Animal leaders and helpers: from the classical tales of

Charles Perrault to the postmodern fables of Angela

Carter and Patrick Chamoiseau1
Lucile Desblache

Abstract
This article aims to show how animal fables and tales, thanks to, rather than in spite of,
their metaphorical or allegorical content, can broaden our perceptions and constructions
of interspecies relationships. It considers to what degree the presence of the natural
world and animals is used by writers to challenge not only the moral conventions and
expected structures of these literary forms, but also traditional images of non-human
beings, of the natural world and of human relationships with non-human beings. The
fundamental role of these genres in promoting human and non-human relationships
and oering new constructions of nature-culture will be outlined, analysing Le Chat
bott [Puss-in-Boots], one of the founding Western tales, together with one of its
contemporary interpretations by Angela Carter to illustrate those points, before
broadening the conclusion with reference to a Creole animal tale by contemporary
Martiniquan writer Patrick Chamoiseau.
Keywords: animal tales; animal ction; animal fables; interspecies relations; Patrick
Chamoiseau; Angela Carter

J. M. Coetzee chose to deliver his Nobel lecture in the form of an oblique intertextual
fable in which Robinson Crusoe and Daniel Defoe question the relationship between
author and literary personae. This variation on the theme of the double haunts
Coetzees ction and will not surprise his readers, familiar with the mise en abyme
strategies of his ction. His lecture opens with an (unidentied) excerpt from Daniel
Defoes seventh letter in A Tour thro the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724). It
describes the use of Lincolnshire decoys, tame ducks trained by men to guide wildfowl
from Holland and Germany to be hunted in the English fens. The decoys, familiar
with these fens, escape unharmed and are rewarded, while the undomesticated ducks
become trapped in nets and are killed by the thousand.
Coetzee, through Defoes voice, introduces these animals in ways that
simultaneously relate to the fable tradition and depart from it, as they are portrayed
in both allegorical and naturalistic ways. A substory of exploitation is latent, beyond
the description of the ducks and their decoy doubles, of their training and hunting.
Yet the presence of the birds shapes the text. They are not anthropomorphized as
traditional fable animals are. Coetzee (and Defoe) tell a story of the lives of animals,
as ever, inextricably linked to ours. It is because of this mutual dependence of human
Journal of Romance Studies
doi:10.3167/jrs.2011.110205

Volume 11 Number 2, Summer 2011: 7588

ISSN 14733536 (Print), ISSN 17522331 (Online)

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Lucile Desblache

and non-human beings that gurative interpretations can be made, not in spite of it.
Far from reducing animals to human accessories, these representations enrich our
perceptions of non-human beings, widen the spectrum of our relationship with them
and point to our diculties with encountering others, be they human or not.
With this idea in mind, I would like to introduce the notions forged by Tom Tyler
(2006) regarding beasts as either ciphers, empty carcasses devoid of meaning, or
indices, guring animals as specic agents. Contemporary readers who are animal
lovers are often quick to criticize the anthropocentric tendencies of the traditional
fable and of the human-centred visions of its anthropomorphized beasts.2 They are,
of course, right in being aware that texts promoting clichd images of animals reduced
to men in zipped furry suits, as Margaret Atwood put it (Atwood 1998: 215) limit
both our perception of animals and our relationships to them. The Beatrix Potter
characters Atwood was referring to may have been inspired by a love for animals and
a wish to represent them realistically, but they were largely meant to symbolize social
status and reected human concerns. Animal gures in traditional stories thus
frequently appear either as stereotypes or as ciphers, objects that do little more in
the text than ll a place (Tyler 2006: 11) and could be replaced with other creatures
without signicant change in meaning. Although these beasts often slip into a
cipherous mode of representation, they are rarely exclusively ciphers. Beatrix Potters
The Tale of Mrs Tiggy-Winkle (1905), for instance, had a vast inuence on the popular
perception of the hedgehog. Following its publication, the hedgehog was no longer
considered as an aggressive ball of spikes, but as an eccentric and attractive creature
belonging to pastoral surroundings, vulnerable and to be protected. As the U.K.
became more industrialized, this image of a defenceless mammal whose main predator
became the car rather than the fox or the badger expanded. Hedgehogs permeate
literature for children in German and in English, whereas their presence is limited in
books published in Romance languages. In the U.K., the British Hedgehog
Preservation Society has approximately 11,000 members; in Germany Pro Igel
contains six societies of protection for hedgehogs. In France, where hedgehogs rarely
appear in literature, the Association pour la Protection des Animaux Sauvages
[Association for the Protection of Wild Animals] mentions them among other
vulnerable species, but they have very little visibility or protection. This is one example
of how an anthropomorphized animal escapes from its cipherous role to assume,
perhaps only partially as in the case of Potters hedgehog, the function of index,
pointing to ways of rendering a particular creature visible, and instrumental in
constructing narratives that attempt translation between the animals we are and the
animals we arent (Armstrong 2008: 225).
Coetzees ducks and decoys are, of course, more poignant and consistent indices
than Potters protagonists. Coetzee, through Defoe, frames his text with this nonhuman presence. Crusoe protests weakly (What did he, Robinson, know of decoy
ducks? [Coetzee 2003]), but accepts that these birds are part of the tour of his island.
They point to their natural and cultural history, to their survival and to ours. As victims
of human actions, they indicate our failure to cherish, accept, meet or even acknowledge
others, be they human or not. Even as powerful indices of non-human beings, these

