David Herman - Narratology Beyond The Human - Storytelling and Animal Life (2018, Oxford University Press)

n Narratology beyond
the Human
Narratology beyond
the Human
Storytelling and Animal Life
David Herman
3
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For Susan, lover of moth, moorhen, and manatee, of dogwood,
cactus flower, and live oak, of coastal path, desert riverbed,
and Plaza Andalusia
■ C O N T E N T S
Preface ix
Introduction 1
PA R T I ■ Storytelling and Selfhood beyond the Human
1 Self-Narratives and Nonhuman Selves 25

2 Boundary Conditions: Identification and Transformation
across Species Lines 51
3 Entangled Selves, Transhuman Families 87
PA R T I I ■ Narrative Engagements with

More-Than-Human Worlds
4 Multispecies Storyworlds in Graphic Narratives 117

5 Life Narratives beyond the Human 157
6 Animal Minds across Discourse Domains 202
7 Explanation and Understanding in Animal Narratives 233
Coda: Toward a Bionarratology; or, Storytelling at Species Scale 249
Notes 295
Glossary 335
Bibliography 341
Index 375
vii
■ P R E F A C E
This book aims to develop a cross-disciplinary approach to post-Darwinian narra-

tives concerned with animals and human-animal relationships, and in the process
open new lines of communication between the two domains of research at whose
intersection it is situated.1 One domain is narratology, the study of the structures,
meanings, and uses of narratives of all sorts. The other domain is research on cultural
understandings of animals that postdate Darwin’s groundbreaking work in evolu-
tionary biology, and in particular his hypothesis that humans are subject to the same
evolutionary processes that bear on other forms of creatural life. Research in this
second area examines how attitudes toward other animals and the broader environ-
ment that we share with them take shape in—and in turn put their stamp on—a
variety of cultural institutions, practices, and artifacts. What has been largely absent
from such sociocultural approaches to creatural life, and what thus sets my study
apart from previous work in the field, is an emphasis on the distinctive structures
and functions of narratively organized discourse centering on animals and human-
animal relationships. Analysis of these structures and functions can, I argue, clarify
the role played by fictional as well as nonfictional narratives in consolidating, chal-
lenging, or reconfiguring more or less dominant understandings of the nonhuman
world. At the same time, I explore how a fuller, more sustained consideration of
animal narratives sheds new light on the nature of storytelling itself.
The chapters that follow thus suggest how the study of fictional as well as non-
fictional narratives that include but extend beyond the realm of the human can pro-
mote dialogue and exchange among the arts, sciences, and humanities. Conversely,
approaching these narratives from a cross-disciplinary perspective can foster new
ways of imagining and responding to trans-species entanglements in the larger bio-
sphere. Because so many encounters with animals are mediated through narratively
organized discourse, there is pressing need for a comprehensive model of what sto-
rytelling practices reveal about (human attitudes toward) the nonhuman world and
its inhabitants. A model that integrates structural and contextual analysis, combin-
ing the technical methods of narratology with research on cultural understandings
of animals and human-animal interactions, can achieve such comprehensiveness,
allowing for a step change in this area of inquiry.
Indeed, a guiding assumption of the book is that it is impossible to come fully to
terms with the narratives under study without engaging in the new ways of thinking
that emerge from and also contribute to cross-or rather transdisciplinary dialogue
of this sort.2 For that matter the root question “What is an animal?” cannot be
answered in the absence of sustained collaboration across different areas of inquiry.
The very notion animal carries mythopoetic, biological-ecological, sociohistorical,
and legal-political resonances that are multiplied when trans-species relationships
ix
x ■ Preface
come into view—and that are further multiplied when questions about how nar-
ratives at once reflect and help shape broader understandings of animals and
human-animal relationships are considered. Accordingly, the combined efforts of
scholars working in the humanities, the social sciences, and the life sciences will
be needed to investigate the range of issues raised by life stories that, in recounting
human-animal interactions, evoke expanded forms of relationality cutting across
the boundary between human and nonhuman worlds. Similarly complex and mul-
tidimensional issues arise in connection with questions about how storytelling
media and narrative genres bear on the process of telling and interpreting animal
stories; about the norms governing ascriptions of subjective experiences to nonhu-
man others, in both nonfictional and fictional contexts; and about the possibility of
engaging with species-level phenomena in narratively organized discourse, which is
arguably tailored to human-scale environments. A central aim of the present book
is to promote, by setting out the rudiments of a narratology beyond the human,
further discussion of these and other issues that straddle disciplinary boundaries
as well as species lines.
A word about my title: In using the expression “narratology beyond the
human,” I build on the precedent set by Kohn (2013) vis-à-vis anthropology.
Kohn himself builds on a still earlier precedent set by Ingold (1990), who argued
that “the most urgent task for contemporary anthropology is to . . . re-embed the
human subject within the continuum of organic life” such that the “study of persons
[is] subsumed under the study of organisms” (224).3 Along the same lines, Kohn
suggests that it is necessary to develop an approach to anthropological research
that encompasses but also reaches beyond the human, “an ethnographic focus not
just on humans or only on animals but also on how humans and animals relate,”
in order to break “open the circular closure that otherwise confines us when we
seek to understand the distinctively human by means of that which is distinctive
to humans”—for example, via sociocultural anthropology with its emphasis on lan-
guage, culture, society, and history (6).4 Analogously, in the present study I depart
from previous analysts’ claims that for a text or a discourse to have narrativity, or
the quality that makes a narrative more or less amenable to being interpreted as a
narrative, the text at issue must present the experiences of human or human-like
agents (see chapter 4 for further discussion). Although a concern with human expe-
riences can by no means be excluded from an approach that focuses, in part, on
stories about human-animal relationships, I explore here the implications of a more
inclusive model of narrative—and a broader conception of narrativity. This model
resituates processes of storytelling and story interpretation, as well as the analytic
frameworks that have been developed to study those processes, in a trans-species
ecology of selves, marked by a prolific allocation of possibilities for subjective expe-
rience across species lines.
Thus, rather than circumscribing narrative within the closed circle of the human,
as a distinctively human means for representing distinctively human experiences,
I work to reframe narrative as a resource for engaging with what can be described
as the co-constitutive relationality between humans and other animals, as discussed
Preface ■ xi
further in chapter 1. As will become evident in my discussion, any given account

may affirm or deny, occlude or highlight relationality of this sort, whereby humans
and nonhumans occupy their particular worldly situations, come to be who and
what they are, through (at least in part) their being-in-relation-to-one-another. But
such variability only underscores the tendentiousness of claims that narrative is
by its nature human-centric—such that narrativity itself depends on the filtering
of situations and events through human or human-like experiencers. A narratology
beyond the human begins by questioning these premises; it then proceeds to build
an alternative platform for analysis on the assumption that stories not only reflect
but also have the potential to reshape understandings of trans-species relational-
ity, in which we and other forms of creatural life—fellow members of more-than-
human communities—are caught up.
The book has been written with two audiences in mind: scholars of narrative who
are interested in how research on trans-species relationships might afford new foun-
dations for the study of stories; and, reciprocally, analysts working in one or more of
the many fields concerned with animal worlds and human-animal interactions who
are interested in how tools from narratology might help them build new frameworks
for inquiry. For readers in the second group, in particular, I have included a glossary
containing definitions of some of the narratological terms of art used over the course
of this study.
Part of the research informing this book was supported by a departmental research
leave from the Department of English Studies at Durham University in the UK. I am
grateful for this support, and also for the many helpful questions and comments
I received from attendees at the conferences, colloquia, and seminars where I presented
parts of the project, including events at Bournemouth University, the University of
Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, Washington
University in Saint Louis, North Carolina State University, the University of Oxford,
Durham University, Queen Mary University of London, the University of Ghent,
and the University of Sheffield. I am also indebted to the students, departmental col-
leagues, and fellow researchers who have given so generously of their time in assisting
me with the scholarship that informs this study, including Jan Alber, Jan Baetens, Paul
Batchelor, Lars Bernaerts, Marco Bernini, Jens Brockmeier, Marco Caracciolo, Megan
Cavell, Thalia Field, David Fuller, Dan Grausam, Carol Guess, Tom Hawkins, Charles
Healy, Don Hubin, Teemu Ikonen, Shun Kiang, Lisa Kiser, Simon James, Norman
Jones, Markku Lehtimäki, Robert McKay, Vera Nünning, Mary Offutt- Reagin,
Matthew Ratcliffe, Stephen Regan, John Paul Riquelme, Carrie Rohman, Nick Saul,
Corinne Saunders, Jenny Terry, Emily Troscianko, Will Viney, and Amy Youngs. Special
thanks go to Jens Brockmeier, Marco Caracciolo, and Matthew Ratcliffe, who offered
insightful comments on several portions of the manuscript and helped me clarify my
thinking about the larger issues at stake, and to Bob McKay and Carrie Rohman for
sharing, in such a collegial and supportive fashion, their extensive expertise in the field
of human-animal studies. At the press, I thank Hannah Doyle, Abigail Johnson, Sarah
Pirovitz, and Hallie Stebbens for their generous support for and assistance with this
xii ■ Preface
project from the outset; Richard Isomaki for his expert copyediting of the manuscript;
and designer Rachel Perkins for her work on the cover art. Likewise, I am indebted to
the press’s external reviewers for their detailed, incisive comments on an earlier ver-
sion of the manuscript. I am grateful as well to Sue Coe for her generous permission
to reproduce images from Pit’s Letter in c hapter 5, and to Fay Duftler, at Galerie St.
Etienne in New York City, for helping me to obtain those images. My thanks go, too,
to Jesse Reklaw and to Eric Reynolds at Fantagraphics Books for permission to use the
images from Reklaw’s Thirteen Cats of My Childhood that I discuss in chapter 1.
Earlier versions of parts of this book appeared in the form of journal articles and
book chapters, and though this material has been substantially revised since its ini-
tial publication, I am grateful for permission to draw on it here:
• “Animal Autobiography; or, Narration beyond the Human.” Humanities 5.4
(2016); special issue on “Animal Narratology” guest-edited by Joela Jacobs.
http://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/5/4/82.
• “Hermeneutics beyond the Species Boundary: Explanation and
Understanding in Animal Narratives.” Storyworlds: A Journal of Narrative
Studies 8.1 (2016): 1–30. Published by the University of Nebraska Press.
• “Trans-species Entanglements: Animal Assistants in Narratives about
Autism.” Edinburgh Companion to the Critical Medical Humanities. Ed. Anne
Whitehead, Angela Woods, Sarah Atkinson, Jane Macnaughton, and Jennifer
Richards. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016. 463–80. Reproduced
with permission of Edinburgh University Press Limited via PLSClear.
• Extracts from pp. 195– 216, chap. 10 “Animal Minds across Discourse
Domains” by David Herman from Cognitive Literary Science: Dialogues between
Literature and Cognition, edited by Michael Burke and Emily T. Troscianko
(2017). By permission of Oxford University Press.
• “Building More-Than-Human Worlds: Umwelt Modelling in Animal
Narratives.” World Building: Discourse in the Mind. Ed. Joanna Gavins
and Ernestine Lahey. London: Bloomsbury, 2016. 53–70. Published by
Bloomsbury Academic, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.
• “Vermin, Visualisation, and Animal Geography: Graphic Adaptations of
Kafka’s The Metamorphosis.” Nyx 9 (2015): 22–37.
• “Narratology beyond the Human.” DIEGESIS: Interdisciplinary E-Journal for
Narrative Research 3.2 (December 2014): 131–43.
• “Modernist Life Writing and Nonhuman Lives: Ecologies of Experience in
Virginia Woolf ’s Flush.” Modern Fiction Studies 59.3 (2013): 547–68. © 2013
Purdue Research Foundation. Reprinted with permission of Johns Hopkins
University Press.
• “Toward a Zoonarratology: Storytelling and Species Difference in Animal
Comics.” Narrative, Interrupted: The Plotless, the Disturbing, and the Trivial
in Literature. Ed. Markku Lehtimäki, Laura Karttunen, and Maria Mäkelä.
Berlin: de Gruyter, 2012. 93–119. Walter De Gruyter GmbH Berlin Boston,
Preface ■ xiii
2012. Copyright and all rights reserved. Material from this publication has
been used with the permission of Walter De Gruyter GmbH.
• “Storyworld/Umwelt: Nonhuman Experiences in Graphic Narratives.”
SubStance 40.1 (2011): 156–81. © 2011 by the Board of Regents of the
University of Wisconsin System. Reprinted courtesy of the University of
Wisconsin Press.
n Narratology beyond the Human
Introduction
Then she [the thylacine or Tasmanian tiger] settles down to feed again.
What he is seeing is both beautiful and terrible at the same time, and he
watches with the same rapt attention he would devote to a film which
told the story of his own life, past and future.
—Julia Leigh, The Hunter (Leigh 1999: 162)
After the initial founding of the field of narratology in the 1960s and its systematiza-
tion and consolidation in the 1970s and 1980s, scholarship on narrative over the last
several decades has been marked by a resurgence of theory-building activity, enabled
in part by analysts’ engagement with ideas from other areas of inquiry. Cross-disci-
plinarity has driven—even constituted—narratological research from the start; but
whereas the early narratologists, following a larger structuralist trend, looked to lin-
guistics as their “pilot-science” for the study of stories, more recent contributions
to the field have drawn on ideas from a variety of source disciplines, ranging from
feminist theory, philosophical ethics, and cognitive science, to digital media studies,
evolutionary biology, and ecocriticism. At the same time, scholars of narrative have
expanded the corpus of stories—and broadened the range of storytelling media—
on which these new, integrative frameworks for analysis have been brought to bear.
The resulting proliferation of case studies across genres, periods, media, and cul-
tural settings has both productively diversified and helpfully constrained research in
the field; this double benefit derives from the way claims about narrative tout court
must now be checked against attested storytelling practices in multiple fictional and
nonfictional genres distributed over a constellation of media platforms, historical
epochs, and cultural contexts.
Such, arguably, is the state of the art when it comes to narrative studies; or, to
shift to the vocabulary of Thomas S. Kuhn (1962), the research situation that I have
described thus far amounts to the normal science of contemporary narratology.1 To
be sure, much more paradigm-extending work of this sort needs to be done, given
that theorists are still refining their methods for investigating narratives within
(let alone across) particular genres and formats, and given too the constant inno-
vation and renewal of the source disciplines from which cognitive narratologists,
analysts of narrative vis-à-vis questions of gender and sexuality, and students of vis-
ual storytelling, among others, continue to recruit concepts and models. But there
is another important task for narratology in the twenty-first century. This task, more
reflexive or metanarratological in nature, extends beyond the process of mapping
out the explanatory reach of current paradigms for narrative study, or for that mat-
ter furthering normal narratological science by supplementing existing paradigms
with new research frameworks of the same general kind. At issue is a reassessment
of the place of scholarship on narrative within a wider ecology of inquiry, a broader
1
2 ■ Narratology beyond the Human
system of values and commitments; this reassessment takes stock of how stories and
traditions for analyzing them relate to the norms, institutions, and practices that
structure academic and other engagements with today’s most pressing concerns,
geopolitical, jurisprudential, environmental, health-related, and other.
Contributing to a reassessment of this sort, the present study uses a range of
example texts to outline an approach to narrative inquiry that, while continuing to
leverage the invaluable gains of paradigm-extending work in the field, also brings
into view alternative pathways for research and engagement—pathways that may
lead to a re-envisioning and recontextualization of normal narratological science.
More specifically, I explore aspects of a narratology beyond the human, considering
how ideas developed by scholars of narrative bear on questions about the nature and
scope of human-animal relationships in the larger biosphere, and vice versa.
In outlining this integrative approach to storytelling in a more-than-human
setting, my study also considers the enabling and constraining effects of different
narrative media, examining a range of post-Darwinian texts disseminated in print,
comics and graphic novels, and film. Focusing on techniques employed in these
media, including the use of animal narrators, alternation between human and non-
human perspectives on events, shifts backward and forward in narrative time, the
embedding of stories within stories, and others, I explore how specific strategies for
portraying nonhuman agents both emerge from and contribute to broader attitudes
toward animal life. Conversely, emphasizing how stories are, in general, interwoven
with cultures’ ontologies, their assumptions about what sorts of beings populate the
world and how those beings’ qualities and abilities relate to the qualities and abilities
ascribed to humans, promises to reshape existing frameworks for narrative inquiry.
Ideas that have been foundational for the field are at stake here, including ideas
about what makes narratives more or less amenable to being interpreted as narra-
tives, about the extent to which differences of genre affect attributions of mental
states to characters (human as well as nonhuman) in narrative contexts, and about
the suitability of stories as a means for engaging with supra-individual phenomena
unfolding over long timescales and in widely separated places, including patterns
and events situated at the level of animal populations and species rather than par-
ticular creatures.
Research conducted under the auspices of narratology beyond the human can be
developed both diachronically, across different epochs, and synchronically, across
cultures, genres, and media in any given epoch, and it can in principle encompass
plant life and geophysical structures and processes as well as the lives of animals.
Because of the need to maintain a reasonably well-delimited focus of inquiry and to
avoid hyperextending the tools for analysis that it is possible to fashion within the
scope of a single monograph, the present book limits itself to narratives centering
on animal worlds and human-animal relationships.2 By the same token, the pres-
ent study concentrates on the post-Darwinian period, and focuses mainly though
not exclusively on English-language narratives.3 Setting up my analysis along these
lines has allowed me to constrain further the corpus of stories being investigated
and thereby prevent, I hope, an overly shallow treatment of my example texts.
Introduction ■ 3
But what is more, I have chosen to concentrate on narratives postdating Darwin’s

