Writing like a rat

Critical Quarterly

Volumn 46, Issue 4, 2004, Pages 59-76

  Ellmann, Maud ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE   (United Kingdom)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 61249722490     PISSN: 00111562     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.0011-1562.2004.00597.x     Document Type: Review

References (56)

1. T. S. Eliot, Collected Poems and Plays (London: Faber, 1969), 41. The present essay benefits from an earlier collaboration with Jonathan Burt, who is currently writing a book on rats for Reaktion. There is bound to be overlap between our work, but in particular I am indebted to Burt for his tips on rats as pets and laboratory animals, and for his clues to the maze of behaviourist psychology
2. 'Eine verblüffende Parallele dazu sehen wir in den Wanderwegen der Ratten, die die Schmarotzer und Giftträger unter den Tieren, wie es die Juden unter den Menschen sind' (programme notes for Der Ewige Jude (The Eternal Jew) (1940), dir. Franz Hippler; quoted from www.holocaust-history.org/der- ewige-jude/ stills.shtml)
3. Think of the poignancy of the lone rat that rears on its hind legs when its colony is put to flames in Seamus Deane's Reading in the Dark (1997), or the 'horrible and horrifying emotion of pity' that causes Rowe to destroy a dog-ravaged rat in Graham Greene's war novel The Ministry of Fear (1943; London: Vintage, 2001), 66. Greene says, 'One cannot love humanity. One can only love people' (p. 184). The equivalent could be said of loving rats
4. Christopher Ricks, T. S. Eliot and Prejudice (London: Faber, 1988), 38
5. I have already discussed Ricks's views and the debate about Eliot's anti-Semitism in 'The Imaginary Jew: T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound', in Bryan Cheyette (ed.), Between 'Race' and Culture: Representations of 'the Jew' in English and American Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 84-101, 195-8
6. See Robert Sullivan, Rats: Observations on the History and Habitat of the City's Most Unwanted Inhabitants (New York: Bloomsbury, 2004), 71-2
7. Hans Zinsser, Rats, Lice, and History (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1935), 208
8. Sullivan, Rats, 21
9. J. M. Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello (London: Seeker and Warburg, 2003), 105
10. James Joyce, Ulysses (1922), ed. Hans Walter Gabler (London: Bodley Head, 1986), ch. 6, p. 94
11. Günter Grass, The Rat, trans. Ralph Manheim (London: Picador, 1988), 5
12. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (1988; London: Athlone Press, 1999), 259, 251, 240
13. Steve Baker, The Postmodern Animal (London: Reaktion Books, 2000), 20-21
14. Eliot, Notes towards a Definition of Culture (London: Faber, 1948)
15. 'Droll rat, they would shoot you if they knew/ Your cosmopolitan sympathies' (Isaac Rosenberg, 'Break of Day in the Trenches')
16. See Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon Roudiez (New York: Columbia, 1982), 56
17. See Harriet Ritvo, The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 82-121
18. See Robert V. Guthrie, Even the Rat was White: A Historical View of Psychology (New York: Harper and Row, 1976)
19. See Stephen Smith, Underground London: Travels Beneath the City Streets (London: Little, Brown, 2004), 50-52
20. See Charles Golding, Rats: The New Plague (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1990), 30-32
21. The dedication reads: 'IN REMEMBRANCE OF "SAMMY", THE INTELLIGENT PINK-EYED REPRESENTATIVE OF A PERSECUTED (BUT IRREPRESSIBLE) RACE. AN AFFECTIONATE LITTLE FRIEND. AND MOST ACCOMPLISHED THIEF!' Beatrix Potter, The Roly-Poly Pudding (The Tale of Samuel Whiskers) (New York: Frederick Warne and Co., 1908)
22. Bram Stoker, Dracula, ed. Maud Ellmann (1897; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 252
23. Karl Marx, Capital, 3 vols (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), vol. 1, p. 342
24. Franco Moretti, Signs Taken for Wonders, trans. Susan Fischer et al. (1983; London: Verso, 1988), 91-3
25. Grass, The Rat, 5
26. See http://www.nobel.se/literature/laureates/1999/lecture-e.html
