a passage from “New Insights Concerning the Human Psyche: The Mannheim Man,” La Spada [The Sword] (1942), by Tommaso Landolfi 

And now for us, Gentledogs! for us both, you vile interruptors! (Loud jeers of hilarity. The speaker has left his notes on the table and continues impromptu. Yells from those on the left: Let him speak!). And to the rescue, dogs of the left, those in thrall to science, to the true, the good, those dispassionate researchers of canine behavior, and not only canine but also human behavior as well as the behavior of all living creatures, with the sole interest of protecting our shared mother nature! Once upon a time, in the very depths of what villainous secular doctrines trained us to consider a blind darkness, messages reached us, timid but distinct. Ah therefore, gentledogs, was the privilege reserved for you true believers alone of hearing, of thinking, of communicating your own ideas? In word—though it must cost your stubborn pride, even those of you shrewd enough to recognize its benefit to you personally—no! (Shouts of: You’re repeating yourself!). Yes, I’m repeating myself and I’ll keep repeating myself until the breath leaves my body! It pains me to tell you, gentledogs, prepare yourselves for the shock, it pains me, but A MAN HAS SPOKEN! And will those with intelligence and compassion ignore its message, or leave the communications of it or any other creature unheard? Noo, of course not. A man has spoken and communicated its thoughts to us. And yes, I’m not ashamed to call them thoughts. A man has spoken—and thus the walls erected by a shameful backward ideology have toppled under the open-minded consideration of a fact of nature, and the columns of our very own “Clever Hans” of canine science, which the humble canine spirit did not dare contravene, have fallen. New horizons, my dear dogs, are now open to investigation, to speculation, to the soul! (Roars). A man has spoken: the final strongholds of a dogma sacred on the outside but actually evil within, the final deeds upheld by a religion that can only rule by fostering general ignorance! They surrender, the defenders of these gloomy contraptions, having lost their step! (Loud uproar). Only a sinister, pathetic ideology, and the idle doctrines of degenerate philosophies lacking any hint of enlightenment, could maintain such vulgar illusions, such shameful prejudices! No, Gentledogs, a man has spoken: and a new era opens for the canine spirit! A new era has been inaugurated for canine science, which one day may be called the LOGANTHROPIC ERA! 

As its long, academic title suggests, Tommaso Landolfi's 1942 speculative fiction story is staged as a presentation of the research into human cognition and behavior at an academic conference, but with a bizarre twist: our hysterical activist narrator is a dog presenting his groundbreaking, controversial research to a skeptical and outraged audience of fellow canines. The story presents a methodical depiction of behavioral science experiments in language and cognition, as the narrator Doktor Iflodnal tests Tommy, a human male with a rope tail who is the pet of a canine family in Mannheim, Germany.

The story satirizes the phenomenon of the so-called gifted animal, especially the Elberfeld horses of Karl Krall, Muhamed and Zarif, who performed math computations and brief responses based on a system of numerical taps for awe-struck audiences and skeptical psychologists in the early 20th century.

Landolfi’s ironic framing—casting the dogs in the role of human scientists, and the human man in the role of the gifted animal—is amusing at a surface level, in its defamiliarizing of the animal hierarchy. (See, for example, the dogs’ amazement that the human animal can correctly count the flowers in a bouquet of red carnations, which look identical to them.) But the work is made subtly more complex and profound by the suggestion at different times that the Herr Doktor is misinterpreting Tommy the Dog's communications and reporting them with overdetermined precision in his talk. Is the narrator's defense of animism through reverse anthropocentrism a mocking of anti-science narrow-mindedness, or a cutting jab at the methods and dogmas of the social sciences?