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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN ANIMALS AND LITERATURE

Imperial Beast Fables

Animals, Cosmopolitanism, and
the British Empire

Kaori Nagai
Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature

Series Editors
Susan McHugh
Department of English
University of New England
Biddeford, ME, USA

Robert McKay
School of English
University of Sheffield
Sheffield, UK

John Miller
School of English
University of Sheffield
Sheffield, UK
Various academic disciplines can now be found in the process of executing an
‘animal turn’, questioning the ethical and philosophical grounds of human excep-
tionalism by taking seriously the nonhuman animal presences that haunt the
margins of history, anthropology, philosophy, sociology and literary studies. Such
work is characterised by a series of broad, cross-disciplinary questions. How might
we rethink and problematise the separation of the human from other animals?
What are the ethical and political stakes of our relationships with other species?
How might we locate and understand the agency of animals in human cultures?
This series publishes work that looks, specifically, at the implications of the
‘animal turn’ for the field of English Studies. Language is often thought of as the
key marker of humanity’s difference from other species; animals may have codes,
calls or songs, but humans have a mode of communication of a wholly other
order. The primary motivation is to muddy this assumption and to animalise
the canons of English Literature by rethinking representations of animals and
interspecies encounter. Whereas animals are conventionally read as objects of
fable, allegory or metaphor (and as signs of specifically human concerns), this
series significantly extends the new insights of interdisciplinary animal studies by
tracing the engagement of such figuration with the material lives of animals. It
examines textual cultures as variously embodying a debt to or an intimacy with
animals and advances understanding of how the aesthetic engagements of literary
arts have always done more than simply illustrate natural history. We publish
studies of the representation of animals in literary texts from the Middle Ages to
the present and with reference to the discipline’s key thematic concerns, genres
and critical methods. The series focuses on literary prose and poetry, while also
accommodating related discussion of the full range of materials and texts and
contexts (from theatre and film to fine art, journalism, the law, popular writing
and other cultural ephemera) with which English studies now engages.

Series Board
Karl Steel (Brooklyn College)
Erica Fudge (Strathclyde)
Kevin Hutchings (UNBC)
Philip Armstrong (Canterbury)
Carrie Rohman (Lafayette)
Wendy Woodward (Western Cape)

More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14649
 Kaori Nagai

Imperial Beast Fables

Animals, Cosmopolitanism, and the British Empire
Kaori Nagai
School of English
University of Kent
Canterbury, UK

Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature

ISBN 978-3-030-51492-1 ISBN 978-3-030-51493-8 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51493-8

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2020
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights
of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and
retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology
now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc.
in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such
names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for
general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and informa-
tion in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither
the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with
respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been
made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps
and institutional affiliations.

Cover credit: LLP collection/Alamy Stock Photo

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
For Karin and Shizuku
 Acknowledgments

This book has been long in making, and I owe a great debt of grati-
tude to many friends and colleagues for their support. First of all, I would
like to thank the members of the Kent Animal Humanities Network, espe-
cially Charlotte Sleigh, Derek Ryan, Caroline Rooney, Sarah Wood, Karen
Jones, Matthew Whittle, Peter Adkins, Ben Marsh, Emilia Czatkowska
and also Donna Landry, who kindly read through the draft of my
manuscript. I take this opportunity to thank Lyn Innes for her generosity
and guidance over years, and her valuable feedback on my project. Many
thanks also to Angela Groth-Seary for checking my German translations
and for her friendship. This book has also been greatly inspired by my
teaching experience, and especially by my students on the module ‘Ani-
mals, Humans, Writing’, who have shown me in many different ways why
it matters to care about animals and the environment. I have met, and
have drawn inspiration from, numerous wonderful scholars in the process
of my writing, and thanks so much to all those whose words and kindness
have touched this project, including (alphabetically) Pratik Chakrabarti,
Jeanne Dubino, Paraic Finnerty, Heidi Goes, Donna Haraway, David
Herd, Sarah James, Ulrich Knoepflmacher, Asako Nakai, Kenji Nakamura,
Julia Noe, Will Norman, Judith Plotz, Gregory Radick, Harriet Ritvo,
Karen Sayer, Ai Tanji, Lynn Turner, Thom van Dooren, John Walker,
Cathy Waters and Pasquale Zapelli.
This book partly originated in the research I conducted in editing the
Penguin Classics edition of the Jungle Books (2013). I am grateful to Jan

vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Montefiore, the general editor of the new editions of Rudyard Kipling, for
her support and guidance, and for commenting on the Kipling chapter
in this book. I would also like to thank the Kipling Society for hosting
intellectually stimulating discussion via its events and e-mail forum, from
which I drew much inspiration. Thanks also to Harish Trivedi for being
a marvellous host of the ‘Kipling in India, India in Kipling’ conference in
Shimla (April 2016), which I had the good fortune to attend. Meeting
Indian animals in real life inspired my writing of this book, and the
encounter with simian residents of the Jakko Hill (whom Kipling wrote
about) was particularly memorable.
I am grateful to the Leverhulme Trust for funding my research on the
Esperanto movement, and also the National Maritime Museum, Green-
wich, for awarding me a Caird Research Fellowship in 2016–2017. My
research at the Museum has enhanced this book’s recurrent maritime
themes. I would also like to thank the librarians and archivists at the
British Library, the Templeman Library, the Bodleian Library, the Caird
Library, the National Archives of India in Delhi, the National Library of
Ireland, the American Philosophical Society Library, the Butler Library
of the Esperanto Association of Britain and the Hector Hodler library
of the Universal Esperanto Association, for their valuable help in aiding
and facilitating my research. I am also deeply indebted to the School of
English, University of Kent, for its support, which made it possible for
me to complete this book. I have also gained much from the School’s
vibrant research culture, especially through sharing ideas and collab-
orating with my colleagues and students in the School’s Centres for
Victorian Literature and Culture and Colonial and Postcolonial Studies.
At Palgrave, I would like to thank Allie Bochicchio Troyanos, Rachel
Jacobe and Ben Doyle, and also the Series editors of the Palgrave Studies
in Animals and Literature, Susan McHugh, Robert McKay and John
Miller, for their invaluable support and guidance. It has been an honour
to publish in this brilliant series. I would like to thank the anonymous
reviewer for the many constructive suggestions, which helped me greatly
to revise my manuscript.
Part of an earlier version of Chapter 4 appears as ‘The Beast in the
Chinese Boxes: The Jungle Books as an Imperial Beast-Fable’, in Kaori
Nagai, Karen Jones, Donna Landry, Monica Mattfeld, Caroline Rooney
and Charlotte Sleigh (eds.), Cosmopolitan Animals (Palgrave Macmillan,
2015), 233–45.
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ix

