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September 8, 2002
SYNDICATED: Putting all heaven in a rage
The zoological garden is a European phenomenon — as well as a European invention and export. Across the continent about 150 million visitors decide to “go to the zoo” each year. And the history of that all-too-concrete metaphor of dominion is now an important part of the history of leisure. The institution’s origins among the princely menageries of the ancient regime, its evolution in the nineteenth century as one of the great bourgeois and civic institutions, its twentieth-century guilt-ridden lurch towards the leisure park: all show that this is fun of a serious — and profitable — kind.
The stark elegance of Eric Baratay, and Elisabeth Hardouin-Fugier’s argument (translated from the original French edition) pulls no punches. Illustrations punctuate the text with an appropriate, and sometimes saddening, beauty. What emerges is a history of the craze for the other — which turned it into a commodity to be codified in the table of human values.
To find in animals a source of both delight and terror, to enjoy alternately the illusion of rapprochement and the King Kong thrill of the savage: these may be instincts as old as conscious life itself. David Hancocks reminds us, in his more diffuse work, of the short ancestral shadow. Imagine, he says, the length of your arm as the span of time since life began on earth. A delicate trim of the middle fingernail would remove all traces of human existence. Humility is here a virtue glimpsed in dizzying perspective.
The “great chain of being” — that Renaissance cliche — proposed a less alienating view. Only a little below the angels stood humanity, divinely guaranteed its dominion over both earth and its non-human inhabitants. It was a picture that was confirmed by the age of the discoveries — and those successes by gunpowder and colonial plot created a new cage for the old relationship between human and animal.
On the social road away from aristocratic spectacle to the bourgeois promenade, Baratay and Hardouin-Fugier — as on so much else — are persuasive. The Jacobins were annoyed by the aristocratic festivity of the menagerie. A stud farm would be more practical. So started the nineteenth-century lunacy of acclimatization — that doomed attempt at domesticating all animals.
But if this kind of display was more rational and ordered, its purpose was no less exploitative. Knowledge at the zoo is never an innocent fruit. Across Europe the zoo was a must-have institution for the new professional elites as city competed with city for prestige.
Entertainment conquered research pretensions. What mattered was pulling in the crowds. In the process it became popular to classify animals into good and bad.
Some sensitivities were touched. Darwin doubted — wrongly — the ability of captive animals to reproduce. Out of sheer boredom some do little else. Flaubert found the “continual oscillation of the caged” a pitiful sight. But the idea of the animal as an illustrative parable was intellectually and politically too useful to be questioned. For it showed that nature, like people, could be controlled.
The modern zoo is post-colonial in its guilty strategies — in its free-range desire to keep the old show on the road but in the park. Hancocks sees the zoo’s salvation as a post-religious entrance into a plural world of values. There seems no end to the ability of humans to impose their hegemonic values on the alien. Blake put it best. The caged birds he saw were an aristocratic delight. Later they would become an artisan pleasure. But every keeper of a cage still “puts all heaven in a rage”.
Zoo: a history of zoological gardens in the West
By Eric Baratay & Elisabeth Harduin-Fugier
Reaktion Books
ISBN 1861891113
400pp. £28
A different nature: the paradoxical world of zoos and their uncertain future
By David Hancocks
University of California Press
ISBN 0520218795
296pp. £24.95
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