The song of the dodo bird. Environmental- and language philosophy
in 19th century fantastic fiction in English
Kérchy Anna
Szegedi Tudományegyetem Bölcsészettudományi Kar
Angol-Amerikai Intézet
akerchy@gmail.com
The animals featuring in Lewis Carroll’s Victorian nonsense fairy-tale fantasy novels are invested with complex symbolical significations, conforming the conventions of a genre marked by a „high semioticity” in Jurij Lotman’s sense of the term. The Carrollian animal lore is equally shaped by the elaborate private mythology of the author’s creative imagination, and his activist agenda in defense of animal rights, (ie. his public stance taken against vivisection and in favour of vegetarianism); while it also reflects his era’s popular literary and scientific views on flora’s and fauna’s role in the anthropocene. A simultaneous analysis of language philosophical and environmental philosophical dilemmas emerging in Carroll’s Alice books allows us to draw a parallel between the interconnectedness of meaningfulness/nonsense and the human being/natural environment divide. The Victorian animal symbolism attributes a privileged role to the dodo bird, a species whose extinction process belongs to the lived reality of the contemporary human populace. For Carroll, the dodo possibly represents the transverbal, vulnerable, transcient deep-layers of language, the posthuman levels of signification, as well as his struggles with speech impediment that made him stumble on words despite his expertise in mathematical formulas and novelistic discourse. The dodo also acts as a herald to a humanimal ethics based on interspecies solidarity, disrupting conventional representational strategies, interpretive frames, and identity politics.