Last but not the least, my heartfelt thanks to Ben Grant for reading and
commenting on many versions of the manuscript, and for sharing life’s
journey with me. Without his love, support and encouragement, this book
would never have been possible. My thanks also go to Karin and Shizuku,
our much-loved fancy rats. The two years I spent with them undid many
of my preconceptions about the nature of human-animal companionship,
and the following pages bear many of their nibble marks. This book is
dedicated to them and their memory.
 Contents

1 Introduction: Rats in the Box 1

2 Winged Tales: The Advent of the Imperial Beast Fable 17

3 ‘Once upon a Time When Animals Spoke’: Theories

of the Beast Fable 47

4 Into the Chinese Boxes: The Jungle Books 77

5 Kangaroo Notebook: Abe’s Metatherian Journey 121

6 Animal Alphabets: Chesterton’s Dog, Browning’s Rats,

Lear’s Blue Baboon 155

7 Fabling Cosmopolitanism: The Ark Esperanto 189

Select Bibliography 223

Index 245

xi
 List of Figures

Fig. 4.1 ‘Embarking Elephants at Bombay for the Abyssinian

Expedition’. Illustrated London News, 11 January 1868 (©
Illustrated London News Ltd./Mary Evans) 100
Fig. 5.1 Huxley’s diagram for the stages of Mammalian evolution
[‘Prof. Huxley on Evolution, Part II’, Nature 23:584 (6
January 1881): 230] (Reproduced with permission of
Springer Nature) 137
Fig. 5.2 Darwin’s Diagram II, showing a marsupial as the common
ancestor of marsupials and placentals drawn by Charles
Darwin in a letter to Charles Lyell, dated 23 September
1860 (Reproduced with permission of the American
Philosophical Society) 139
Fig. 6.1 John Lockwood Kipling’s title illustration in the Preface
to Rudyard Kipling, The Jungle Book (London: Macmillan
and Co., 1894), v 156
Fig. 6.2 John Lockwood Kipling, ‘Little Anklebone’, Frontispiece
to Flora Annie Steel, Tales of the Punjab, Told by the People
(London: MacMillan and Co., 1894) 157
Fig. 6.3 Edward Lear, ‘The Quangle Wangle’s Hat’, in Edward
Lear, Laughable Lyrics: A Fourth Book of Nonsense Poems,
Songs, Botany, Music, etc. (London: R. J. Bush, 1877), n.p. 180

xiii
xiv LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 7.1 A group photo taken at the Second Universal Esperanto

Congress, 1906: Ludovic Lazarus Zamenhof (centre),
with John Pollen (left) and Sher Khan, the Nawab of
Radhanpur (right) (Reproduced with permission of the
Butler Library, Esperanto Association of Britain) 207
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Rats in the Box

B. F. Skinner, in his autobiography The Shaping of a Behaviorist (1979),

recalls how ‘one fine Sunday morning [he] went to the Biology Building
and descended to [his] subterranean laboratory’.1 Skinner is the famous
inventor of the ‘Skinner Box’, a laboratory apparatus in which an animal
is trained or ‘conditioned’ to press a lever to get food, and on that day
he was back in his laboratory to resume his experiment on rats:

I put the rats in their boxes and started my programming equipment. I

was still using circuit breakers, and the friction drives under the four disks
emitted a rhythmic pulse: di-dah-di-di-dah – di-dah-di-di-dah. Suddenly
I heard myself saying ‘You’ll never get out. You’ll never get out ’. (174;
emphasis in original)

‘You’ll never get out. You’ll never get out ’. When I first came across
these words, which came to Skinner’s lips unawares, I assumed that they
referred to the rats he had put in his boxes: they would never get out,
trapped as they were in the laboratory, repeating their task to get food.
This appeared to me to be a key moment in which Skinner unwittingly
acknowledges and verbalises the cruel nature of his animal experiment.
Also, he is shown to be fully aware of the unequal power relation-
ship between himself and his rats: he is their jailer and lawmaker, who
sentences them to lifelong confinement.

© The Author(s) 2020 1

K. Nagai, Imperial Beast Fables,
Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51493-8_1
2 K. NAGAI

But, no. Skinner’s recollection disallows the possibility of such a rat-

centric reading of his anecdote, as he goes on to say:

Evidently the rhythmic stimulus had had the effect Sherrington called
summation. An imitative response had joined forces with some latent
behavior, which I could attribute to a rather obvious source: I was a
prisoner in my laboratory on a lovely day. (174)

‘Summation’ here refers to the English neurophysiologist Charles Scott

Sherrington’s discovery that a subliminal stimulus, ineffective on its own,
becomes effective when it is repeated.2 Skinner on that day was exposed
to the repetition of a mechanical and rhythmic pulse coming from the
rat boxes, to the point that it had the effect of bringing to light his
latent thought: ‘You’ll never get out. You’ll never get out’. The episode
concludes with his ‘authorial’ interpretation of what he had uttered: obvi-
ously it meant that he was ‘a prisoner in [his] laboratory on a lovely day’.
Skinner has the last word, as if to recover the control he had lost when
some other voice used his body to speak through him.
This episode is included in Skinner’s autobiography as the moment
which ignited his interest in the ‘latent behaviour’ of our mind, leading
to his design of what he called ‘the verbal summator’, a device which
‘simply repeats a series of vowel sounds over and over until the subject
reads something into them’ (176). Skinner calls these sounds ‘auditory
inkblots’ (175), likening his invention to the Rorschach test and Freudian
free association: it can be used to ‘[snare] out complexes’ (176), as it
‘enables the subconscious to verbalize itself’ (176). That is to say, his ‘rats
in the box’ inspired him to invent another device to ‘snare’ an animal
within the human subject: a part of himself, which, just like rats, felt
trapped in the laboratory, resigned to the fact that it would never be able
to get out on that fine Sunday morning.
To quote the Oxford English Dictionary, a ‘fable’ is ‘a short story
devised to convey some useful lesson; esp. one in which animals or inan-
imate things are the speakers or actors’. The word is derived from the
Latin word fārı̄, ‘to speak’.3 A ‘fable’, which therefore means any spoken
story, is generally understood as a fiction or fabrication in which animals
magically speak. It gives expression to the speech of animals, including
their silence and the silencing of their voices. It is true that Skinner’s
scientific anecdote is not a typical fable, like those of Aesop, which centre
 1 INTRODUCTION: RATS IN THE BOX 3