groundbreaking contributions because his hypothesis that humans are caught up in
the same evolutionary processes that affect other animals has had such a profound
impact on understandings of our species’ place within the wider realm of creatural
life (Darwin 1859/2009, 1871/1999). Indeed, one of my working assumptions
is that a “narratology beyond the human” would not have been possible without
Darwin’s deconstruction of hierarchical oppositions between human and nonhu-
man forms of life.
Here, however, it is worth mentioning Dennett’s (1995) wide-ranging account
of the sources and manifestations of resistance to Darwin’s “dangerous idea”—the
idea that “life on Earth has been generated over billions of years in a single branch-
ing tree—the Tree of Life—by one algorithmic process or another” (51). Defining
the term algorithm as “a certain sort of formal process that can be counted on—
logically—to yield a certain sort of result whenever it is ‘run’ or instantiated” (50),
Dennett attributes to such algorithmic processes three key features: substrate neu-
trality (the process can be run no matter what materials are used in its instantiation);
underlying mindlessness (despite more or less complex results, each constituent
step, and each transition between steps, is simple enough for a “straightforward
mechanical device to perform”); and guaranteed results (an algorithm is, in effect,
a “foolproof recipe”) (50–51). Suggesting that the process of natural selection, as
described by Darwin, shares these features, Dennett goes on to write:
Here, then, is Darwin’s dangerous idea: The algorithmic level is the level that best
accounts for the speed of the antelope, the wing of the eagle, the shape of the orchid,
the diversity of species, and all the other occasions for wonder in the world of nature.
It is hard to believe that something as mindless and mechanical as an algorithm
could produce such wonderful things. . . . Can [the biosphere] really be the out-
come of nothing but a cascade of algorithmic processes feeding on chance? and if
so, who designed that cascade? Nobody. It is itself the product of a blind, algorithmic
process. (59)
Reviewing work in fields that include cosmology, psychology, language acquisition,
(meta)mathematics, ethics, and the history and theory of evolution itself, Dennett
argues that, in addition to attempting directly to rebut the implications of Darwin’s
algorithmic model, theorists in these and other domains have sought to discredit
through charges of reductionism or scientism—or to circumvent or evade by other
means—Darwin’s “implicit claim that the various processes of natural selection, in
spite of their underlying mindlessness, are powerful enough to have done all the
design work that is manifest in the world” (60).4 Along similar lines, Margot Norris
(2010) has traced the split between Pavlovian and Freudian models of animal
and human psychology, respectively, as well as Kafka’s subversive transposition of
these models across species categories, back to early twentieth-century resistance
to Darwin’s ideas—more specifically, his argument for a fundamental continuity
between the mental capabilities and dispositions of humans and other animals, in
works such as The Descent of Man and The Expression of the Emotions in Man and
Animals (Darwin 1871/1999, 1872/1998; see also Norris 1985 and chapter 7 of the
present study).
To extrapolate from Norris’s analysis: narrative traditions that emerged in the
wake of Darwin’s non-or anti-anthropocentric account of processes of natural selec-
tion manifest the same basic dynamic that Dennett discusses in a more general way
vis-à-vis the reception of Darwinian theory across a variety of disciplines and cul-
tural settings. Some post-Darwinian narrative traditions work to reinforce the species
hierarchies that other traditions, in a manner that resonates with Darwin’s biocentric
approach (Norris 1985), call into question. In other words, and to anticipate issues dis-
cussed in more detail in the chapters that follow (see, in particular, c hapters 3 and 7),
prior models of species identity and human-animal relationships—models circulat-
ing more or less pervasively in the culture(s) of which I am a member—inform (my
interpretation of) stories featuring nonhuman characters. Some of these models, such
as those associated with factory farming and biomedical research, are premised on and
help reinstantiate in narrative terms the species hierarchies that can be traced back to
Aristotle’s Scale of Nature (Clutton-Brock 1995) but that “Darwin’s dangerous idea” in
effect deconstructed. Yet other stories featuring animal subjects and cross-species rela-
tionships thematize, contest, and work to reshape models of the sort just described. In
this sense, telling different kinds of narratives about humans’ relationships with non-
human others has the potential to alter understandings of our place within a more-
than-human world, and hence of what constitutes or defines the human.
Overall my emphasis in the present study is on the power of narrative to reframe
the cultural models or ontologies that undergird hierarchical understandings of
humans’ place in the larger biotic communities of which they are members. It is also
important to acknowledge, however, the way narrative can at the same time be used
to shore up, reproduce, and even amplify human-centric understandings of animals
and cross-species relationships.5 Accordingly, one way of describing the brief of a
narratology beyond the human is to say that it aims to map out, both genealogi-
cally and in the context of any given account, the interplay between anthropocentric
and biocentric storytelling traditions, and to explore how specific narrative practices
emerge from—and feed back into—this dialectical interplay (again, see chapter 7).
In the remainder of this introduction, I first situate my approach more fully
within the broader context of contemporary narrative studies as well as human-
animal studies (and related fields). Here I flesh out more fully what is entailed by
moving beyond what in Kuhnian terms might be termed “normal narratological
science” so as to take stock of how stories and traditions for analyzing them relate
to concerns being articulated in cross-disciplinary work on animals and human-
animal relationships. Then, in lieu of a bare outline of the chapters contained in
the book, I use a case study in storytelling across media—more specifically, a com-
parison of Julia Leigh’s 1999 novel The Hunter and its 2011 cinematic adaptation
by director Daniel Nettheim—to provide a sketch of the concerns to be explored
in each chapter and also a brief demonstration of the analytic methods that will
be used to engage with those concerns. A number of far-reaching questions take
Introduction ■ 5
shape in this context—questions that I seek to address over the course of the study
as a whole: What forms of relatedness are made possible by cultural ontologies in
which an expanded community of selves extends beyond the species boundary, and
how are these transhuman networks of affiliation configured or reconfigured in fic-
tional texts, nonfictional discourse on animals, the storyworlds of cinema, narratives
for children, and other storytelling modes? How do the attested characteristics of
particular species, and the relative (in)frequency of humans’ interactions with the
members of those species, bear on allocations of possibilities for transhuman subjec-
tivity in narrative contexts? To what extent can existing paradigms for narratological
analysis capture forms of cross-species relationality, as they manifest themselves in
the structures of narrative discourse, and to what extent will new, cross-disciplinary
modes of inquiry be required to develop a narratology beyond the human? How, in
turn, might the concepts and methods that emerge from such a narratology bear on
ways of understanding humans’ place in the larger biotic communities in which they
participate?
Before turning to these and other questions raised by my approach, however,
I need to address a key concern for any investigation of narratives in which animals
feature importantly: namely, the issue of anthropomorphism.
n R
EASSESSING ANTHROPOMORPHISM
Over the course of this study I use anthropomorphism, anthropomorphic projection, and
cognate terms sparingly, in part because of conceptual problems bound up with the
very notion of anthropomorphism. For one thing, analysts have drawn distinctions
between naive and critical or heuristic modes of anthropomorphism. Thus Bekoff
(2013) responds to lines of argument advanced by self-described antianthropomor-
phizing theorists ranging from Morgan (1894) to Kennedy (1992), suggesting that
“anthropomorphic language does not have to discount the animal’s point of view.
Anthropomorphism allows other animals’ behavior and emotions to be accessible to
us” (63). Burghardt (2010) makes a similar case for the view that “anthropomorphism
can be useful in studying and interpreting animal behavior if it is applied critically. This
means anchoring anthropomorphic statements and inferences in our knowledge of spe-
cies’s natural history, perceptual and learning capabilities, physiology, nervous system,
and previous individual history” (73). What is more, as Fisher (1996) points out, it is
possible to subdivide still further the conceptual territories subsumed under the rubric
of anthropomorphism. Thus Fisher (1996: 6–8) proposes a taxonomy that includes
the following varieties of anthropomorphic thinking: imaginative = representing imagi-
nary or fictional animals as being like humans; interpretive = ascribing mentalistic predi-
cates (M-predicates) to an animal in order to interpret or explain the animal’s behavior;
categorical = ascribing M-predicates to animals that could not, in principle, have those
predicates; situational = erroneously ascribing M-predicates to animals that could, in
principle, have those predicates in some other situation. Fisher further subdivides cat-
egorical anthropomorphism into species type (= ascribing M-predicates appropriate for
one species to a different species) and predicate type (= ascribing an inappropriate M-
predicate to a given creature).
For his part, Sober (2005), drawing on the work of primatologist Frans de Waal
(2001), notes that strictures against anthropomorphism introduce a bias of their
own: that is, “anthropodenial,” whereby one assumes a priori that nonhuman organ-
isms are not like humans. As discussed further in chapter 7, Plumwood (2007) has
identified far-reaching consequences of such anthropodenial, arguing that terms like
anthropomorphism and sentimentality have themselves been employed “to delegit-
imate boundary breakdown between human and non-human worlds” (17); such
techniques of delegitimation “enforce segregated and polarised vocabularies that
rob the non-human world of agency and the possibility of speech, with departures
from reductionist standards declared irrational or superstitious” (20). Elsewhere,
Plumwood (2002a) concedes that some “humanisation of perspective” will always
be at the background level of any engagement with nonhuman lives, but argues that
the real questions, in this connection, are “how damaging [such humanisation] is,
what is its meaning, and what practices could be used to counter it if and where it
needs to be countered?” (58). In sum, distinguishing between weaker and stronger
forms of anthropomorphism, Plumwood suggests that “weak forms are unavoida-
ble but not necessarily harmful, while strong forms may be damaging but are by no
means inevitable” (58). She grants that ignoring an animal’s differences from humans
amounts to a damaging, difference-denying anthropomorphism that is also a form
of anthropocentrism (59).6 Yet “cross-species representation, like cross-cultural
representation, is not automatically colonising or self-imposing, and may express
motives and meanings of sympathy, support and admiration” (60). Accordingly,
“Specific cases have to be argued on their merits, not just in terms of the alleged
intrusion of non-indigenous or human impurities, but in terms of the kinds of
insights they present or prevent and the moral quality of the representation” (60).
In short, it is possible to put practices in place to prevent a reflexive, unthinking col-
onization of the other; in particular, “an appropriate methodology for dealing with
cross-species conceptual difference and translation indeterminacy” will be one that
stresses “corrigibility and open expectations” (60).
But Plumwood goes further. She holds that “the problems of representing anoth-
er’s culture or another [species’] communication . . . pale before the enormity of
failing to represent them at all, or of representing them as non-communicative and
non-intentional beings” (60–61). For Plumwood, “a rationalist-Cartesian policing
of human-animal discontinuity, to maintain the human observer’s distance from
and indifference to the animal observed,” can be identified as a key motive for rais-
ing the charge of anthropomorphism (see also Tyler 2003, 2012). In contrast with
this boundary-policing move, Plumwood cites Marian Stamp Dawkins’s (1993)
argument against reductionist views that there is no way for humans to know non-
human experience, building on Dawkins’s suggestion that “we can use the same
method for non-human experience that we use in the human case, namely enter-
ing into the ‘same-but-different’ world of another similar but differently-situated
individual” (59).7
Introduction ■ 7
As already suggested by this sketch of some of the conceptual problems bound up

with (accusations of) anthropomorphism, further difficulties arise when it comes
to teasing out the relationship between anthropomorphism and anthropocentrism.
Karlsson (2012), for his part, sets up a four-way distinction between a pragmatic,
embodied anthropocentrism and a more chauvinistic value-theoretical anthropo-
centrism, on the one hand, and, on the other, between psychological and cultural
modes of anthropomorphism, depending on whether human or human-like mental
states are being ascribed to nonhumans or understandings of human cultural group-
ings and practices are being imported into the study of relationships among nonhu-
man animals. Yet it may not be easy to locate within this matrix the exact position of
a particular claim or representation branded as anthropomorphic.
Considerations such as these have led me to avoid using the descriptor anthro-
pomorphic as much as possible in the present study. Instead, I rely on periphrastic
formulations that, unlike a term that has functioned ambiguously and sometimes
incoherently in discourse about cross-species encounters, may be able to provide
leverage for coming to grips with the relational, co-constitutive interplay between
the various forms of creatural life in a more-than-human world. I do, however, make
regular use of the term anthropocentric throughout my analysis. Indeed, as indicated
previously, my working assumption is that the chief task of a narratology beyond the
human is to map out the dialectical interplay between anthropocentric and biocen-
tric storytelling traditions, and to explore how specific narrative practices shape and
are shaped by this interplay.
n C
O N T E X T U A L I Z I N G T H E A P P R OA C H
The example narratives discussed in the chapters that follow include fictional and
nonfictional accounts in which nonhuman animals play a central role, as well as nar-
ratives focusing mainly on human characters that nonetheless raise questions about
their relationships with other kinds of beings. Some of the narratives to be examined
profile animals, from the start, in as detailed a fashion as they do their human coun-
terparts (as in Reklaw’s Thirteen Cats of My Childhood, Williamson’s Tarka the Otter, or
Auster’s Timbuktu), whereas other relevant narratives bring trans-species encounters
and relationships into view less overtly—or more intermittently (as in Groff ’s “Above
and Below” or Lawrence’s St. Mawr). Further, my discussion includes narratives
about a variety of animal species—invertebrates as well as vertebrates, non-mammals
as well as mammals, microfauna as well as megafauna—to avoid what Clark and May
(2002) have described as a taxonomic bias in conservationist discourse. The bias in
question leads to a disproportionate emphasis on charismatic species with “big eyes
and fur, such as pandas or lemurs; big eyes and impressive movement, such as whales
and otters; impressive movement and/or striking colors, such as kingfishers or kites;
striking colors, such as butterflies and orchids; or at least a widely known narrative of
human contact, such as wolves and salmon” (Carrithers et al. 2011: 664).
Rather than focusing exclusively on narratives about nonhuman characters and
their worlds, then, this study outlines an approach to narrative inquiry that takes into
account the complexity (and co-constitutive effects) of human-animal interactions

