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‘Vulpis the fox gets his name from
the person who winds wool (volupis) – for he is a creature with circuitous pug
marks [that’s footprints to you and I] who never runs straight but goes on his
way with tortuous windings.
He is a fraudulent and ingenious animal. When
he is hungry and nothing turns up for him to devour, he rolls himself in red
mud so that he looks as if he were stained with blood. Then he throws himself
on the ground and holds his breath, so that he positively does not seem to
breathe. The birds, seeing that he is not breathing, and that he looks as if he
were covered in blood with his tongue hanging out, think he is dead and come
down to sit on him. Well, thus he grabs them and gobbles them up.
The Devil has the nature of this
same.’ – From the Cambridge University Library Bestiary.
So
today, we’re going to look at foxes. Here “he” is, in a standard pose adapted
from the granddaddy of all bestiary texts, The Physiologus, this one
taken from our own Cambridge University Library Bestiary. It’s special, isn’t
it?
The fox had – still has – a complex
symbolic life and imaginative legacy. For the purpose of most European bestiary
texts, the fox is allegorised as the Devil, who pretends to be dead to those
not fully committed to Christ, revealing his true nature only when the ensnared
sinner is past all help. So far, so simple.
But, if the fox is aligned with –
or a figure for – the devil, how are we to interpret medieval literature’s most
famous vulpine anti-hero: Reynard the (heavily anthropomorphised) Fox? For
those not familiar with Reynard, he originated in France, and went on to become
a staple of the allegorical folk tale across Europe from around the 12th
Century all the way up to the early modern period. The most well-known version
of these tales is the Romance of Reynard the Fox, and it’s quite
something. While on the surface these stories are bawdy or comic adventures,
they are also marked by a satirical tone, and perhaps an oblique critique of
medieval society’s most cherished institutions, particularly within later
versions of the tales, where Reynard is used to take pot-shots at the
aristocracy and to criticise both political and ecclesiastical disorder or
corruption. Although Reynard is presented as sly, amoral, cowardly, and
self-seeking, he is also a sympathetic character, whose cunning is a necessity
for survival. He represents a triumph over craft and mental agility over the
brute strength typically personified by Isengrim, the greedy and dull-witted
wolf, and Reynard’s arch nemesis.
Reynard, then, might be seen as a
kind of peasant hero, and I think our first useful line of enquiry might be
something along the lines of why make this trickster hero a fox to begin with? From
there our questions snowball: is Reynard’s ability to broach criticism of the
social order connected to his status as a reviled outsider? By voicing dissent
through this morally dubious instrument, does the author conceal their own
intent and sympathies, addressing, so to speak, two audiences at once? Are the
poor themselves considered to be animal-like? To what extent are they
encouraged to identify with this foxy figure and his feral hustle?
Some things to think about: while
the fox looks weak and small, compared with the larger wolf, his intelligence
and daring have ensured his survival. This is as true in real-life as it is in
fiction. It was only after the wolf was exterminated from most of Europe that a
concerted effort began to destroy the fox. The wolf was effectively obliterated
from Europe not only because it was hunted – persecuted – out of existence, but
because its habitat was destroyed, because it could not adapt to survive in the
new landscapes inaugurated by human encroachment. Foxes on the other hand are
superbly flexible synanthropic and commensual animals. Something about
Reynard’s anthropomorphic fox-human hybrid seems to signal this closeness.
We spoke before about a synanthropic species being one whose adaptation and development has been driven by the pressure of close cohabitation with humans. Synanthropes play environments and logics hostile to their very existence back against themselves in order to thrive. Reynard as feral survivalist? Let’s have a look at some foxy theory, starting with Moten and Harney, and their blistering ‘The University and the Undercommons: Seven Theses’ (2004) which later became part of the book The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (2013).
The Only Possible
Relationship to the University Today Is a Criminal One
“To the university I’ll
steal, and there I’ll steal,” to borrow from Pistol at the end of Henry V, as
he would surely borrow from us. This is the only possible relationship to the
American university today. This may be true of universities everywhere. It may
have to be true of the university in general. But certainly, this much is true
in the United States: it cannot be denied that the university is a place of
refuge, and it cannot be accepted that the university is a place of
enlightenment. In the face of these conditions one can only sneak into the
university and steal what one can. To abuse its hospitality, to spite its
mission, to join its refugee colony, its gypsy encampment, to be in but not
of—this is the path of the subversive intellectual in the modern university.