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77

ducks and decoys remain tropic, suggest images other than themselves. As such, they
link readers to the tradition of narrating texts with and through animals, which,
however anthropocentric in most stories, however unsuccessful at times, is at the heart
of literature and of our desire to consider both human and non-human worlds.
My aim in this article is to show how animal fables and tales, thanks to, rather than
in spite of, their metaphorical or allegorical content, can broaden our perceptions and
constructions of interspecies relationships. I consider the fundamental role of these
genres in promoting human and non-human relationships. I illustrate this using a
comparative methodology to discuss how animal tropes can enhance relationships
between human and non-human beings rather than reduce beasts to literary objects.
I consider Le Chat bott [Puss-in-Boots], one of the founding Western tales,
together with one of its contemporary interpretations by Angela Carter to illustrate
these points, broadening the conclusion with reference to a Creole animal tale by the
contemporary Martiniquan writer Patrick Chamoiseau.
Animal studies scholars, and before them, philosophers, such as Gilles Deleuze and
Flix Guattari (1975, 1980) have often been severe in their judgement of the
guration of animals in literature and culture. They stress that the humanization of
animals traps both human beings and beasts in representations which objectify them.
Signicantly, Cary Wolfe, in his recent survey of relationships between animal studies
and the humanities, argues that animals are partly dened by the ways humans
acknowledge them culturally as a problem for students of literature and culture
(Wolfe 2009: 567). The view that cultural representation of animals is problematic
follows the belief, nearly always prevalent in scientic thought until the end of the
twentieth century, that anthropocentrism is detrimental. But recent work (Pick 2011;
Tyler 2005) suggests that this view relies on unsustainable notions of a humanity
separated from the rest of the world.
While always valued as resources (for food, transport and work), animals did not
enter the human imagination as meat or leather or horn [] [but] as messenger and
promises, as the Marxist philosopher John Berger (1994: 4) reminds us. Atomization
of knowledge and industrialization of production in Western societies helped to turn
tropic animals from a relational, magical metaphor into objects of cultural
consumption. Indeed, some writers and readers will never let the animal reach the
threshold other than in the guises of established forms which keep them at a distance
(Bailly 2007: 789). Yet this mistrust of the imaginative power of literature is also
limiting. We are, after all, as dened by animals as they are dened by us. Moreover,
tropic representation does not have to be reductive. Symbolism, and other forms of
tropic representation, can enhance awareness of other creatures and the natural world
they embody, as Annabelle Sablo, on urban animal guration (Sablo 2001), and
Mary Midgley, on the concept of Gaa as a holistic image of earth (Midgley 2006),
have argued. A symbol often is, but need not be, what Gaston Bachelard called an
epistemological error (Bachelard 2000: 14), a clich devoid of meaning which clouds
our knowledge and restricts our behaviour to set patterns. A living metaphor, as Paul
Ricoeur (1997) would have called it, can be deciphered and traced back to the reality/
realities that inspired it. The contemporary science ction and environmental writer