and relationships, factoring that complexity into the analysis of particular stories—
and also into a reconsideration of the nature of narrative itself. Reciprocally, the
book highlights how concepts and methods developed by theorists of narrative can
benefit scholars working in the multiple disciplines falling under the umbrella of
human-animal studies, from anthropology, sociology, and sociolinguistics, to phi-
losophy, literary theory, and film studies.
On the one hand, although human-animal studies is a burgeoning, cross-
disciplinary field of scholarship, and although some of the work in this field explores
questions of narrative in a general way, to date there has been no sustained, book-
length attempt to leverage concepts from narratology to investigate stories about
animals and human-animal relationships.8 Several relevant articles by specialists
in narrative theory have been published in recent years, including Bernaerts et al.’s
(2014) study of nonhuman narrators (discussed further in c hapter 5), Keen’s (2011)
discussion of questions of narrative empathy vis-à-vis animals in graphic narratives,
and Nelles’s (2001) analysis of animal focalization. Likewise, McHugh’s (2011)
monograph Animal Stories and Mitchell et al.’s (1997) volume Anthropomorphism,
Anecdotes, and Animals touch on issues that are pertinent to the present book. But
my study aims to extend this work significantly, by broadening the range of narra-
tological questions considered, drawing in a fuller, more thoroughgoing way on
concepts and methods recently developed by analysts of stories, and diversifying
the corpus of narratives that are examined through this framework (or set of frame-
works) for inquiry.
Thus, in exploring how narratives at once reflect and help create frameworks for
understanding that determine what sorts of beings can be included in larger “ecolo-
gies of selves” (Kohn 2013: 16–17), in the context of which self-other relationships
and hence the very notion of a self unfold, the three chapters contained in Part I of
this book engage with multiple strands of narratological scholarship. Here I con-
sider studies of how self-narratives, or the stories humans use to link together what
they construe as self-relevant events over time, involve forms of relationality that
extend beyond the species boundary, and hence provide a means for negotiating the
self ’s position within and responsibility to larger biotic communities. I also draw on
research on types of narration, work on narrative temporality, and studies of char-
acters and characterization. The chapters contained in Part II then outline ways of
analyzing stories about animal worlds and human-animal relationships via develop-
ments in transmedial narratology, scholarship on life narratives, approaches to the
study of narrative and mind, models arising from the domain of narrative hermeneu-
tics, and research on the powers and limits of stories vis-à-vis emergent phenomena,
including species histories unfolding on the macro-level temporal and spatial scales
associated with evolutionary processes.
On the other hand, despite some recent attempts to underscore the relevance of
ideas from the environmental humanities for scholarship on stories (Bartosch 2010;
James 2015; Lehtimäki 2013; Weik von Mossner 2016a, 2017b), much more needs
Introduction ■ 9
to be done to explore how taking research on animals and human-animal relation-

ships into account might reshape the foundations of narrative theory itself.9 To this
end, the present study considers how engaging with issues raised by stories that
cross the species boundary may necessitate a reconceptualization of some of the
most basic concepts in the domain of narrative theory, including narrativity, char-
acter, thought representation, and storyworlds, or the worlds projected by narrative
texts and inhabited by the agents, nonhuman as well as human, with which a given
narrative is concerned. As argued in Herman (2018b), scholarship on how mentally
projected storyworlds provide grounds for—or, conversely, are grounded in—nar-
rative experiences requires further extension and elaboration when the worlds in
question bring multispecies environments into view. In these environments, attri-
butes associated with intelligent beings, including the capacity to have a perspective
on events, intentionality, agency, and others, can extend beyond the realm of the
human. In such contexts, postclassical research on storyworlds, designed to over-
come the structuralists’ failure to investigate issues of narrative referentiality and
world modeling, is itself due for innovation and transformation. Thus by widening
their remit and engaging with traditions of inquiry that center on humans’ inter-
actions and relationships with larger biotic communities, approaches to narrative
world making can embrace the nature, scope, and cultural functions of multispecies
storyworlds as newly focal concerns.
Indeed, story analysts have yet to engage with questions of species identity—and
interspecies relationships—in their full complexity. Relevant questions concern the
degree to which animal inhabitants of storyworlds occupy a focal or peripheral posi-
tion in the unfolding of events, the extent to which these inhabitants acquire the sta-
tus of experiencing, agential subjects versus experienced, acted-upon objects, and,
concomitantly, the degree to which their comportment takes shape via the register
of action, involving talk about intentions, motives, and other reasons for acting, and
not just the register of events, limited to talk about caused movements that have
duration in time and direction in space (see chapters 6 and 7). Addressing these
sorts of questions entails revisiting core narratological concepts via perspectives
afforded by multispecies ethnography, trans-species anthropology, cultural ecol-
ogy, and other frameworks for studying how cross-species entanglements unfold in
broader cultural settings.10
I go on to discuss these frameworks for inquiry in more detail in c hapter 3 and
elsewhere, but it is worth highlighting here aspects of this research that will be par-
ticularly important as I work to establish foundations for a narratology beyond the
human. Relevant scholarship includes the following:
• Work by Adams (1990), Adams and Donovan (1995), Le Guin (1987/1994),

Plumwood (1993), and other ecofeminists who have pointed to interconnec-
tions between patriarchal institutions that foster the subordination of women
and humans’ wider attempts to control nonhuman life forms (see chapters 2
and 5 of the present study)
• A broader rethinking of traditional, human-centric approaches to ethics to