on the conversations and actions of talking animal characters. Neverthe-

less, it has many traits of the fable and can be read as one. First of all,
the anecdote exemplifies the fable’s function to convey a useful ‘human’
lesson through an animal story. The rats in the boxes, literally the central
‘device’ of the story, become completely forgotten, and are replaced by
the story of a man trapped in a laboratory. This substitution also suggests
that certain types of animal testing operate like a fable: humans observe
animals to acquire greater understanding of themselves.
Despite its clearly anthropocentric interpretive frame, which seems to
be calculated to suppress any animal agency, animals speak in a fable. It is
a literary genre in which animals and other inanimate beings are given the
power of speech. Skinner’s anecdote is faithful to this law of the genre,
as it stages the voice of the nonhuman, transcribed as ‘di-dah-di-di-dah
– di-dah-di-di-dah’. According to Skinner, this sound, or rhythmic pulse,
was made by the ‘circuit breaker’, which is part of the rat apparatus. Its
role is to ‘automatically [eliminate] superfluous contacts’ made within the
Skinner box, ‘due to the inexpertness of the rat’s manipulation of the
lever’.4 In practice, the device ‘acts to break the circuit from the lever for
a short time’ after a rat correctly presses it down, in order to discount
‘irregular’ manipulations of the lever by the rat.5 This device was neces-
sary to make the results rigorous, or to reduce rats into data and a model
species to be studied by humans. In order to arrive at scientific truth,
which would allow him to tell human stories, Skinner has to repress, and
refuses to note, the rats’ many ‘irrelevant’ acts. The sound of the circuit
breaker is then an invitation for us to imagine what the rats might actu-
ally be doing in this scene. As the circuit breaker was operated by the
rats, its rhythmic pulse is their voices, or, more precisely, a translation of
their voices. It speaks softly yet powerfully, testifying to the rats’ agency
and the effects which they had on Skinner. As we have already seen, the
sound spoke to Skinner’s latent thoughts, making him realise that he was
another rat trapped in the laboratory, and even inspired him to create a
new machine.
The agency of the ‘rats in the box’ is further underscored by the addi-
tional information which Skinner provides in his autobiography, according
to which he later introduced into his rat apparatus a device operated by
mercury, which had the same effect as the ‘circuit breaker’, and func-
tioned as ‘an additional safeguard’ to eliminate superfluous contacts.6
This new device had a detrimental effect on his health because ‘a small
wisp of vapor rose from the [mercury] cup every time the circuit broke,
4 K. NAGAI

and in some of [his] experiments four rats were pressing levers at a fairly
high rate’ (86–7). This description brings to mind a vivid image of the
rats rapidly tapping the levers, emitting the pulse of ‘di-dah-di-di-dah –
di-dah-di-di-dah’—affecting Skinner, his latent thoughts and desires, and
his health and welfare (he recalls that this ‘possibly lethal device’ caused
his hair to fall out ‘at an alarming rate’ (87)). Thus, Skinner’s ‘rats in
the boxes’ story is hardly an allegory of man as a lab rat. Real rats are in
operation, tapping, eating, calling one another, and living, and the fable
allows us to hear their voices.

∗ ∗ ∗

Imperial Beast Fables: Animals, Cosmopolitanism, and the British Empire

is a book on (and of) fables. With the Skinner Box in mind, it presents the
British Empire as a fabular Animal-Machine. It is made up of a prolifer-
ating and interconnected network of boxes, each of which is a theatre of
human-animal interactions. The book thus contains quite a few trapped
animals, trained, transported and translated, while there are also, in the
background, nonhuman ‘voices’ urging us to think outside the box, if we
could only learn to hear them.
Till very recently, the fable had been a neglected or even demonised
genre in the field of animal studies, despite the fact that animals are
central to fables, as both subject matter and narrative device. It had
been regarded as a prime example of the anthropocentric misrepresen-
tation of animals: by making animals talk and act like humans, the fable
turns them into a human allegory, taking full advantage of the fact that
they would not talk back to us. Harriet Ritvo declares that the fable
‘has little connection to real creatures, none at all’, in stark contrast to
‘texts produced by people who dealt with real animals’.7 Indeed, as Erica
Fudge, writing about the fable in the Early Modern tradition, observes,
‘the beast fable is not merely a literary convention’ but a reading lesson,
which ‘actually enacts the aim of humanism itself’: ‘To look beneath
the surface of the fable, to read the moral not the animal, is where the
human can be found … To misread a fable is to be an animal’.8 For
Jacques Derrida, the fable, as a ‘determinate literary genre in the Euro-
pean West’,9 embodies the epistemic and material violence which humans
exercise over other animals: ‘We know the history of fabulization and how
it remains an anthropomorphic taming, a moralizing subjection, a domes-
tication. Always a discourse of man, on man, indeed on the animality of
 1 INTRODUCTION: RATS IN THE BOX 5

man, but for and in man’.10 Such anthropocentrism makes it necessary

for us, if we would address animals, to ‘avoid fables’ (37).
In recent years, however, there has been a flowering of scholarship
which revisits and re-evaluates the fable as a genre that tells the stories of
animals themselves. For instance, Naama Harel, in a 2009 article, urges
us to listen to the ‘animal voice behind the animal fable’: some fables, if
not all, give us ‘an alternative understanding, which does not exclude
the nonhuman animals and does not reduce them to human figures
and issues’.11 Similarly, John Hartigan Jr., in his Aesop’s Anthropology:
A Multispecies Approach (2014), argues that fables ‘stage other species as
capable of speaking to us’ and ‘present both the possibility and problem
of how we might listen to and then learn from other species’.12 Hartigan
excitingly characterises the fable as a space in which ‘species thinking’
takes place: not simply the knowledge of humanity as species, as Dipesh
Chakrabarty, who originally coined the term, defines it,13 but rather the
thinking with and through other species, which requires us radically to
reconsider the whole gamut of cultural practices which have long been
thought to be exclusively human.14 Similarly, Jeremy B. Lefkowitz calls
attention to ‘the surprisingly fluid boundaries between fable and natural
science’: human knowledge about animals has been formed in ‘dialogue’
with fables and anecdotes, sometimes drawing on the fable’s insights into
animal behaviour, and sometimes defining ‘truth’ against the fable as a
fiction.15 As an example of such fable-inspired thinking, Lefkowitz gives
an account of the recent scientific re-enactments of Aesop’s fable ‘The
Crow and the Pitcher’, in which a thirsty crow drops stones into a pitcher
to raise the water level in it. Set the similar task of retrieving a worm
floating in a narrow tube partly filled with water, a variety of crows have
admirably solved the task by putting stones one by one into the tube.
Bird and Emery, who pioneered this experiment by testing on four captive
rooks in 2009, playfully cite the fable’s moral—‘necessity is the mother of
invention’—as part of their discussion.16 The fable, then, encapsulates a
lesson applicable not only to humans but also to other species.
Not surprisingly, many scholars have taken the Darwinian theory of
evolution as the defining influence on the modern representation of
animals.17 Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of
Man (1871) revolutionalised the way in which man’s relationship with
other creatures was perceived: as Virginia Richter in her Literature after
Darwin (2011) succinctly puts it, ‘After Darwin, the human being was
just an animal like any other – although, admittedly, the top animal’.18
6 K. NAGAI