[…]
But for the subversive
intellectual, all of this goes on upstairs, in polite company, among the
rational men. After all, the subversive intellectual came under false
pretenses, with bad documents, out of love. Her labor is as necessary as it is
unwelcome. The university needs what she bears but cannot bear what she brings.
And on top of all that, she disappears. She disappears into the underground,
the downlow lowdown maroon community of the university, into the Undercommons
of Enlightenment, where the work gets done, where the work gets subverted,
where the revolution is still black, still strong.
file:///C:/Users/onlye/Downloads/the%20university%20and%20the%20undercommons.pdf
And while we're chewing on that, I also offer this, from Valerie Solanas' S.C.U.M Manifesto (1967):
SCUM will keep on
destroying, looting, fucking-up and killing until the money-work system no
longer exists […] until enough women cooperate with SCUM to make violence
unnecessary to achieve these goals, that is, until enough women either unwork
or leave work, start looting, leave men, and refuse to obey all laws
inappropriate to a truly civilised society.
https://editions-ismael.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/1968-Valerie-Solanas-S.C.U.M.-Manifesto.pdf
We'll certainly be spending more time time with Valerie, but for now, those interested in her life before and beyond the shooting of Andy Warhol, could do worse than to read the biography by Breanne Fahs (The Feminist Press, 2014), and here's a fab essay to get you started:
http://www.breannefahs.com/uploads/1/0/6/7/10679051/2008_feminist_studies_fahs.pdf
Back to Reynard: I’d argue that the above are feral and foxy manoeuvres: circuitous and winding paths to social sabotage, deviancy, sedition. This is feral, squatting sanctioned social structures with her rangy and transgressive strut.
Feral is like Reynard, a kind of
posterchild for the margins, a bandit, a rebel, folk hero, anti-hero, upsetter,
citizen of the ‘undercommons’. This is also a mode of thinking and writing,
what Halberstam calls ‘low theory’, a model of knowledge eccentrically
assembled; opportunistic, omnivorous, refusing to confirm – to conform to – the
stale hierarchies of knowing that maintain the status and the functioning of
‘high theory’. Feral is insufficiently theorised. Has strange rigour. Is
not professional. Not productive. But a bug in the system of ‘reduction and
demand’. Feral will indeed ‘sneak into the university and steal’ what she can.
Feral as clarion for the spited, the rejected. Feral is a manifesto. A refusal
of the binary prescription upon which the entire neoliberal project is founded:
where worthy knowledge and culture are extracted, and the dross is discarded as
criminality and waste. Feral lives and thrives amid the discards. On the dung
heap. In the skip, rummaging among the refuse. Feral as scummy. that is, feral
as SCUM, fighting on two fronts: to thrive within a world that does not want
her to exist; playing the logics and structures of that world against itself in
an act of synanthropic culture-jamming. Her very persistence in this world
functions as a form of 'unwork' or fuck-up. When feral writes it is with an avid
determination to use every available resource. Feral is the pressured
resourcefulness required of those on the margins, it is cobbling and borrowing,
scavenging and stealing. Feral is janky adaptation. Feral is make do and mend.
Feral is shoddy substance loved into function, can be a mode of research, a way
of doing literature, a queer methodology.
Don’t take my word for it. The
medieval scholar Jean Scheidegger studies what she calls ‘renardie’ (foxiness),
the verbal art reflected in The Romance of Reynard the Fox, which reverses
power relationships by flipping assumptions about relative degrees of agency
and dynamism, demonstrating simultaneously the ‘lawlessness of writing and its
ability to set its own laws’.
