1This essay elaborates on the literary animals in selected works by Laura E. Richards (1850–1943). For the most part figurations of humans and human affairs, Richards’s literary animals uphold the human-animal divide in texts that abound in anthropomorphism, anthropocentrism, and speciesism. However, a survey of Richards’s seven decades-long creative output in various styles and genres across literary periods reveals significant shifts, which I read as reflective of American culture’s changing attitude towards animals. Richards’s transitioning from Aesopian to post-Darwinist animal fables in the late nineteenth century, for example, points to the writer’s wavering assumptions about clear-cut distinction between humans and animals and, hence, human’s absolute superiority. Coincidentally, Richards’s animal fable repertoire expands around the time when the mutually enforcing interplay of Darwin’s theory of evolution with “the daily practices that put people in contact with animals led to significant changes in the understanding of these animals’ ontological status” (Mason 19).

2In her autobiography Stepping Westward (1931), Richards informs about such “daily practices” in her family. She recalls herself as a young wife and mother getting accustomed to her New England in-laws’ interactions with animals after moving to Gardiner, Maine in 1869. The account attests that typical for the time, their place of residence, and social class, the Richards family appreciates “companion animals” in and around the house, especially the dogs who accompany the men as “teammates in cross-species sport” (Haraway, Companion 14). In one chapter, the autobiographer even relates her emergence as a writer to the animals that were present in her immediate surrounding, invariably nourishing her body, soul, and mind as food, companions, and intellectual, or poetic sustenance in those days.

4Taking the cue from the “brisk, twinkling, wise old woman,” who authored Stepping Westward (298), this essay interrogates how Richards’s “poetic thinking … on questions of writing and representation, proceeds via the animal” (Moe 4). To outline Richards’s zoopoetics, if in broad strokes, I read her bestiary diachronically through the lens of Cultural Literary Animal Studies (for a definition see Borgards’s “Introduction”), asking how exactly, and to which effect, animals figure in selected texts, depending on literary genre, period, and target audience. Abiding by the principles devised by Roland Borgards, I “contextualize (an animal text never comes alone), historicize (no animal text stands outside its time), and poeticize (an animal text is never self-explanatory)” the works at hand (“Tiere und Literatur” 229–232; my translation).

1. A Textual Tapestry of the Animals

8In her 1931 autobiography Stepping Westward, the octogenarian author reminisces that her “story and rhyme writing” had not only been “an important factor in the family budget” (329–330). In the long years that she spent caring for the children day in day out, her creative output also helped to sustain a sense of autonomy: “The rhymes and jingles, the nursery tales, even the girls’ books, were cobwebs spun more or less out of my own brain” (330). In keeping with Tennyson, Richards could easily have referred to her oeuvre as “a magic web with colours gay.” That she uses the mildly deprecating metaphor “cobwebs” instead, is no insignificant instance of self-irony. The senior artist’s humble self-portrait as an attic spider references Ovid’s famous tale of the mythological spider-woman. Like the Lydian girl, who defeats the goddess Athena in a weaving contest with a masterfully crafted tapestry of the Gods, Richards made a confident claim on her creativity as a young female artist. And like Arachne, she got punished for it.

9As a young writer Richards used her talent to provide for her family on top of “the child-bearing, nursing, rearing” (Stepping 329), an extraordinary accomplishment even by today’s standards. The autobiographer implies that by doing what needed to be done at the time, and seemingly effortlessly, her younger narrated self was either too naïve, too arrogant, or simply too busy to realize her affront: That her forays into the public realm violated the doctrine of true womanhood, rousing the envy and resentment of both genders. Lady friends, to whom the senior autobiographer sardonically attests “an admirable taste in dress” (278), made sniding remarks about her professional aspirations: “‘You are so fortunate, Laura! You can make ten dollars whenever you like, with a scratch of the pen!’” (278). And the patriarchal literary establishment considered Richards’s ludicrous, lucrative nonsense rhyming an outright mockery of serious literature. As a result, Richards got “demoted from the category of artist to the category of mother who composes verses” (Russ qtd. in Gordon Ginzburg 181). Receiving little scholarly attention for her children’s rhymes and stories, Laura E. Richards is known to this day, if at all, as the 1917 Pulitzer Prize Winner for the biography of her mother, Julia Ward Howe (1819–1910), author of the patriotic lyrics for “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” (1861).