Darwin is also the major reference point in the two key books on the
fable genre in the Victorian period. Horst Dölvers, in his Fables Less and
Less Fabulous (1997), which examines the popularity of the Aesopian
fables at this time, puts forward the idea of the ‘post-Darwinian fable’,
which refers to the way in which Darwin’s theory changed what we read
into an animal fable: it no longer tells a human story in the guise of
animal characters, but unsettlingly wakes us to the truth of the bestial
origin of man.19 The concept of the ‘post-Darwinian fable’ is further
explored by Chris Danta in his Animal Fables after Darwin: Literature,
Speciesism, and Metaphor (2018), which analyses the works of writers such
as Robert Louis Stevenson, H. G. Wells, Franz Kafka and J. M. Coetzee
as post-Darwinian Aesopian fables.20 Danta’s reading of these modern
texts is grounded in his re-evaluation of the animal fable as Darwinian
in nature, and therefore closing the ontological gap between the human
and the animal. Danta intriguingly characterises Western anthropocen-
trism as being marked by a ‘vertical’ orientation: the human is defined by
his ‘uprightness’ of posture and rectitude, as well as by the act of looking
up to worship God, which also signifies his power over the earth-bound
beast (7–8). In contrast, the post-Darwinian fable is ‘a biocentric story
form’, which ‘existentially reorients the human perspective toward the
earth and the nonhuman animal’ (30).
Building on the recent ‘animal turn’ in studies of the fable, Imperial
Beast Fables seeks to offer an innovative reinterpretation of the fable as a
theatre of the human-animal relationship, especially within the context of
British imperialism. My assumption is that the fable is both anthropocen-
tric and biocentric, and this is in accordance with the way in which the
fable is typically double-tongued: it is associated with rhetorical devices
such as allegory, irony and metaphor, all of which ‘name ways of saying
one thing with another thing, or by means of another thing’.21 An
anthropocentric take on the fable is invariably accompanied by a ‘bio-
centric’ interpretation, which has the effect of decentring it. Indeed, the
fable tells a human story by putting animals centre stage, which can
foster animal ways of looking at the world. Likewise, Imperial Beast Fables
shows how the fable can double-talk to embody the ideologies and values
of the British Empire, while covertly critiquing them. An imperial beast
fable might display the power of Empire as brutal, animal power, as in
La Fontaine’s famous fable ‘The Wolf and the Sheep’, the moral of which
is ‘The reason of the strongest is always the best’22 ; on the other hand,
the fact that this power is put on show allows us to step back from and
 1 INTRODUCTION: RATS IN THE BOX 7

outside it in order to create a narrative space in which to reflect upon and

resist it.
In its central focus on nineteenth-century imperialism and colonialism,
Imperial Beast Fables revises the fable’s vertical reorientation of the
human-animal hierarchy earthward while also following a horizontal
movement towards the non-West, across the oceans, which led Europe
to ‘discover’ non-European fables. A great deal has been written on the
topic of animals and the British Empire. As John M. MacKenzie puts
it, ‘European world supremacy coincided with the peak of the hunting
and shooting craze’: ‘the colonial frontier was also a hunting frontier and
the animal resource contributed to the expansionist urge’.23 This led to
what John Simons calls ‘the tsunami of exotic animals which deluged
England’.24 Not only did these animals become familiar sights in zoos and
travelling menageries, but they also greatly contributed to the advance-
ment of European science in the form of stuffed or pickled specimens,
sent from the colonies in great numbers.25 Imperial Beast Fables argues
that non-European ‘indigenous’ fables were part of the exotic spoils
of colonialism, eagerly collected by missionaries, settlers, travellers and
anthropologists. It takes as its starting point the long nineteenth-century
fascination with non-European beast fables, which include the Oriental
fable tradition, as it is found in such collections as the Panchatantra,
the Jâtaka tales and the Arabian Nights , and African beast fables, which
also found their way to the plantations of the West Indies and the Amer-
ican South. Each fable is a box containing exotic animals, which therefore
staged a scene of colonial encounter between Europeans and their animal
others. It constituted a site of colonial translation and appropriation, as
well as a shifting zone of race, species and language.
Notably, the post-Darwinian re-evaluations of the fable genre mostly
take the Aesopian fables as their reference point, thus locating the genre
within the European literary and philosophical tradition, beginning in
Ancient Greece. In contrast, Imperial Beast Fables follows the Europeans
in their quest for ‘non-European’ fables. Its genealogy starts in the late
eighteenth century, when fables found in the colonial space emerged as
exotic curiosities and valuable anthropological documents, thus predating
the ‘post-Darwinian’ fable, which was officially made possible only after
the publication of On the Origin of Species in 1859. In doing so, however,
it is not my intention to present non-European beast fables as a better
alternative to the Eurocentric tradition of the animal fable. Instead, Impe-
rial Beast Fables uses the term ‘beast fable’—which was commonly used
8 K. NAGAI

in the nineteenth century to theorise the non-European fable—in recog-

nition of the fact that Aesop is hardly the progenitor of the fable as
a literary genre.26 Indeed, the nineteenth century was a period during
which the Europeans themselves were actively debunking the myth that
the fable tradition started with Aesop the Greek fabulist, as the non-
European world, made to represent ancient and ‘primitive’ cultures, was
now believed to be the birthplace of beast fables. Recognised as a well-
travelled genre, ubiquitously found across the world, the beast fable
seemed to be the best literary genre with which to tell the stories of
the animals whose lives formed an important part of the global and
cosmopolitan enterprise called the British Empire. As Gert-Jan Van Dijk
puts it, ‘fables have conquered the world, transgressing the barriers of
time and place’,27 just as the British Empire aspired to do. The beast
fable’s successful history of global distribution therefore embodied the
‘animal’ energy of the movement of Europeans as colonisers, settlers, trav-
ellers and migrants, often accompanied by their nonhuman companions.
On the other hand, the rapid process of globalisation and mass migration
effaced countless stories of ‘animal bodies’ who failed to reach their desti-
nations, to settle or to compete against newcomers: this book aspires to
give expression to the presence and voices of such animals.
Rudyard Kipling’s two Jungle Books —The Jungle Book (1894) and The
Second Jungle Book (1895)—were considered by his contemporaries to
be an innovative reworking of ancient Oriental beast fables. Throughout
this book, I will use the Jungle Books as a framework and central reference
point, and as the prime example of the ‘imperial beast fable’. It is true that
the Jungle Books have often been cited as the most flagrant examples of
the anthropocentric misrepresentation of animals. Not only are Kipling’s
animal characters too ‘human’ in their speech and demeanour, but also
they are made allegorically to represent Indian native subjects, presenting
the process of colonisation as one of domestication. As Jopi Nyman puts
it, Kipling’s animal characters ‘appear to be too closely connected with
the racialized native Other’; this simultaneously bestialises non-European
humans and anthropomorphises nonhuman animals.28 Moreover, in cele-
brating the British Empire, Kipling is said to make the animals as they are
disappear: ‘the potential Otherness of the animal is suppressed and the
colonial animal abandoned to construct a national allegory’ (52). Imperial
Beast Fables resists the common reading of the Jungle Books as an allegory
of the Raj or the Empire, in which animals are made to symbolise humans
or human ideologies. Instead, it attaches importance to the fact that they
 1 INTRODUCTION: RATS IN THE BOX 9

