word, because the 's' of ὗς elides with the ζ of ζυ.

ζῷον ‘zōon' means beast, animal; but also ‘form, shape’. L&S also note alternate forms, including ‘ζώϊον’, which is a little closer to ‘zyn’. (Or perhaps the poem’s thinker is half-remembering that ‘ζύ-‘ (‘zy’) is the prefix for words to do with yoking together or joining up such as ζῦγμα (‘zugma’, ‘zeugma’: ‘anything which joins two bodies’; another common component of magical charms).

ὗν ‘hyn’ is the genitive form of the same word (‘of swine’, ‘swine’s’).

Might this mean that the words are there to evoke a speaker with poor Greek, vaguely remembering a Greek-language magic charm for transforming an enemy into the shape of a pig? The charm could begin: 'a swine in the shape of a pig ...' (and conceivably continue '... be thou now brought forth' or some such); or perhaps 'swine [assume thou] the actual shape of a pig ...'  That is to say, we can imagine a dog-Greek necromancical charm along the lines of 'let this person's pig nature be made manifest in a swinish exterior form ...' the articulation of which is interrupted before the speaker can finish the charm. 'ὗ[ς] ζύ ὗν ...'

We think of black magic charms as couched in Latin (as they often were); but medieval magic charms phrased in ancient Greek magic were not unknown, as Ogden's Greek and Roman Necromancy (2001) makes plain. After all, the very word "necromancy" is from the post-Classical Greek νεκρομαντεία (nekromanteía), a compound of Ancient Greek νεκρός (nekrós), "dead body", and μαντεία (manteía). All we need now is some charm that starts ὗς ζῷον ὗν ... either in a medieval black magic text, or else in a writer like Hipponax (not Hipponax, though, so far as I can see: I've checked). Surely there must be such medieval charms, designed to turn your enemy into a pig?

Emily Apter's Twenty Theses on Translation

Emily Apter's The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature (Princeton Univ. Press 2011) opens with her 'twenty theses on translation':

Nothing is translatable.

Global translation is another name for comparative literature.

Humanist translation is another name for comparative literature.

The translation zone is a war zone.

Contrary to what U.S. military strategy would suggest, Arabic is translatable.

Translation is a petit metier, translators the literary proletariat.

Mixed tongues contest the imperium of global English.

Translation is an oedipal assault on the mother tongue.

Translation is the traumatic loss of native language.

Translation is plurilingual and postmedial expressionism.

Translation is Babel, a universal language that is universally unintelligible.

Translation is the language of planets and monsters.

Translation is a technology

Translationese is the generic language of global markets

Translation is the universal language of techne.

Translation is a feedback loop.

Translation can transpose nature into data.

Translation is the interface between language and genes.

Translation is the system-subject

Everything is translatable.

Lovely, stimulating stuff. I don’t ‘agree’ with all of it, mind (I’m not supposed to agree with it, I suppose; any more than I am supposed blithely to 'agree' with Nietzsche’s more pared-down apothegms). But they are getting at something important by refusing to map meaning from grid to grid the way the ‘transparent’ paradigm for translation tacitly presumes. (To be a little more specific: I think ‘translation is a war zone’ is a hyperbole that muddies something true about the way texts are in conflict with other texts; the point about Arabic being translatable ‘contrary to what U.S. military strategy would suggest’ rather squanders its point—which I take to be about the sometimes murderous condescension of cultural imperialism—in cheap agit prop: the US military knows perfectly well that Arabic is translatable, after all, and sends its troops into battle with kitted-up Arabic translators alongside them. Also, I don’t see that translation is always the loss of native language, or always inevitably traumatic. But maybe that’s my Anglophone privilege showing. And the other theses touch on something really important: especially the Beckettian nothing and everything being translatable point, the feedback loop and ‘techne’ points, and translators as ‘the literary proletariat’.)

There’s an interesting review of Apter's latest book, Against World Literature, by Joshua Mostafa over at The Sydney Review of Books.

That's Not Even How You Pronounce "Prague" ...

Edward Lear: 1846.

1907 Alice in Wonderland cover

Art by Charles Robinson. Once you notice the way the March Hare is staring straight at you, the image becomes considerably more unnerving. No wonder Alice looks so alarmed. Also: apparently starring Richard Dawkins as the Mad Hatter: