Notorious: Animal passions in the desert: Lions, camels and a human, oh my!

Abstract

“You believe animals to be wholly deprived of passions” asks the narrator of Balzac's 1836 story, “A Passion in the Desert,” and he adds, “you should know that we can give them all the vices driven by our state of civilization.” It is in the context of Balzac's questioning of animal passion that I would like to consider the striking and passionate expressions shared among the lion, dromedary and human figures in Jules Verreaux' “Lion Attacking a Dromedary.” The denial of animal passion can be understood as a Cartesian legacy that influenced both taxidermy and the illustrations of early natural histories, but would eventually be questioned during the 18th and 19th centuries. Thus, Buffon accepted that an animal might be excited or moved by passions, but also wrote that any depiction of that agitation could only distort the representation of a species' essence. During the 19th century, by contrast, both scientific and artistic representations of animals show an increasing interest in animal emotions, even as these would underscore a greater affinity between human and non-human animals, as evidenced by Darwin's 1872 publication of The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. Balzac's story and Verreaux's taxidermy question to what extent passions humanize animals or bestialize humans, a question with potential relevance, I will argue, for understanding how the vices of civilization might relate to the figure of the human Courier in the exchange of passions.