are written as a collection of fables, the genre which is traditionally set

aside as a space in which nonhumans can speak. The Jungle Books, which
draw on the Indian fable tradition, tell the stories of Mowgli the wolf-boy
and his animal brothers, alongside the stories of other animals living in,
or working for, the British Empire. Kipling represents nonhuman animals
as important members of the Empire, and this can be seen to herald the
twenty-first-century effort to rewrite imperial history by taking nonhuman
agency and environmental and conservation issues seriously.29 Moreover,
the Jungle Books replicate the interlocking narratives, or the ‘box within a
box’ structure, which Oriental fable collections such as the Panchatantra
and the Arabian Nights are famous for. This theme of proliferating boxes
is a recurrent one in Imperial Beast Fables. Through it, I present the
British Empire as a worldwide network of animal stories.
Chapter 2, ‘Winged Tales: The Advent of the Imperial Beast Fable’,
investigates the roles which non-European fables played in the making of
the British Empire. It introduces the Jungle Books as the state fable of
the British Empire, and relates them to another iconic reworking of the
non-European beast fables: Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus, which
I characterise as a beast fable of post-Civil-War America. In both cases,
the white settlers/colonisers are shown to be educated in the school of
non-European fables in which animals, who welcome the colonisers, teach
them the art of migration, transculturation and colonial appropriation.
Chapter 3, ‘“Once Upon a Time when Animals Spoke”: Theories of
the Beast Fable’, considers several contemporaneous theories of the beast
fable. It shows different ways in which the genre provided a theoret-
ical space in which controversial ideas such as the possibility of animal
language were proposed and explored. The Darwinian idea of interspecies
kinship is inseparably entwined with philological investigations into the
origin of language, and we see humans intently listening to animal stories
to determine who they were and where they came from.
Chapter 4, ‘Into the Chinese Boxes: The Jungle Books ’, analyses
Kipling’s beast fables as representations of the colonial practices of
enclosing and exploiting nature. It consists of two parts, the first of which,
‘Stories of the Forest’, places Kipling’s jungle stories in the context of the
early efforts of forest conservation in India. The second part, ‘Stories of
the Sea’, shows how Kipling’s forest stories are connected with animal
stories from other parts of the world through the Empire’s maritime
activities. The ocean, control of which was key to the expansion and
consolidation of Britain’s maritime empire, also emerges as a space of
10 K. NAGAI

creaturely vulnerability and political resistance, in which Kipling allows a

nonhuman storyteller to challenge man’s absolute dominion over nature,
which is pushing many species to the verge of extinction.
Chapter 5, ‘Kangaroo Notebook: Abe’s Metatherian Journey’, presents
Europeans’ encounter with Australia, a land of unfamiliar animals such
as kangaroos and platypuses, as a beast fable, or the scene of the
unsettling colonial encounter. It critiques Thomas Huxley and other
British scientists’ assumption that the Australian marsupials are inferior
to European mammals. The chapter uses as a theoretical framework the
Japanese author Kobo Abe’s novel and beast fable Kangaroo Notebook,
which narrates its protagonist’s strange journey into an unknown world.
Looking at Huxley’s journey through this lens inverts the Eurocentric
order of things, in which non-European stories are always read according
to European theories (but never vice versa), and allows us to explore other
ways of telling animal stories.
Chapter 6, ‘Animal Alphabets: Chesterton’s Dog, Browning’s Rats,
Lear’s Blue Baboon’, argues that animal alphabets, or a combination of
animals and letters (e.g. ‘A for Ass, B for Bull, C for Cow …’), is central
to the modern beast fable. Drawing on texts such as The History of Little
Goody Two-Shoes and G. K. Chesterton’s introduction to Æsop’s Fables,
it argues that to master animal alphabets, and to learn to read (animals),
became a key requirement in the education of the modern orderly citizen.
The chapter contrasts these texts with a variety of literary works such as
Robert Browning’s ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’, Thomas Hardy’s ‘The
Fiddler of the Reels’, and Edward Lear’s nonsense texts, which mark the
moment when the societal order breaks down. Central to these texts
is the figure of the musician/poet as a beast charmer, to whose music
animals are irresistibly drawn. He is shown to be a dangerous character
who dissolves the boundary between humans and nonhumans and joins
them together in their animal movement, thereby opening up a space of
nonsensical animal cosmopolitanism.
The beast fable can be defined as a utopian space in which we can
magically understand, or converse with, our animal companions with
whom we do not otherwise share a common language. In Chapter 7,
‘Fabling Cosmopolitanism: The Ark Esperanto’, I liken the beast fable to
Esperanto, one of many international languages constructed in the nine-
teenth century, when the rapid process of globalisation brought together
people with different linguistic backgrounds, creating the need for a
common language. Both the beast fable and Esperantism embody an
 1 INTRODUCTION: RATS IN THE BOX 11

alternative form of cosmopolitanism to the one created through the hege-

mony of European languages. In this spirit, I retell the story of Mowgli
and Shere Khan the tiger through the real story of another Shere Khan,
an Indian prince who, just like his namesake in the Jungle Books, was
made politically speechless, and whose life was touched by the Esperanto
movement.
As I demonstrated in my discussion of Skinner’s anecdote, I conceive
of the imperial beast fable as a box (or an enclosed space) which contains
and showcases an animal (or animals). The human spectator or observer is
incorporated as an integral part of the structure. Thus, the fable is partic-
ularly suited to capture the modern human-animal power relationship,
which produces and displays so many caged or enclosed animals. Each
of these modern enclosures opens up a space of the beast fable, or a
theatre of man’s control over other animals. Importantly, the modern
fable is characterised by a deep sense of nostalgia and loss, which John
Berger identifies as the effect of looking at animals: ‘animals are always
the observed…. What we know about them is an index of our power,
and thus an index of what separates us from them. The more we know,
the further away they are’.30 At the same time, the very act of enclosing
animals in ‘a box’, which separates us further from them, paradoxically
provides a safe arena in which humans can dream of their kinship with
other animals, not only as that which has irrevocably been lost, but also
as an ecological vision of a possible future.
Imperial Beast Fables critiques the notion of the fable as representing
a purely anthropocentric enclosure by relating it to the imperialist logic
of appropriating and othering the non-European world. In making this
connection, I have been inspired by recent work in animal studies which
draws on the power of animal storytelling to unsettle the dominant
anthropocentric narrative which endangers our lives. For instance, Susan
McHugh stresses the importance of interspecies storytelling in Indige-
nous oral traditions, which disrupt and unsettle the Eurowestern narrative
of ‘total human domination’: this storytelling, which teaches us how to
survive together, can be read as ‘a vibrant form of resistance to the forces
of destruction’ that are putting at risk the diversity of species and cultures,
teaching us how to survive together.31 Imperial Beast Fables seeks to
make an important contribution to this recent re-evaluation of animal
storytelling by focusing on the strategies of appropriating and silencing
non-European animal voices which have their roots in nineteenth-century
colonialism and globalisation. Europeans, in the process of collecting,
12 K. NAGAI

