“A Spasmodic Affection”: John James Audubon’s Trans-corporeal Poetics\"

Emer Vaughn “A Spasmodic Affection”: John James Audubon’s Trans-corporeal Poeticsi On the morning of October 27, 1826, the artist and ornithologist John James Audubon welcomed two gentlemen and a lady to his rooms in Edinburgh. The group had come to assess the watercolor paintings that would become the basis for the famous Birds of America (1827-38)—which would be a series of 435 aquatint engravings (commissioned through Robert Havell, Jr.) departing from the norms of ornithological illustration by making the viewing experience interactive, even transformative.ii The life-sized, meticulously hand-colored engravings seem to arrest birds midflight. That morning, Audubon presented his paintings in sequence, using his drawing of doves (“a Picture of lovers,” as he described it) to set the mood for a more dramatic scene: “Now that I found the Steam was High, that perhaps some explosion might be produced, I exibited the Rattlesnake attackd by the Mocking Birds—this had the desired Effect” (180). The engraving based on this painting gives a sense of what Audubon meant by producing an “explosion” in his audience [Figure 1]. We come to the engraving expecting to see birds, and that is what first draws the eye: following the bright white wing and tail feathers of the male mockingbird in the lower left corner, our attention is directed to the sinewy triangular shading of its breast. This momentum lands the eye, unexpectedly, in the rattlesnake’s open mouth as it emerges unexpectedly from among the tree branches, its body camouflaged by the bark. Starting back from the rattlesnake, the viewer acts out a scaled-down version of the male mockingbird’s hurried, seemingly unplanned retreat. No longer critically “detached,” the viewer is involved, physically aligned with the interests and activities of the birds.iii The moment of surprise over, we can trace at leisure the curve of the snake’s body, wrapped around the tree trunk, its darker brown tail extending upwards like a tree limb, the dull yellow of its rattle resembling the end of a broken branch. As the eye moves back along the white angular lines of the snake’s mouth, the female mockingbird, with her dusky brown

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breast, seems to emerge from behind the snake. While the other birds distract the intruder, the mother is poised to strike at its eye and, perhaps, save the nest.iv The male mockingbird’s seeming surprise is a ruse, after all. Audubon uses his art to produce a sensory engagement that is a version of his own interactions with the species depicted. By transforming observation into physical engagement, the engraving shifts the relationship between itself and the viewer. It is a moment of what Timothy Morton has characterized as strong ecomimesis, when “the mind lets go while the body takes over”—and we feel present in the natural world: here, we experience an illusory closure of the space between self and animal (54). While creating this experience is no small feat, Audubon further complicates it by selecting a scenario in which observation prompts us to realize that, like the snake, we have been “taken in” by the birds’ performance.

Figure 1. Mocking Bird. By John James Audubon; engraved by Robert Havell. Source: Cornell University Library, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections.

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The fact that these physical and affective transactions between viewer and engraving take place in a moment might tempt us to overlook their complexity. The engraving constructs sympathy as an affective and corporeal circuitry within which we shift between positions of mastery, parity, and vulnerability. This construct is, I suggest, a microcosm of the trans-corporeality that emerges from the larger body of Audubon’s written work, in which he constructs his own humanity in the crosshairs of the sympathy and violence that connect him to his subject matter. Criticism of Audubon has traditionally highlighted the role of violence in his work. Irmscher calls Audubon’s engravings innovative “vortices of violent activity, visual fields of force that [make] the viewer participate in an experience rather than, as had been the tradition, contemplate from a safe distance a scientific fact” (Poetics 195). New characterizes Audubon’s violence as an affirmation of “creation's strangely electric, because ineluctably lethal, vitality” (81). More recent criticism has argued that the violence central to Audubon’s relationship with animals makes him an important figure in the history of human subjectivity as theorized by Giorgio Agamben, who proposes that the concept of the human is arrived at through an “anthropological machine” that violently excludes animals and animality from the category of the human.”v While Audubon’s violence towards animals helps to establish him as a representative figure in the development of the modern anthropological machine, the understanding of human and animal consciousness that emerges in his writings proposes a greater degree of overlap than the Agambian model. Rather than disconnecting Audubon from his birds, violence connects him to them, both conceptually and materially. This paper contemplates violence as the starting point for a poetics of embodied subjectivities. The extended narratives and variable subject matter of Audubon’s writings, as opposed to the engravings, provide Audubon with an occasion to craft his identity in a more sustained way. Working with Audubon’s essays and journals, I suggest that Audubon makes the act of looking at nature an occasion for physical re-engagements that push back against understandings