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Lucile Desblache

Sheri Tepper thus notes how our emblematic ways of perceiving a creature, in this
instance a bat, can lead us back to its presence: The problem is that we thought of it
[the bat] as purely symbolic. We should have remembered that symbols are often
distillations of reality that ags were once banners own during battle. That a crucix
was once a real device for execution. Both are symbols of something that is or once
was real (Tepper 2002: 517). Even authors who do not put compassion towards
animals at the centre of their work and assert human/non-human boundaries in their
texts highlight the importance of a representation connected with reality: I think we
should be careful before we turn other creatures into images of ourselves. [] My
idea [] [for Angels and Insects was] to show the insects as Other, resisting our
metaphorical imposition (Byatt 2001: 1923).
We should certainly remain alert and critical in our readings of anthropomorphic
writing. In early Western literature, traditional genres such as fables not only reduced
animals to tropes of humanity; they contributed to relegating them to the bottom of
the living hierarchy; they also tended to iron out any dierence within species or
individuals, ruling out particularism: bears, wolves, insects, imaginary beasts and so
on were equalized in so far as they became tools of analogy or satire. In Greco-Latin
texts, beasts tended to be portrayed as creatures lacking human attributes. In emergent
Judeo-Christian cultures, animals primarily reected features of humanity. The
medieval scholar Hanneke Wirjtes put it succinctly in her preface to the The Middle
English Physiologus (1991): Nature is not studied for its own sake, but for what it can
tell us about Gods purpose and about how we should conduct our lives. Nature has
become a metaphor (Wirtjes 1991: xix). The consequences for fables and tales from
within this tradition were twofold: the minorization of animal literature, and the
anthropocization of literary beasts.3
Yet in spite of this anthropocentric and anthropomorphic tradition, animal fables
and tales have succeeded in fostering a sense of closeness between humans and the
natural world. In many cases animal metaphors allowed a connection with animals
otherwise severed. They also were an important genre in combatting the increasingly
atomistic and mechanistic approaches to knowledge prevalent from the seventeenth
century. In the early modern period, when science and exploration were promoted at
the expense of most living beings, animals were seen as inferior creatures to be exploited,
conquered or disregarded (see Fudge 2002). Fables and tales though, which relied on
their presence, kept a window open, however small, to other possibilities of considering
and relating to them. These contradictory attitudes reveal one of the most visible
paradoxes of Western modern cultures: they value animals as literary subjects on the one
hand while objectifying them in scientic, philosophical and political areas on the other.
This contradiction still inuences our creative and intellectual outputs today.
To most Western twenty-rst-century readers, fables and tales primarily rely on
the paradoxical combination of allegiance and satirical reference to the past, even
when set in the present. Yet using these genres as instruments of critique was a
valuable tool to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century tale and fable writers, who, as
Marina Warner has shown, were dissident fth columnists, undermining social and
cultural conventions (Warner 1994). The view that fables and tales reemerged in the