translating and interpreting the local fables, could decide which animals
were allowed to speak and to what end, and which animals needed to be
eliminated to facilitate their settlement. Moreover, animals were mummi-
fied and reduced to the status of ancient or ‘dead’ objects of study, rather
than being treated as a living and evolving tradition, and as fellow trav-
ellers. This book therefore seeks ways to help these animal stories out of
the box to which they (and we) have been consigned.
At the heart of the beast fable is the familiar opening phrase ‘once upon
a time’, with which we are transported to the mythic time when animals
spoke and conversed with us. The nineteenth century was a period when
this magic phrase was given much power: it was able to open the door to
the origin of human language, to our ‘bestial’ past, and to a wide variety
of unfamiliar animals whom globalisation had brought into close prox-
imity with us. Beast fables, considered by many to be the oldest form of
literature, were thought to have retained the living voices of animals who
‘once upon a time’ conversed with our animal ancestors: the Victorians
started thinking in terms of deep geological time, and the beast fable was
an important part of this new planetary awareness. It has been proposed
that folklore would be the most effective medium in which to commu-
nicate important information, such as the dangers of nuclear waste sites,
to future generations, millennia from now.32 If folklore can be trusted to
survive into such a distant future, we should pay more attention to beast
fables, which the Victorians imagined to have reached us across deep time
and perhaps across species lines. Just as the tapping sounds of Skinner’s
rats alerted him to the harmful chemical his box was releasing, the beast
fable, when carefully attended to, might have serious messages to pass on
to us, which would aid us in the global environmental challenge which all
species collectively face. Indeed, the fable, as the Roman fabulist Phaedrus
puts it, comes with ‘a double dowry’: ‘it raises a laugh and is a stern and
prudent guide to living’.33 And in this world of ecological crisis, a ‘stern
and prudent guide to living’ is exactly what we need. Perhaps we can find
it in those animals whom the folkloric tradition has appointed as our wise
teachers.
 1 INTRODUCTION: RATS IN THE BOX 13

Notes
1. B. F. Skinner, The Shaping of a Behaviorist: Part Two of an Autobiography
(New York: Knopf, distributed by Random House, 1979), 174.
2. Charles Scott Sherrington, The Integrative Action of the Nervous System
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1947), 36–8.
3. ‘fable, n.’ OED Online. Oxford University Press (date accessed 7 February
2020).
4. Skinner, The Shaping of a Behaviorist, 86.
5. B. F. Skinner, ‘The Rate of Establishment of a Discrimination’, Journal of
General Psychology 9 (1933): 305.
6. Skinner, The Shaping of a Behaviorist, 86.
7. Harriet Ritvo, The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the
Victorian Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 4.
8. Erica Fudge, Perceiving Animals: Humans and Beasts in Early Modern
English Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 65.
9. Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, vol. 1. Ed. Michel Lisse,
Marie-Louise Mallet, and Ginette Michaud. Trans. Geoffrey Bennington
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 34.
10. Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am. Ed. Marie-Louise
Mallet. Trans. David Wills (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008),
37.
11. Naama Harel, ‘The Animal Voice Behind the Animal Fable’, Journal
for Critical Animal Studies 7:2 (2009): 19. For other recent scholar-
ship on the fable from an animal studies perspective, see, for instance,
Joshua Schuster, The Ecology of Modernism: American Environments and
Avant-Garde Poetics (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2015),
Chapter 1: ‘Fables: On the Morals of Marianne Moore’s Animal Mono-
logues’, 22–46; Sebastian Schönbeck, ‘Return to the Fable: Rethinking
a Genre Neglected in Animal Studies and Ecocriticism’, in Frederike
Middelhoff, Sebastian Schönbeck, Roland Borgards, and Catrin Gersdorf
(eds), Texts, Animals, Environments: Zoopoetics and Ecopoetics (Freiburg:
Rombach Verlag KG, 2019), 111–25; Bruce Shaw, The Animal Fable
in Science Fiction and Fantasy (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010). Karen
Edwards, Derek Ryan, and Jane Spencer (eds), Reading Literary Animals:
Medieval to Modern (London: Routledge, 2020) has a strong emphasis
on the fable, with two chapters on the genre: Carolynn Van Dyke, ‘Enti-
ties in the World: Intertextuality Entities in the World: Intertextuality in
Medieval Bestiaries and Fables’, 13–28 (Chapter 1) and Jane Spencer,
‘Behn’s Beasts: Aesop’s Fables and Surinam’s Wildlife in Oroonoko’, 46–65
(Chapter 3).
12. John Hartigan Jr., Aesop’s Anthropology: A Multispecies Approach
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 53.
14 K. NAGAI

13. Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘The Climate of History: Four Theses’, Critical

Inquiry 35:2 (2009): 197–222.
14. Hartigan, Aesop’s Anthropology, 47–52. See also John Hartigan Jr.,
Care of the Species: Races of Corn and the Science of Plant Biodiversity
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), Chapter 5, ‘Species
Thinking: Calibrating Knowledge of Life Forms’.
15. Jeremy B. Lefkowitz, ‘Aesop and Animal Fable’, in Gordon Lindsay
Campbell (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Animals in Classical Thought
and Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 16.
16. Christopher David Bird and Nathan John Emery, ‘Rooks Use Stones to
Raise the Water Level to Reach a Floating Worm’, Current Biology 19 (25
August 2009): 1412.
17. See, for instance, Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narra-
tive in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 3rd edn
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Margot Norris, Beasts
of the Modern Imagination: Darwin, Nietzsche, Kafka, Ernst, and
Lawrence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985); George
Levine, Darwin and the Novelists: Patterns of Science in Victorian Fiction
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).
18. Virginia Richter, Literature After Darwin: Human Beasts in Western
Fiction 1859–1939 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 3.
19. Horst Dölvers, Fables Less and Less Fabulous: English Fables and Parables
of the Nineteenth Century and Their Illustrations (London: Associated
University Presses, 1997), 92–3.
20. Chris Danta, Animal Fables After Darwin: Literature, Speciesism, and
Metaphor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).
21. J. H. Miller, ‘The Two Allegories’, in Morton W. Bloomfield (ed.),
Allegory, Myth, and Symbol (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1981), 356.
22. For brilliant analyses of La Fontaine’s fable, see Jacques Derrida, Rogues:
Two Essays on Reason. Trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stan-
ford: Stanford University Press, 2005); Louis Marin, Food for Thought.
Trans. Mette Hjort (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989),
Part II, Section 5.
23. John M. MacKenzie, The Empire of Nature: Hunting, Conservation, and
British Imperialism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), 7.
24. John Simons, The Tiger That Swallowed the Boy: Exotic Animals in
Victorian England (Faringdon: Libri Publishing, 2012), ix.
25. See, for instance, Ritvo, The Animal Estate; Part III ‘Animals and Empire’;
Helen Cowie, Exhibiting Animals in Nineteenth-Century Britain:
Empathy, Education, Entertainment (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan,
2014).
 1 INTRODUCTION: RATS IN THE BOX 15