To what extent is a feral existence, or a feral scholarship, possible within the space of the university? When thinking about what we can 'steal' for others, do we sometimes lose sight of what is stolen from us? How are the feral absorbed, interpreted and recuperated by the very system they set out to undermine? How are the feral spent and erased? What are the (wilful/ unconscious) failures of recognition that simultaneously assimilate and exclude both feral subjects and feral methodologies. I suggest this essay by Jodie Kim from Wasafiri might provide food for thought:
file:///C:/Users/onlye/Downloads/02690055%202021%201918457.pdf
I also wanted to go ahead and share this from a forthcoming thing of mine. it's not very heartening, but it does speak to some of those above issues:
sparks fly at the edge. this is the outcast’s consolation. and yet, even as they keep you at arm’s length, they fold the fruits of that frustrated industry back into their dully functioning centre; use it to refresh and sustain themselves. it is a very particular species of theft, not usually the appropriation of techniques or themes, but the cynical misdirection of effort and energy: you are the allegorical catfish in the cod tank. you keep them just agile and alert enough to stay alive. while the uniquely pressured position of the feraltern subject drives her relentless innovation, rarely will she receive recognition or reward for the same. rather, her work will be mediated, interpreted, and ultimately metabolised into myriad crowd-pleasing imitations. this work will come to overwrite and replace her difficult original, so much so that it will, after a time, define what it means to make art in the manner of x, a category from which our feraltern artist-subject is now effectively excluded. it is not, as has so often been suggested, imitation as the sincerest form of value-neutral flattery. rather, it is a process of assimilation, replication and replacement, a process that is only made possible through the dynamics of hierarchy and suppression that operate between the centre and the edge. elvis presly was not flattering big mama thornton when he stole and warped the alabama singer’s hymn to black female empowerment (‘hound dog’). his very success, his very visibility as an exceptional white, male artist, is predicated on her relative obscurity, on forcing her back to the margins.
+
music is the most easily observable example of this trend because of its broad populist appeal, but it happens across all of art and literature. in poetry, the problem is compounded by the fact that feraltern art and its pod-poem replacements may appear on the page as indistinguishable to the naked eye. what is the difference, for example, between a piece of work in which a major (hegemonic) language like english is deterritorialized by inserting into it words, phrases, and structures from a subaltern or marginalised language, and a piece of work in which the language of the feraltern other is pillaged to spice and nourish that same hegemonic language? or, to put it another way: how do you spot a fake? especially if it’s a good fake? especially if the priest-class of critics responsible for adjudicating upon a work, generating the discourse surrounding it, and interpreting it to its readership have a vested interest in perpetuating the fraud?
+
fun fact: your agent (urgh) does not love you. your publisher does not love you. their ideal artist is a tragic death (preferably suicide) with an insanely prolific body of work behind them (and to which they have surrendered the rights). these fucks do not want your living body, but its functional ghost, the faked punk of your beautiful ruin. you live in a world and a publishing culture where even your death – especially your death – can be recruited as a unique selling point. people love a dead iconoclast. and of course, there is a date-stamp on their iconoclasm, they may safely indulge its legend, separate from the active political forms of its expression: che guevara, sid vicious, sylvia plath, sean bonney. it looks like zeitgeist. it is, in fact, nostalgia.
+
we can be terribly naïve: we like to think that those who profess to care about the work will naturally be invested in the well-being of the body and brain that produced it. nine times out of ten that isn’t the case. when was the last time you were referred to as “a machine”? a phrase that emerges disguised as a compliment, but that betrays the extent to which others are willing to deny you your personhood. of course, you are prolific, but invisiblised inside “prolific” is the sweat, the effort, the unequal labour, the endless shitwork. “prolific” functions as a refusal of the anxiety and disparity that drives being so. if the work is both a psychological compulsion and a practical necessity, then both of these things are intimately tied to your experiences as classed, gendered, and racialised subjects; to the times you have been called lazy or incapable, told that your life only has value if instrumentalised in the service of something greater than your lowly self. “prolific” disappears the hardwired imperative to be incessantly producing, from having to produce in order to maintain a presence, to meaningfully “compete”. to be shy, retiring, slow and considered, all of these luxuries you cannot afford. the feraltern subject will simply not get away with farting out one wafer thin book every three years or so and expecting to have it feted. “prolific” excites jealous comment or sotto voce whispers on the subject of obnoxious self-promotion from the arbiters of a social etiquette that disproportionately favours the privileged. you will be told that you are “lucky” to be “able” to produce so much by those who miss that terrible, imperative summons. and from those who are supported and maintained in the creation of their art. and yes, of course there is a plus side: persistent innovation, constant surprise, ruptures that become pathways opening up all over the shop within feral practice. but it also means that we over-extend to the point of exhaustion, that we live with a constant gnawing dread, an endless obligation to do. where sparks fly, burn-out is inevitable, but of course, they want it that way, don’t they?