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of human subjectivity as static and monolithic. Human subjectivity and the animal subjectivities on which it is founded are recognized as temporary structures. This poetics of trans-corporeality aims to conceptualize the material connection between nature and the human subject. Trans-corporeality, as defined by Stacy Alaimo, envisions human subjectivities as material, porous sites constantly intersected by environmental entities, organic and nonorganic. While Audubon’s violence against birds has historically made him a problematic figure, that violence also provides the occasion for trans-corporeal connections. I argue that human and animal subjectivities in Audubon’s writings shuttle between conceptual fantasies and changeful embodied subjectivities. This process hinges on Audubon’s physical presence alongside animals. In representing this process to his readers, Audubon develops a materialist poetics that explores the relationship between embodiment and identity. Audubon’s professional and personal writings reveal him to be a person forever attempting to make birds into his birds—to encounter and possess them once and for all—while reckoning with the unpredictable, changeable, and insistently material beings they turn out to be. In his autobiographical essays, Audubon presents himself as a privileged expert whose identity comes into being through his relationship with birds. This identity is, like Audubon’s birds, an ecomimetic fantasy, crafted through a combination of violence and embodied sympathetic identification in the framework of dichotomies between human and animal. Audubon’s autobiographical writings locate the origins of his professional identity in his often violent mastery of idealized birds—a process that is central to his larger body of work. This fantasy complex develops in two essays which have become critical touchstones in Audubon studies: “Myself,” which identifies the origin of Audubon’s vocational connection with birds in a story about exotic family pets, and “My Style of Drawing Birds” which explains the development of Audubon’s artistic technique. In both essays Audubon defines himself through a connection to birds’ deaths and a drive to simulate their reanimation on his own terms.

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In “Myself,” Audubon relates how, as a young child, he witnessed a deadly squabble between two family pets—Mignonne, one of several “beautiful parrots,” and a monkey: One morning, while the servants were engaged in arranging the room I was in, “Pretty Polly” asking for her breakfast as usual, “Du pain au lait pour le perroquet Mignonne,” the man of the woods probably thought the bird presuming upon his rights in the scale of nature; be this as it may, he certainly showed his supremacy in strength over the denizen of the air, for, walking deliberately and uprightly toward the poor bird, he at once killed it, with unnatural composure. The sensations of my infant heart at this cruel sight were agony to me. I prayed the servant to beat the monkey, but he, who for some reason preferred the monkey to the parrot, refused. I uttered long and piercing cries, my mother rushed into the room, I was tranquillized, the monkey was forever afterward chained, and Mignonne buried with all the pomp of a cherished lost one. (766) This sentimental story about witnessing the death of a favorite pet, punishing the guilty party, and honoring the memory of the departed, is weighted with personal significance for Audubon, who locates in this moment the beginnings of his vocation. Given the representational convolutions of his art, perhaps it is not surprising that this supposedly autobiographical scene is staged. It is, really, a fantasy of sorts. The woman Audubon refers to was not his biological mother (she had died), and biographers have questioned whether the scene took place in Nantes or Saint Domingue.vi Each location reverberates with the traumas of Audubon’s childhood—the Reign of Terror and the Haitian Revolution. Unconcerned with the larger social histories, Audubon paints a setting that is a composite of his personal histories—the exotic creatures of the New World transplanted to the drawing rooms of the Old—as the original site of his nature/self fantasy.vii Critics have read this scene as dramatizing the violence against the animal at the heart of Audubon’s artistry, but I want to call attention particularly to the way that Audubon plays up the

