The representation of animals in Guillermo Schmidhuber's In Praise of Stupidity

Abstract

Praise (Eulogy) of stupidity –fabled essay– by Guillermo Schmidhuber (2005) consists of a Prologue for the intelligent reader, written by The Academy of Animals: The Zoonesco, followed by a series of essays as letters that conclude with a brief story. The Edict of the Assembly of the animals is at the end. This essay focuses on the analysis of animal representation in the prologue and in the nine stories that are interspersed among the epistles. The approach to address the mentioned corpus is Structuralism Roland Barthes which leads to the semiotics of the text. The purpose of this method is to provide an open interpretation according to the connotation that each of the stories evokes. The analyzed texts constitute a satire of mankind. Animals act as symbols that criticize religious, political and moral systems built by humans. The presence of classical elements makes clear the anthropocentric view of the universe to which the animal species are opposed, in favor of a new ethic that integrates all living beings with equal rights. The animalization of humans represents an involution process. Pride, envy, violence and stupidity are the factors that trigger the regression in the evolutionary scale while wisdom, democracy and morality are attributed to the development of existence.