190OF HYBRIDITY AND THE HYBRIDDykes), though the speech of Edson’s ape is a severe falling off in dig-
nity and philosophical sophistication from that of Red Peter. The poem
enacts various kinds of mixing and confusing of categories. A spat about
spilled coffee leads to a philosophical argument. The ape is pet or spouse,
belonging to the man, but also an independent thinker and actor. The
conversation between man and ape shows the man exerting his author-
ity as husband or owner: he makes the accusation that the ape has got-
ten on the coffee, threatens the ape, and screams that he is frightened
by the ape. On the other hand, the ape is the apparently rational crea-
ture here, insisting that an ape cannot be spilled on coffee. The man has
made a fundamental category error, and he is the apparently irratio-
nal one, seeming to inhabit a universe with alternative physical laws.
Because to him the ape doesn’t look human, and because he does not
“know what the hell you are,” the animal is responsible for the man’s
mistake. The reader, like the man, must begin by assuming that the man
is sovereign and right and not the absurd character in the poem. Not
only does the ape seem to speak the truth in the poem, but his modes of
speaking are also much more varied: he whistles, peeps, tweets, pipes,
hoots, and screeches. Yet this variety of sounds can suggest animal or
human. In its brevity and its being simultaneously prose and poetry, this
“poem” adopts the form of classical animal fable. Here too category is
invoked and inverted, for if this poem is allegory, the meaning or referent
of the allegory is opaque. Allegory implies a one-to-one correspondence
of signifier and signified, vehicle and tenor, but here the point seems
to be to suggest that categorical binaries (human and animal, man and
ape, liquid and solid, accuser and defender, master and slave, prose and
poetry, comedy and horror, etc.) are merely words with seemingly arbi-
trary relations to the real.
In Edson’s “Ape,” a mother and father argue about the edibility of a
monkey literally “dressed” for dinner, with onion rings around its fin-
gers and a “ribbon tied in a bow on its privates.”^49 The father, who is
“damn sick of ape every night,” thinks it is not dressed enough, scream-
ing that he wishes mother would “put underpants on these apes; even
a jockstrap.” To him, these apes “aren’t dinners, these are post-mortem
dissections.” To mother, his distress is a sign that he suspects her of