Montaigne's Apology is a sprawling examination of
various Christian theological positions, relentlessly critical
of the vanity of human presumption and animated throughout by
skepticism about the efficacy of human reason. In one highly
readable section this skepticism takes the form of comparing
the mental powers of human beings to those of animals. Early
in that section Montaigne writes of man, "How does he know, by
the force of his intelligence, the secret internal stirrings
of animals? By what comparison between them and us
does he infer the stupidity that he attributes to them? /
When I play with my cat, who knows if I am not a pastime to
her more than she is to me?" (trans. Donald Frame).
When Joyce substituted "understand what we say" for "play
with," he was borrowing from another passage a few sentences
later in the Apology: "This defect that
hinders communication between them and us, why is it not
just as much ours as theirs? It is a matter of guesswork
whose fault it is that we do not understand one another; for
we do not understand them any more than they do us."
Here and elsewhere in the essay Montaigne argues that animals
understand the intentions of other animals, albeit
imperfectly, through various kinds of signals, often across
species boundaries. Horses can tell when a dog's bark
expresses aggression toward them; hearing another kind of
bark, they are not alarmed. Birds utter different cries for
different situations and their meaning is understood, often by
other species. Nor are sounds needed to signify: countless
physical gestures can communicate intentions, in animals as in
humans.
In addition to the many varieties of language, and the many
structures, both social and architectural, that animals build,
Montaigne argues that their behaviors show clear evidence of
intellectual processes, to any observer who is not stubbornly
determined to dismiss them as unconscious products of natural
instinct. The fox that decides where to cross a frozen river
by putting its ear to the ice to listen for rushing water; the
dog that follows its master to three branching paths and,
after finding no scent on two of them, goes charging up the
third without sniffing; the thirsty bird that drops stones
into a container until the water at the bottom rises to the
top: in these and dozens of other examples Montaigne infers
that the animal is thinking, just as everyone would infer that
a human being who behaved similarly was thinking. He also
observes evidence of compassion, fidelity, cooperation,
gratitude, shame, anger, trickery, playacting, and a host of
other supposedly human emotions, virtues, and powers.
Bloom converses with his cat, and he attributes not only
understanding but also humanlike emotions to her:
"vindictive," "cruel." The narrative hovering near his
consciousness does the same thing: "shameclosing eyes,"
"mewing plaintively," "dark eyeslits narrowing with greed."
Later in Calypso the transference is reversed: "The
ferreteyed porkbutcher," "foxeyes," "They used to believe you
could be changed into an animal." To some extent Bloom is
undoubtedly anthropomorphizing his cat, and the
transformations of people into animals are more fanciful than
declarative. But all these meditations on the commonalities
between human beings and animals introduce the notion that the
different species exist on a biological and psychological
continuum.
In previous chapters Stephen has imagined himself as a "dogsbody" and viewed a dog on
the beach in strikingly human terms. Bloom's interest in
animals breeds an interest in vegetarianism, and also a sense
of compassion: he feeds not only his cat but also gulls
hovering over the Liffey and a dog roaming the streets of
Nighttown, and he once took a homeless dog into his household.
He would probably agree with Montaigne that "those who keep
animals should be said rather to serve them than to be served
by them."
Ulysses in general might be said to exemplify
Montaigne's statement that "We are neither above nor below the
rest." Humanity is part of an interconnected web of living
things, and indeed things in general. The novel adumbrates a
post-humanist perspective that might properly be called
ecological.
