The Zoo in Literature From Spectacle to Mirror (Preview) (original) (raw)

Literature has often been fascinated with the idea of the zoo as a microcosm, an endangered artificial ecosystem, a place where animals can be ‘rescued’ from the dangers of a more and more humanised environment and, ultimately as a mirror image where human beings could contemplate their own real face reflected in the imprisoned animal’s behaviour, melancholic attitudes, neuroses. Zoos also become a metaphor for oppression, solitude, confusion and heterogeneity, as well as infractions of one’s own private sphere – animals become attractions, spectacles to be gazed upon with sympathy, scorn, disgust, or a mix of all. In writers like Italo Calvino, Angela Carter, Giovanni Arpino, Vladimir Majakovsky, to name but a few examples, zoos are places of social and cultural rebellion, afflicted by role-reversals between humans and animals, or utopian microcosms. Satire is quite prominent in zoo narratives too: for example, in Zoschchenko’s novella The Adventures of a Monkey (1945) a chimp escapes from a zoo but, after experiencing the hardships of the soviet regime, surrenders herself gladly to her original cage. This chapter will focus on a fictional corpus centred on the theme of the zoo, trying to demonstrate how the consolatory identification of the animal with human traits is ultimately misleading. The range of texts and fragments, instead, offer a challenge to human conscience, its inconsistencies and lack of inclusion of the marginalised more-than-human in a co-evolutionary discourse and a more comprehensive outlook on our post-human reality.