Animal Anecdotes: The Politics of Pleasure in Natural History, 1660-1810

Abstract

In “Animal Anecdotes: The Politics of Pleasure in Natural History, 1660-1810” I argue that anecdotes about animals are pleasurable because of the positive affect that they produce, an affect that arises from the anecdote’s contradictory form. Anecdotes are short narratives that purport to be about something real. Anecdotes are also portable. They can be stretched from their original context to suit another. They can also be collected and displayed together in order to support a larger narrative. From these qualities, I suggest that anecdotes have two primary drives. One is towards the singular anecdote and the other is towards the collection of anecdotes. Yet both the single anecdote and the collection resist complete definition. Although they are meaningful, the exact meaning of anecdotes cannot be pinned down. Single anecdotes resist meaning through their lack of context. Collections of anecdotes have an abundance of context but, due to the ever-expanding nature of that abundance, can also never have a complete or final meaning. The anecdote’s dual drives towards singularity and association create a pleasurable experience of incompletion and possibility for the reader. Eighteenth-century authors used anecdotes to think about animals because they experienced a similar pleasure from encounters with other animals. Like reading an anecdote, encountering another species requires imagining contexts and making associative connections that are not immediately apparent or ultimately provable. I argue that the very incompletion of that imaginative experience is pleasurable and that eighteenth-century authors used the form of the anecdote to convey that pleasurable experience. “Animal Anecdotes” makes two interventions in eighteenth-century studies and animal studies. First, it argues that eighteenth-century natural history is undergirded by the formal device of the anecdote. This formal choice draws an analogy between collections of anecdotes and collections of specimens in natural history. Second, it argues that the anecdote is a useful form for imagining the minds of other animals because it allows narratives to be incomplete. By allowing for incomplete knowledge anecdotes do not force the world into a single narrative or truth. At the same time, the anecdote’s incompletion leaves open the possibility of new knowledge and new ways of being in the future. The texts I examine are primarily fictional accounts of natural history or natural histories that are aimed towards the public and especially women. These include The Blazing World (1666), to Oroonoko (1688), The History of Pompey the Little (1751), The Loves of the Plants (1789), and The Natural History of Birds by Charlotte Smith (1807). All of these texts use the anecdote’s allusiveness and resistance to singular meaning in order to highlight the allusiveness and resistance to singular meaning they find in the very animals and plants they are describing. The result is a version of natural history that sees species’ differences as starting points for creative experimentation and thought rather than as clear and permanent limits to be defined.