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materiality of his own sentimental responses while downplaying the materiality of his subject matter. As Irmscher points out, the “man of the woods” (a popular term for the orangutan) is guilty because he acts with cool intentionality, yet his name also links him to the adult Audubon, the selfproclaimed “American woodsman” whose other writings carefully track the scores of birds killed in the name of his work (“Violence”). Audubon’s animal nature, which kills birds without compunction, is projected outward onto the orangutan. The infant Audubon’s loss of composure is implicitly contrasted with the “unnatural composure” of the man of the woods. As a result, Audubon can represent himself as a person highly susceptible to an embodied sentimental response, shown in the “sensations” of “agony” in his infant heart, and the loss of language when he attracts the attention of his “mother” with a series of (bird-like?) “long and piercing cries.”viii Audubon’s relationship to the bird, natural in its artlessness, makes him the means of her symbolic immortalizing through ritual burial. It may seem odd that witnessing and protesting Mignonne’s death, as Audubon writes, “perhaps did lead me in after times to love birds”—a sentiment that fueled his artistic ambitions and so led to the deaths of many more birds (766). This is less a story about a lost relationship with a family pet than a fantasy of possessing Mignonne without clouding his sentimental connection to her. Examining the scene from “Myself” as the initiating instance of Audubon’s trans-corporeal subjectivity spotlights the interplay of violence, animality, and embodiment that unfolds in his larger body of work. Audubon rejects the orangutan’s base actions and establishes his human identity by identifying with the differently anthropomorphized bird. The corporeality acknowledged as human occurs in the physical responses that validate Audubon’s sentimental connection with Mignonne. At the same time, corporeality is simplified in a way that promotes Audubon’s fantasy of reanimating ideal specimens. Audubon describes his connection to Mignonne as both embodied and intrinsic— he feels her pain and speaks her language, as she speaks his—without his needing to get his hands

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dirty. Audubon thus establishes a purely artistic, nondestructive relationship with the bird he loves. As an adult, however, he is the guilty party in the death that precedes his art. Audubon emerges both in opposition to material animality and sentimental animality: the fantasy self masters the one and reanimates the other. The tidy conclusion of this story is possible in part because Mignonne does not resist Audubon’s use of her. Mignonne, in other words, is as much a fantasy as Audubon—a fantasy specimen who, Audubon claims, makes his avowed love of birds comprehensible.ix Mignonne’s ready adaptation to household life (learning her name, asking for breakfast, and in French no less) make her an ideal object of sentimental identification—a “civilized creature” of the kind described by Jennifer Mason, and one whose aristocratic and exotic attributes make her seem all the more worthy of Audubon and the reader’s attention. x We assume that she remains on her perch as the orangutan approaches, too innocent to suspect foul play. Beyond this more straightforward framing of Mignonne as a sentimental “creature,” the creaturely aspects of this “denizen of the air” are minimized, most notably in the fact that, because the orangutan does the dirty work for him, Audubon neither kills Mignonne nor witnesses her decay, as he must do for the specimens upon which his paintings are based. Mignonne is buried, not painted—her decomposition tucked away out of sight, with the suggestion of another kind of “reanimation.” Perhaps what Audubon imagines for himself with this story is similar to what his engravings enable for viewers—contemplative, close-up appreciation of birds who don’t fly away at our approach. Audubon does not rest comfortably in the role of detached observer, though—he makes materiality central to his own relationship with birds. This centrality informs Audubon’s artistic strategies, which draw viewers unawares from observing to participating by eliciting behaviors in the audience that simulate environmental absorption. The starting point of this approach occurs in “My Style of Drawing Birds.” Recounting his first successful attempt to pose a bird in a life-like way, he writes: “at Last there Stood before me

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the real Mankin of a Kings Fisher!. . . . Reader this was what I Shall ever call my first attempt at Drawing actually from Nature, for then Even the eye of the Kings fisher was as if full of Life before me whenever I pressed its Lids aside with a finger” (761). The method used here involved posing a freshly killed specimen with wires and pins anchored to a board. The fantastical moment of reanimation is more than an exchange between Audubon and his specimen, however, but an exchange between a network of many other actors.xi The props—board, wires, finger—are visible and arranged in conjunction with Audubon’s observations of the living bird and the trial and error of past attempts. This is a moment of selective, conscious susceptibility that recreates the likeness of a prior moment. Audubon’s cultivated susceptibility and willingness to reach out and touch the dead specimen leads to the “discovery,” with body and mind, of the bird as he hopes to see it—an apparition of Nature that feels real. This simulation, for all its technical detail, is also a confession of Audubon’s fantasy of possessing a living, breathing bird, in the sense of approaching close enough to reach out and touch the bird, to inspect it, to have the opportunity to appreciate the full effect of a particular pose. Audubon shows himself to be highly conscious of the lifelessness of the bird’s body, the extent to which the illusion depends on himself, and the “as if”-ness of the specimen’s animation. When Audubon writes that his methods enable him to draw “actually from Nature,” we know it is a Nature that has been meddled with. The neatly-resolved materiality of Audubon’s childhood fable ramifies into a more complex investigation of the lived pursuit of nature-fantasies. Audubon-theartist aspires to create dematerialized fantasy specimens, “denizens of the air” who sit still at our approach, pulsing with life and yet holding a pose that allows us to inspect them minutely. This scene points the way to the emergence of labile embodied subjectivity in Audubon’s poetics. As an “attached” observer, Audubon makes himself part of the re-animated specimen. “My Birds,” as Audubon calls them, are fantasies constructed from the birds’ bodies, from boards and

