Virginia Woolf’s Flush played a starring role in my previous post about the language of smell. Its central character, a cocker spaniel, sniffs his way through the world, and Woolf’s prose pirouettes and somersaults through synaesthetic metaphors as it tries to capture that experience. Having written another earlier post touching on the problem of knowing other minds (heterophenomenology being the beguiling technical term), and alluding to Thomas Nagel’s famous essay ‘What Is It Like To Be A Bat?’, I thought I might register the pertinence of Flush to that question too. Among the many passages trying to convey Flush’s sensory experiences, which could already be seen as aspiring to heterophenomenological content, there are some that turn towards the incompatible mental worlds of the dog and its mistress, the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

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And yet sometimes the tie would almost break; there were vast gaps in their understanding. Sometimes they would lie and stare at each other in blank bewilderment. Why, Miss Barrett wondered, did Flush tremble suddenly, and whimper and start and listen? She could hear nothing; she could see nothing; there was nobody in the room with them. She could not guess that Folly, her sister’s little King Charles, had passed the door; or that Catiline, the Cuba bloodhound, had been given a mutton-bone by a footman in the basement. But Flush knew; he heard; he was ravaged by the alternate rages of lust and greed. Then with all her poet’s imagination Miss Barrett could not divine what Wilson’s wet umbrella meant to Flush; what memories it recalled, of forests and parrots and wild trumpeting elephants; nor did she know, when Mr. Kenyon stumbled over the bell-pull, that Flush heard dark men cursing in the mountains; the cry, ‘Span! Span!’ rang in his ears, and it was in some muffled, ancestral rage that he bit him. (p. 26)

Woolf is interested in the origins of the spaniel as a breed, and tells a story of working dogs called ‘Span!’ by their ancient Iberian owners. This history is buried deep in the memory of the dog, and it stirs at unexpected times. The narrative voice knows something about this that Miss Barrett cannot. Much of this passage is concerned again with the senses of the dog, and what they afford. However, ‘understanding’ is brought in, what Flush ‘knew’ as well as what he ‘heard’, the reach of imagination: I think this is offering us the idea of building on sensory difference and getting further into what it might be like to have a spaniel’s way of thinking.

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Sleep became impossible while that man was there. Flush lay with his eyes wide open, listening. Though he could make no sense of the little words that hurtled over his head from two-thirty to four-thirty sometimes three times a week, he could detect with terrible accuracy that the tone of the words was changing. Miss Barrett’s voice had been forced and unnaturally lively at first. Now it had gained a warmth and an ease that he had never heard in it before. And every time the man came, some new sound came into their voices – now they made a grotesque chattering; now they skimmed over him like birds flying widely; now they cooed and clucked, as if they were two birds settled in a nest; and then Miss Barrett’s voice, rising again, went soaring and circling in the air; and then Mr. Browning’s voice barked out its sharp, harsh clapper of laughter; and then there was only a murmur, a quiet humming sound as the two voices joined together. But as the summer turned to autumn Flush noted, with horrid apprehension, another note. There was a new urgency, a new pressure and energy in the man’s voice, at which Miss Barrett, Flush felt, took fright. Her voice fluttered; hesitated; seemed to falter and fade and plead and gasp, as if she were begging for a rest, for a pause, as if she were afraid. Then, the man was silent. (pp. 40-1)

‘That man’ is the poet Robert Browning, and this passage (which I think is dazzlingly good; not all of Flush is dazzlingly good, but I think this bit is) conveys a pet dog’s experience of human conversation and its subtexts. I think I can more or less leave it to speak for itself. Its similes and metaphors, intimations and possible misconceptions, compose a picture of the inwardness of another species. However, what comes across just as vividly, perhaps more so, and seems to me like its main achievement, is the portrayal of human drama, of two people falling in love, asking questions, and fearing answers, seen more sharply as a result of an estranging perspective.