10However, the “cobwebs” metaphor not only facilitates the whimsical metamorphosis of the Greek goddess Pallas Athena into American housewives and patriarchs. While Richards’s updating and translocating mythology to twentieth-century USA allows a distinction of male and female competitive behaviors as well as a nuanced assessment of their impacts on the career of the nineteenth-century woman writer, the “cobwebs” are also characteristic of Richards’s pervasive use of naturalistic imagery and animal metaphors. “Metaphorical thinking,” American writer James Geary states in I Is an Other: The Secret Life of Metaphor and How it Shapes the Way We See the World, is a way “not just for describing but for comprehending one thing in terms of another, for equating I with an other .… Metaphor is a way of thought long before it is a way with words” (3). And Richards was clearly accustomed to thinking with animals. In Stepping Westward, Richards not only describes human-animal relationships that are typical of nineteenth-century, white, middle-class Americans and specific to her own family, but relates them to her genesis as a writer, poetic self-understanding, and style of writing.

11In “The Cove,” the autobiographer muses about the family’s relationship with animals. The chapter is named after her husband’s family estate in Gardiner, Maine, where Richards moved in 1869. Identifying as “a city child” (231), Richards has only aesthetic interest in animals upon arrival in the river town, which was only “forty miles from the sea” (173), but a world away from her native Boston: “I saw a butterfly; saw it brilliant, lovely, a marvel for poets to sing and painters to paint; I did not know the number of spots on those shining wings, nor the kind of chrysalis it came out of, nor the time and season of its hibernation” (232). While the writer admits to lacking both her daughter’s zoological expertise and the hunting ardor of her “husband and his brothers—who had the whole Book of Nature thumbed and mellowed into easy familiarity” (232), animals, the reader gets to understand, were nonetheless integral to Richards’s rural New England life: as foodstuff, companions, and story material.

12During hunting season, Richards recalls, “the general atmosphere was one of cartridges and powderhorns” in the house (233). “When evening came, a neat row of plump little brown bodies lay on the shelf … woodcock, partridge, upland plover .… A ‘good bag’ was a glorious thing … and the little, pretty, harmless things were delicious eating” (234). Hunting days typically ended with the family—hounds, and hunters and all—united around the hearth, simmering down after the excitement, the bloodshed, and a good meal of game animals. Richards writes:

The talk in the evening, round the glowing fire, would match the day; talk of birds, dogs, game .… A long, still interval; a setter gets up, shakes himself, turns round three times and settles again to his nap. A log crumbles, and the brands are carefully lifted and laid together. Smoke ascends in blue rings and spirals; to me on the sofa, it is all very soothing, very peaceful. At length a deep, calm voice speaks: ‘I knew a dog once—’. (234)

13The nostalgic report taps into a reservoir of cultural myths that are central to American imagination like the fireplace as “a domestic symbol” for a harmonious family life (Roberts 6). Symbol of the American home and highly emotionally charged, the hearth is rendered as the target location where all outdoor adventure is destined to end in happy conviviality. Conjuring up the inherent romanticism of the American campfire tale, it moves all related activities indoors and brings the wilderness home into the setting of domestic fiction. There the shot animals are transformed into both physical and cultural nourishment for all members of the family. With the cooking and eating notably unmentioned by Richards, her narrative focuses immediately on another ritualistic performance: Storytelling. Engaging in “the universal fireside activity of frontiersmen” (Davidson 177), the Richards men, like all American trappers, “did not have to make up all their campfire tales. They soon learned many of the Indian myths and legends … about animals that behave like human beings” (181).