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wires, and from Audubon himself (166). And yet, at the moment of reanimation we “see” only the exchange of looks between bird and human, not the props themselves. This recognition of self emerges through a controlled and partial trans-corporeality with a limited recognition of the material factors of identity. Audubon’s physical engagement with his specimens in other contexts shows his awareness of the potential destabilization of the fantasy. The porous materiality which seems in Audubon’s writing to be a necessary part of his work has the potential to encroach on Audubon’s own sense of self, as birds resist his work in various ways. Audubon is all too aware that his fantasies of both Nature and self are temporary structures prone to dissolve into one another, despite his own best efforts—the specimen begins to decay and stink, the artist’s fingers cramp, eyes blear. Nature follows Audubon even as he moves away, changing him materially. The choreography of Audubon’s poetics, then, is a negotiation between the separation of self from nature and the collapse of self into nature. While the end product of the artistic process depends on creating some sense of separation between self and environment—that is critical distance—Audubon also explores facets of the self-in-nature that emerges when separation is threatened. As this happens, the materials of nature dissolve into the various, unpredictable, meshlike environment of contemporary ecocriticism. Morton proposes that proper understandings of the material world should jettison the term nature for “mesh” as a means of acknowledging that humans are not separate from, but enmeshed in it. Morton calls attention to one of the term’s meanings in the OED: the mesh is “‘a complex situation or series of events in which a person is entangled; a concatenation of constraining or restricting forces or circumstances; a snare’” (28). This particular understanding of the mesh is appropriate for Audubon because, as we will see, his trans-corporeal subjectivity is written from the perspective of a being under threat—a stance that complicates the traditional reading of violence in Audubon. By making moments like that in “My Style” the focal point of his art, Audubon rejects the

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traditionally hierarchical human / animal relation of environmental absorption of human consciousness, Audubon complicates the debasement of animality and the cerebral definition of the human. Instead, he calls attention to moments of environmental absorption that locate him and his subject matter in the “mesh.” Audubon’s work as an artist and naturalist prompts him to confront the materiality of his relationship with birds, ranging from the more violently controlling interactions of hunting and dissection to his own volatile physical responses—youthful pangs of empathy coexist with pangs of hunger, apathy, nausea and revulsion. The living birds were crucial to his work, as was his own ability to kill the birds in a way that would still enable him to preserve an appearance of life in them. These practices pushed him into a closer physical engagement with the specimens, in the sense that his observations of the birds when alive existed on a continuum with his posing the freshly killed specimens, inhaling the scent of their decomposition while racing against the clock to draw them quickly, and dissecting their bodies to note everything from the contents of their stomachs to the tensile strength of their bones. Depending on the species, the integrity of the specimen, and the needs of the moment, the specimen might also just be eaten, with passing observations on stomach contents. By the end of the process, the body of the living bird had often become a disgusting object that provoked physical revulsion in Audubon—something of which he was glad to be rid, as he writes in the Mississippi River Journal: “Drawing nearly all day I finished the Carrion Crow, it stunk so intolerably, and Looked so disgusting that I was very glad when I through it over Board—” (55). The crow’s aspect changes over the course of Audubon’s extended and close-up observation. It is no longer his bird—in a way, it escapes. Audubon’s way of drawing birds, then, as he narrates it, pursues dematerialized fantasies through material means. The physical connection with birds reanimates them, but it also, over an extended period of time, undoes the illusion. Touch is overwhelmed by smell, and the body is something that must be gotten rid of. The painting is what remains. The combination of attraction