address problems in interspecies ethics, or ethical questions arising from
(or shaping understandings of) the co-constitutive relationality between
humans and other animals—with Willett (2014), for example, developing a
“postmoral critical theory of interspecies ethics” (82) that extrapolates from
accounts of affect attunement between human infants and their adult caregiv-
ers11 (chapters 1, 5, and 7)
• Research on animal geographies that, in exploring “where, when, why, and how
nonhuman animals intersect with human societies” (Urbanik 2012: 38), seeks
to take into account how questions of location, landscape, and scale bear on
humans’ interactions with the full range of animal species (chapters 4 and 7)
• Work exploring the historical and conceptual links between attitudes toward
animals and understandings of disability in the realm of the human (chapter 3)
• Literary scholarship on the role of animals and human-animal relationships
in the storyworlds of science fiction, a genre distinctive for the way it exploits
narrative’s power to (re)configure the known world otherwise, and also to
build entirely other worlds (chapter 2 and the coda)
• Analyses of the intertwined genealogies of (ideas about) race, ethnicity, sexu-
ality, and species, via the study of how associations between animals and dis-
favored human groups are established and maintained in narratives and other
kinds of discourse circulating in a given culture or across cultures (chapters 2,
5, and 7)
• Scholarship on humans’ interactions with companion animals and compan-
ion species more broadly, with a focus, again, on the mutually constitutive
ways of relating that such transhuman modes of companionship require and
entail (chapters 1–3)
• Along similar lines, the ongoing reassessment of value hierarchies premised
on the centrality or exceptionality of the human, by commentators working
to develop concepts of posthumanism, contributors to the cross-disciplinary
field of the environmental humanities, philosophers and sociologists of sci-
ence, specialists in animal ethics, and researchers in the biological sciences
concerned with forms of niche construction, behaviors passed down as a non-
genetically encoded inheritance from generation to generation among non-
human populations, and other hallmarks of animal cultures (see chapters 6, 7,
and the coda)
• Research on the challenges of using narrative to take the full measure of the
biological, ecological, and ethical issues raised by the extinction of whole spe-
cies (see my discussion of The Hunter below, chapter 7, and the coda)12
Rather than providing at this stage a fuller summary of how this research affords
new perspectives on issues that are foundational for the study of stories, I turn now
to a demonstration of this work’s relevance vis-à-vis the two touchstone narratives
mentioned previously: namely, Julia Leigh’s 1999 novel The Hunter and its 2011 cin-
ematic adaptation by Daniel Nettheim.13 I use these same texts to illustrate the other,
Introduction ■ 11
converse proposition that is also at the heart of this book—namely, that ideas from
the field of narratology can scaffold research on animal worlds and human-animal
relationships. In developing my analysis, I include a thumbnail sketch of the chap-
ters in which readers can find more details about the ideas presented in condensed
form here.
WO V E R S I O N S O F T H E H U N T E R : T O U C H S T O N E S
n T
F O R A N A R R A T O L O G Y B E YO N D T H E H U M A N
Leigh’s novel, like Nettheim’s film adaptation of her text, centers on the protago-
nist’s search for what is in all likelihood the last extant thylacine (also known as the
Tasmanian tiger), with a view to harvesting the animal’s DNA for a multinational
biotech firm that is left unnamed in the novel but called Red Leaf in the film. It is not
just the company that is named in Nettheim’s adaptation; in a further reduction of
the ambiguity or indeterminacy to which Leigh’s storytelling methods sometimes
give rise (but see below), from the start of the movie Nettheim assigns the name of
Martin David to the titular character, to whom the narrator of Leigh’s text refers only
as “M” and who early on in Leigh’s account must consciously practice his story of
being “Martin David, Naturalist down from the university” (5). The novel and film
diverge in a similar way when it comes to identifying the characters’ motivations. In
Nettheim’s adaptation, Lucy Armstrong, the widow of Jarrah Armstrong, zoologist
and author of Bioethics for Another Millennium, informs M that her husband has gone
missing after stating his intention to thwart Red Leaf ’s plan to obtain (and presum-
ably reproduce) the unique toxin used by the tiger to paralyze its prey. By contrast,
Leigh’s M makes it a point to remain unsure about the exact nature of the project for
which he has been hired:
By studying one hair from a museum’s stuffed pup, the developers of biological weap-
ons were able to model a genetic picture of the thylacine, a picture so beautiful, so
heavenly, that it was declared capable of winning a thousand wars. Whether it will be
a virus or antidote, M does not know, cannot know and does not want to know, but
there is no question the race is on to harvest the beast. Hair, blood, ovary, foetus—
each one more potent, each one closer to God. (40)
Although both versions of The Hunter engage with the discourses of extinction
vis-à-vis an animal whose last known exemplar died in captivity in 1936, in neither
account does the protagonist himself show explicit contrition or remorse about the
extinction event that he has been tasked with bringing about, or at least finalizing.
With the novel exploiting the resources of verbal narration to provide extensive,
detailed access to M’s memories, perceptions, inferences, and emotional responses
to events, Leigh’s hunter, far from having scruples about his role in this extinc-
tion event, seeks mainly to prove himself capable of overcoming the failure of past
searches to locate the tiger: “It was hopeless, said the zoologists, because the animal
was extinct: a combination of habitat fragmentation, competition with wild dogs,
disease and intensive hunting had forced their demise. But this history does not
discourage M: there is always new history to be made. Today he is acting upon new
information, so today the hunt begins afresh” (Leigh 1999: 37).14 Nettheim’s film
goes one step further. In recounting her husband’s attempts to protect the tiger from
Red Leaf, Lucy suggests to Martin that given the firm’s nefarious purposes the tiger
would probably be better off extinct (1:11:10). This sentiment may shape Martin’s
decision to dispose of the tiger’s body at the end of the film, rather than harvest the
prized biological material that M, for his part, is prepared to commit murder to safe-
guard (Leigh 1999: 167–68).
Nettheim’s adaptation does show the hunter in tears during the sequence in
which he closes in on his quarry; and, in what might be interpreted as a moment
of hesitation caused by the consequentiality of his impending act, he brings his rifle
down from his shoulder after initially locating the animal in his gun’s telescopic
sight—before killing it with a single shot (in contrast with the four shots taken by
M in the novel [163–64]). Yet the source of the hunter’s distress in the film ulti-
mately remains unclear. It may derive from a more or less unconscious conflation
of the (female) tiger with Lucy Armstrong (Narraway and Stark 2015: 20), who
has been murdered along with her daughter by a hit man or enforcer sent by Red
Leaf. Alternatively, Martin David may be distraught in a more general way over the
destruction of this human family—and hence of the possibility of finding a family of
his own by taking over the role of the now-absent father. This violent dissolution of
family ties resonates with the killing of an animal whose death represents the extinc-
tion not just of a species but of an entire animal family, in the zoological sense of that
term.15 In this second gloss, the film brings into view the transhuman conceptions
of family—or rather the reframing of the idea of family itself as more than human in
nature and scope—that I discuss in more detail in chapter 3. In any case, Nettheim
fosters variable interpretations by relying on the visual resources of cinema to stage
the protagonist’s emotional response to events—specifically, his killing of the tiger
and subsequent burning of the animal’s body to deny Red Leaf access to the tiger’s
DNA—but without using voice-over narration or dialogue (for example) to resolve
the open question of Martin David’s precise reasons for acting. In the end, has Martin
abandoned his instrumentalizing, exploitative orientation toward this last animal of
its kind because of his animus against Red Leaf specifically?16 Or do his altered atti-
tudes and patterns of conduct flow from some other, more generalized aversion to
humans’ destructive practices vis-à-vis the wider domain of creatural life, of which
Red Leaf ’s stop-at-nothing methods are merely a particularly explicit manifestation?
Much more can be said about how these two versions of The Hunter, both inde-
pendently and in dialogue with one another, bear on broader understandings of
animal worlds and human-animal relationships. For instance, underscoring the
parallels between humans’ violent subjugation of other species and the forms
of domination that underwrite colonizing projects, the novel points to the inter-
linked histories of the thylacine and “the local Aboriginal people, in the years before
they . . . were almost driven to extinction” (57). Thus M remembers that govern-
ment had at different times proposed using De Witt Island, “a tiny and forbidding
rock of a place, shunned by all,” first as an Aboriginal “sanctuary” and then as a place
Introduction ■ 13
for sequestering any surviving thylacines (57).17 The film adaptation, meanwhile,
highlights how the hunter finds himself caught up in a conflict between environ-
mentalists and the logging industry.18 Leigh’s M refuses to listen when one of Lucy’s
house guests tries to read aloud to him a passage from Jarrah Armstrong’s Bioethics
for Another Millennium; the passage begins: “At a time when the planet is overrun
with man, is it really so unfeasible to question whose life is more . . .” (108). By
contrast, Nettheim’s Martin David aligns himself in the end with Jarrah’s anti–Red
Leaf position. Indeed, his final embrace of Bike, the Armstrongs’ son, suggests how
his altered understanding of humans’ place within larger biotic communities leads
Martin to adopt, in turn, a different, less separatist approach to intraspecies relation-
ships as well.
To further my analysis of the two versions of the narrative, I turn now to a discus-
sion of The Hunter in light of the key questions raised by the chapters contained in
the present study.
Storytelling and Selfhood beyond the Human
The Hunter bears closer inspection by way of a number of the issues articulated in
Part I, where I use the concept of “self-narrative” to explore a variety of texts fea-
turing animals. Self-narratives have been defined by social psychologists as the
stories people tell in order to make sense of and justify their own actions—with
this storytelling process at once reflecting and helping establish relational ties with
others (Gergen and Gergen 1997). Chapters 1 and 2 locate types of self-narratives
on a spectrum involving more or less fully imagined forms of relationality between
humans and other animals. Chapter 1, building on my analysis of the two versions
of The Hunter in the present section, considers how different storytelling media as
well as different methods of narration bear on the project of using self-narratives to
situate human selves within a larger, trans-species ecology of selves. Chapter 2 then
uses a range of texts—including memoirs and works of nature writing; narratives
told by therians, that is, communities of persons who identify as nonhuman ani-
mals; modernist, postmodernist, and contemporary fictional narratives; and works
of fantasy and science fiction intended for younger audiences—to investigate issues
raised by narratives that stage acts of identification as well as outright transforma-
tion across the species boundary. Chapter 3 continues to situate self-narratives in
the broader context of creatural life by examining stories that ground affiliations
between humans and animals in cross-species kinship networks. With a view to
reframing the very idea of family as a transhuman concept, the chapter discusses
two parents’ memoirs about their autistic children’s interactions with animals; it also
analyzes accounts of pet keeping as well as narratives about human-animal relation-
ships that were told in contexts of family therapy.
In the two versions of The Hunter, Leigh and Nettheim both suggest how self-
narratives at once shape and are shaped by relationships with others—relationships
unfolding both within and across the species boundary. Thus M’s /Martin David’s
sense of self—including his sense of how his current mission to harvest the last
thylacine’s DNA fits within the longer story of who he is—impinges on his initial
interactions with the Armstrong family, even as those interactions (some of which
involve the family’s own engagement with the tiger) come to remold his self-narra-
tive over time. In the film, Martin David, after avoiding the family at first and making
an unsuccessful attempt to shift to different quarters by renting a room in town, is
later shown staring at the photograph of Jarrah Armstrong and the two children—
both in the Armstrong residence and while he is out in the wilderness searching
for the tiger. This action can be glossed as an effort by Martin to project himself
imaginatively into a sort of ready-made family, in which he could serve as substitute
husband and father.19 Perhaps as part of this same act of projection, after Lucy’s and
Sass’s deaths, Martin destroys the thylacine’s remains, in keeping with Jarrah’s inten-
tions as recounted by Lucy: namely, to prevent Red Leaf from gaining access to the
tiger’s DNA. Hence Martin’s gravitation toward the sole family survivor, Bike, can
be interpreted as both the cause and the result of his abandoning a self-narrative
premised on his being a hunter-for-hire.
Leigh’s novel, it can be argued, registers in an even more nuanced manner the
interplay between the protagonist’s self-narrative and his understanding of how
he fits within a larger ecology of selves, nonhuman as well as human. For exam-
ple, as M eats his first meal at the Armstrong house, his inferences about the chil-
dren’s perceptions of him affect his self-perception, with the externally sourced
heterodiegetic narration being colored in turn by the focalizer’s sense of self: “The
giant—for M now sees himself as a giant—the giant doesn’t talk while he eats.
They watch” (Leigh 1999: 8). Conversely, M’s habitual way of telling the story of
who and what he is affects his attitudes toward the Armstrong family. Thus after
the accident that has left Sass badly burned, Lucy institutionalized, and Bike in
foster care, M reconsolidates the self-narrative that his interactions with the fam-
ily had called into question. In the process he “comes to think of his fondness for
Lucy and the children as an aberration, a monumental lapse in judgement, and his
vision of growing old and happy in a bluestone house seems to him near laugha-
ble . . . his true purpose is the one which he first set out to achieve: to be a hunter, to
harvest the tiger” (147–48). But the relational dimensions of selfhood, in Leigh’s
account, do not stop at the species boundary. Thus, as M pursues the tiger in the
wilderness, his image of the thylacine bears directly on M’s self-image: “After years
of inbreeding does she bear any behavioural resemblance to her forebears? . . . Is
her striped and honeyed coat short and dense like that of a Doberman’s, or has
it fallen to maggot-ridden mange? This ignoble image of his prey discourages M
and he immediately sets about to rectify it: Yes, there is virtue in being a survivor”
(66). Even more strikingly, in the passage that contains the lines I have used as
an epigraph for this introduction, M’s self-narrative begins to converge with the
story line(s) he has built up around the tiger. Hence, as the thylacine “shovels her
pointed wolf-like face into the bloody remains of a wallaby,” M watches her “with
the same rapt attention he would devote to a film which told the story of his own
life, past and future . . . he holds the animal in his sights, knowing that he is a killer,
and that he, too, will be killed” (162).
Introduction ■ 15
This convergence of narratives, which the film remediates by splicing into the
story of Martin David’s pursuit of the tiger grainy footage of the last, captive thy-
lacine pacing restlessly within the confines of a cage, links up with the questions
of identification and transformation discussed in chapter 2. Both Leigh’s novel
and Nettheim’s film can be grouped with other narratives that move beyond an
understanding of self-other relationships in terms of trans-species alignments to a
challenging or even erasing of the boundary between humans and nonhumans—
whether through acts of identifying with other animals or through hypothesized
or fictional transformations of species identities. Thus, late in the film adaptation,
Martin David lies motionless in the tiger’s lair, awaiting her return. Nettheim evokes
in this sequence not just the stratagem of an expert hunter, but the performance of
an identificatory act also recounted in the novel, when M discovers the
bones of a pup, pale and clean, undisturbed since the creature lay down to die. . . .
This could not be the pup of his tiger, but rather the remains of an unknown great-
aunt or uncle. So, lonesome, is this where she comes for company? M trails a finger
over the curved lumpy spine, then lies down on the ground in a mirror position,
eye to eye with the skull, and imagines for a second that he, too, will rot in this cave.
(159–60)
Indeed, the novel is chock-full of such acts of identification, and also of moments
where the species boundary itself comes into question. Early in the hunt, M engages
in what he conceives of as a dialogue with the tiger, as part of the process of imag-
ining how she used to follow her mother “down the escarpment onto the verdant
plains”: “Do you remember how the sheep would mill around in clusters, doing
nothing all day but fattening themselves? And how, when they first smelt you, they
would tremble and start, push against one another, bleat?” (47). Later, in a pas-
sage I return to in c hapter 2, inside his tent M envisions himself changing shape,
“swallow[ing] the beast” in order to take on the mindset needed to track down the
animal—a technique he uses again when “as he walks he imagines himself as the
tiger: after food and shelter” (113). Other identificatory acts involve performances
that cross or confuse species categories, in a way that shifts the emphasis from iden-
tification to (human-into-animal) transformation. For example, in parallel with
some members of the therian communities discussed in chapter 2, Bike pins to
his pants a long stocking stuffed with newspaper, apparently to emulate a tail (19).
In a more instrumentalist fashion, M, in order to hide his scent while on the hunt,
smears all over himself a paste made out of wombat and wallaby droppings, “until
he is not quite human, a strange but not entirely unfamiliar beast” (30). Perhaps
the most remarkable moment of category crossing or intermixture, however, occurs
when M learns that Lucy and the children have left their house following the acci-
dent. In recounting his response, the narration suggests how for the ratiocinative,
self-repressing hunter, the intensity of the emotions triggered by the fate of the fam-
ily transports M into what he registers or models as a non-or extrahuman realm, in
which he himself had previously situated the thylacine and her imagined death: “M
has had his chest scooped out. His skin has been peeled from his body. He can dislo-
cate his jaw and fill the universe with a stone-grey roar” (135).
More generally, this passage suggests how definitions of the human grounded
in the capacity for (hyper)rationality reflect—and reinforce—overly narrow under-
standings of the human and the nonhuman alike (Plumwood 2002a). The passage
stages how, in deviating from the dispassionate, calculating habits of mind that
have made him such a skilled hunter, M (according to the model of human-animal
relationships that he has internalized) in effect loses the attributes that distinguish
humans from other species, and enters the domain of animality. Along similar lines,
in the film adaptation it is only after Martin David drops the impassive demeanor
that he had maintained prior to Lucy’s and Sass’s death, and becomes capable of
expressing the emotional distress he displays in the final phases of the hunt, that he
can align himself with thylacine—and against Red Leaf. Here I broach questions
discussed in more detail in c hapter 3, in my analysis of parents’ accounts of their
autistic children’s interactions with animal assistants. I draw on these accounts to
explore contradictions in the use of narrowly defined forms of rationality as a crite-
rion for the human.
Likewise, chapter 3’s examination of how narratives told in or about therapeutic
situations project transhuman kinship networks resonates with issues raised by both
versions of The Hunter. In particular, Bike’s drawings of the thylacine can be com-
pared with the use of genograms and other kinds of visual aids in contexts of family
therapy (Arad 2004; Hodgson and Darling 2011). In these contexts drawings by
children and other family members shed light on how kinship networks cut across
species lines—and also function as models for situating humans within more-than-
human communities. Leigh’s novel includes an ekphrastic description of Bike’s “cave
drawing” of the tiger “with one pointy ear and a wide-open jaw filled with blue tri-
angles, or teeth” (77). M’s conversation with Bike about the drawing leads to the
revelation that Jarrah Armstrong did in fact see the tiger himself (79). In Nettheim’s
film, Bike’s drawings of the thylacine in situ provide Martin David with a map that
proves to be more powerful than the professional-grade, computer-generated maps
he brings with him to Tasmania. Based on his father’s reports of where he encoun-
tered the thylacine, Bike’s drawings enable Martin David not only to find the tiger
but also to reconstruct his self-narrative around the expanded, trans-species forms
of relationality that the drawings encapsulate.
Narrative Engagements with More-Than-Human Worlds
Part II of this book begins by returning to the question of how the constraints and
affordances of different storytelling media bear on narratives that explore humans’
place in a more-than-human world. More specifically, building on my analysis of
Jesse Reklaw’s Thirteen Cats of My Childhood in c hapter 1, c hapter 4 examines in
more detail how the creators of comics and graphic novels in which nonhuman ani-
mals are focal participants use the verbal-visual affordances of the medium to project
nonhuman worlds. Chapter 5 then turns from issues of media to questions about
Introduction ■ 17
genre vis-à-vis the project of developing a narratology beyond the human. More pre-
cisely, I investigate experiments with life writing that raise issues relevant for this
project, considering how the writing of nonhuman lives has given rise to a variety of
strategies for engaging with the subjective experiences of animals.
Once again, the two versions of The Hunter repay scrutiny via these analytic per-
spectives. Chapter 4’s concern with animal narratives across media suggests the rel-
evance of medium-specific affordances for a comparison of Leigh’s and Nettheim’s
treatment of animal worlds and human-animal relationships. In particular, the chap-
ter raises questions about how the film’s use of both a sound-and an image-track to
explore (trans)human aspects of the hunt relates to the approach made possible by
the novel’s single-track design. From the start, Nettheim uses the medium of cin-
ema to highlight Martin David’s investment in technology as well as high culture,
as he plays music by composers such as Dvořák, Handel, and Vivaldi on his iPod.20
Narraway and Stark (2015) argue that Martin’s broadcasting of Vivaldi’s Gloria in D
Major through speakers attached to a tree on the Armstrongs’ property mark him as
a “civilising force” intent on “colonising the wild” (21)—even as his dissatisfaction
with the music of Bruce Springsteen, championed by Sass, puts him at odds with
popular culture (21). These details of characterization, arising from the multimodal
set-up of cinema, allow Nettheim to reframe the debate being waged by environmen-
talists and (elements of the local population supporting) the logging industry. Given
Martin David’s eventual reassessment of his place within and responsibilities to the
broader realm of creatural life, the film seems to suggest that art itself, or the domain
of aesthetic experience, provides means for addressing questions about animal ethics,
biodiversity, and extinction that might otherwise get caught up in polarizing—and
paralyzing—disputes (see also Bartosch 2016; Brewer 2009). In this connection,
note how the film makes reflexive use of the previously mentioned footage of the cap-
tive thylacine thought to be the last of its kind, recorded in 1936 at the Hobart Zoo.
Not only does Nettheim intersperse this footage with the narration of Martin David’s
experiences during the hunt, juxtaposing filmed sequences of different creatures’
lives to hint at the expanded forms of relationality that support new ways of living-
in-relation-to-others; what is more, he forecasts the protagonist’s discovery of such
trans-species relationality with the help of the editing techniques used at the begin-
ning of the film. Here footage of the captive tiger opening its jaw into a 120-degree
angle, viewed by the protagonist on his laptop computer, fades out into a scene where
Martin David drives his sports utility vehicle into the Tasmanian countryside (3:50).
Apart from details that emerge from Martin David’s intermittent phone con-
versations with a representative from Red Leaf, and from his interactions with Jack
Mindy and with Lucy Armstrong and the children, Nettheim does not provide view-
ers with information about the protagonist’s perceptions, inferences, or emotional
responses to events associated with the hunt—excepting the information that can
be gleaned from Willem Dafoe’s actions and demeanor over the course of the film.
By contrast, Leigh exploits the resources of print to project in rich detail the evolv-
ing network of beliefs, desires, intentions, and emotions in which M’s engagement
with the thylacine takes shape, and on which that engagement in turn impinges.
For example, an early passage in the novel suggests that M, a soldier by training
(25), may have taken on the role of hunter in part as a reaction to his unadventur-
ous physician father (55), whom M hasn’t seen in ten years. In a moment of fantasy,
captured in a passage that blends indirect reports of M’s thoughts with free indirect
as well as free direct discourse, in which the narration takes on the texture (more or
less fully) of what can be inferred to be the protagonist’s own mind style, M imagi-
nes a more empathetic version of his father encouraging him to participate in the
tiger hunts that took place a hundred years previously (15–16). Here again the novel
points to the intersection between human-animal relationships and questions about
the scope and nature of family ties.21 Subsequently, through an alternation between
detailed present-tense narration that hews close to M as a locus of perception, on the
one hand, and vignettes of the protagonist’s past triggered by his experiences in the
current moment, on the other hand, the narrative registers the texture of M’s men-
tal life as he transitions between brief stays at the Armstrong house and extended
searches for the tiger in the wilderness. Thus the sound made by an animal caught in
a trap evokes what M remembers reading about the thylacine’s uncanny roar (56);
washing blood off his hands after baiting a trap calls to M’s mind the phrase “clean as
a baby’s bottom,” used by the ex-girlfriend whose abortion he had to borrow money
to pay for (69); and entering a region left undefined on his map causes M to ponder
the tiger’s spatial memory and ability to navigate by “some fabulous combination of
the senses,” even as he remembers how he himself counted fence posts while making
his way to school as a child (156–57).
Indeed, as this last juxtaposition of perception and memory suggests, Leigh uses
narration imbued with M’s habits of mind tend to stage what Plumwood (2002a)
in research mentioned previously describes as a double movement or reorientation
that cross-disciplinary work in the “ecological humanities” can help promote. At
issue is a resituating of humans in the larger domain of animal life, and, conversely,
a recontextualizing of animals as a part of culture, including a reframing of their
behavior in webs of motives and intentions that resonate with humans’ own. For
example, in line with Plumwood’s first direction of movement (leading from the
human to the nonhuman), when M observes Sass trying to wake up from a deep
sleep early in the novel, his tendency to employ human-animal analogies colors the
narration: “The girl is so tired a thin membrane of sleep covers each eye, lizard-like,
and he wonders what time they [Sass and Bike] eventually crawled to bed” (10).
Similarly, M himself, as he seeks to pick up the tiger’s trail early in the hunt, “slithers”
through the riparian scrub, before getting down on all fours and wriggling under
thorny bush (36). The text follows the second direction of movement (leading from
the nonhuman to the human) when Bike tells M the thylacine’s origin myth (78),
and when M himself reads the print of a thylacine forefoot as a message, of indeter-
minate meaning, that the tiger has left him (115).
In turning from questions of medium to questions of genre, and thus anticipat-
ing the shift from the main concerns of c hapter 4 to those of c hapter 5, I argue that
both Leigh’s and Nettheim’s versions of The Hunter use modes of generic hybridity
to unsettle assumptions about the lives of animals. Hybridity of this sort can be seen
Introduction ■ 19
as emerging from and feeding back into the project of imagining cultural ontolo-
gies otherwise—and in particular the qualities and abilities those ontologies assign
to various forms of creatural life. In particular, although they center on a fictional
hunt, both the novel and film engage with nonfictional narratives surrounding the
history of the thylacine and this species’ extinction.22 In Nettheim’s adaptation, the
spliced-in 1936 footage of the last-known tiger, taken at the Hobart Zoo, brings
about a higher-order splicing together of documentary and fiction film. The result-
ing intermixture of text types, though situated within an overarching generic frame
that is identifiably fictional, highlights the complexity and multidimensionality of
this highly culturally embedded animal. Thus claims emanating from myth or leg-
end, from the repertoire of anecdotes or localized tales that make up the culture’s
collective life narrative of the Tasmanian tiger, from the disciplines of zoology and
ecology, and from contemporary environmentalist and conservationist movements
cross-pollinate with Nettheim’s portrayal of a fictional last animal, in effect destabi-
lizing assumptions about the behaviors, capacities, and dispositions of the thylacine
itself.
Similar intermixtures surface at several points in Leigh’s novel, with similarly
destabilizing effects—as when M refuses to be discouraged by evidence suggest-
ing the tiger’s extinction (37), when he recalls accounts of the interlinked histories
of Australia’s Aboriginal people and the thylacine (57), and even when he visits
a butcher shop and sees a display that lists the price of “Tassie tiger” as “$50,000
per kilo” (40). Likewise, M’s reflections about how within the storyworld of the
novel “the tiger had remained invisible,” despite numerous eyewitness reports over
the decades (36–37), resonate with recent reports of thylacine sightings in North
Queensland, Australia (Kennedy and Dwyer 2017; Weisberger 2017). And Leigh’s
engagement with the discourse of genetics in the novel (166) calls into question the
very premise of initiatives designed to reverse the process of extinction via cloning
technologies (see Leigh 2002; Turner 2007). Through M’s extended acts of iden-
tification with an animal he imagines to be the last of its kind—an animal living in
conditions of isolation that are not, however, fully imaginable—Leigh suggests the
impossibility of restarting species histories, even if using genetic material to recreate
exemplars of lost animals becomes technically feasible.
The other chapters in Part II continue to explore, from other perspectives,
areas of intersection among the issues of genre, narration, and species difference.
Chapter 6 uses narratological work on thought presentation and concepts from phe-
nomenology and the philosophy of mind to address questions raised by attributions
of mental states—and also the capacity for (self-)narration—to nonhuman charac-
ters in both fictional and nonfictional contexts. Chapter 7, in turn, draws on ideas
from hermeneutic theory to explore how by bracketing the norms governing such
mental-state attributions and holding them up for conscious scrutiny, experimen-
tal, self-reflexive narratives that reach beyond the species boundary can potentiate
new understandings of human-animal relationships. Different ways of telling animal
narratives can, in other words, reset the norms used to allocate possibilities for sub-
jectivity to nonhuman agents.
In this connection, it is instructive to compare the degree to which (and the