14The lady of the house, already a mother of three at this point, is cast in a passive role as “intermittently sofa-bound Mamma” (Stepping 222). Listening to the men’s (tall) tales, she is at the receiving end of their expeditions into the great outdoors and the hunting grounds of intercultural imagination. “I learned the value of silence,” the autobiographer concedes in hindsight (234). While she might have picked up on the effect of silence on these evenings by the fireside, Richards’s sense of timing and performative pause was already honed by constant singing and music making: “Ballads and songs and the like, early assimilated, had given me a good ear for metre and rhythm” (156). What she obviously came to realize, though, is the value of animals as story material and how to deliver it “in harmony with the gestures and vocalizations of nonhuman animals” (Moe 2).

15She employs the dog, who “gets up, shakes himself, turns round three times and settles again to his nap” (Stepping 234), firstly to describe the peace and quiet of the moment. Secondly, his motions literally animate Richards’s narration of the episode at the fireplace. The sentences syntactically imitate the dog’s settling-into-a-sleeping-position-routine. Picking up on the number and the rhythm of his motions, the sentences each consist of three short units which are separated yet connected by commas. Like the rings and spirals of smoke, the dog slowly moves in circles. So does the narration which lingers, revolving slowly, to describe the family circle’s set up around the fireplace.

16Animals in Richards’s home, the reader learns from this scene, are simultaneously living, performing creatures and concepts that exist of such creatures, which are attributed with meaning and subjected to processes of literarization and oral performance. Consequently, one can say that Richards’s literary animals are also “material-semiotic nodes or knots in which diverse bodies and meanings coshape one another … where the biological and literary or artistic come together” (Haraway, Species 4). While Richards’s process of becoming a writer means “to become with” the animals with whom she co-exists in “world-making entanglements” and interacts in shared “contact zones” (4), they do not count as individuals. Representatives of a certain species or breed, they are valued for their skills, or taste, but not to establish emotional connection. On Richards’s textual tapestry they appear as types. And especially in her early children’s verse, they are subjected to the cruel wit of the young writer who treats them—predator or prey—as foodstuff.

17Recalling that no tear was shed over the killed birds, “poor creetur’s” that they were (Stepping 234), Richards appears mellowed: “Thinking of them now, I feel a retrospective pang; I do not remember feeling any at the time” (234). Self-critically, she puts herself at a remove from her own younger self and is also busy confirming that her husband’s “love of sports” (235) has subsided: “Forty years, I should say, have passed since he felt either desire or willingness to kill any living thing” (235). It could well be that the autobiographer, blaming their younger selves’ heartless behavior on their youth and the way things were at the time, panders to a modern reader whose attitude towards animals she believes is also more sympathetic. She is, however, very clear about two things: that the once silent woman on the sofa has found her voice in the presence of animals and that they came to challenge her sense of human superiority. Quoting folk wisdom, Richards wraps up the scene: “We’re all poor creetur’s!” (234).

18Especially during Richards’s “‘juvenile’ stage of writing” (369), flocks of animals are stomping, crawling, buzzing, waddling through her texts. Beginning with Baby’s Rhyme Book; With Pretty Pictures, For Our Little Ones (1878), animal characters serve to entertain and educate the young. Told in the vein of a fairy tale, the novel The Joyous Story of Toto (1885) lets forest animals speak with the boy protagonist to help him support his ailing grandmother. Four Feet, Two Feet, No Feet; Or Furry and Feathery Pets, And How They Live (1885) brings together prose texts on the “Strangest freaks of Nature’s laws,” so that the child reader may “[s]tudy all their ways and habits” (3). While Richards is comfortable with animals as her main narrative fare, she feels she does “not really belong [in] the realm of natural history” (Stepping 324). However, one of her earliest excursions into natural history is remarkable.