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79

seventeenth century as a covert form of political critique has been held by many
scholars.4 But this opposition was not only political. It also expressed a form of
philosophical and scientic critique. As scholars such as Marina Warner (1994) and
Jayne Elizabeth Lewis (1996) have emphasized, the seventeenth-century preoccupation
with Aesops fables was attractive, as these showed animals behaving like humans and
allowed the safe distance needed to portray humans as superior to the rest of creation.
But inscribing their work in this tradition also allowed writers to endow animals with
the power of speech and reason, to describe them as sentient and intelligent creatures
and to highlight the fragilities of the boundaries between human and non human
beings. Fable and tale writers showed themselves as largely opposed to the experimental
and mechanistic current that led to the systematic abuse and subjugation of animals
in science still in place today. This happened at a time when, on the one hand, human
society was generally cruel or indierent to animals, but when, on the other, attitudes
and sensibilities, towards domestic animals in particular, were changing.
If early modern scientists and philosophers generally showed little regard for the
creatures they were experimenting with, few imaginative writers intended to
instrumentalize the animals which inspired their texts and some meant to express
compassion towards them. Although the medieval bestiaries associated individual
animals with human moral features, most early modern fabulists widened this
reductive strategy. Like the writers of those bestiaries before them, they also thought
that they were writing natural history, even though their assumptions were mostly
erroneous. Nevertheless, their creative investigations led them, in many cases, to
question boundaries between human and non-human beings rather than to illustrate
mans superiority over other creatures. They also stressed something that we could
still do well to take into consideration the possible combination of ethical thinking
and scientic knowledge, even if the former is not necessarily directed towards
animals. In the preface to his fables, Jean de La Fontaine states that Elles [les fables]
ne sont pas seulement morales, elles donnent encore dautres connaissances. Les
proprits des animaux et leurs divers caractres y sont exprims; par consquent les
ntres aussi, puisque nous sommes labrg de ce quil y a de bon et de mauvais dans
les cratures irraisonnables (La Fontaine 1989: 23) [They (the fables) are not only
moral, they also provide other types of knowledge. The characteristics of the animals
and their various natures are featured in them; and consequently, ours, as they
summarize what is good and bad in brutes].5 He goes on to say that he wrote the
fables in order to instruct children in natural history as well as morality: [I]l leur faut
apprendre ce que cest quun lion, un renard, ainsi du reste; et pourquoi lon compare
quelquefois un homme ce renard ou ce lion. Cest quoi les fables travaillent; les
premires notions de ces choses proviennent delles (23) [We must tell them
(children) what a lion, a fox, and so on are; and why we sometimes compare a man
to this fox or this lion. This is what fables intend to do; the rst notions of these things
initiate from them]. Like many early modern and modern writers who established
the genres of animal fables and tales, he remained convinced that such tales could
provide both knowledge and ethics, in spite of vehement criticism from most
contemporary scientists and philosophers, including both Francis Bacon and Ren

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Lucile Desblache

Descartes. In this respect, fables stood as one of few cultural expressions resisting the
dualistic approaches which opposed science and poetry.6 In his Discours Madame de
La Sablire (1678) [Address to Madame de La Sablire] La Fontaine explicitly voices
his strong reservations towards Descartess mechanist views on animals, ending with
an open question regarding the dierence between humans and animals. Similarly,
his contemporary Charles Perrault argues that animals have a corporal, if not spiritual
soul and he protests against the notion of the animal-machine. As a member of the
Acadmie Franaise, he also used his position to argue for the importance of tales as
a literary genre (Perrault 1964). It is clear from these writings that, although both
authors used an allegorical mode of representation and projection, they did not
intend to subjugate or objectify animals and that the genres of tales and fables were
intended to make animals visible in texts while suggesting co-constitutive
relationships with them, to borrow Haraways term (Haraway 2008: 27).
Fables and tales tended to be written for both children (explicitly) and an adult
(implicitly) readership.7 Although beasts were given humanized forms, they were
introduced as animals to children. The second-degree reading, entirely anthropocentric,
was meant for adults, for whom the signicance of animality was redirected towards
human concerns. The fact that the two readerships were intended allowed a stimulating
interaction between rst and second degree interpretations. The child readership
allowed the presence of animals to remain central to the stories. As some tales and
fables developed into genres that could be exclusively intended for adults in the modern
and contemporary period, they became increasingly anthropocentric.8 Some of these
tales represent beasts as cipherous mirrors of a humanity seen in isolation from the rest
of the living, thus perpetuating the sense of a divide between species, of a frontier
which necessarily implies conquering by the human of the non human. Yet many tell
the story of a humanity taught to treat animals as inferior, disposable creatures, but
sensing the absurdity of an existence disconnected from them, and relate the fragility
as well as the impermanent nature of boundaries between species.
Le Chat bott, one of the most celebrated early modern tales, expresses this
characteristic contradiction of the genre. Perrault, in his story published in 1697 as
one of the eleven Mother Goose tales, chooses an animal to represent human mastery.
In doing so, he draws on a technique common in early modern European fabulists,
as Erica Fudge remarked (2002: 723). In a society that despised animals, the latter
were paradoxically used to teach humans morals and encourage the achievement of
human ideals. The storyteller uses a cat as an ultimate character of transgression,
defying stereotypes and exposing key paradoxes of human-animal relationships, as
outlined below.
First, there is ambiguity of feeling towards the animal protagonist. The cat only
makes eeting appearances in fables, generally as a traitor. Although Perrault explicitly
acknowledged his source in a tale by Giovanni Francesco Straparola, Fortunato and
his cat from Facetious Nights, the cat is not given the same prominence in the original
version of the story, where Fortunato remains the central character. By the end of the
seventeeth century in Europe, cats, often persecuted (see for instance Darnton 2009),
were only beginning to be accepted as likeable pets and not just necessary mousers.