26. Considering his iconic status, it is remarkable that we know so little

about Aesop the Greek fabulist, to the point that it has been suggested
that he himself is a fable. The most trustworthy information we have
on him comes from a short passage written by Herodotus, according to
whom Aesop lived around 550 B.C., was a slave in Samos, and died
at the hands of the inhabitants of Delphi. There is no consensus as to
where Aesop originally came from: ‘Thrace, Phrygia, Aethiopia, Samos,
Athens and Sardis all claiming the honour’, and some believe that he was
an African slave. Nevertheless, many stories have been told around this
legendary figure as a master storyteller, locating the fable genre within the
Western philosophical and literary tradition, which originates in Ancient
Greece. [‘Aesop’, The Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th edn (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1910), vol. 1, 276.]
27. Gert-Jan van Dijk, Ainoi, Logoi, Mythoi: Fables in Archaic, Classical, and
Hellenistic Greek Literature: With a Study of the Theory and Terminology
of the Genre (Leiden: Brill, 1997), xiii.
28. Jopi Nyman, Postcolonial Animal Tale from Kipling to Coetzee (New
Delhi: Atlantic, 2003), 52.
29. See, for instance, John Miller, Empire and the Animal Body: Violence,
Identity and Ecology in Victorian Adventure Fiction (London: Anthem
Press, 2014); ‘Nonhuman Empires’, special issue edited by Rohan Deb
Roy and Sujit Sivasundaram in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa
and the Middle East 35 (2015): 66–173. For recent readings of the Jungle
Books as the empire of nonhumans, see Shefali Rajamannar, Reading
the Animal in the Literature of the British Raj (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2012); Parama Roy, ‘Kipling’s Bestiary’, Victorian Literature
and Culture 45 (2017): 821–37.
30. John Berger, About Looking (1980; London: Bloomsbury Publishing,
2009), 16.
31. Susan McHugh, Love in a Time of Slaughters: Human-Animal Stories
Against Genocide and Extinction (University Park: Pennsylvania State
University Press, 2019), 9, 1.
32. Thomas A. Sebeok, Communication Measures to Bridge Ten Millennia
(Columbus, OH: Office of Nuclear Waste Isolation, Battelle Memo-
rial Institute, 1984), discussed in Dennis Duncan, ‘Languages Lost in
Time’, in Dennis Duncan, Stephen Harrison, Katrin Kohl, and Matthew
Reynolds (eds), Babel : Adventures in Translation (Oxford: Bodleian
Library, 2019), 154–65.
33. Phaedrus, Fabulae Aesopia, 1, Prologus, quoted with a translation in J.
P. Sullivan, ‘Form Opposed: Elegy, Epigram, Satire’, in A. J. Boyle (ed.),
Roman Epic (London: Routledge, 1996), 151.
 CHAPTER 2

Winged Tales: The Advent

of the Imperial Beast Fable

R. Howard Bloch, in his article ‘The Wolf in the Dog: Animal Fables
and State Formation’ (2004), postulates that ‘the fable tends to appear at
crucial moments in the development of cities and courts, moments also
associated with state formation in the West’.1 He illustrates this with a
series of examples, which constitute an interesting history of the animal
fable, paired with that of the rise of states and empires:

in the sixth century BC with Aesop and the rise of the Greek city-state;
in the first century AD with Phaedrus, Babrius, and Rome; in the ‘cos-
mopolitan culture’ of Charlemagne’s court with its imperial and Roman
revival; in the Anglo-Norman empire that, under Henry I and especially
Henry II, offers, in what is sometimes referred to as the ‘Renaissance of
the twelfth century’, a model for almost all that follows by way of central-
ized economic, judicial, and political institutions alongside the rise of the
communes that on both sides of the Channel grew into what we think of as
towns (in distinction, say, to the Italian city-state). And that also produced
the first woman poet in French, the remarkable Marie de France, whose
103 fables are a conduit of the animal tale from the Classical world to that
of the sixteenth-century Renaissance as well as the court of the Sun King
and Lafontaine. Nor, really, is the crystallization of the fable at moments
of state formation restricted to the West, for the Pancatantra, source of
the Arabic Kalilah wa Dimnah, was contemporaneous with the rise in the
fourth and fifth centuries of ancient Indian civil administration. (69–70)