19In “Some Fishy Nonsense” (1878) she combines entertaining nonsense verse with didactic natural history to communicate critical commentary. The poem relays the story of Timothy Tiggs and Tomothy Toggs who go fishing, eager to watch the metamorphosis of tadpoles into frogs. Stuck in a bog, the two end up catching only small fish, which they mistake for pollywogs. Unaware of their error, they are disappointed by the looks of their catch and scold it after a quick inspection: “‘[T]was a sin oh! / That things with no legs should pretend to be frogs” (158). Therefore, the poem’s title can be interpreted to both voice the protagonists’ view that the fish behave in a way that makes no sense and expose it as the nonsensical result of limited zoological knowledge. The reader laughs about such ignorance. However, taking up the idiomatic meaning of the term “fishy” as suspicious, brings into play an ethical category, which is more closely defined as religious by the term “sin” a few lines later. Clearly, the protagonists, who could be either boys or men since the poem is unspecified about their age, pass moral judgment. Once the creatures, which Tim and Tom subject to a superficial, non-scientific inspection, fail to visually support for their assumption, they altogether dismiss it. In other words, the poem describes ordinary people’s reflexive pitching of religion against natural science, which is characteristic of anti-Darwinist, creationist discourse, and dismisses it as “fishy nonsense.”

20The illustrated story Five Little Mice in a Mouse Trap (1880) dabbles with zoomorphism. The eponymous mice, the homodiegetic narrator explains, are really children: “Of course the children have real names, just like other children; but I have given them mouse-names, which I very much prefer to Harry and Bessie” (19). From here on, Richards usually decides for an unabashed anthropomorphism, which is “perhaps the most common of all metaphorical modes” (Popova). The collected texts of Baby’s Rhyme Book (1878), In My Nursery (1890) and Tirra Lirra (1932) mostly attribute human traits to literary animals and conceptualize humans and their concerns in terms of animals and animality. The writer trusts that the children pick up on associations between themselves and, for example, ravenous little tigers, naïve chooks, or cocky monkeys, whose fun and relatable actions help them understand the consequences of their own (bad) behavior. By employing animals specifically as tools to train children into proper behavior—the ideological dominance of middle-class ideals such as cleanliness, table manners, or discipline is palpable in these works—Richards reiterates the belief that animals are located on a lower evolutionary rung, forming the Other of civilized, bourgeois America.

21Written for the purpose of moral instruction, poems such as “The Polar Bear’s Party” (Tirra 17–20), or “The Three Little Chickens Who Went Out to Tea, and the Elephant” (Nursery 119-121) have the “bipartite form” of the “classic animal fable” (Stevenson qtd. in Danta 18). As such they tell “a brief story with a moral” whose “meaning can be transferred to the human sphere” (Danta 18), and “often seek to reduce human motivation to the logic or law of animal predation,” that is, “to eat or be eaten” (19). As Etti Gordon Ginzburg notes, “[q]uite a few of Richards’s verses are menacing, and their aggressive, even cruel, contents” openly express parental frustration with children’s instinctual, undisciplined behavior (182). The “explosive content” of these poems is remarkable, not only because of its incongruence “with nineteenth-century American notions of maternity” (182). Defying sentimental notions of the angelic, innocent child, the exposure of children’s animal nature in her “story poems” (Arbuthnot xiii), Richards performs, I argue, a step from classic to post-Darwinian animal fable. “What Darwin’s theory of evolution makes possible,” Chris Danta explains in Animal Fables after Darwin: Literature, Speciesism, and Metaphor, “is the idea of a scientific fable that critiques the human” (19). Via “the associative link between animals and children” (Gordon Ginzburg 182), Richards’s naturalistic verses implicate the human child “in the biological order,” forcing readers “to contemplate and confront the existential fact of their [own and the children’s] apehood” (Danta 19). While the conflation of the human child and nonhuman animals might have seemed obvious to Richards personally—at home she often observed similarities between animals’ and small children’s instinctual behaviors—it is highly problematic due to the “confluence of animality and racialization” in nineteenth-century America (Jackson 3).

22Already in the antebellum years, “likening black people to animals—to apes in the jungles of Africa … —was a central, perhaps even indispensable, ideological practice for enacting and stabilizing the institution of slavery” (Kim 16). And while Richards’s literary monkeys can per se stand in for any child regardless of its race or gender, “The Monkeys and the Crocodile” (1878) must be read with respect to the cultural context in which it appeared. In Baby’s Rhyme Book (1878), the poem was followed by a full-page, black-and-white landscape image of a densely grown riverbank where five monkeys, climbing lianas in a tree, dangle above a crocodile that is lurking in the water (35). Contrasted by human figures in a boat in the background, the monkeys are unmistakably rendered as animals in their natural habitat by the unacknowledged artist (Figure 1).