Sorry, not very cheerful. But moving swiftly on, let's ask ourselves can writing really be a feral act?
And what can poetry borrow back from foxiness? Perhaps in its dynamism, it’s
tricksterism, its commitment to ludic forms, a reversal of situations and
hierarchies through sleights both physical and verbal. Perhaps in
shape-shifting hybridity, in its sense of movement and metamorphosis. Perhaps in its fraught existence inside of a hegemonic or major language? We're going to come back to this a little further down the road, but for now, as a place to start, do enjoy as much as you think you can stand of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's Kafka, Towards a Minor Literature (1986):
And because that's a bit intense, here's a good summary of the key points:
file:///C:/Users/onlye/Downloads/minor-literature.pdf
I’m
including a link to some fox books I think you might like to check out as well,
along with the PDFs where I have those, but part of the “homework” for next
term might be looking for more of these, as well as writing either or both:
a) Your own animal allegorical tale, featuring a feral anti-hero/ A feral manifesto of your own.
https://vervepoetrypress.com/product/geraldine-clarkson-crucifox/?v=79cba1185463
https://poetryschool.com/assets/uploads/2021/10/Fox-Haunts-Penn-Kemp.pdf
The second link is for a PDF of
‘Fox Haunts’ (2018) by Penn Kemp, and I think it’s relevant to how we might
invite foxiness into our work because multiple foxes streak through, across and
around this work, as ‘both metaphor lurking behind conscious mind and a living
creature reclaiming, rewilding our suburbs.’ “Rewilding” is an interesting
choice of word. For a kick-off note that active, transitive verb, so different
from the conventional memorialising aims and ethics of poetry. Rewilding
prioritizes untamed ecological processes in terms of ecological conservation.
Rewilding efforts are aimed at restoring and protecting both natural processes
and wilderness areas. Unlike environmental conservation (which largely seeks to
preserve a singular state of nature through top-down management) rewilding
projects recognize that there is no a priori state: the land is always in the
process of becoming – fluctuating and historical. When humans aren’t centre
stage, writes environmental geographer Jamie Lorimer, ‘the expertise of animals
is valued, and organisms and landscapes are given more scope to determine their
own futures.’ So, it is a form of ecological restoration predicated on minimal
human intervention. This concept has its political analogue in the green
anarchist idea of returning to an 'undomesticated' or 'natural' state; it
posits a return to nomadic or hunter-gatherer life-ways and forms of social organisation
based on spontaneous and fluid cooperation as opposed to stratification and
hierarchy. It also emphasises the development of the senses, and the fostering
of deep personal relationships with non-human species and the environment.
That’s a lot to ask of a fox,
right? So how does Kemp approach this? There are many types of foxes haunting
her work: they appear as cultural symbols, folkloric tricksters, as heroes, and
villains, but also ass living creature with a life totally separate from
humans, a singular being apart from all that we project onto it. One of Kemp's
animating ideas or questions is whether we can respect the Other without
subduing or reducing it into something we can relate to; whether we are able to
honour the fox as something fundamentally different from ourselves. Kemp writes
of the fox. 'You are no metonymy for the real.' And her poetic speakers
traverse back and forth between fox as autonomous entity and fox as metaphor.
In the third section of the book, 'Little Literary Foxes,' poetry itself is
imagined as fox-like, preforming a really satisfying inversion of the way in
which nature is historically used by literature: 'May you be translated. And
remain / entirely your own,' the speaker says to the fox. Which I think is a
hope we might all have for our animal others.
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