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and repulsion, concluding with a double “escape”—the body goes one way, the fantasy of the bird goes another—has its literal roots in the act of dissection. Dissection in particular opposes the transcendent reanimation effected by the engravings. Audubon writes about a pelican specimen’s immitting a Strong desagreable fishy smell Weighed 6 1/2 ^lb femorals Much as the shoulders == On dissection it was a Male—the Stomack Very Long and slend, fleshy— Containing only about 50 slender Blue Worm all alive about 2 1/2 Inches Long—the Gut Measured 10 feet about the size of a Moderate Swans quill…the rump and the root of the Tail was Covered With a Thin Coating of Oily Yellow fat extremely rancid, and Much air was Contained between the Whole of the Skin and flesh of the body; the Bones of the Wings & Legs although Extremely hard and dificult to Breake, were very thin Light and perfectly empty— (135-6). This passage communicates information derived from a dissection, of course, but it is not a dry, purely quantitative plotting-out of the bird’s body. Like the engravings, it is full of movement: the blue worms “all alive,” the pressure of air between skin and body, Audubon’s struggle with and breaking of the bones. The performance of the dissection in this passage is sensory, with the tactile fleshiness of the stomach, the rancid oiliness of the skin, the unpleasant fishy smell of the whole, suggesting a hands-on picking-over that is quite unlike a sanitized modern dissection or even, come to that, a wiring for Audubon’s paintings. By making us feel this specimen between our fingertips, does Audubon not make the final line’s image of bones “thin Light and perfectly empty” all the more satisfying? Almost as if the perfect emptiness of these innermost parts reveals again, through Audubon’s destructive touch, the bird’s elusive beauty. Perhaps here, even more than in his essays, Audubon shows us the extent of his own corporeal enmeshment with the fantasy-birds of the engravings.

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Works Cited Agamben, Giorgio. The Open: Man and Animal. Trans. Kevin Attell. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003. Alaimo, Stacy. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010. Audubon, John James. John James Audubon: Writings and Drawings. Ed. Christoph Irmscher. New York: The Library of America, 1999. Blum, Ann Shelby. Picturing Nature: American Nineteenth-Century Zoological Illustration. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. Hicks, Thomas W. "Mockingbird Attacking Blacksnake" The Auk. 72:3 (July 1955); American Ornithologists' Union. Iannini, Christopher P. Fatal Revolutions: Natural History, West Indian Slavery, and the Routes of American Literature. The University of North Carolina Press, 2012. Irmscher, Christoph. The Poetics of Natural History: From John Bartram to William James. Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2009. Irmscher, Christoph. “Violence and Artistic Representation in John James Audubon.” Raritan: A Quarterly Review. Fall 1995; 15 (2): 1-34. Academic Search Premier. Web. 24 Sept 2013. Latour, Bruno. Reassembling the Social—An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Laurence M. Klauber, Rattlesnakes: Their Habits, Life Histories, and Influence on Mankind. Volume II, Second edition. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972. Mason, Jennifer. Civilized Creatures: Urban Animals, Sentimental Culture, and American Literature: 18501900. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005.

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Morton, Timothy. Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007. New, Elisa. The Line’s Eye: Poetic Experience, American Sight. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998. Traisnel, Antoine. “Huntology: Ontological Pursuit and Still Lives.” Diacritics: A Review of Contemporary Criticism, 2012 Summer; 40 (2): 4-25. Project Muse. Web. 24 Sept 2013. Wittenberg, Rod D. “Foraging Ecology of the Timber Rattlesnake (Crotalus Horridus) In a Fragmented Agricultural Landscape.” Herpetological Conservation and Biology, December 2012; 7 (3): 449-461. Herpetological Conservation and Biology. Web. 6 Dec 2014. Ziser, Michael. “Animal Mirrors: Poe, Lacan, von Uexküll, and Audubon in the Zoosemiosphere.” Angelaki, 2007 Dec; 12 (3): 11-33. EBSCOHost. Web. 24 Sept 2013.

The title of this paper refers to a passage in Audubon’s essay on the Golden Eagle in his Ornithological Biography. The work takes a physical toll on Audubon—he writes that it “nearly cost me my life” (356). This is because, after subjecting himself to toxic fumes in a botched attempt to kill a captive specimen, he sketches for so long and with such zeal that he is struck by a “spasmodic affection” (356). While Audubon uses this term in an archaic sense to describe a neurological medical event, it also fits the dangers inherent in looking at this magnificent bird: the seemingly innocent desire to sympathetically observe unravels into a surprisingly risky endeavor that connects Audubon’s body to that of his birds—even if the bird is already in a cage. The term might even be extended to the entirety of Audubon’s relationship with birds, suggesting as it does a combination of affect and unruly physical responsiveness. i