Animal leaders and helpers

81

Edward Topsell, in his History of Foure-Footed Beasts (1607), describes the cat as an
unclean and impure beast that liveth only upon vermin and ravening (cited in
Thomas 1984: 109) and Georges Buon in his Histoire naturelle (1756: 1854) still
condemns male (and female cats) as disloyal, perverse and evil. Perraults disinherited
millers son conrms this view in the rst lines of the story, lamenting that, after he
has eaten up his cat and made a mu from his skin, he will die of hunger. Yet this
despised cat is chosen to be the hero of the story and is both endearing and ruthless.
Second, Perraults cat is undoubtedly anthropomorphic, a standard fable character
in this respect. Eloquent and elegant, he is described as an excellent hunter (his master
lui avait vu faire tant de tours de souplesse, pour prendre des Rats et des Souris,
comme quand il se pendait par les pieds, ou quil se cachait dans la farine pour faire
le mort [Perrault 1889] [had seen him play a great many cunning tricks to catch rats
and mice, such as hanging by his heels, or hiding himself in the meal, and pretending
to be dead ]), but no information on his feline appearance or on any aspect of his
non-human features is given. In the iconography of the tale, the most recurrent
element is his wide-topped pair of boots, symbol of authority and leadership. Like
most tale animals of that time, he also speaks. Yet he is not one of the urban,
aristocratic (Warner 1996: 3) shifting characters trapped in animal form typical of
most early modern tales and does not conform to stereotyped feline images. Madame
dAulnoy,9 for instance, tends to use animals who are human beings temporarily
animalized: [The White Cat, The White Doe, The Story of Mira, The Blue Bird]. By
contrast, at no point does Perraults Puss have the doubts or uncertainties of a shifting
creature. It is his condence which causes readers to question human morals and
rational superiority. Although anthropomorphic, neither does he conform to the
clichd representation of feline domesticity. Cats are often associated with femininity
and its alternative ways of defying mens dominance. The early versions of Le Chat
bott by Straparola and Giambattista Basile both introduce a female cat, encouraging
positive associations between femininity and animality, and implying, as Jack Zipes
has suggested, that the peasant protagonists need the feminine intelligence and
guidance to rise in society (Zipes 2004: 136). Yet Perrault, reluctant to portray
intelligence in a female being as Zipes also demonstrated in another study (Zipes
1991: 25), establishes this cat as the quintessence of virility. In terms of Freudian
family romance (Freud 1909), while the millers son may be equated to the Foundling,
the cat is the Bastard. He can be seen as an allegory of the power of reason and
intelligence used to overcome adversity. He does not communicate universal truths,
his non-human essence is not used to deliver a supra-human discourse, but rather to
demonstrate his superior powers of reasoning. This Master-cat shows that rational
thinking is not the privilege of humanity. The fact that humans would benet from
an awareness of this is a by-product of the story.
Finally, Puss-in-Boots is a dubious moral character. In spite of his masters lack of
care, the cat remains loyal. In all other respects, he is prepared to lie, to threaten and
to kill without mercy in order to pursue his objectives. This lack of morality is not
associated with animal instincts for survival, but implies disregard for human ethics,

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Lucile Desblache

as the two morals provided at the end one praising enterprise at all costs, the other
stating that looks primarily determine the choice of a husband seem to assert:
Morale
Quelque grand que soit lavantage,
De jouir dun tel hritage
Venant nous de pre en ls,
Aux jeunes gens pour lordinaire,
Lindustrie et le savoir-faire
Valent mieux que des biens acquis.

Autre morale
Si le ls dun meunier, avec tant de vitesse,
Gagne le cur dune Princesse,
Et sen fait regarder avec des yeux
mourants
Cest que lhabit, la mine et la jeunesse,
Pour inspirer de la tendresse,
Nen sont pas des moyens toujours
indirents.