manner in which) the novel and film versions of The Hunter engage in mental-state
attributions vis-à-vis the thylacine, and also the degree to which these texts call
attention, reflexively, to the broader norms regulating such mind-ascribing prac-
tices. Concerned mainly with the way Martin David and the other humans grapple
with questions about human-human as well as human-animal relationships brought
into focus by the hunt, Nettheim’s film refrains from focalizing events through the
thylacine or otherwise attempting to convey the animal’s perspective on events—
although the use of eyeline matching in the final sequence in the wilderness suggests
that the tiger is not only cognizant of Martin David’s presence, but also capable of
reciprocating his gaze (1:30:48). In the novel, by contrast, M engages in frequent,
often richly detailed ascriptions of mental states, processes, and dispositions to the
thylacine—although these ascriptions, besides being filtered through M’s mind
style rather than independently endorsed by the narrator, also come across as
hedged inferential constructs rather than confident assertions of knowable reasons
for acting. He imagines the tiger shaking herself awake (33); makes a hypotheti-
cal foray into the animal’s past experiences with her mother (47–48); speculatively
attributes his inability to find the tiger to the way “the lonely years have soured in
her, soured her sense of smell so that now she madly wanders through the scrub,
pulled one way by one scent, one way by another” (93); hallucinates (after suffering
a head injury in a fall) that she is “standing over in the shadows, studying him” (96),
and then becomes afraid that she is hunting him (102); infers when he misses her
with his rifle that “for no good reason the tiger has changed her path at the very last
instant, side-stepping the bullet into the phalanx of pines” (120–21); formulates the
thought that “all animals are essentially unpredictable, they are mysteries and not
puzzles which can be worked out” (154–55); and, in a moment remediated by the
eyeline matches in the film, observes through his rifle sight what he takes to be the
exact moment when the tiger first sees him (163).
The two versions of The Hunter are thus marked by different ascriptive practices
when it comes to engagements with the thylacine’s subjective experiences. To cap-
ture such differences and the way they cut across the fiction-nonfiction distinction,
I introduce in c hapter 6 the technical term discourse domain, which refers to the arenas
of conduct in which strategies for orienting to self-other relationships—including
human-animal relationships—take shape. Discourse domains are frameworks for
activity that determine what kinds of subjective experiences it is appropriate and
warranted to attribute to others, nonhuman as well as human. Broader cultural ontol-
ogies translate into, and depend for their support on, constellations of discourse
domains taken in this sense. Accordingly, the richness and density of the cross-
species mental-state attributions in Leigh’s novel as well as the comparative paucity
of such attributions in Nettheim’s film flow in a top-down manner from domain-
specific assumptions about how to understand agents vis-à-vis their larger environ-
ments for acting and interacting. Despite (or perhaps because of) the hedged or
modalized nature of M’s attributions, the novel can be aligned with domains marked
by prolific allocations of possibilities for subjective experience across the species
Introduction ■ 21
boundary. The film, by contrast, aligns itself with domains that are more parsimoni-
ous when it comes to such allocations—at least until the final sequence of the hunt.
At the same time, by simultaneously drawing on and holding up for inspection
available frameworks for conceptualizing animal experiences as well as relationships
that cross species lines, individual narratives can have a bottom-up impact on the
norms for mental-state attributions circulating within particular domains, and hence
on the wider cultural ontologies in which those domains participate. The novel, it is
true, stops short of staging as profound a change to M’s self-narrative as the change
to Martin David’s self-narrative dramatized by the film. Yet in tracing through the
moment-by-moment modulations in M’s attitude toward the creature that emerges
as his interlocutor more than his target or quarry, Leigh’s text, as compared with
Nettheim’s adaptation, arguably engages in a more critical and reflexive way with the
ontological assumptions that support dichotomizing and hierarchical understand-
ings of human-animal relationships.
Finally, the coda to the book puts forward the hypothesis that narrative, even
though it is grounded in and optimally calibrated for human-scale phenomena, fur-
nishes routes of access to emergent structures and processes extending beyond the
size-limits of the lifeworld, including species transformations at the level of phylo-
genetic history. In this way, the coda suggests how the study of what can be called
storytelling at species scale constitutes an important aspect of narratology beyond
the human. Once again, The Hunter, and in particular Leigh’s novel, rewards being
analyzed along these lines. For example, whereas the film remains firmly anchored
in the present moment of the hunt, the novel uses external analepsis to support
what I describe in the coda as multiscale narration, whereby stories afford concep-
tual scaffolding for engaging with macro-level phenomena more or less massively
distributed in space and time. Thus, as M makes his first trip into the Tasmanian
wilderness with Jack Mindy, the novel suggests the ongoing relevance of the pre-
historic past, the way actions performed in the here and now take their place within
the multi-billion-year arc of terrestrial history. The narration recounts how the track
the characters follow “cuts straight up, a steep and muddy plumb-line running with
water. One hundred and sixty-five million years ago potent forces had exploded,
clashed, pushed the plateau hundreds of metres into the sky. Now the two [men]
regularly lose their footing, grab hold of ferns to steady themselves” (14). Later, as M
begins his pursuit of the tiger in earnest, the text features another instance of exter-
nal analepsis with prehistoric reach. This time, however, the analepsis or flashback is
coupled with counterfactual scene-building—another narrative-based resource, as
described in the coda, for engaging with geophysical, biogeographical, and evolu-
tionary processes and events unfolding along macro-level timescales:
[M]‌slouches toward the valley, down an easy boulder-studded slope, the smooth
legacy of an ice-cap spread over sixty-five square kilometres some 20,000 years ago.
What must the plateau have been like before? Ragged and jagged, teeming with ani-
mals, giant fauna now extinct. Only the small and relatively quick had survived: kan-
garoos, wallabies, thylacines, wombats. But it was not, he knows, the last Ice Age that
had killed them, those fantastic giant beasts. Already sixteen, yes, sixteen Ice Ages
had passed without dramatic loss of life. What made the last one different was a two-
legged fearsome little pygmy, the human hunter. (30–31)
This passage, again filtered through M’s mind style, forecasts the protagonist’s own
role in bringing about yet another human-caused extinction event. The text thereby
hints at the diagnostic if not predictive functions of storytelling at species scale, or
rather the ability of multiscale narration to bring within the scope of human com-
prehension the trans-or suprahuman consequences of our species’ actions, priori-
ties, and values in the wider context of terrestrial life. In this way, the passage also
points to the larger stakes of a narratology beyond the human.
The stories we tell about animals—in fictional and nonfictional accounts, in per-
sonal and collective narratives, in verbal, graphic, and cinematic artifacts—both are
shaped by and help shape broader cultural understandings of creatural life; these
understandings encompass how we view our relationships with and responsibili-
ties to other-than-human agents and communities. There is thus an urgent need to
develop a framework for analysis that can shed light on the narrative structures and
storytelling methods used by the members of human cultures to engage with other
kinds of beings. To what extent, and in what manner, do the ways of telling stories
that emerge from and help define a given (sub)culture take into account the range
and variety of nonhuman subjects, their multiplicity of perspectives and modalities
of experience, and the fundamental requirements that must be honored for them
to thrive alongside or rather in relation to humankind—and hence for us humans
to thrive as well? The chapters that follow outline an analytic framework designed to
address questions of just this sort.
n P A R T I
Storytelling and Selfhood
beyond the Human
1 Self-Narratives and
Nonhuman Selves
She was only one lost thing among so many others, not special for
being human.
—Lauren Groff, “Above and Below” (Groff 2011: 119)
The chapters included in Part I of this book use a number of case studies to explore
how fictional as well as nonfictional narratives can serve as a workspace for recon-
sidering—for critiquing or reaffirming, dismantling or reconstructing—ways of
understanding humans’ place in a more-than-human world. Centrally relevant for
this exploration and indeed for my study as a whole is the concept of the self-narra-
tive, defined by Kenneth J. Gergen and Mary M. Gergen (1997) as “the individual’s
account of self-relevant events across time” (162). Discussing the idea of self-nar-
ratives in more detail in what follows, I argue that theorists of narrative are well
positioned to contribute to a broader, cross-disciplinary investigation of how such
stories of the self are imbricated with assumptions concerning the scope and lim-
its of selfhood as such. At issue, more specifically, is how self-narratives relate to—
emerge from but also potentially impinge upon—assumptions about possibilities
for selfhood beyond the human.
As both the research on self-narratives and my case studies suggest, accounts of
who one is are inextricably interlinked with understandings of self-other relation-
ships. In turn, these understandings are interwoven not only with assumptions
about what a human self is and how it emerges over time, but also with broader cul-
tural ontologies, which determine the kinds of selves that are assumed to populate
the world, and hence the range of others in relation to whom a given self-narrative
takes shape. In setting the boundaries of selfhood, cultural ontologies specify, in the
form of common knowledge, what sorts of entities should be profiled as a “who”
and not just a “what”; such ontologies, which are partly worked out in and through
a culture’s or subculture’s storytelling practices, settle the question of which enti-
ties should be matched with the assemblage of traits that are deemed to constitute
selfhood, including subjective experiences, or the capacity to have a perspective on
events. Self-narratives, both bearing the impress of and helping to mold these wider
cultural ontologies, project a more or less restricted or inclusive geography of selves
across the species boundary, engaging in relatively parsimonious or prolific alloca-
tions of subjectivity to nonhuman others. As a result, whether they ignore, deny,
or embrace possibilities for selfhood beyond the human, and hence forms of trans-
species relationality, self-narratives highlight the pertinence of ideas from narratol-
ogy for human-animal studies—and vice versa.
25
26 ■ Storytelling and Selfhood beyond the Human
In addition to analyzing how self-narratives situate human agents in the space

of selfhood, however, a narratology beyond the human can contribute to another
critically important task in this connection: namely, constructing new, more sustain-
able individual and collective self-narratives grounded in an expanded sense of the
self ’s relationality, its situation within wider webs of creatural life. These new narra-
tives can be viewed as more sustainable because, by reintegrating the human self in a
larger community of selves than that recognized by dominant scientific, social, legal,
and moral norms, they prefigure and help make possible ways of living on which the
continued survival of the earth’s entire biotic community arguably depends.
In the present chapter, after further discussion of Gergen and Gergen’s social-
psychological account of self-narratives vis-à-vis Paul Ricoeur’s analysis of the
philosophical underpinnings of the problem of personal identity and also recent
anthropological work on the structure and functions of cultural ontologies, I turn
to examples of self-narratives in which questions about trans-species relationality
come to the fore, albeit in distinct ways. My first case study is Lauren Groff ’s 2011
short story “Above and Below.” Groff ’s narrative, which tells the story of an unnamed
female protagonist who leaves behind the life she knew as a graduate student in lit-
erature at a university in Florida and who then experiences the vicissitudes of home-
lessness over a period of approximately eighteen months, uses the resources of
fiction to explore what happens when the focal character can no longer embrace the
self-narrative in terms of which she had previously made sense of her experiences.
More specifically, the story suggests the insufficiency of self-narratives that occlude
or curtail humans’ relations to a trans-species community of selves, and conversely
how reassessing one’s place within a larger biotic community requires the fashioning
of a new self-narrative.1
The following section then focuses on Jesse Reklaw’s graphic memoir Thirteen
Cats of My Childhood, originally published in 2006; in this nonfictional account,
Reklaw combines words and images to recount his experiences with the cats with
whom he and his family lived while Reklaw was growing up. Whereas Groff ’s het-
erodiegetic narration in “Above and Below” projects a storyworld organized around
the protagonist’s search for a different self-narrative over time, Reklaw’s autodiegetic
account emerges from the way he, as narrating I, goes about projecting the story-
world in which earlier versions of himself exemplify evolving attitudes toward the
cats.2 Although Reklaw’s text parallels Groff ’s in modeling the interplay between
self-narratives and understandings of human-animal relationships, in this instance,
as in other memoirs concerned with pets or with service or therapy animals, the
family’s companion animals (rather than nonhuman creatures more generally) fea-
ture as key participants in Reklaw’s account of how—and why—he became who
he is.3
In chapter 2, I turn to fictional and nonfictional self-narratives involving not just
reorientations toward or interactions with other animals but acts of identification—
and even outright human-into-animal or animal-into-human transformations—that
result in convergent, hybridized, or mutated species identities. If Groff empha-
sizes how the process of constructing self-narratives is interlinked with broader
Self-Narratives and Nonhuman Selves ■ 27
orientations to creatural life,4 and if Reklaw uses a graphic memoir to explore how
relations with companion animals both shape and are shaped by emergent concep-
tions of the self, the examples discussed in c hapter 2 suggest how narratives about
self-other relationships that cross the species boundary can engage more or less
critically and reflexively with established ontological categories, in some instances
unsettling not only hierarchical understandings of kinds of life but also the human-
animal distinction itself. Chapter 3 continues this exploration of cross-species
entanglements, investigating how narratives told in or about therapeutic situations
involving animals project transhuman kinship networks.
n T
HE SCOPE AND LIMITS OF SELFHOOD:
AN EXCURSUS
Before I embark on my investigation of storytelling and selfhood beyond the human,

it may be helpful to provide a preliminary sketch of key issues surrounding the idea
of nonhuman selfhood.5 Some of these issues arise from debates about what, in
conceptual or philosophical terms, constitutes a self. The neuroscientist and phi-
losopher António Damasio (2000), for example, draws a distinction between what
he calls core selfhood, based on a transient core consciousness (re)created through
experiences occurring in the here and now, and what he terms extended or autobi-
ographical selfhood, based on “a repository of memories for fundamental facts in
an individual biography that can be partly reactivated and thus provide continuity
and seeming permanence in our lives” (217). As Zahavi (2008) notes, for Damasio
the sort of persistent personal identity associated with extended or autobiograph-
ical selfhood reaches its fullest expression only in humans (138), meaning that in
Damasio’s account the most elaborated form of selfhood, built on the foundations
of a core self that would seem to be available to any being capable of having experi-
ences, is limited to humans. Carruthers (1989) makes a parallel argument, suggest-
ing that nonhuman animals, in contradistinction to humans, lack the capacity for
self-awareness. Andrews (2015) summarizes the argument as follows: separating
experience from consciousness proper, Carruthers holds that “even though animals
have sense organs [that allow them to experience the world and “move about it in
coherent ways”] they are not conscious, because they lack the metacognitive abili-
ties”—in particular, the ability to form beliefs about perceptions—“that are required
for conscious experience” (Andrews 2015: 59–60).
This argument, however, is vulnerable to the objection raised by Griffin (2001)
vis-à-vis Edelman’s (2003) and Lloyd’s (1989) similar distinction between primary
consciousness versus reflective consciousness, or being conscious of something
in one’s environment versus being conscious about one’s own conscious states or
processes (see Griffin 2001: 7–8). In Edelman’s account, “Animals with primary
consciousness integrate perceptual and motor events with memory to construct a
multimodal scene in the present,” or what Edelman terms “the remembered pres-
ent,” to which such animals can only respond adaptively (Kuiken 2010: 22; compare
Edelman 2003: 5521–22). Animals with secondary consciousness, by contrast, “can
go beyond the limits of the remembered present and reflectively consider past his-
tory, future plans, and . . . consciousness of being conscious” (Kuiken 2010: 22; see
also Edelman 2003: 5521–22; Lloyd 1989: 179–208). As Griffin points out, how-
ever, it is more difficult than it might seem to draw a bright line between primary and
reflective consciousness, thus construed (compare Carruthers on experience versus
consciousness):
Self-awareness is often held to be a capability found only in humans and the Great
Apes. And reflective as opposed to perceptual consciousness is often said to be nec-
essary before an animal can be aware of itself. . . . If we grant that some animals are
capable of perceptual consciousness, we need next to consider what range of objects
and events they can consciously perceive. Unless this range is extremely narrow, the
animal’s own body and its own actions must fall within the scope of its perceptual
consciousness. (Griffin 2001: 274)6
Research on mirror self-recognition raises other potential difficulties for analysts