27. Hugh Sykes Davies, The Papers of Andrew Melmoth (London: Methuen and Co., 1960)
28. See also Robert Hendrickson, More Cunning than Man: A Complete History of the Rat and its Role in Human Civilisation (New York: Kensington, 1983), which begins with an account of Engebi Island, a Western Pacific atoll where the United States tested its nuclear arsenal. When scientists visited the island in 1950, they found that all animal and plant life was radioactive, yet the island abounded with rats which had not only survived but prospered (pp. 1-2)
29. see also John B., Watson, 'Kinaesthetic and Organic Sensations: Their Role in the Reactions of the White Rat', Psychological Review Monograph, 8:33 (1907), 1-100 (esp. p. 96)
30. and Golding, Rats, 3, 52
31. Watson, 'Kinaesthetic and Organic Sensations', 1-2
32. These questions are proposed as alternatives to those of the behaviourist by Coetzee in Elizabeth Costello, 72
33. Edward Chase Tolman, 'Cognitive Maps in Rats and Men' (1948), in Collected Papers in Psychology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951), 250, 253, 260
34. Tolman, 'Determiners of Behaviour at a Choice Point' (1938), in Collected Papers in Psychology, 172
35. Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello, 105
36. Tolman, 'Cognitive Maps in Rats and Men', 242-3
37. Henry H. Donaldson, The Rat: Data and Reference Tables for the Albino Rat (Mus norvegicus albinus) and the Norway Rat (Mus norvegicus) (1915; rev. edn 1924)
38. quoted in J. Russell Lindsey, 'Historical Foundations', in The Laboratory Rat, 2 vols, ed. Henry J. Baker, J. Russell Lindsey, and Steven H. Weisbroth (New York: Academic Press/Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979), vol. 1, p. 5
39. Golding, Rats, 54
40. Sigmund Freud, Notes Upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis (1909), in the Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1953-1974), vol. 10, p. 167
41. See Freud, Standard Edition, vol. 10, p. 212n
42. See Jacques Berthold, Des Rats et des ratières: Anamorphoses d'un champ métaphorique de saint Augustin à Jean Racine (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1992), 11-19
43. See Berthold, Des Rats et des ratières, 12-13
44. Sykes Davies, The Papers of Andrew Melmoth, 21
45. Derrida argues that the syllable 'RA', a homonym of rat and a palindrome of 'AR', which is a homonym of art, disseminates itself throughout Artaud's writing - 'RA, the grammar of the future'; see The Secret Art of Antonin Artaud, ed. Paule Thévenin and Jacques Derrida, trans. Mary Ann Caws (1986; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), 128
46. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), Standard Edition, vol. 5, p. 525
47. Beckett, letter in German to Martin Esslin, 9 July 1937, quoted in Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, Arts of Impoverishment: Beckett, Rothko, Resnais (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 22
48. Beckett, Watt (1953/1963; London: Calder, 1998), 79-81
49. Richard Ellmann, James Joyce (1959; rev. edn New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 517
50. Admittedly Eliot made this remark in 1951, long after writing 'Burbank', but he must have been aware of the meaning of 'piles' and the possibility of double entendre in the line. See Peter Ackroyd, T. S. Eliot (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), 303
51. Eliot, Collected Poems and Plays, 67
52. Joyce, Ulysses, ch. 6, p. 94
53. Wyndham Lewis, The Apes of God (London: Nash and Grayson, 1930), 145, 154, 155
54. See Fred Botting and Scott Wilson (eds), The Bataille Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), Pt 3, pp. 165-219
55. For a fascinating study of rats as figures of excess in Mayhew, see Christopher Herbert, 'Rat Worship and Taboo in Mayhew's London', Representations, 23 (1988), 1-24
56. See also Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor, ed. John D. Rosenberg (London: Griffin, Bone and Co., 1861), vol. 3, pp. 1-21, which includes brief portraits of Jack Black the Rat-Catcher and Jimmy Shaw the rat-fight entrepreneur