"Everything had language" : Vazha-Pshavela's " Snake Eater " from the Perspective of Animal Studies
Hayate Sotome u-tokyo.academia.edu
"Everything had language" : Vazha-Pshavela's " Snake Eater " from the Perspective of Animal Studies
Keki N Darualla is one of the notable poets of Indian English Literature. His remarkable animal poems Hawk and Wolf bear the notion of the conflict between man and nature. By using his strong imagistic brilliance Darualla juxtaposes both the mythical primitive world and the present world where animals have been killed mercilessly. Moreover, the poem Wolf vividly portrays the Indian superstitious society where parents make use of various myths in order to discipline their children. The speaker asserts that human murders nature for their own desire. This greedy nature of human being is responsible for the deplorable plight of the animals. When we look at the relationship between man and nature, it is always assumed that man is the owner who has the 'right' over nature and this greed or anthropocentric behaviour of mankind is reflected in these poems, Hawk and Wolf. The hawk is a predator that must kill to eat but, man makes the hawk kill for his own anthropocentric desire by replacing its own natural instincts. Man has made hawing a fine art and ritual. Thus, these poems bear a note that if animals are wiped out continuously, our future generations will have to face its consequences.Myth plays a significant role in the formation of moral values of an individual. They are predominantly based on the man-nature relationship. In these poems Hawk and Wolf, the speaker depicts this juxtaposition of both biocentric and anthropocentric world in a vivid way. Sue Ellen Campbell in her essay, The Land and Language of Desire draws the concept of 'Biocentrism' in order to question the man centric universe (128). Here, the image of the wolf engrosses the mind of the poetic persona but, in the course of time, the existence of the wolf in his village almost metamorphoses into a myth. When we look at the relationship between men and environment it is always assumed that man is the owner or who has the 'right' over the environment and this greed or anthropocentric behaviour of mankind is reflected in the poem Wolf. The opening line of the poem Wolf bears a hypnotic impact on the mind of the reader as the speaker says, "Fire lit/half silhouette and half myth" (Darualla 1-2). The greedy nature of human being is responsible for the deplorable plight of the animals. Earlier there were more jungles as the poetic persona was influenced by the wolf in his childhood. Here, the reader can find two moves, one is temporal and the other is spatial. It is worthy to note that the temporal move indicates looking back at past or what we can call analepsis. On the other hand, spatial move indicates looking forward at future or prolepsis. Here, the poetic persona's analeptic return to his childhood captures one of the central themes in diasporic writing. In the poem Wolf, the poetic persona uses various synonyms of wolf such as prowler, wild sniffer, throat-catcher in order to scare the children. He makes use of past tense as he recollects his childhood which is preoccupied with various narratives related to wolf. His memory of the wolf is so strong that it has encircling his entire past. Earlier, child's nights were filled with such kind of narration as the poetic persona depicts, "My mother said/his ears stand up/at the fall of dew/he can sense a shadow (Darualla, 15-18). Moreover, the poetic persona by using a proleptic move says that it is very difficult to discipline a child now as there is lack of tales, animals as well as forests and despite of wolf's cries, the image of smoking gun barrels are ringing in his daughter's mind. Therefore, the poetic persona is getting emotional as he is not able to discipline his own child by narrating the old bed-time stories of wolf. Moreover, in the poem Hawk, Darualla also uses various adjectives and phrases to depict the powerful predator hawk. The hawk can drill the sky without any fear. It is worthy to note that where the first stanza of the poem, Hawk depicts the nature of the hawk which is wild but the second stanza portrays a contrasting picture of the hawk as this stanza bears the image of a domesticated hawk.