who view self-awareness as a shibboleth separating fully conscious human selves
from merely perceiving or experiencing agents on the other side of the species
boundary. At issue is research suggesting that some nonhumans animals share with
humans the ability to recognize mirror images as correlates of their own bodies—an
ability that would seem to be bound up with the capacity for self-awareness and
hence a concept of self (Gallup 1998; Andrews 2015: 71).7 And yet conversely, as
Griffin (2001) notes, it is hard to determine what accounts for animals’ failure to
recognize mirror images as representations of their own bodies: is it that they are
incapable of self-awareness, or that some other factor accounts for their not correlat-
ing the appearance of movements of a mirror image with those of their own bodies
(275–76)? In short, to use Andrews’s (2015) formulation, failing to perform mirror
self-recognition tasks “cannot be a negative test for self-consciousness; failing is not
evidence that an animal lacks self-consciousness” (71).
One of the broader issues at stake in these and other debates about nonhuman
consciousness and selfhood has been articulated by Varsava (2013) in a different
context. In her analysis of Laurence Gonzales’s 2010 novel Lucy, to which I return in
more detail in chapter 2 as well as the coda, Varsava argues that Gonzales’s story of
a human-bonobo hybrid remains anchored in traditional humanist understandings
of species differences and relationships, rather than engaging in earnest with more
reflexive, posthumanist modes of critique—modes of critique according to which
we humans constitute just one species among others, not the paragon or standard
by which the capacities and proclivities of other forms of creatural life should be
judged (compare Braidotti 2013; Wolfe 2010). The plot of Gonzales’s novel turns on
attempts by various characters to (dis)prove the protagonist’s claims to humanness,
through arguments about whether her traits and abilities qualify her for inclusion in
(a slightly widened understanding of) the domain of the human. In this sense, Lucy
falls back on the human-animal opposition that the novel might prima facie seem
to unsettle, by imagining an experiment in cross-species reproduction. A similar
emphasis on maintaining humans’ exceptional or paradigmatic status vis-à-vis other

species—on holding up Homo sapiens as the species of reference—can be discerned
in accounts that assign to humans a concept of self that is unavailable to most if
not all other animals, by way of a distinction between experience and consciousness
or a narrowly defined capacity for self-awareness.8 The operative question, for such
accounts, is where to draw the line between humans and other animals, and also
how to rank the full range of species in relation to that line of demarcation.
But another question—a question at the heart of the present study—is what
motivates this line-drawing project in the first place. Or, to be more precise: How
can engaging with narratives and the models that have been developed to study
them shed light on the sources and implications of humans’ dichotomizing, hier-
archicalizing habits of mind vis-à-vis other animals? And how are those habits of
mind bound up with relatively parsimonious allocations of the possibility for self-
hood within the large and abundant domain of creatural life? Coming to terms with
these issues, I argue, requires a recontextualization of discourses concerned with
nonhuman subjectivity and selfhood, including (neuro)philosophical, cognitive-
ethological, and other discourses. More specifically, these discourses need to be
brought into dialogue with a broadly anthropological approach to differences
among competing cultural ontologies, as that term is used by Kohn (2007, 2013),
Candea (2010), Descola (2013), and other anthropologists whose ideas I discuss in
more detail in the following section. In suggesting how, across different ontologies,
different kinds of beings may count as selves, this work provides grounds for my dis-
tinction between ontologies that make relatively parsimonious allocations of pos-
sibilities for selfhood beyond the species boundary, on the one hand, and ontologies
that are more prolific when it comes to making such allocations, on the other hand.
In these terms, philosophical arguments and frameworks for ethological inquiry
that refuse to accord validity or even coherence to the idea of animal selves can be
viewed as both emerging from and also helping reconsolidate ontologies of the sec-
ond, more parsimonious type.
The project of resituating ideas of selfhood vis-à-vis broader cultural ontolo-
gies bears, in turn, on the organization of the present book. One of the reviewers
of an earlier version of my study suggested that “the book appears to follow a some-
what counterintuitive trajectory, with the treatment of self-narratives preceding the
chapters on the representation of much more basic animal experiences.” As just
indicated, however, the most fundamental concerns of my study are, first, the ontol-
ogies in terms of which members of a given (human) culture or subculture divide
up the world into those entities that can be viewed as other selves and those that
cannot; and second, how narratives reflect but also help constitute such ontologies.
I therefore begin my study with three chapters exploring these two fundamental
concerns and their interrelations. Then, in Part II, I widen the investigative focus
to consider methodological as well as conceptual issues that arise when narratives
and the frameworks used to study them are viewed from the perspective established
over the course of chapters 1–3. Thus the key questions addressed in chapters 4–7
(as well as the coda) are the following: What are the prospects for a narratology
that grounds storytelling practices in what Kohn describes as an “ecology of selves”

(2007: 4; 2013: 16–17)? And how can such a narratology contribute to a rethinking
of human institutions, values, and assumptions in light of our inextricable entangle-
ment with other, nonhuman members of the larger biotic communities in which we
participate?
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BOUNDARY
As previously noted, I adapt the concept of self-narrative from Gergen and Gergen
(1997), although research by other analysts such as Jerome Bruner, Daniel Hutto,
Alasdair MacIntyre, Ricoeur, and Andreea Ritivoi also informs my approach (see
Herman 2013: 73–99 for an overview of some of this research). In their study
“Narratives of the Self,” Gergen and Gergen (1997) confer on self-narratives crucial
psychological, interactional, and more broadly sociocultural functions. Suggesting
that self-narratives result from persons’ attempts “to establish coherent connections
among life events” (162), they further argue that “although self-narratives are pos-
sessed by individuals, their genesis and sustenance may be viewed as fundamentally
social,” since such narratives are ultimately “symbolic systems used for such social
purposes as justification, criticism, and social solidification” (163; see also Ritivoi
2009: 27–36). In other words, “As the individual’s actions encounter varying degrees
of approbation, . . . it becomes increasingly necessary for the individual to articulate
the implicit narrative line in such a way that the actions in question become intel-
ligible and thus acceptable” (177). Self-narratives are thus sense-making resources
“constructed and reconstructed by people in relationships, and employed in rela-
tionships to sustain, enhance, or impede various actions” (163).9
The case studies to be considered in this chapter bring into focus how Gergen
and Gergen’s model can be extended and enriched with ideas from other domains
of inquiry, suggesting how the concept of self-narrative opens out into broader ques-
tions for a narratology beyond the human. For one thing, in both accommodating
the variability of selves over time and capturing the coherence of a self ’s always-
emergent profile, Gergen and Gergen’s model resonates with Paul Ricoeur’s (1990/
1992) discussion of narrative vis-à-vis the contrast between identity and selfhood.
For Ricoeur the problem of personal identity arises from a tension between what
he describes as the two main sides of the concept of identity: identity as sameness
(idem) and identity as selfhood (ipse). In opposing sameness in the sense of idem-
identity, or the persistence of recognizable traits that make a self identifiable over
time, to selfhood viewed as ipseity, in which changes to the self take rise from a dia-
lectic between self and other-than-self, Ricoeur argues that “from the outset . . . self-
hood of oneself implies otherness to such an intimate degree that one cannot be
thought of without the other” (3). He also argues that narrative constitutes a pri-
mary resource for negotiating this dialectic of selfhood and sameness, which for
Ricoeur complements that of selfhood and otherness (16). My analysis of Thirteen
Cats of My Childhood builds on these claims to suggest how narratives like Reklaw’s
thematize and incorporate into their very design the complementary relationship
between the two dialectics in question; such texts show that understandings of the
self as emergent in time are interlinked with understandings of that self as situated in
a larger space of selfhood, that is, a realm of others who are selves in their own right.
Thus, in drawing on the resources of autodiegetic narration to align himself more or
less closely with his younger self, Reklaw registers how changes in his sense of who
he is correlate with an expansion of the number and kinds of selves to whom he
holds himself accountable.
To explain how narrative provides means for reconciling the idem and ipse dimen-
sions of personal identity, Ricoeur extends the analysis of emplotment he had devel-
oped in Time and Narrative (Ricoeur 1981–85/1984–88). In the extended analysis,
“The specific model of the interconnection of events constituted by emplotment
allows us to integrate with permanence in time what seems to be its contrary in the
domain of sameness-identity, namely, diversity, variability, discontinuity, and insta-
bility” (1990/1992: 140). Ricoeur transposes the idea of emplotment from the
action to the characters of a narrative, suggesting how the dialectic of the charac-
ter provides a template for understanding the dialectic of sameness and selfhood
(140–41). In other words, in the domain of personal identity emplotment “can be
described in dynamic terms by the competition between a demand for concord-
ance and the admission of discordances which, up to the close of the story, threaten
this identity” (141), with “configuration” being the narrative process that mediates
between such concordances and discordances. By virtue of the concordances enter-
ing into the construction of the character, “The character draws his or her singularity
from the unity of a life considered a temporal totality which is itself singular and dis-
tinguished from all others” (147). By virtue of the equally formative discordances,
however, “This temporal totality is threatened by the disruptive effect of the unfore-
seeable events that punctuate it (encounters, accidents, etc.)” (147). As Ricoeur
goes on to remark, furthermore,
The mediating function performed by the narrative identity of the character between
the poles of sameness and selfhood is attested to primarily by the imaginative varia-
tions to which the narrative submits this identity. In truth, narrative does not merely
tolerate these variations, it engenders them, seeks them out. In this sense, literature
proves to consist in a vast laboratory for thought experiments in which the resources
of variation encompassed by narrative identity are put to the test of narration. (148)
The case studies to be discussed in this chapter and the next can be viewed as part
of this laboratory, engaging in experiments that raise questions about the scope and
limits of human identity itself.
More broadly, Gergen and Gergen’s emphasis on the sociointeractional func-
tions of self-narratives—their relational approach to the self as a construction to be
worked out through socially embedded sense-making acts that situate happenings,
achievements, and projects vis-à-vis a more or less persistent narrative line—needs
to be reframed within a wider, transhuman conception of self-other relations. The

idea of self-narratives can thus be brought into dialogue with the comparative study
of the various ontologies projected by different cultures, past and present, this area
of study being part of what might be called the “ontological turn” in anthropological
research.10 In this way, by broadening the remit of possible-worlds and text-worlds
approaches, among other domains within contemporary narratological research
(see Doležel 1998; Pavel 1986; Ryan 1991; Werth 1999), a narratology beyond the
human can help map out the ontologies not just of the storyworlds associated with
individual texts or genres but also of the cultures in which those texts and genres
are embedded, and by which they are animated. At issue are more or less widely
shared understandings of the kinds of beings that populate the world, the qualities
and abilities those beings are taken to embody, and how the beings included in vari-
ous categories and subcategories relate to those categorized as human.11
For example, Latour (1991/ 1993) has shown how a notionally modern
ontology— one that posits a divide between nature and culture, things and
persons—is belied by complex networks spanning human and nonhuman actants
(10–12; see also Descola 2013: 32). But whereas Latour’s account flattens out con-
trasts among animals and other sorts of actants that can be categorized as nonhuman
(computational devices, built structures, geological formations), other theorists
have zoomed in on human-animal relationships in particular and explored the way
different ontologies allocate possibilities for selfhood more or less prolifically across
the species boundary.12 Viveiros de Castro (1998), for instance, explores the ontol-
ogy projected by Amerindian peoples, for whom “The world is inhabited by differ-
ent sorts of subjects or persons, human and non-human, which apprehend reality
from different points of view” (469). In accordance with a process that Viveiros de
Castro terms “cosmological deixis,”
The Amerindian words which are usually translated as “human being” . . . do not
designate humanity as a natural species. They refer rather to the social condition of
personhood, and they function (pragmatically when not syntactically) less as nouns
than as pronouns. They indicate the position of the subject; they are enunciative
markers, not names. . . . Amerindian souls, be they human or animal, are thus index-
ical categories [and] Amerindian ontological perspectivism proceeds along the lines
that the point of view creates the subject; whatever is activated or “agented” by the point
of view will be a subject. (476–77)
Kohn (2007, 2013) maps out a similarly prolific matrix for subjectivity and selfhood
among a particular group of Amerindians—namely, the Quechua-speaking Runa
in Ecuador’s Upper Amazon region. Kohn (2007) seeks to develop an “analytical
framework that goes beyond a focus on how humans represent animals to an appre-
ciation for our everyday interactions with these creatures and the new spaces of pos-
sibility such interactions can create” (4; see also Haraway 2003, 2008; Kirksey and
Helmreich 2010); he suggests that for the Runa “all beings, and not just humans,
engage with the world and with each other as selves—that is, as beings that have
a point of view” (2007: 4). Accordingly, if perspectives, ways of experiencing the