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William Lizars, based in Edinburgh, made the first engravings, and the series was later taken over by Robert Havell, based in London (Irmscher Poetics 189). On the transformative break between Audubon’s engravings and those of his predecessors, see “Audubon at Large” in Irmscher’s Poetics, 188-235, Blum, and New, “Line’s Eye, Lit Stream”, 53-104. iii While it is the transformation of observation to physical engagement that interests me here, Audubon has a variety of techniques for indirectly implicating the viewer. Of Audubon’s engraving of vultures, for example, Ziser points out the mutual exchange of predatory assessment between viewer and birds, and even suggests that the “absorbing blackness with which Audubon has painted his vulture requires us to squint our eyes and crane our necks in a vulturine scrutiny of the bird’s interior spaces” (25). iv In the Ornithological Biographies, Audubon describes the kind of behavior on which this scene is modeled, writing that, when a nest is attacked by a snake, "not only the pair to which the nest belongs, but many other Mocking Birds from the vicinity, fly to the spot, attack the reptiles, and, in

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some cases, are so fortunate as either to force them to retreat, or deprive them of life" (Audubon 230). While the mockingbird's skill in sparring with snakes has been well documented (see, for example, the account of a single bird repeatedly attacking a blacksnake in Hicks, Audubon's depiction of the rattlesnake in this engraving and his description of their behaviors in a subsequent essay sparked a herpetological debate on their tree-climbing abilities. Klauber argues that Audubon tended to confuse rattlesnake behaviors with those of black snakes (493-5), but timber rattlesnakes have been known to climb trees while foraging (Wittenberg). v Traisnel uses Audubon to theorize huntology, his term for the shift in human / animal relations at the turn of the nineteenth century, arguing that the physical hunt for animals, an act of warfare that places “the animal” on equal, if adversarial, footing with “the human,” became an epistemological hunt under the guise of natural history. For Ziser, natural history’s interest in “animal” languages, initiated by Audubon and popularized by Poe, is the basis of the Lacanian theory of human language and the sense of self. vi If it took place in Saint Domingue, as Richard Rhodes argues in John James Audubon: The Making of an American (New York: Vintage, 2006), then the woman would have been another caretaker in the employ of Audubon’s father. If it took place in Nantes, as Irmscher suggests (and Audubon himself stated), then the woman would have been Audubon’s stepmother, Anne Moynet. See Irmscher’s essay in Riding/Writing Across Borders in North American Travelogues and Fiction. Vienna: Austrian Academy of Science Press, 2011. vii

Christopher Iannini’s reading of this scene as an allegory of the Haitian Revolution (260262), similar to Christoph Irmscher (Poetics 205-206) and Richard Rhodes’ reading of this fable-like story (21), helpfully focuses our attention on the personal experiences which would have predisposed Audubon to identify with the bird’s suffering. viii Michael Ziser also notes the similarity between the infant Audubon’s “cries” and avian speech in his reading of “Myself” as a “Lacanian fable about infantile investment in the linguistic competence of a parrot against the oppressive physical coordination of an ape” (23). ix My discussion of nature and fantasy here indirectly follows Timothy Morton’s discussion of two of the three primary symbolic uses of the term nature: nature as a “placeholder for…other concepts,” nature as a normative standard, and “nature as fantasy” (14). The third usage is the focus of Morton’s aesthetic analysis in Ecology without Nature. Audubon’s birds are his nature-fantasies, and the nature in “drawn from nature” is the messier reality with which he engages in his writings. x In Civilized Creatures: Urban Animals, Sentimental Culture, and American Literature, 1850-1900, Jennifer Mason argues that the large numbers of domesticated animals present in cities and homes played an important role in the affective discourses of the day. Audubon, working in the first half of the century, played an enormous role in creating a popular conception of birds, particularly the smaller species, as sentimental animals with domestic habits worthy of emulation. For a brief history of the importance of birds as sentimental objects in natural history, see Irmscher’s Poetics 202-203. As Irmscher notes, Audubon’s personal writings frequently reference the fables of Jean de la Fontaine, which anthropomorphize birds for didactic reasons. xi Latour’s sociological model of the “actor-network” sees any and all objects as potential agential actors and any event as the result of multiple, overlapping agencies. Latour proposes that “Action is not done under the full control of consciousness; action should rather be felt as a node, a knot, and a conglomerate of many surprising sets of agencies that have to be slowly disentangled” (44). Audubon’s discovery in “My Style” is both an “actor-network” and a moment of transcorporeal subjectivity.