Ovid’s Metamorphoses is a story of new bodies. The world emerged from a rough, undifferentiated mass, thanks to a god and a “better nature.” Jupiter destroyed it, in anger. Later, a divine collective decision brought it back into being. Finally, Phaeton, the unwary child of another god, the Sun, almost reduced the universe to ashes. The gods live in a beautiful town, a celestial Rome. They are over-occupied and worried for all human affairs: they help, advise, punish, and reward. They love, suffer, get angry, and take revenge. Bending people’s will, directing their agency and manufacturing events are, for them, an incessant activity. The gods care for the cosmos. Their truly favourite occupation, however, is the transformation of human beings into non-human, or, at least non-anthropomorphic creatures. They can never stop reshaping women and men into other animals, plants, stars, or springs. These are hybrids: not quite the same as they were before, but not completely different either. Together with an unexpected corporeal figura, an old identity remains. New bodies are new configurations of embodiment. A poetic metaphysics runs through the Metamorphoses. At the end of the poem, a philosophical commentator, Pythagoras of Samos, delivers a lecture on its principles. His long and famous speech, uttered in Book 15, has provoked many conflicting interpretations. I shall suggest my own. In doing so I hope to be able to demonstrate two things. Firstly, Pythagoras offers a synoptic theory of change that subsumes what occurs in the Metamorphoses. Change makes the world, and it does so quite well. Cuncta fluunt, all things are in flux, Pythagoras says, and yet the stream of becoming allows for moments of relatively lasting stability. Without being eternal, concrete inanimate objects and complex living beings come into existence — and then subsist for a while. Pythagoras himself personifies this experience. He has enjoyed many different lives. He can remember the successive identities he took over time. Likewise, the nova corpora we encounter in the poem come to be, become what they now are — and are there to stay. What is more, these animal, vegetal or mineral new beings know who they were, and still are anyhow, notwithstanding what they have also become. Their memory is their awareness of a transition from being shaped and equipped in a visibly human fashion, to being differently incorporated into the world. This point is hardly new, but its importance deserves to be emphasized once again, because it is precisely this particular kind of becoming — creative, rather than destructive; vital rather than deadly; cumulative rather than annihilating; partial rather than total — that explains the metamorphoses in the poem as well as Pythagoras’s vision of changeability. The cosmos of the poem is posthuman for we could be recycled in an instant into other kinds of beings, but it is paradoxically anthropocentric because this plasticity affects us -- and we are still there. Secondly, Pythagoras sets up a taxonomy that separates humans, non-human animals, and plants. On the one hand, this taxonomy is porous on account of the liquid ontology that keeps together the world. “All things are in flux” means that immortal souls transmigrate from human to non-human beings. Fluidity blurs the lines of demarcation. But, on the other hand, it also creates perceptive uncertainty about the potential humanity of beings that do not look anthropomorphic. This is particularly disconcerting when it concerns food. By mistake, we might eat semi-human flesh. Precisely because humanity is diluted across the ecosphere, therefore, Pythagoras’ taxonomy has to respect alimentary distinctions. Differences matter from the standpoint of what we, as human beings, may or may not eat. Once again, we are the protagonists. We must abstain from eating meat. We are permitted to consume only vegetables and fruits. This classification of food groups (edible versus inedible) fits perfectly Pythagoras’s own conception of metempsychosis, a crucial component of his general theory of universal mutability. It is also consistent with the poetic and narrative thinking of the Metamorphoses. Such a thinking deserves to be takes seriously, for the poem is not merely a masterful exemplar of a literary genre, epic poetry. The poem creates a “possible world,” defined by a range of “modalities” – what must, should, might or can happen. All these necessities and possibilities may well be incompatible with the expectations of a Roman of the first century BCE, in their daily life. Metamorphosis itself is a miracle. And yet a consistent line of thought runs through this marvellous universe. Metamorphosis brings about all kinds of animals — wild, domestic, unappetizing or good to eat. We have to abstain from all of them, Pythagoras warns, lest we ingest potentially human flesh. We must all be vegetarians. In the same poetic biosphere, however, there exist also massive trees, colourful flowers, or aromatic herbs that either grow in the wilderness or can be cultivated. Metamorphosis gives rise to some of them. A question then arises. Since it is the transformation of humans into all sorts of non-anthropomorphic beings that creates the risk of anthropophagy, can vegetarianism protect us from eating a human transformed into a plant? The answer is yes. Metamorphosis generates no vegetables destined for culinary use. Only inedible plants are metamorphic, thus misleading. All farm or garden products that are comestible are “safe” to eat. These plants have always existed as such, unscathed by any human pedigree. No cannibalism is in sight, therefore, for a vegetarian. Far for being a foil or a fad, vegetarianism operates in the text itself. By crafting a consistent set of distinctive traits, Ovid makes sure that the poem agrees with Pythagoras’s vegetarian ethics, and yet takes the liberty to recount the life of half-human plants. These vegetal hybrids may well bleed or speak, but nobody would dream of tasting them. They are not foodstuff. The cosmos of the poem respects a vegetarian contrainte, which is logical, structural and literary.