Bruce Thomas Boehrer is both a literature professor and a parrot lover. This makes him eminently qualified to write a book about the cultural impact of parrots on Western art, literature and imagination. Frankly, I assumed Boehrer was British, and was surprised to learn that he's a professor in Florida who spent part of his childhood in El Paso, Texas! Somehow, his knowledge of world literature and his writing skills sound more...well, European. Or am I just being prejudiced? His revulsion to animal cruelty in general and psittacophagy in particular also sound very British.
Boehrer's book "Parrot culture" isn't the easiest read around. Often, it does sound like a college lecture in literature, and the author even ventures into the risky world of art criticism. Yet, somehow it never becomes *really* boring, perhaps because of the subject-matter. Parrots, after all, are intrinsically interesting: exotic, common, intelligent and stupid, all at the same time, in a bewildering combination. As a kid, one of my best friends had an assortment of budgies ("parakeets"), and I remember thinking that they were really silly, since they couldn't talk. The quiet hyacinth macaw in the local pet store I considered even sillier, since it didn't even scream! And what is a parrot that can't talk, or scream, if not redundant? So much for my scientific objectivity...
But on to the book. The first European to describe parrots was a certain Ktesias of Cnidus around 398 BC. Ktesias had seen Indian parrots in Persia, and correctly described their ability to mimic human speech: "It talks like a man in Indian, but if taught Greek can talk in Greek also". Few people, if any, believed him. It wasn't until the conquests of Alexander the Great that parrots became more widely known in the Greek world. We even know what species Alexander sent back to Greece: the Alexandrine parakeet. Aristotle described the bird, and the rest is history.
Boehrer then describes how European cultures viewed the parrot, and how these notions changed. The Greco-Roman world saw parrots in many different ways: as a symbol of inferior humans, as comic relief, as near-divine. During the Middle Ages, few parrots reached Europe, and yet the parrot became an important religious symbol, associated with the Virgin Mary, the Garden of Eden, or God himself. During the Renaissance, the parrot was secularized and turned into an object of ridicule and spite. In Baroque art, the parrot becomes a symbol for native lands to be colonized, or simply a luxurious accessorie, and in Early Modern plays, parrots once again symbolize social and racial inferiority. Being compared to a parrot becomes an insult.
During the 19th century, the parrot was often a symbol of the sentimental, and pet parrots became increasingly popular. Boehrer also believes that a morbid fascination with dead animals characterized the period, and his verbal execution of the great naturalist and bird-painter Audubon is particularly entertaining (and very British).
The last chapter of the book takes us into the modern world. The author interviews environmental activists, writes about his own fascination with parrots, and even talks to a parrot smuggler! The smuggler was apparently imprisoned for trying to smuggle a couple of Australian parrots to the US, all the while the Australian government is busy exterminating thousands of parrots themselves. Who is most absurd, the human or the parrot, one wonders?
Amazon has coupled this book with Richard Verdi's "The Parrot in Art", a good choice in my opinion. Verdi's book is really an exhibition catalogue, and while the text is much shorter than Boehrer's book, the paintings are reproduced in full color (Boehrer's book shows some of the same paintings, but in black-and-white, and smaller size). Thus, the two books nicely complement each other.
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