“Call of the Wild” — In Defense of Anthropomorphism
This summer, I went back and reread Jack London’s “Call of the Wild” and “White Fang” for the first time since high school as a running project of going back and reading books assigned to me growing up that, looking back, I knew I couldn’t have appreciated that way that I would now. This list has brought me back to gems like Beowulf, Grapes of Wrath, All Quiet on the Western Front, and so on and so forth, but going through these two Jack London novels has probably been the most interesting experience for me so far as a scholar of environmental philosophy and the humanities.
As an adult and academic concerned with environmental matters, I’ve become deeply invested in thought systems such as transcendentalism, animism, vitalism, and any other “-ism” centered around developing a deeper and more meaningful kinship with our environment, or the “non-living” world as it has been regarded in recent centuries. By the end of “Call of the Wild”, I was riveted by how Jack London wrote such an emotionally gripping novel almost purely from the perspective of a dog in a way that also raises important questions about the sled-dog trade of the 1800s that are so often overlooked in favor of less troublesome tales such as Balto. To me, writing a story like this, especially one that has remained a staple among other American classics, requires a pretty profound level of animist ideology, conscious or not.
Once I finished the book, I did what I always do and headed over to the internet to catch up on “the discourse” to see where this book stands in contemporary reception. Suffice it to say, I was rather shocked to see that it was commonplace for people to write off this book under accusations of “anthropomorphism” as if the term was inherently detrimental or indicative of poor writing. Don’t get me wrong, discussions of anthropomorphism and their uses in modern day environmental philosophy are well-worn in academic spaces, but I had no idea the level to which a disgust for the term had infiltrated the more colloquial corners of Goodreads and Reddit.
In short, anthropomorphism is the practice of applying distinctly human attributes to non-human entities, and criticisms of anthropomorphism have been thrown at some of the most prolific biologists and environmental philosophers for centuries, from Darwin to Thoreau. In an interview with the Guardian on the dangers of anthropomorphizing in social media, psychologist Patricia Ganea writes, “Anthropomorphism can lead to an inaccurate understanding of biological processes in the natural world,” she said. “It can also lead to inappropriate behaviors towards wild animals, such as trying to adopt a wild animal as a ‘pet’ or misinterpreting the actions of a wild animal.”
As someone who frequents national parks in Wyoming and Colorado and has seen tourists who see elk for the first time in person after years of fawning over them on Instagram and bring their toddlers way too close using “it’s cute” or “they just eat grass” as an excuse, I can say with certainty that this is a valid concern. What’s important to note, however, is that there is no one perspective when it comes to anthropomorphism, and that one should always look at how the -ism is being utilized, rather than stopping at the -ism itself. If using “it’s vegetarian” as an excuse to bring your toddler within 25 yards of a bull moose is an example of irresponsible anthropomorphism, then “Call of the Wild,” I argue, is a potential candidate for exemplifying a responsible and productive case of this mode of relating to the more-than-human world. Using London’s flavor of anthropomorphism, I believe it can lead us away from thinking about the Disney-flavored, tree-hugging variety of anthropomorphism that operates at the expense of understanding the way the non-human entities live and experience the world, but rather as a means to enhance the way we come to such understandings of and with the beyond-human realm.
One of the brightest and most inspiring mentors I’ve had in my many years of academia was Dr. Jane Bennett, environmental philosopher and political theorist currently teaching at Johns Hopkins University. Dr. Bennett has been making waves in the political theory space for the last 30 years with books such as Enchantment of Modern Life, Influx and Efflux: Writing up with Walt Whitman, and my personal favorite, Vibrant Matter. Of all the radical aspects of Bennett’s work, one of the most salacious at the onset of her career was the fact that she dared to take transcendentalists seriously as philosophers (gasp!), with Thoreau of course being her (and my) greatest muse. In both my seminar with Jane and in Vibrant Matter, she notes the frequent anthropomorphism Thoreau conducts of the wildlife around him, most notably the infamous loon in Chapter 12 of Walden. An example:
“At length having come up fifty rods off, he uttered one of those prolonged howls, as if calling on the god of loons to aid him, and immediately there came a wind from the east and rippled the surface, and filled the whole air with misty rain, and I was impressed as if it were the prayer of the loon answered, and his god was angry with me; and so I left him disappearing far away on the tumultuous surface.”
Throughout this chapter, Thoreau writes a rather humorous account of his interactions with this loon, and uses many human characteristics to describe the loon’s behavior to the end of relating to the bird and cultivating positive experiences between the two. Or, at the very least, positive for nurturing a deeper appreciation for the animal in Thoreau’s understanding of Walden Pond. Between the mention of the loon praying to a loon god, to his responding to the wind and rain itself, decided anti-anthropomorphists may be clutching their pearls by this point. However, in Vibrant Matter, Bennett explains how this kind of relating to the more-than-human loon may actually be crucial to cultivating understanding between humans and the creatures we meet in our own lives:
“[Anthropomorphism] can catalyze a sensibility that finds a world of ontologically distinct beings which together form confederations … [and] can uncover a whole world of resonances and resemblances more effectively than an organization of hierarchical structures.”
This, in fact, is how oral folk traditions all over the world have relied on anthropomorphist stories all along — to illustrate the beings one will experience in their own lives, with different animals representing different mythic archetypes, and organizing these creatures not through hierarchy, but as a confederation of living things which occupy and experience the same space as a community of beings. This is how Thoreau writes of the loon and other animals in his stories, and it’s how London writes of Buck and his pack. Buck, Spitz, Dave, and all of the other dogs written into London’s story are written as a confederation of living beings experience the ecosystem of a Yukon sled trail in their own ways, and that, I think, is the key to how anthropomorphism is used to the benefit, rather than the detriment to the story.
The end goal here is in fact in this concept of a confederation. For, in Bennett’s work, her main purpose with considering the more-than-human as politically valid actants is to allow them entry as part of our “politic” in a meaningful way — to consider them as a part of the political community we vote and advocate for. If London were to have eschewed anthropomorphism, it would have been a nameless group of sled dogs occupying the narrative space of the Yukon tundra, and if Thoreau had eschewed anthropomorphism, the loon would perhaps only have been mentioned in passing — hardly an effective way to relate to the characters, and even more importantly, hardly a way to cultivate the sympathy and emotional investment that real sled dogs, real wolves of the American west, or real bird populations, and so many more confederations deserve — neigh, need — in our political, social, and economic spheres.
In the end, Anthropomorphism is a mode of relating to the other-than-human. It is the key to enabling genuine emotional connection, resonance, and sympathy between the human and more-than-human in a time when we need it the most. Rather than critiquing anthropomorphism as a mode of relating to the world around us, it is the premise and the nature of those relationships which should be held under scrutiny, for that is where the problems of anthropomorphism truly begin to manifest.
