In David Garnett's novella A Man in the Zoo (1924) a young man, as an extreme gesture in a row with his fiancée, has himself placed for weeks in a cage in the Ape House at London Zoo. Spectators find him on display as a species between the orang-utan and the chimpanzee. In many scenes of this novella the mere presence of the cage wires marking a strict line between the human-as-spectator and the animal-as-exhibit produces defamilarising and disturbing effects. Take the scene in which the fiancée, Josephine, arrives among the crowd of spectators:

The scene is both comic and disturbing. Normal conventions of signification are transgressed in a view of the human as animal and of caged animal behaviour (walking up and down) as human boredom.