(Perrault 1999: 71)

[Moral: There is great advantage in receiving a large inheritance, but diligence and
ingenuity are worth more than wealth acquired from others.
Another moral: If a millers son can win the heart of a princess in so short a time, causing
her to gaze at him with lovelorn eyes, it must be due to his clothes, his appearance, and
his youth. These things do play a role in matters of the heart. (Perrault 1889:147)]

Le Chat bott is contentious in the very areas tales usually promote as human
privileges: morality and rationality, of which human protagonists of this tale seem
entirely devoid.
The prudish Victorians seemed to shy away from this immoral story, but the feline
champion of rational thinking and shaker of moral universals has inspired many
versions in the last hundred years.10 Most of these contemporary interpretations,
particularly in lm are ludicrously anthropomorphized and fail to provide any creative
critique of human attitudes or of relationships between human and non-human
beings. In others, such as Philip Pullmans book for children Puss-in-Boots (2000), a
strongly humanized narrative as well as omnipresent moral markers keep the story
entrenched in a conventional, stiingly anthropocentric tale where no animal is given
any signicance.
Yet some recent interpretations of the tale seize the paradoxical motifs of the
original tale to question further human/non-human boundaries. Angela Carter thus
gives lighthearted twists to this story known to all Westerners, linking her critique of
patriarchal values to one of human arrogance. Her Puss-in-Boots is included in a
volume of ten stories inspired by traditional tales, The Bloody Chamber and Other
Stories (1979). It appeared at a time when tradition as it manifested in high culture
was being challenged. Carters trademark [was] to disrupt profoundly both our
expectations of what should follow what in such tales and our customary moral and
aesthetic response to them (Walker Bynum 1999). She did so by representing and
constructing non-human beings, sometimes shockingly objectied in hallucinatory
visions, as in The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Homan (1972). At the same
time, using the fairy tale genre, she chose a framework which is by essence traditional.
Animal representation in Carters work relies on magic realism. She uses real features

Animal leaders and helpers

83

of non-human creatures within a symbolic context. The unexpected combinations of

realism and symbolism makes the reader question received ideas, even if it does not
always promote a sense of connection between human and non-human worlds. In her
fairy tales, Angela Carter challenges tradition, but it remains there to be challenged
further. Animal representation is part of that traditional framework and still functions
within human culture/non human nature binaries, even if it attempts to deconstruct
them with numerous hybrids and cyborgs. In the case of Puss-in-Boots, Carter
portrays the protagonist as a non-human being who masters rational thinking,
historically and culturally associated with humanity, and particularly with men. Her
feline characters play the role of indices, showing that rational powers do not lie
exclusively with humans, and that non human creatures may use them more wisely.
The hero certainly acts as a creature who points out or discloses something for us
[], helpfully indicates an avenue of thought that will prove productive (Tyler 2006:
18). He thus broadens readers views of established ideas on thinking powers, on men
and on (male and female) cats. Carters non-human protagonists (both a male and a
female cat are introduced) are presented as individual feline creatures with specic
characteristics, gender and personalities; and as agents of contrast pointing out human
deciencies, with regard to rational abilities and moral standing. In this second
respect, the cats invest the text humorously through descriptions of feline bodies and
souls (tonguing my arsehole with the impeccable hygienic integrity of cats [Carter
1996: 172]), cultural denitions (an ambulant rat-trap [177]) and idiom adaptations
(hunting cellar rats for my keep [171]).
Carter gives her Puss-in-Boots operatic tones reminiscent of both Pierre-Augustin
Caron de Beaumarchaiss Le nozze di Figaro (1786) [The Marriage of Figaro] and
Domenico Gaetano Maria Donizettis Don Pasquale (1843), the latter plot based on
a philanderer falling in love with a young beauty married to an old miser. Constantly
chaperoned by an unsympathetic servant, Carters female heroine nevertheless escapes
her prison to join her seductive lover, thanks to the stratagems devised by the two
human characters cats, Puss-in-Boots and Tabs. As in Perraults tale, the feline hero
provides a metaphor for the empowering eect of intelligence and, some would argue,
lack of principle. Carters cat is a very dierent foil to his master than the cat in
Perraults story. He is both double and other, part-human, part-feline. Whereas in
Perraults story, the cat possesses the attributes lacking in his master (wit, condence,
powers of organization and planning, imagination), Carter draws many parallels
between her Puss-in-Boots and his owner. She describes them, in Pusss words, as
boon companions (172), interdependent on each other. She not only draws on the
symbolism of the boots to assert his authority: ne, high, shining leather boots over
the natty white stockings that terminate my hinder legs (170). She also associates the
cat with another human rebel, Figaro. Or rather, lets the cat identify with him. His
(smug) Frenchness (reminiscent of Beaumarchais?) is emphasized at the beginning of
the story, as it is made clear that French is the only language in which you can purr
(170). Another strategy for laying claim to the part-human identity of the cat consists
in making him a rst-person narrator, which further asserts his authority over the
reader and allows distancing from the features of the traditional tale, normally