Figure 1: From Baby’s Rhyme Book. by Laura E. Richards, illustrator unknown, copyright © 1878. Public domain. https://ufdc.ufl.edu/​UF00055024/​00001/​images/​38. Accessed November 15, 2024.

23Reprinted in In My Nursery (1890), the text appears alongside two penciled illustrations by an unacknowledged artist which complement the text on two pages (153–154). Depicting only the monkeys on the tree and the crocodile with no background, the nature setting is erased and the interaction between the animals taken out of context (Figure 2). The second cut-out drawing even depicts the crocodile, who is apparently satisfied with devouring one of the monkeys, leaning against the tree in an upright position, patting his swollen stomach with one hand and picking his teeth with the other, while the surviving monkeys are shown crying like human babies (Figure 3). With the animals anthropomorphized, the setting de-natured, and the scene decontextualized, “The Monkeys and the Crocodile” no longer represents the natural event of a predator hunting its prey but more obviously riffs on Southern lore of African American children as alligator bait, which was also a popular subject of so-called “coon cards” (“Coon Cards” 72).

Figures 2 and 3: From In My Nursery. by Laura E. Richards, illustrator unknown, copyright © 1890. Public domain.

24Conjuring up the racist “‘gator bait’” trope, which turns the natural event into a political statement (King 123), the poem’s rendition in In My Nursery not only resonates with white America’s deep-seated racial anxieties, which were further reinforced by the increasing acceptance of Darwin’s evolution theory in the late nineteenth-century. It also passes antiblack hostility off as humorous and on to the next generation. And it is no exception, either. Richards’s poetry generally and continuously “provides American children with biased and gendered—often disturbing and violent—views about other countries, races, and ethnic groups” (Gürsel 149), and animals, one could add.

25To conclude, her expression of sympathy for real animals in Stepping Westwards notwithstanding, in her fables Richards is invested in animal characters only as means to an end. Derrida identifies such investment as “an anthropomorphic taming, a moralizing subjection, a domestication, always a discourse of man, on man, indeed on the animality of man, but for and as man” (405). Urged, therefore, to “avoid fables” (405), I now direct the attention to Richards’s “Eletelephony” (1932). This animal poem is usually subsumed under the umbrella term nonsense poetry and has, so far, been overlooked in what little scholarship exists on Richards’s work. A language game from beginning to end, “Eletelephony” demands a discussion of the linguistic operations it performs to describe the poem more precisely as modernist literary nonsense.

2. The Poetics of Animacy

26“Eletelephony” narrates the story of an elephant’s attempt to “use the telephone:”

Once there was an elephant,
Who tried to use the telephant —
No! No! I mean an elephone
Who tried to use the telephone —
(Dear me! I am not certain quite
That even now I’ve got it right.)
Howe’er it was, he got his trunk
Entangled in the telephunk;
The more he tried to get it free,
The louder buzzed the telephee —

(I fear I’d better drop the song
Of elephop and telephong!) (Richards 31)

27Unfortunately, his (the elephant is gendered male in the poem) trunk gets “entangled in” the machine. The more he struggles to “get it free,” the louder and more insistent does the phone “buzz.” The poem ends, leaving the elephant tied up and the enervated speaker speechless.

29Agreeing with American poet and children’s literature expert X. J. Kennedy’s argument that generally nonsense poetry’s “very brevity” makes the mayhem it recounts “only momentarily threatening” (31), I furthermore read “Eletelephony” with Susan Stewart’s Nonsense: Aspects of Intertextuality in Folklore and Literature (1978). Stewart claims that “[n]onsense, play, and paradox, as activities that discourse on the nature of discourse, are built into the generic system as methods for innovation and evaluation” (50), and are hence “contingent upon the nature of its corresponding common sense” (51). Nonsense poetry provides readers not just with an opportunity to playfully explore “how to feel,” which Karen L. Kilcup and Angela Sorby generally consider “poetry’s unique contribution to children’s education” (5), but “how to feel” specifically about the impossible and improbable, about that which is not, or not yet, common sense. As the ending “phony” in the poem’s title indicates, the diegetic mayhem might be fake. However, the affect that the poetic rendition of mayhem produces in the reader is real. A testament to the discourse on the hybridization of machine and human that has been in full swing in the 1930s, undoubtedly disturbing legions, and way before Haraway popularized the cyborg as “a creature” and a critical concept in the Humanities in 1985 (“Cyborgs” 7), Richards’s nonsense poem “Eletelephony” momentarily cancels established “animacy hierarchies” (Silverstein qtd. in Chen, Glossary 32).

