I also use the word “romance,” however, in relation to my own beloved childhood stories. While some of these stories revisit the masculine fascination with naturalism and primitivism (itself a form of romance), others offer an enticing invitation to visit a benign paradisal world where dogs and humans communicate intuitively, where dogs are always noble and self-sacrificing and humans are willing to be tutored by the exemplary canine. These fictions are part of the cultural fabric that informs this collection, and they indeed have shaped our cultural values and sensibilities, even if we are only now discovering the dimensions of these fictional influences. Jennifer Mason argues convincingly that the dominant thread of American cultural criticism has favored the theme of wilderness as a critical formative factor in American culture and society. This focus, long the generative fence between male/female and nature/culture, is an artificial barrier to a richer understanding of the meaning of America. What is missing from the “manly male fleeing into the wilderness” trope? It is the presence of domesticated animals among us—and the meanings they carry. In Mason’s words, “domesticated animals have remained a critical blind spot in American studies, even in the work of those most committed to rejecting the dichotomized view of nature and culture, in which humans exist ‘outside’ of nature and contact between human and nonhuman renders the nonhuman ‘unnatural.’”21 Mason takes careful measure of some signal fictions and fiction writers in making her case, and work like this is an important ally in my consideration of photographs as another piece of evidence about the cultural importance of animals, dogs in particular.
In her study of modernist to contemporary fiction, Susan McHugh says that “as fictions record the formation of new and uniquely mixed human-animal relationships in this period, they also reconfigure social potentials for novels and eventually visual narrative forms.”22 Here, McHugh claims the entire expanse of cultural production as the legitimate territory of animal studies, flagging the fact that fictions about animals get translated into film, television, and digital media. Words do not supersede pictures; they become pictures. Although film, television, and digital media are beyond the scope of my book, the implicit heritage from photography and stories to moving pictures is clear, and so I call on a range of literature from the early twentieth century to the current twenty-first century. I have additional motives for including some reference to contemporary fiction, and they have to do with the substance of that fiction. I include fictional works about dogs and purportedly by dogs because so many of them offer a complex affirmation of the persistence of our Edenic longings, which have generated so much of our great dog literature. In The Dogs of Babel, by Carolyn Parkhurst, grieving husband Paul Ransome decides that he will teach his dog, Lorelei, to talk. His wife, Lexy, has died by falling, or jumping, from the apple tree in the backyard. Paul decides that the dog must have seen the tragic event, and he becomes convinced that if only Lorelei could speak, she could help him understand Lexy’s Edenic plunge earthward. At once a mystery and a meditation on what can be communicated wordlessly, The Dogs of Babel can take for granted that readers will accept the idea that an otherwise rational man might expect the dog to help him in his grieving because, in fact, we imbue our dogs with just such mysterious capacity. Invoking the mythological resonances of the dog’s name, Paul explains his project this way: “I sing of an ordinary man who wanted to know things no human being could tell him.” Picturing Dogs, Seeing Ourselves originates from the same conviction—that the dog can tell us something. In Paul Ransome’s words, “dogs are witnesses. They are allowed access to our most private moments. They are there when we think we are alone. Think of what they could tell us. They sit on the laps of presidents. They see acts of love and violence, quarrels and feuds, and the secret play of children. If they could tell us everything they have seen, all of the gaps of our lives would stitch themselves together.”23
VISUAL STUDIES
I couple my collection of antique photographs of people and their dogs with literature, where appropriate, in order to better understand some of the gaps in our public testimonies. But the photographs are always the starting point and the narrative stepping-stones. The field of visual studies articulates the understanding that images are not merely illustrations of cultural moments best represented by words but are themselves of cultural moment. In Visual Genders, Visual Histories, Patricia Hayes discusses visual studies as a new field. Quoting Christopher Pinney, she makes a case for acknowledging and studying the power of the visual to shape cultural history. Suppose that we “envisage history as in part determined by struggles occurring at the level of the visual.” And what if pictures are “able to narrate to us a different story, one told, in part, on their own terms”? What she is talking about, Hayes specifies, “is not so much a history of the visual, but a history made by visuals.”24
In the same spirit, I have tried to let the pictures suggest the story, rather than simply using them as illustrations for a story already determined by other sources. Moreover, while I want to give literature its due, I think that the communicative skills of dogs themselves prompt our interest in a more skillful visual comprehension. Alexandra Horowitz comments that she treasures dogs because they don’t use language. “There is no awkwardness in a shared silent moment with a dog: a gaze from the dog on the other side of the room; lying sleepily alongside each other. It is when language stops that we connect most fully.”25 That most animals don’t have language in the way in which we understand the term does not mean that they can’t and don’t communicate. It just means that we haven’t figured it out. But one effect of animal studies, on the applied side of things, is the awareness that better communication with animals is possible, whether we are talking about the most social of critters—dogs—or the mysteries of horses, cows, or pigs. We are learning more about visual cues in language and the subtleties of those cues. Temple Grandin says that animals see in pictures, much as autistic people do. So taking pictures seriously as evidence, inspiration, and narrative art could be a good step toward understanding what a more visually, as opposed to linguistically, oriented intelligence can discover.
I discuss my “visuals-first” approach to Picturing Dogs in chapter 1, where I introduce the physical formats that characterize the photo collection and offer some examples of how the images might be construed. More important, this chapter also broaches the question of a “visual rhetoric” created by juxtaposing seemingly unrelated images and weaving them back into their cultural context. “Rhetoric” is the ancient art of persuasion, a form of communication intended to sway an audience through eloquence, reason, or emotion. By “visual rhetoric” I simply mean the persuasive power of the visual and, in the case of the materials here, the communicative power of groups of thematically related images.
John Berger points out that, by itself, a photograph cannot lie, but “by the same token, it cannot tell the truth; or rather, the truth it does tell, the truth it can by itself defend, is a limited one.”26 That is, without the story that could accompany an image, all photographs are ambiguous, “except those whose personal relation to the event is such that their own lives supply the missing continuity.” Photographs without narrative, that is, photographs that have been disconnected from their context, are permanently ambiguous unless we construct a narrative pathway. The discontinuity of the images I have gathered here, for example, “by preserving an instantaneous set of appearances, allows us to read across them and find a synchronic coherence. A coherence which, instead of narrating, instigates ideas.”27 It is those prompted ideas that constitute the “half-language” of the visual rhetoric of photographs. Julia Hirsch says something similar in commenting that “family photography does not preserve the shadows of our experience but rather their external share in ancient patterns,”28 and these patterns take their shape and structure from cultural context. I extend Berger here by suggesting that we cannot only instigate ideas but create meaningful narratives from the half language of visual rhetoric. I do so using the photographs as primary artifacts, and contextualizing them with stories.
In her guest column for the PMLA, Marianne DeKoven comments that literature is replete with meaning-laden animals, and that “analyzing the uses of animal representation” can illuminate the ways in which we use animals and animality to perpetuate human subjugation or to obscure pernicious but subliminal value systems.29