© The Author(s) 2020 17

K. Nagai, Imperial Beast Fables,
Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51493-8_2
18 K. NAGAI

According to Bloch, the appearance of animal fables at times of state

formation is no coincidence. They serve as allegories of new states, playing
a special role in ‘the creation of urban space as well as state values and
institutions’ (70), while capturing, by using animal metaphors, contempo-
raneous human anxieties and desires concerning changing social relations.
Bloch draws attention to the ‘civilised’ nature of animal fables, ‘despite
the predatory ethos of the animal world and despite the corruption and
inefficiency of the animal court’ (78). Emphasising the motifs of peace,
fairness and justice, animal fables seek to define new rules of conduct in
the new regime. Fables can be seen as ‘a repositioning of the relationship
between violence as a principle of social domination and speech as a means
of social interaction at court’ (77). It is important that animals speak in
fables, as such bestial speech is a sign, as well as a vital means, of the
successful transition from war to peace—from brutality to humanity—as
fables ‘show an insistence upon the socially adaptive uses of speech that
are part and parcel of an increased awareness of the mediatory role of
words – as opposed to the immediacy of violent conflict – in the redefini-
tion of human relations that occurs within the space of town and court’
(77).
If every state and empire, built in the wake of outbursts of unspeak-
able violence, requires animal fables to re-establish order and civility, it
is natural that the British Empire, which extended its territory on an
unprecedented scale through colonisation and mass migration, should
have had its official fabulists and many animal fables. Indeed, Rudyard
Kipling’s Jungle Books can easily be added to Bloch’s list of animal
fables corresponding to state formation. This work has been often inter-
preted as a thinly disguised allegory of British India, in which Mowgli
the wolf-boy stands for the white coloniser, ruling over and befriending
the jungle animals who represent different types of Indian subjects.
Given Bloch’s emphasis on the importance of ‘speech’ to mitigate the
violence of conflicts, it is no coincidence that the ability to speak civilly is
highly valued in Mowgli’s jungle. As Kaa the Rock Python, impressed
by Mowgli’s gracious words of gratitude, puts it, ‘A brave heart and
courteous tongue. […] They shall carry thee far through the jungle,
manling’.2 Moreover, the Jungle is ruled by codes of conduct called ‘the
Law of the Jungle’, clearly representing the British Empire as a lawful
space.
With this alignment between state formation and animal fable in mind,
this chapter will demonstrate that the Jungle Books ’ scope as a fable of
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"The Plague struck down nine thousand a day for more than a year,
in that time—"
It went on and on, a cyclopean newsreel, growing in detail as
Ozymandias absorbed our comments and added new words to his
vocabulary. We followed the robot as it wheeled its way through the
desert, our recorders gobbling in each word, our minds numbed and
dazed by the magnitude of our find. In this single robot lay waiting to
be tapped the totality of a culture that had lasted three hundred
thousand years! We could mine Ozymandias the rest of our lives,
and still not exhaust the fund of data implanted in his all-
encompassing mind.
When, finally, we ripped ourselves away and, leaving Ozymandias in
the desert, returned to the base, we were full to bursting. Never in
the history of our science had such a find been vouchsafed: a
complete record, accessible and translated for us.
We agreed to conceal our find from Mattern once again. But, like
small boys newly given a toy of great value, we found it hard to hide
our feelings. Although we said nothing explicit, our overexcited
manner certainly must have hinted to Mattern that we had not had as
fruitless a day as we had claimed.
That, and Leopold's refusal to tell him exactly where we had been
working during the day, must have aroused Mattern's suspicions. In
any event, during the night as we lay in bed I heard the sound of
halftracks rumbling off into the desert; and the following morning,
when we entered the mess-hall for breakfast, Mattern and his men,
unshaven and untidy, turned to look at us with peculiar vindictive
gleams in their eyes.

Mattern said, "Good morning, gentlemen. We've been waiting for

some time for you to arise."
"It's no later than usual, is it?" Leopold asked.
"Not at all. But my men and I have been up all night. We—ah—did a
bit of archaeological prospecting while you slept." The Colonel
leaned forward, fingering his rumpled lapels, and said, "Dr. Leopold,
for what reason did you choose to conceal from me the fact that you
had discovered an object of extreme strategic importance?"
"What do you mean?" Leopold demanded—with a quiver taking the
authority out of his voice.
"I mean," said Mattern quietly, "the robot you named Ozymandias.
Just why did you decide not to tell me about it?"
"I had every intention of doing so before our departure," Leopold
said.
Mattern shrugged. "Be that as it may. You concealed the existence of
your find. But your manner last night led us to investigate the area—
and since the detectors showed a metal object some twenty miles to
the west, we headed that way. Ozymandias was quite surprised to
learn that there were other Earthmen here."
There was a moment of crackling silence. Then Leopold said, "I'll
have to ask you not to meddle with that robot, Colonel Mattern. I
apologize for having neglected to tell you of it—I didn't think you
were quite so interested in our work—but now I must insist you and
your men keep away from it."
"Oh?" Mattern said crisply. "Why?"
"Because it's an archaeological treasure-trove, Colonel. I can't begin
to stress its value to us. Your men might perform some casual
experiment with it and short circuit its memory channels, or
something like that. And so I'll have to invoke the rights of the
archaeological group of this expedition. I'll have to declare
Ozymandias part of our preserve, and off bounds for you."
Mattern's voice suddenly hardened. "Sorry, Dr. Leopold. You can't
invoke that now."
"Why not?"
"Because Ozymandias is part of our preserve. And off bounds for
you, Doctor."
I thought Leopold would have an apoplectic fit right there in the
mess-hall. He stiffened and went white and strode awkwardly across
the room toward Mattern. He choked out a question, inaudible to me.
Mattern replied, "Security, Doctor. Ozymandias is of military use.
Accordingly we've brought him to the ship and placed him in sealed
quarters, under top-level wraps. With the power entrusted to me for
such emergencies, I'm declaring this expedition ended. We return to
Earth at once with Ozymandias."
Leopold's eyes bugged. He looked at us for support, but we said
nothing. Finally, incredulously, he said, "He's—of military use?"
"Of course. He's a storehouse of data on the ancient Thaiquen
weapons. We've already learned things from him that are
unbelievable in their scope. Why do you think this planet is bare of
life, Dr. Leopold? Not even a blade of grass? A million years won't do
that. But a superweapon will. The Thaiquens developed that
weapon. And others, too. Weapons that can make your hair curl.
And Ozymandias knows every detail of them. Do you think we can
waste time letting you people fool with that robot, when he's loaded
with military information that can make America totally impregnable?
Sorry, Doctor. Ozymandias is your find, but he belongs to us. And
we're taking him back to Earth."
Again the room was silent. Leopold looked at me, at Webster, at
Marshall, at Gerhardt. There was nothing that could be said.
This was basically a militaristic mission. Sure, a few anthropologists
had been tacked onto the crew, but fundamentally it was Mattern's
men and not Leopold's who were important. We weren't out here so
much to increase the fund of general knowledge as to find new
weapons and new sources of strategic materials for possible use
against the Other Hemisphere.
And new weapons had been found. New, undreamed-of weapons,
product of a science that had endured for three hundred thousand
years. All locked up in Ozymandias' imperishable skull.
In a harsh voice Leopold said, "Very well, Colonel. I can't stop you, I
suppose."
He turned and shuffled out without touching his food, a broken,
beaten, suddenly very old man.
I felt sick.
Mattern had insisted the planet was useless and that stopping here
was a waste of time; Leopold had disagreed, and Leopold had
turned out to be right. We had found something of great value.
We had found a machine that could spew forth new and awesome
recipes for death. We held in our hands the sum and essence of the
Thaiquen science—the science that had culminated in magnificent
weapons, weapons so superb they had succeeded in destroying all
life on this world. And now we had access to those weapons. Dead
by their own hand, the Thaiquens had thoughtfully left us a heritage
of death.
Grayfaced, I rose from the table and went to my cabin. I wasn't
hungry now.
"We'll be blasting off in an hour," Mattern said behind me as I left.
"Get your things in order."
I hardly heard him. I was thinking of the deadly cargo we carried, the
robot so eager to disgorge its fund of data. I was thinking what would
happen when our scientists back on Earth began learning from
Ozymandias.
The works of the Thaiquens now were ours. I thought of the poet's
lines: "Look on my works, ye mighty—and despair."
*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK OZYMANDIAS
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