31The word elephant affects the reader differently. After all the largest land animal living on the planet, his harmlessness is perplexing. Richards uses the elephant’s reputation as clumsy and dumb to produce a comic effect. The cartoonish animal character in “Eletelephony” resembles the “slapstick animals” of American poet Marianne Moore (1887–1972), which “notch modernist poetics and the history of film comedy more closely together” (Mak 875). Like the swan in “Critics and Connoisseurs” (1916), “one of Moore’s earliest variations on slapstick as a theme” (884), Richards’s elephant is “an imperfectly ballasted animal,” whose attempt “to stand up” (Moore qtd. in Mak 884) and use modern technological equipment designed for delicate human hands is comical. So is the perceived incongruity of the elephant and the telephone. “The perception of incongruity in an event or situation amuses us, which in turn causes the risible sensations—laughter, for example—that we feel in response to humor” (Carroll, “Notes” 27). The joke is, however, on the human whom the elephant represents by way of satirical anthropomorphism. “You may laugh at an animal,” French philosopher Henri Bergson explains in Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, “but only because you have detected in it some human attitude or expression” (Bergson); here the ineptitude to handle modern technology.

32Quick to understand the association between the elephant and an adult human, children in particular delight in “Eletelephony” (see, for example, user comments on allpoetry.com). Young readers laugh about the adult’s failure to know their limitations as much as about the elephant’s specific predicament of getting his trunk entangled with the telephone. They might even feel a spark of Schadenfreude about the adult know-it-all’s incompetence that is exposed by the poem, while adult readers could be amused by the poem’s representation of modern technology of communication as an obstacle to communication. Decidedly not a fable, “Eletelephony” does not aim at moral instruction but entertainment. Yet, instead of ending in disaster and death as nonsense poems often do, “Eletelephony” provides assurance that messing everything up can be fun and happens to the best. It releases tension through laughter in young children who might not yet master the English language and adults, who feel disturbed by technological developments. In my view, however, the genius of “Eletelephony” goes beyond such appeasement or entertainment as the following discussion of the poem’s discourse will show.

36Once the poem clarifies the illustration’s ambiguity in favor of the animal’s intellectual abilities (speaking on the phone) instead of his instinctual behavior (playing with the phone, or eating it), the elephant potentially masters the cultural technique of telecommunicating—at least for as long as it takes to read the poem, which ends precisely when the phone “buzzed.” The very choice of wording indicates that the machine is animated because the term “buzzing,” has an altogether different, pardon the pun, ring to it than “ringing,” the term which is commonly used to describe the telephone’s mechanical dial tone or busy line. In this way, Richards’s poem “performs aesthetic acts, transmits emotion corporally, targets the body and ‘feed[s],’” to use Gilles Deleuze’s words, “a ‘passionate conversation’ by way of embodied communication that emits ‘atypical, almost animal traits of expression’” (qtd. in Alsadir 53). From a recital of “Eletelephony,” which “follows its own rhythm, processing sense as commanded by vocal-gestural and semantic-affective relations, while abiding by the laws of grammar and logic in the text” (Campe 25; my translation), even children pick up on these “animal traits of expression” (Deleuze qtd. in Alsadir 53). Richards would have as a young listener: “I did not want my poetry simple. I wanted it to flash and ring and roll; bells and trumpets for Laura Elizabeth!” (Stepping 44).