world, “exist beyond the human, then we humans are not the only selves in this
world” (Kohn 2013: 72).13 Rather, the very concept of self, and hence the narra-
tives used to bring the self ’s experiences into relation with a story line constructed
through processes of interaction, must be situated within a more or less expan-
sive “ecology of selves” (Kohn 2007: 4; 2013: 16–17), whose membership criteria
will vary depending on the ontological commitments involved (see also Degnen
2013: 3, 5–6).
In my next section, turning to Groff ’s fictional account of a protagonist caught
between an obsolescent self-narrative and an as-yet-unimagined story line that
might accommodate a different way of living, I adapt Latour’s emphasis on the con-
test of ontologies within the ostensibly singular cultures of modernity. “Above and
Below,” I argue, dramatizes the protagonist’s movement away from a restricted to a
more inclusive ecology of selves, exposing a fault line between parsimonious and
prolific allocations of the possibility for selfhood beyond the human.14 This fault
line can also be described in terms of the contrast between anthropocentric and
biocentric perspectives on the world; at issue are perspectives positing a hierarchical
separation between humans and other species, on the one hand, and perspectives
assuming a fundamental continuity across human and nonhuman forms of life, on
the other. Groff ’s text registers the reciprocal influence flowing between the break-
down of the protagonist’s self-narrative and her growing recognition of her place
within a more-than-human world. In this way, the story traces mutations in the con-
cept of selfhood brought about by a rejection of anthropocentric geographies of the
self; such geographies assign humans a position above other forms of creatural life,
while gapping out experiences located below the imaginary elevation of the human.15
The protagonist’s intermittent encounters with animals punctuate phases of her
movement away from an over-restrictive ontology that curtails or obscures her rela-
tional ties to a wide range of relevant others, suggesting possibilities for biocentric
becoming within an expanded ecology of selves.
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B E C O M I N G I N “ A B OV E A N D B E L O W ”
Unlike texts in which nonhuman beings assume, from the start, a primary actantial
or thematic role vis-à-vis their human counterparts, as in Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty,
Virginia Woolf ’s Flush, Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing, or Karen Joy Fowler’s We Are
All Completely beside Ourselves, Groff ’s narrative brings trans-species encounters and
relationships into view intermittently. More precisely, human-animal relationships
come to the fore at key junctures in the unfolding story, marking transition points in
the protagonist’s attempt to move beyond an obsolescent self-narrative. Thus, with
the title of “Above and Below” linking issues of identity with the dynamics of rela-
tionality, the text highlights how humans’ understanding of their relations to other
kinds of selves takes on special salience when self-narratives come under pressure, or
no longer find purchase at all. Reciprocally, the protagonist’s recognition of her place
within a world that extends beyond the human shapes how she goes about recon-
structing the story of who—and what—she is. The text thereby demonstrates how
narratives ostensibly centering on human protagonists can nonetheless raise impor-
tant questions about the scope and limits of selfhood in a wider world of selves,
nonhuman as well as human.16
Formally, by not using quotation marks to distinguish instances of speech and
thought representation from narratorial reports, and by blending such reports with
moments of narrated perception,17 Groff creates maximal consonance between
narrator and protagonist; the story thus stages, through a sequence of vignettes
strictly focalized through the protagonist, what it is like to live in the aftermath of
a self-narrative that has fallen into obsolescence. In turn, by tracing out the lived
consequences of the main character’s having “chosen to lose” and said “goodbye to
longing” (Groff 2011: 106) by the time the story begins, Groff ’s text suggests that it
requires the creation of another, different account, an offsetting narrative, to register
the loss or active rejection of a previously sustaining story of self. In a way that har-
monizes, in part, with Gergen and Gergen’s emphasis on the social embeddedness
of self-narratives, Groff portrays the protagonist as taking the measure of her current
situation by comparing it against a now-defunct narrative line, in terms of which she
had once organized her ongoing interactions with others, her understanding of past
conduct and relationships, and her hopes for the future.
The ghostly presence of this inoperative story line makes itself felt from the start,
as the protagonist, extending her arm through the open car window, drives away
from the university town where she used to live: “She could almost see her hopes
peeling from her palm and skipping down the road in her wake: the books with her
name on them; the sabbatical in Florence; the gleaming modern house at the edge
of the woods. Gone” (Groff 2011: 107). Similarly, the opening references to the pro-
tagonist’s ex-boyfriend, the bookshop owner who calls her used books “worthless,”
and the eviction notice on her apartment door all point to a narrative vector that has
become palpable through its absence. More generally, Groff evokes this obsolescent
story of the self by alluding to the relationships, practices, and institutions in which
it once flourished, but from which the protagonist has, by the beginning of the text,
chosen to distance herself. Groff ’s account thus intersperses scenic narration of the
character’s experiences of poverty and homelessness with analeptic shifts to prior
contexts in which she had once been a very different self. These contexts include
her relationship with the mother of her former boyfriend, “a soft-haired, hugging
woman” from whom, after the breakup, she expects a phone call that never comes
(108); her engagements with literary works she once admired (“the Goethe, the
Shakespeare, the Montale. The sun was bleaching it all to dust” [110]); the former
friends sitting at a table in a coffee shop who, though they had complained about
being too poor to buy lattes, had “a kind of wealth you don’t know you have until you
stand shivering outside in the morning, watching what you used to be” (114); “the
ghost of the professor [whom] she’d been” and whom she must summon in order to
speak authoritatively to a police officer; and even the childhood stuffed turtle stolen
from her ransacked and vandalized car. Anticipating a subsequent analepsis that
reaches back even farther in time—one evoking difficult family relationships in the
context of which the protagonist’s self-narrative as an academic may have emerged
as a compensatory strategy (109)—the first part of Groff ’s story also includes a tel-
ephone conversation between the main character and her mother, who is married to
a domineering spouse and on painkillers for “chronic idiopathic pain” (108).
Interwoven with these references to a former life, fractured community, and
obsolescent story line, however, are moments in which the protagonist glimpses
her place within another, wider community, transhuman in scope and opening
up new narrative vectors leading to a different future. This expanded ecology of
selves requires a reframing of Gergen and Gergen’s idea of relationality, because it
suggests that shifting to an ontology that is more prolific in allocating possibilities
for selfhood also entails a rethinking of self-other relationships. In this alternative
ontology, the others to whom human selves are accountable, and in dialogue with
whom their self-narratives take shape, now include nonhuman beings who share
the capacity to experience the world from a particular perspective on events (com-
pare Illies 1973: 39; Kohn 2013: 1–26). The structure of Groff ’s narrative, featuring
animals who serve as gatekeepers at key transition points during the protagonist’s
journey away from an abandoned community, through relative isolation, toward a
reconfigured, cross-species collective, mirrors the process by which the main char-
acter disentangles herself from a reactive, defensive self-narrative and moves toward
a new story of the self as one living creature among others, embracing new pos-
sibilities of biocentric becoming. This structure also underscores the difficulty of
dis-inhabiting an ontology with which one has become familiar, and reinhabiting
the world otherwise.
Over the course of the narrative, the protagonist oscillates between fearful dis-
avowal and open acceptance of her membership in this larger ecology of selves.18
For example, as she packs up her camping equipment while leaving her apartment,
the equipment reminds her of the time she and her ex-boyfriend had tried camping
out on the Suwannee River in Florida but found themselves “petrified by the bel-
lows of bull gators” (106). Yet the protagonist, in vacating her former life, is herself
“slithering out from underneath” a mountain of student debt (106), like one of the
alligators or snakes repeatedly mentioned in the text—the animal metaphor in this
instance arguably emanating from the character rather than imposed by the narrator,
given the highly consonant mode of narration used by Groff. At another key tran-
sition point, the protagonist, moneyless and hungry, ventures to town with a view
to seeking out support from services for the homeless—moving farther away from
the story line in terms of which she had once made a claim for self-sufficiency. The
fountain at the center of town where she searches for coins has the design of a frog
spitting up water, and from the side of the fountain “she sat like a second frog on the
edge of the fountain, hunched over her hunger” (109).
Fearful disavowal again comes into play, however, when the protagonist stum-
bles upon the homeless camp later in the story, taking the first step toward joining
a different community—a community of the disempowered, the marginalized, the
unnoticed. The camp happens to be situated near the bike path “where she and her
ex, once upon a time, had taken long, leisurely rides to see the alligators glistening
on the banks of the sinkhole ponds. It was the dark of the woods, thick with Spanish
moss and vines that looked from the corners of her eyes like snakes. She felt a new
upwelling in her, a sharp fear, and tried to swallow it” (115). But later, just before
the main character further solidifies her ties to a new community by living in the
“squat” whose residents collectively earn enough money to pay the utility bills and
buy food by selling items that have been thrown away, she again aligns herself with
a nonhuman other. The protagonist, recalling the amount of waste there is when
students move out from dormitories, sneaks onto campus in search of food: “She
felt ratlike on campus, scuttling from shadow to shadow. If anyone she knew saw
her, if anyone smelled her” (117). Similarly, having just arrived at the Prairie House,
the protagonist becomes alert to her position within a new ecology of selves. As she
meticulously scours the kitchen, her predilection for cleaning here and elsewhere in
the narrative perhaps serving to indicate her attempt to clear the way for a different
story of self, the protagonist observes that “the moon had risen over the prairie and
shot the hummocks with shadow. A small creature was moving at the edge of the
lawn, and in the house she could hear the others sleeping, their small movements
and breath. She was alert, as she hadn’t been in years” (118).
This new alertness to nonhuman as well as human others had been prepared for
in part by Euclid-Euclean, the epileptic cleaner of bars and restaurants whom the
protagonist meets earlier in the story, and who serves as kind of mentor figure, a
guide who points the way from a parsimonious to a more prolific allocation of possi-
bilities for selfhood across species lines. Having criticized the university students he
encounters, remarking that they “get sillier and sillier each damn day, filling up those
heads with tweeters and scooters and facebooks and starbooks and shit” (113),
Euclid-Euclean continues:
This land, he told her, is full of living twits and unsettled spirits, both. The spirits were
loud and unhappy and filled the place with evil. All them dead Spanish missionaries
and snakebit Seminoles and starved-to-death Crackers and shit. He, Euclid-Euclean,
come down from Atlanta near on four years back and got infected with the spirits and
they were inside him and he couldn’t find his way to leave. (113)
As he tells the protagonist “about his talking dog when he was a kid, or [describes]
his moments of illumination, when the world slowed and the Devil spoke in his ear
until he was chased away by the brightness that grew inside [him] and bathed the
world in light” (114), Euclid, true to his namesake, takes on the role of a cultural
geometer, redrawing the boundaries between the past and present, imagined and
real, self and other. He thus affords access to an alternative ontology that the protag-
onist finds unsettling. Accordingly, as she cleaned the kitchen at the Prairie House
after first arriving there, “She avoided the windows, sensing that if she looked out she
would see Euclid’s hungry spirits massing up from the prairie, the starved Crackers,
the malarial conquistadores on their ponies” (118).
Once established at the Prairie House, though, Groff ’s character begins to inhabit
this world of altered boundaries and changed categories; it is a world marked by
widened possibilities for selfhood, an expanded set of self-other relations requiring,
in turn, a reconfigured self-narrative.19 One evening, as the other residents gather
around a bonfire for a Christmas party, the protagonist walks away into the sur-
rounding prairie, “each step a relief from the drunken voices, the flaming moths of
paper spun from the fire, the sear of the flames. Past the first hummock of trees, the
darkness took on a light of its own and she began to distinguish the texture of the
ground” (118–19). As this enlarged world takes clearer shape, her place within it
likewise comes into focus, suggesting possibilities for biocentric becoming:
She moved calmly over the pits of sand, palmettos biting at her calves, strange sud-
den seeps of marsh. Small things rustled away from her footsteps, and she felt fondly
toward them, for their smallness and their fear.
After ten minutes, human noise had scaled to nothing, and insect noise took on
urgency. . . . She kept herself still, and was so quiet for so long that the prairie began
again its furtive movements. The world that, from the comfort of the fire, had seemed
a cool wiped slate was unexpectedly teeming.
She could smell the rot of a drainage ditch that some well-meaning fools had dug
through the prairie during the Depression. The land had taken the imprint of their
hands and made it its own. She thought of the snakes sleeping coiled in their burrows
and the alligators surfacing to scent her in the darkness, their shimmy onto the land,
their stealthy bellying; how she was only one lost thing among so many others, not
special for being human. (119)
The recognition of her own relatedness to the members of other species, and the
rejection of the hierarchy that places these species below humans, opens a space
for biocentric becoming. The disrepair of the drainage ditch emblematizes such
becoming, suggesting a world of unpredictable transformations, unplanned growth,
that eludes and subverts human attempts to establish fixed positions in landscapes
marked by ceaseless mutation.
Yet Groff uses ellipsis together with a massive increase in narrative speed to block
full access to the reconfigured self-narrative that the protagonist has begun to elabo-
rate by the end of the story. The sketchiness of the new narrative line is indicative; it
suggests that moving from a parsimonious to a prolific ecology of selves, and thereby
reframing relationality in transhuman terms, constitutes only a starting point, not
a resolution, for new, more sustainable stories of who and what one is. The final
section of the narrative jumps ahead several years, after the protagonist attends her
“mother’s funeral on a hill gone white with sleet” (119), to focus on the character’s
experiences during the difficult birth of her own daughter. As the protagonist under-
goes an operation during the birth, Groff backtracks to the night of the party, indi-
cating that the character felt panic after recognizing her status as one animal among
others out on the prairie. When the vertical hierarchy dividing up the creatural
world gives way to a horizontal model of affiliation and alignment, the protagonist
has “the sense of being lost” (119). Frightened by “the breath of some bad spirit hot
on the back of her neck” (119), she makes her way back to the light of the bonfire.
It is not clear exactly what has transpired between that night and the final scene in
the hospital years later, nor what narrative vector the protagonist may have pursued
to make sense of the intervening events and experiences. But the conclusion of the
text suggests that, whatever the specifics of the protagonist’s emergent self-narrative,
her story-in-the-making has opened up new possibilities for biocentric becoming,
trans-species affiliation, in an expanded ecology of selves. Even as the protagonist
reflects on relational ties afforded by a community of human selves—“the hands [of
the operating physician] in her flesh, her own crossed on her chest, her daughter’s
tiny fists drawn up into the air” (119)—she remains oriented to other ties to other
possible selves, in the world beyond the human. Thus, observing the Christmas
poinsettia in the corner of the hospital room, she finds herself thinking about what
might inhabit the black dirt contained in the flower pot (119).
Whereas Groff leaves unspecified the exact shape and future implications of her
protagonist’s reconfigured self-narrative, and focuses on trans-species relationality
in a generalized way, Reklaw, in his graphic memoir Thirteen Cats of My Childhood,
presents a self-narrative with which a particular kind of companion animal is interin-
volved, and suggests how the process of (re)evaluating his relationships with mem-
bers of this species at once stems from and results in an altered conception of self.20
n C
O M PA N I O N A B L E S E LV E S : T H E I N T E R T W I N I N G
OF HUMAN AND NONHUMAN LIFE HISTORIES
IN THIRTEEN CATS OF MY CHILDHOOD
Originally appearing in 2006 in volume 2 of his self-published series of minicom-

ics titled Couch Tag (2005–6), and republished in 2013 in a volume with the same
name released by Fantagraphics Books, Thirteen Cats is a retrospective autodiegetic
account of Reklaw’s experiences with the cats adopted by his family, from the time
he was a small child to his departure for university-level studies as a young adult.
The family moves houses frequently, and as the parents’ marriage comes unraveled,
Jesse’s sister and he grow apart, and many other circumstances change, the family’s
practice of adopting cats remains one of the only constants in Jesse’s life.21 In paral-
lel with the fluctuating distance between the older narrating I who uses words and
images to tell the story of the family’s thirteen cats, on the one hand, and the younger
experiencing I’s encounters with those cats, on the other hand, Reklaw’s sequence
of vignettes charts a complex, shifting relationship between human and nonhuman
worlds, with those worlds sometimes converging, sometimes diverging, but never
achieving complete congruence.
More precisely, Reklaw uses a story about intraspecies and indeed intraindividual
differences—different family members’ various stances toward the cats as well as
the temporal and attitudinal distance between the older Reklaw and the younger
Jesse—to explore how humans’ ways of engaging with the world relate to those of
other animals. At the same time, Reklaw’s self-narrative suggests that learning to
register and respect nonhuman phenomenologies has been instrumental in trans-