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Lucile Desblache

narrated in the third person. The language used is anthropomorphic but the spirit
feline. Carters protagonist is described in detail as a cat even if he is a humanized,
partially clothed one: A tom, sirs, a ginger tom and proud of it. Proud of his ne,
white shirt front that dazzles harmoniously against his orange and tangerine
tessellations (oh! what a ery suit of lights have I); proud of his bird-entrancing eye
and more than military whiskers; proud, to a fault, some say, of his ne, musical
voice (170).
The lengthy descriptions of this ne marmalade cat (170) do not only bring an
element of realism into the tale, they are also used to emphasize the animality of the
human protagonists. As Aidan Day notes, Carter associates the animals sexual
presence not only with the male character, but also with the female heroine. She thus
repels negative associations between animality and femininity, attacks androcentrism
and shows that animal energy [is] shared equally between the sexes (Day 1998: 147).
Conventional markers are further blurred with the choice of an animal known to be
independent to unmask the arbitrary and tyrannical rationalism inherited from
Cartesian thought and the Enlightenment, and which Carter fought all her life. Her
Puss embodies the wit and rational values liberated from the oppressive features of
our patriarchal societies. As Perraults feline hero expressed his domestic but rebellious
and disloyal qualities, Carters cat is the twentieth-century, autonomous, aloof,
sensuous pet that shares readers homes. The story ends with a wink at Perraults own
morals: So may all your wives, if you need them, be rich and pretty; and all your
husbands, if you want them, be young and virile; and all your cats as wily, perspicacious
and resourceful as: PUSS-IN-BOOTS (Carter 1996: 185).
Reinterpreting fables which have a long cultural history is daunting and few are as
condent as Carter in taking the challenge of doing so. Traditional guration and
stereotypes can linger in the text and stie ideas regarding interspecies relationships,
particularly in short stories for children. Summarizing the priorities of animal studies
literary scholars, Susan McHugh outlines three imperatives [] with direct
implications for literary critique:
First, conceptualize agency as more than simply a property of the human subject form.
Second, recover the spectrum of agency forms represented in a variety of cultural
traditions albeit subordinated in Western humanism, perhaps most obviously in the
literary history of canon formation. [] [T]hird, connect the representational forms
and material conditions of species life, which entails [] [explaining] the agency of
literary animals, respecting that they cannot nally be enlisted in the tasks set for them
by literary representation. (McHugh 2009: 48990)

Fable and tale animals can get caught in a network of signs and images which, as
the contemporary French writer Jean-Christophe Bailly (2007: 119) writes, can
prevent the expression of their energy. But animal fables and tales are particularly well
placed to recognize animals agency and to voice these imperatives. Most fable and
tale animals, in fact, talk. Their talk is of course translated by human beings. It
emerges not only from their capacity to respond, which has preoccupied so many
philosophers from Plato to Derrida, but more importantly from an ability to listen,