38In “Eletelephony,” the most conspicuous punctuation marks are em-dashes (—) and parentheses. Most obviously the em-dash can be read as symbolizing the phone’s dial tone, or the busy line. Em-dashes (German: Geviert-, or Gedankenstriche, which literally translates as ‘thinking lines’) are “graphic operators of interruptions, for digressions” (Menke 171). By making space, literally, for tangential ideas, supplements, interjections, they “dissolve the singular narrative line” (171). Em-dashes point to references that exist beyond the margins of the text, real and virtual libraries, preceding discursive orders (171). In the case of “Eletelephony,” I would like to add, they rather point to future discursive orders and outrageous concepts.

39In Richards’s poem, em-dashes appear at the end of three lines: after “telephant” in line two, after “telephone” in line four and after “telephee” in line ten (second verse). Only “telephunk” in line eight (second verse) is succeeded by a colon, because it is the central line, the turning point in the poem, in which the elephant’s trunk gets entangled with the apparatus (or a part thereof). Each em-dash is preceded by one of the beforementioned “[n]onsense neologisms” (Sewell 115). Rather than announcing digressions that are explicated on the page, the em-dashes function as operators of pause, nudging the reader to take a moment to a) laugh and/or b) sit with the idea, feel into the nonsense that has just been uttered, as if by mistake. Consequently, emphasis is put on the three blends. Effects of slips of the tongue, they are the central loci of fun, of “purely mental delight” in the poem (149). Nonsensical in the present, they point to future possibilities.

4. From Imagetext to Animated Cartoon

42In online forums such as allpoetry.com users fondly remember reading “Eletelephony” as children (Richards). In 2024, however, a child has likely never seen, let alone used, the kind of telephone that is referenced in Richards’s popular nonsense poem—an apparatus with a handset and cord, a heavy, old-fashioned clunker compared to today’s mobile phones. To understand the poem, kids of today depend entirely on visualizations of the phone’s style such as Davis’s black-and-white illustration, which complements the original publication of the poem in Tirra Lirra (31). Rendering “the absurd confusion of ‘Eletelephony’” (Arbuthnot xiv), Davis depicts an elephant’s head whose large ears and trunk are wrapped in the long and flexible wire cord, connecting the handset with the base unit of a candlestick phone. He firmly holds the receiver with the tip of his long, curled trunk. With his head bent forward and mouth open, he seems to speak into the phone whose stand has toppled over (Figure 4).

43Like the poem’s tilting title, which works as both a noun and an adjective, the illustration is inherently unstable. With no background other than the white page to provide contextual information, which results from a graphic design technique called free-form-select, animal and apparatus appear out of nowhere. Centered on the page and rendered in profile, the elephant’s head is tilted to the left. With his gaze directed downwards and away from the reader, the elephant seems to be speaking on the phone, which makes him a “phantastic animal” in Borgards’s sense (“Tiere” 312; my translation). He could also be read more realistically, as about to bite into the phone, or, playing with it. The elephant’s facial expression is also ambiguous. Depending on the viewer’s (ethical) vantage point, it can be read as either cheerful, the picture hence pronouncing pleasure in the animal’s entanglement with the machine, or, if the viewer empathizes with the distressed elephant, as cranky or even desperate. Anamorphosis reconciles the happy and the sad that exist together in the image.

Figure 4: From Tirra Lirra: Rhymes Old and New. by Laura E. Richards, copyright © 1932, 1955. Reprinted by permission of Little, Brown and Company, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

46As soon as Davis’s ambiguous illustration is put into dialogue with Richards’s poem, which is placed below it, interpretation is fixed. According to the poem, which attributes higher intellectual faculties to the animal, the elephant is, indeed, about to speak on the phone, and not eat, or play with it. Interpretation is further informed by the poem’s specific comic dimension, which results from the speaker’s speech errors. All lapses are sound errors, producing funny blends and nonsensical neologisms such as “telephee” and “telephong.” All play on phonological similarities between the word ‘telephone’ and ‘elephant,’ on syllable structure, stress, and sounds. In some, letters and phonemes are re-mixed. In “telephant” or “elephone” syllables are switched. The title “Eletelephony” classifies as a more complex “Spoonerism,” where “a transposition or metathesis of two segments” occurs (Fromkin 30), formally mirroring the conceptual integration of “elephant” and telephone” as well as the act of “eletelephoning.” Formal integration is further maintained by the spelling of “ph” instead of “f” in all blends, which remains consistent throughout the text.

47Richards’s conceptual blending of elephant and telephone is accomplished via the elephant’s physique and gestures. The animal’s large ears, which may suggest good hearing, function as analogs of the phone’s receiver. The trumpeting sounds correspond with the telephone’s loud buzzing. It is not even too far-fetched to assume that the elephant picks up a phone’s mouthpiece, because “the dorsal extension of the tip of the trunk …, often referred to as ‘the finger,’ possesses remarkable mechanical dexterity, and is used for a variety of special behaviors including grasping food and tactile and ultimately chemosensory recognition via the vomeronasal organ” (Rasmussen and Munger). And while Richards was likely unaware of this fact, elephants are even capable of communicating over long distances, using “very low frequency calls known as ‘rumbles,’” that is infrasound which humans can barely detect (“Eavesdropping”).

48Products and productive of formal integration, Richards’s (intentional) blends are funny. In turn, the conceptual integration is also comical. Progressing from funny blends in the first to nonsensical neologisms in the second stanza, the speaker’s verbal struggle affords the poem with dynamic intensity. Furthermore, the speaker’s (unintentional) performance of creatively combining various segments of the words “telephone” and “elephant” (signifiers) is matched by the simultaneous mix-up of the elephant and telephone (signified) on the level of diegesis. Here the elephant’s interaction with the phone is rendered as a physical comedy, resulting from bodily actions (including the speaker’s slips of the tongue). With the speaker’s stuttering as analog to the comic body’s act of tripping, the poem, one could argue with Noël Carroll, engages slapstick humor’s “free reign of sadism in terms of either comic debacles or sprawling accidents” (26). Cruel wit makes Richards’s text as ambiguous as Davis’s image, together swaying back and forth between the happy and the sad, the comic and the tragic.

49In the June 1935 edition of Child Life, John Gee visualizes the elephant’s interaction with the telephone utterly unambiguously (Figure 5). On a double page spread, the U.S. American magazine for children and young adults features four of Richards’s poems alongside twelve illustrations. Three images supplement the reprint of “Eletelephony.” The one in the top left corner of the page shows an elephant who got the tip of his trunk stuck in the mouthpiece of a more advanced phone model with a rotary dial. The animal has a sour look on his face, likely in response to the mishap that ridicules his cultured ways, or aspirations, which are indicated by the glasses he wears. The illustration on the right side depicts a miniature elephant, who awkwardly clings to the switch hook, extending sideways from the apparatus, whose cord he seems to have walked like a tightrope. He looks grumpy and his body posture betrays discomfort as the phone is about to tilt over. Finally, the tiny illustration in the middle depicts a telephone with a decorative, zoomorphic top that is shaped like an elephant’s head with the trunk serving as the phone’s mouthpiece. Here animal and machine have fused into one lifeless, static object. Prioritizing the machine, I think this image better supplemented a poem entitled “Telephantology.”

Figure 5: From Child Life. by Laura E. Richards (text) and John Gee (illustrations), copyright © 1935. Reprinted by permission of Rand McNally.

50In summation, none of Gee’s images recasts Richards’s trunk-tangling tongue-twisters as dynamically as Davis’s and none depicts the connection of animal and machine as even remotely playful and pleasureable. Both is exclusive to Tirra Lirra’s ambiguous rendition of “Eletelephony,” which tips the scales in favor of the comic by loudly engaging in physical comedy, while silently retaining the unfortunate condition of the elephant who is unable to call for help. Expressive of the progressive mechanization of everyday life, the imagetext in Tirra Lirra ultimately suggests that modern life, which keeps both human and nonhuman animals in bondage and tragically impeded by the very technology meant to improve life, is best endured laughing. Recent reprints of the poem without Davis’s illustration on websites such as poems.org, poetrybyheart.org, or poetryanalysis.com, some of which even fail to truthfully reproduce the poem’s original structure of two 6-line-stanzas and punctuation, miss the media-historical dimension of “Eletelephony,” and thus the special genius of the original imagetext.