Animal leaders and helpers

85

much less discussed. Perhaps the inability to listen, prevalent in human beings,
determines why so many readers and critics nd literary animal representation
problematic. Ursula Le Guin, more than two decades ago was already reminding us
that: By climbing up into his head and shutting out every voice but his own,
Civilized Man has gone deaf. He cant hear the wolf calling him brother not
Master, but brother. He cant hear the earth calling him child not Father, but son.
He hears only his own words making up the world. He cant hear the animals, they
have nothing to say (Le Guin 1994: 11).
For that reason, some contemporary authors, acknowledging the sadness of our
deafness, favour tales where animals speak to each other, rather than to or with us.
Patrick Chamoiseau is one of them. Inspired by his local Martinique, he writes, for
instance, of the eagle enlightened by the humming bird (Chamoiseau 2009), of
Mabouk, lne-chien (Chamoiseau 1998: 259) [Mabouk, the donkey-dog], a dog
yearning to be a donkey, of the Baiser tonn du chien au chat (99100) [surprise
kiss given to the cat by the dog]. This last story is the shortest in the book, une miette
dhistoire (99) [a crumb of a story]: a cat and a dog nd shelter from the rain in a
dry place. They discover that neither likes rain and, rather than ght with each other,
they start looking at each other. They end up seeing each other fully, which leads to
the surprise kiss given by the dog to the cat, and maybe to more creatures who will
look at each other and start seeing and listening to each other.
Tales such as these not only link us to animals who have shared our past and share
our present. They introduce literary beasts as powerful agents of constructive intraand inter-species relationships. They whisper in our ear imaginative ways of relating
to dierent beings in non hierarchical ways, bringing to us quelque chose de
lhorizontale plnitude du vivant (Chamoiseau 2009: 240) [something from the
horizontal fullness of the living]. Perhaps it is not that there is too much speech in
the world (Coetzee 2003) as Robinson concludes on his return from his desert island;
but that other voices need to be listened to.
Notes
1. The author would like to acknowledge the support of the following projects: The Project
Gender Equality in a Sustainable Culture: Values and Good Practices for Collaborative
Development (FEM2010-15599. Subprograma de Proyectos de Investigacin
Fundamental no orientada) funded by Spanish Ministry for Science and Innovation; and
The Animots project, funded by the Agence Nationale de la Recherche (CNRS Paris).
2. The notion of vision is understood, in Mary Midgleys words, as ways of imagining the
world (Midgley 2006: 2).
3. Minorization here is understood in its common usage, not in the Deleuzian positive
meaning, which refers to linguistic, political and collective ways of bypassing dominant
forms of literature (Deleuze and Guattari 1975).
4. See in particular Lewis (1996), Patterson (1991) and Warner (1994).
5. Unless otherwise indicated, translations are my own.
6. Discussing this opposition between literature and science, Midgley develops the argument
that the cognitive role of poetry (Midgley 2006: 50) is essential to the growth of science.
7. Although a small proportion of the population was literate in Europe until the ninetieth
century. Denise Escarpit (1985) reminds us that in France, in 1762, 47 per cent of men
and 27 per cent of women could read.

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Lucile Desblache

8. Twentieth-century allegorical fables tend to reduce animals to motifs expressing human

existential or social malaise, from Natsume Soseki to Yann Martell, George Orwell or
Mikhail Bulgakov to Marie Darrieussecq. Franz Kafkas animals are an exception in
expressing this malaise while moving across the boundaries of species and language,
connecting the human and non-human worlds in the process.
9. She is the writer who places most beasts at the centre of her stories (and is unusual in that
respect).
10. For a history of the reception and adaption of Puss-in-Boots in France and in England,
see Escarpit (1985). Recent interpretations include David Garnett s novel Master Cat
(1974), James Finn Garners Politically Correct Bedtime Stories (1995) (short stories
interpreted in the new light of political correctness), Alan Armstrongs Whittington
(2005), based on Dick Whittington, and Mercedes Lackey Reserved for the Cat (2007)
(novel on new interpretations of human/feline corruptions). Puss-in-Boots is also one
of the major characters of the Shrek lms. A new French lm was released in 2009, La
Vritable histoire du chat bott, produced by Pascal Hrold, Jrme Deschamps and Macha
Makeie. A major animation lm by Steven Spielberg is planned for 2012.

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Lucile Desblache

Filmography
Hrold, Pascal, Jrme Deschamps and Macha Makeie (producers) (2009) La Vritable
histoire du chat bott.
Andrew Adamson, Vicky Jenson (dirs.) (2001) Shrek.

COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

Author: Desblache, Lucile

Title: Animal leaders and helpers: from the classical tales of Charles Perrault to the
postmodern fables of Angela Carter and Patrick Chamoiseau¹
Source: J Romance Stud 11 no2 Summ 2011 p. 75-88
ISSN: 1473-3536
DOI:10.3167/jrs.2011.110205
Publisher: Berghahn Books
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