forming Reklaw into the person who tells this story in this particular manner, his atti-
tudes toward and treatment of the family cats functioning as a yardstick for gauging
the distance between Reklaw’s past and present selves. Overall, then, Reklaw’s text,
like Groff ’s, suggests a reciprocal influence between embracing modes of relational-
ity across the species boundary and recognizing the need to restructure individual
and collective self-narratives. But whereas Groff explores the dialectical interplay
between self-narratives and ways of relating to broader biotic communities, Reklaw
focuses on how cross-species relationships involving particular companion animals
at once shape and are shaped by evolving self-narratives.22
Thirteen Cats thus highlights the fruitfulness of bringing studies of self-narratives
into dialogue with research on humans’ relationships with companion animals,
defined by Donna Haraway (2003) as “horses, dogs, cats or other beings will-
ing to make the leap to the biosociality of service dogs, family members, or team
members in cross-species sports” (14).23 Adopting perspectives afforded by three
levels or scales of analysis (62)—namely, those of “evolutionary time at the level
of the planet earth and its naturalcultural species,” “face-to-face time at the scale
of individual bodies and individual lifetimes,” and, when it comes to the discourse of
breeds, “historical time on the scale of decades, centuries, populations, regions, and
nations”—Haraway posits that humans and companion animals are caught up in
“co-constitutive relationships in which none of the partners pre-exist[s]‌the relating,
and the relating is never done once and for all” (12). Situated mainly at the scale of
face-to-face time, in Haraway’s terms, and highlighting the way humans both change
and are changed by the lives of the animals with whom they share their day-to-day
existence, Reklaw’s account of his experiences with the family cats mirrors other
contributions to the subgenre that has come to be known as the pet memoir, as well
as narratives told by veterans and others about their experiences with service and
therapy animals. Like these other stories, Thirteen Cats suggests that Jesse and the
family cats come to be who and what they are by virtue (at least in part) of their
being-in-relation-to-one-another.24
Luis Carlos Montalván’s Until Tuesday (Montalván and Witter 2011), for exam-
ple, emphasizes the mutually shaping nature of the relationship that he, a veteran
of the Iraq war suffering from PTSD, has with a golden retriever named Tuesday, a
service dog rather than a pet.25 Writing that “Tuesday and I are so in tune with each
other after more than two years together that we can read each other’s body language
and know each other’s thoughts” (8), Montalván later recounts a specific moment of
mutual recognition, formative for both human and dog, when Tuesday “looked into
my eyes and a calm came over him that I had never seen before. . . . He didn’t know
that I was the mission he’d been training for, but at that moment, at the very least, he
realised that I needed him. And maybe I realised, in my heart and in my head, that
this was a two-way relationship and he needed me too” (153). A similar emphasis on
the co-constitution of human and canine identities—and life trajectories—surfaces
in other popular dog memoirs, such as Allen and Sandra Parton’s Endal (2009),
named after a dog whom Allen meets at a center that trains canine assistants for
persons with disabilities, and who, as he is portrayed in the memoir, chooses Allen
as much as much as Allen chooses him as a working partner (161); Dean Koontz’s
A Big Little Life (2009), in which Koontz sees in his own golden retriever, Trixie, a
model for how to live in “quiet courage, unbowed by suffering” (257), while ascrib-
ing to Trixie just before her death a desire “to be stroked and held, and to hear us
tell her how good she was, how beautiful” (255); and—one of the earliest texts in
the sub-subgenre of the dog memoir—John Grogan’s Marley and Me (2005), about
a yellow Labrador retriever who “became part of our [Grogan and his spouse’s]
melded fabric, a tightly woven and inseparable strand in the weave that was us. Just
as we had helped shape him into the family pet he would become, he helped to shape
us, as well—as a couple, as parents, as animal lovers, as adults” (332).
Indeed, a range of nonhuman companions feature in the recent spate of multispe-
cies memoirs, confirming that dogs are not the only animals with whom humans get
caught up in reciprocally formative modes of relationality. Thus in Wesley, Stacey
O’Brien’s memoir about a barn owl with whom she lived for two decades, O’Brien
recounts how she decides not to commit suicide after being diagnosed with an inop-
erable brain tumor, her rationale being that “Wesley had been my constant compan-
ion, my teacher, and my friend. I now made the decision to honor this little body
with the huge soul and see him through to the end” (211). For her part, in telling the
story of how she adopted a cat named Homer, blind from birth because of a severe
infection, Gwen Cooper (2010) evokes a domestic space marked by an uncanny
degree of synchronization of moods and activities across species lines:
When I was in an especially good mood, Homer ran zanily around the apartment,
his cartwheels and caperings the physical manifestation of what I was feeling. If I was
sad, Homer curled in a tight little ball in my lap and couldn’t be persuaded out of his
funk even when presented with a favorite toy or a fresh can of tuna. When I walked
from room to room, Homer might charge in front of me or lope behind me or weave
in and out of my legs. But the rhythms of our steps had so completely adjusted them-
selves to the other’s that neither of us missed a beat, never faltered, never tripped the
other one up. (142)
More generally, suggesting something of the scope of humans’ interconnections

with other forms of creatural life, a variety of companion animals populate multispe-
cies memoirs of this sort, including pigs (Montgomery 2007), hawks (Macdonald
2015), horses (Richards 2009), corvids (Woolfson 2008), elephants (MacPherson
2002), and others.
Although statements concerning the mutually formative nature of their authors’
interactions with companion animals feature prominently in memoirs like these,
in Thirteen Cats of My Childhood Reklaw draws on the resources of narrative itself
to model how awareness of such co-constitutive relationality develops over time.
Specifically, Reklaw uses autodiegetic narration, in which a younger experienc-
ing I and the older narrating I can be assumed to be mutually constitutive agents,
as a resource for modeling cross-species relationships that have the same general
structure—and vice versa. This mode of narration allows Reklaw’s text to demon-
strate, formally as well as thematically, how the felt, experiential impact of coming
to realize one’s own being-in-relation-to-nonhuman-others contributes to the for-
mation of an emergent self. In parallel with Ricoeur’s (1990/1992) analysis of the
complementary contrasts between sameness and selfhood and selfhood and other-
ness, Thirteen Cats suggests that earlier and later instantiations of a human self are
caught up in a dialectic of commonality and difference mirroring the one in which
humans and other animals are caught up. Further, the degree to which Jesse grasps
this shared structure of difference-within-continuity determines how closely the
narrating Reklaw aligns himself with the experiencing I’s ways of interacting with
the family cats.
The two panels reproduced as figure 1.1 indicate how storyworlds populated by
nonhuman agents resonate with those in which self-other relationships, rather than
crossing the species boundary, involve different, temporally distributed versions
of a human self. The panels suggest how changes to the self over time that mediate
access to the past provide an analog for understanding humans’ equally mediated
access to nonhuman worlds, and vice versa. Concluding the vignette titled “Gene,”
the sequence focuses on the way Jesse and his sister, because they “couldn’t get
enough cats,” “chronicled the events of [the cats’] backyard microcosm” (Reklaw
2006/2013: 10). Here the text stages at a hypodiegetic level the way storytelling
affords resources for engaging with the experiential worlds or Umwelten of other
animals.26 The children rely on narrative to situate the cats as intelligent agents
in an unfolding action structure, ascribing to them a range of mental states and
dispositions—emotions such as jealousy, and localized intentions as well as larger
plans—that constitute reasons for acting (Herman 2013: 73–99).27 Reciprocally,
in parallel with Jesse’s and his sister’s story-within-the-story, the process of retro-
spective autodiegetic narration makes it possible to build a storyworld in which
Figure 1.1 Parallels between chronicling animal lives and engaging with one’s own past.
Credit line: From Thirteen Cats of My Childhood © Jesse Reklaw. Reprinted by permission
of the artist and Fantagraphics Books.
the past self ’s experiences can be situated and hence made sense of. Thus over the
course of his account Reklaw attributes to his earlier self a range of qualities, per-
ceptions, and motivations, including an early tendency to engage in destructive
behaviors that extends to taunting the family cats (3, 4, 9), an ability to register but
not necessarily fully understand tensions in the family caused in part by his father’s
alcoholism and proneness to rage, and an initial insensitivity about the death of
some of the cats that contrasts markedly with Jesse’s subsequent grief about the
loss of his favorite cat, Boots. In both intraspecies and interspecies encounters, nar-
rative affords an environment for Umwelt exploration, by means of story-enabled
attributions of mental states and dispositions to intelligent agents inhabiting fun-
damentally other worlds. Furthermore, in both contexts such attributions not only
serve to profile told-about others but also, and through that very process, create a
profile for the teller.
The interplay between the text’s verbal and visual tracks in figure 1.1 invites fur-
ther reflection on the parallels between using stories to negotiate nonhuman experi-
ences and the process of constructing autodiegetic narratives. The wall that stands
between the reader and the (unseen) cats of whose actions Jesse is giving an account
can be interpreted as corresponding to the temporal boundary separating Jesse’s
lived experiences from Reklaw’s later account of those experiences. True, whereas
the wall beyond which Jesse is looking allows him to observe the cats without him-
self being seen and thus potentially influencing their behavior, there is no such
site of privileged access to the past when it comes to telling the story of how one
became who one is. Yet it should be noted that in the story-within-the-story—that
is, the hypodiegetic narrative that in turn centers on the act of telling stories—Jesse
constructs his account of the cat’s behavior while engaging in dialogue with his sis-
ter. In line with research suggesting that the current moment of telling invariably
shapes the process of self-narration (Eakin 2008, 2014; Gergen and Gergen 1997;
Ritivoi 2009; Smith and Watson 2010), the kinds of details that Jesse includes in his
embedded narrative about the cats—the strategies he uses to emplot the sequence
of observed events as one entailed by a kind of love triangle involving Paranoid,
Gene, and Frosty—are tailored to the assumptions, expectations, and interests that
the narrating Jesse ascribes to his interlocutor. In turn, the double relationality evi-
dent at the hypodiegetic level—the self-other relations that unfold across and also
within species lines in the scene of storytelling portrayed in figure 1.1—parallels
the inter-and intraspecies relationality in which the older Reklaw’s account of his
younger self ’s narrating act is in turn caught up.
This double relationality links up with Haraway’s (2003, 2008) discussion of
broader ethical issues raised by humans’ interactions with companion animals and,
more generally, companion species. In line with Willett’s (2014) account of interspe-
cies ethics, discussed in the introduction, Haraway argues that “all ethical relating,
within or between species, is knit from the silk-strong thread of ongoing alertness
to otherness-in-relation. We are not one, and being depends on getting on together.
The obligation is to ask who are present and who are emergent” (2003: 50). A con-
cern with such otherness-in-relation manifests itself in two ways in Reklaw’s text.
On the one hand, Thirteen Cats includes metanarrative moments that explore the
tension between human storytelling proclivities and the nonhuman experiences
brought within the purview of those proclivities. On the other hand, Reklaw uses
relative sensitivity to otherness-in-relation to mark degrees of distance between his
past and present selves; the maximum distance obtains when Jesse proves unable
to engage in a trans-species expansion of the domain of subjectivity, a mapping of
the space of selfhood beyond the human. In other words, Reklaw’s self-narrative
suggests that he becomes who he is by virtue of making comparatively prolific allo-
cations of possibilities for selfhood beyond the human and, relatedly, coming to rec-
ognize the limits of animal stories in which such allocations are curtailed.
Both the verbal and visual tracks of the text emphasize the disparity between
some of the family’s stories about the cats and the cats’ own ways of negotiating their
surrounding environment. Thus, in the first vignette of Thirteen Cats, “Black Star,”
Reklaw’s sister’s story about Black Star’s magical ability “to disappear into darkness
and change her size and shape at will” (2) conflicts with what Reklaw eventually
learns through “secondhand stories and some photographs”: namely, that Black
Star died after being hit by a car, and that, “afraid of how the death would affect us
kids, mom got a new all-black kitty and secretly tossed out Black Star’s corpse.” By
the end of the one-page vignette, the replacement cat, “Black Star II,” has become
increasingly attracted to the woods until he is “completely absorbed into the wild”—
indicating not just the failure of the mother’s ruse but also the extent to which com-
panion animals, more generally, resist assimilation to human projects. At the same
time, in the visual track Reklaw provides larger, more detailed images of Jesse’s sis-
ter’s imaginary Black Star with magical powers, and also of the ersatz Black Star, as
compared with the first Black Star, whether alive or dead. Here the sparser visualiza-
tions of the original cat suggest the difficulty of sorting through the narratives that
grow up around and come to define animal companions—and hence of identifying
the story lines that might best do justice to the lived experiences of the animals in
question.
Later, in connection with a cat named Frosty, the text again suggests that animal
life stories are sometimes tantamount to confabulation, with these made-up accounts
serving to fill the gaps in individual or collective memory about a companion ani-
mal. With Reklaw having used extradiegetic narration in a previous panel to recount
how Frosty vanished toward the end of the family’s three-year stay in an upscale
house in Sacramento and how “no one remembers what happened to her,” the pan-
els reproduced in figure 1.2 project an imagined reunion between Frosty and Gene
in Rancho Cordova, the town where, some twenty miles away from Sacramento,
Jesse’s father had driven Gene in order to abandon him at a construction site (16).
The confabulatory qualities of the sequence, which perhaps resonate with Jesse’s
(and Reklaw’s) sense of parental abandonment, are underscored by its being the
only one in which Reklaw confers on cats the capacity to use human language.
Yet even as Reklaw, in the mode of critique, registers the story-resistant or story-
transcending aspects of the cats from his childhood—that is, the way they refuse
to be contained within narratives that define them primarily in terms of the human
Figure 1.2 Animal biography as confabulatory practice.

domestic spaces they inhabit—he also demonstrates positively how narrative can
be used to trace out interconnections between Jesse’s changing attitudes toward
and treatment of the cats, on the one hand, and his burgeoning understanding of
his own situation within the family, on the other hand. For example, the vignette
titled “Frosty,” reproduced as figure 1.3, tells the story of how this “indifferent all-
white cat” proved to be incapable of hiding “in our brown and gray suburb” (3). In
narrating how the cat keeps clear of “six-year-old-me and my toy-destroying experi-
ments,” Reklaw presents an intersection between human and nonhuman ways of
experiencing the world; even as he recounts this episode in a manner that signals
his recognition of the rights and responsibilities associated with such interspecies
encounters, Reklaw also uses the story to explore reasons for his younger self ’s lack
of recognition.
As in figure 1.1, in this vignette Reklaw weaves together intra-and interspecies
attributions of mental states: the narrating I portrays Jesse as imputing to Frosty
an interest in Lego bricks, and then seeking to bait him out into the rain; the cat,
drawn with an expression of surprise, follows the Lego brick tied to a string, fails
to be bothered by the rain, and then loses interest in Jesse’s ploy. But this sequence
is bookended by panels in which Reklaw’s father “paced himself through a six-pack
and the last of his stash [of marijuana], while flipping channels between two football
games and a Godzilla movie.” In the final panel of the vignette, Jesse stares at the tel-
evision screen, with the visual track suggesting that what he sees there is the reflec-
tion of his father with a beer can in his hand. (It remains an open question whether
the young Jesse did in fact see his father’s reflection on this occasion, or whether his
father’s image in the TV is what, in looking back on the episode involving Frosty,
the older Reklaw sees in his mind’s eye.) When these framing panels are situated in
the larger context of Reklaw’s father’s decline into alcoholism and the failure of his
parents’ marriage, a context of which the narrating I but not the experiencing I is
aware, Reklaw’s synopsis of the film, in which Godzilla knocks “a turtle-monster
onto his back, never to right himself,” takes on extra significance. It suggests not only
Figure 1.3 Family life vis-à-vis interspecies relationships.
Figure 1.4 Narrative metalepsis and selfhood beyond the human (I).

the parallels between the film and his father’s life story, but also that Jesse’s insensi-
tivity and even cruelty toward Frosty and some of the other cats (4, 9)—his failure
to appreciate fully what it was like for them to experience the world as autonomous
beings in their own right—derived in part from his own uncertain position within
the family, a position that was undermined by verbally abusive and sometimes phys-
ically destructive behavior on the part of his father (11, 17).
This link between the difficulties of Jesse’s family life and the issue of recogniz-
ing and responding to selfhood beyond the human becomes explicit in two further
sequences, in which Reklaw uses metalepsis, or the conflation of narrative levels, to
suggest parallels in the structure of experience not only across levels of the story but
also across species lines. Compare figures 1.4 and 1.5, where the metalepsis works
strictly visually.
Figure 1.4 is taken from a vignette titled “Triplets” (4–5), in which Jesse and
his sister trap two kittens in a dollhouse and then peer inside to see the damage
caused by their efforts to escape. Figure 1.5, meanwhile, shows the aftermath of
one of Jesse’s father’s rages; here the mise-en-scène almost exactly mirrors that of
the dollhouse interior shown in the previous image, what with the doubling of the
overturned flower pots and the disarranged furniture positioned at similar angles
(11). The way the dollhouse storyworld is both embedded within and corresponds
to Reklaw’s larger storyworld suggests the trans-species reach of destructive behav-
ior, the way problems with the design of self-narratives, and hence with strategies for
relating to others, propagate themselves not only within families but also across spe-
cies boundaries. Jesse’s father’s inability to construct a self-narrative consonant with
his professional responsibilities and overall situation in life has a ripple effect, shap-
ing Jesse’s own emergent self-narrative by circumscribing the community of selves in
which he places himself and to which he holds himself accountable.
Figure 1.5 Narrative metalepsis and selfhood beyond the human (II).

Conversely, taken together figures 1.6 and 1.7 show how widening one’s relational
network to include nonhuman others translates into changes in one’s self-narrative.
Figure 1.7 captures the moment when, after the (probably human-caused) death
of Boots, Jesse’s claiming of relational and affective ties to Boots coincides with his
ability to “talk back” to his father (17). Or, to put the matter the other way around,
Jesse’s making of a claim for agency coincides with a recognition of wider possibili-
ties for subjectivity, agentive status, across species categories. Here Jesse adamantly
refuses the story line of hyperemotionality his father seeks to impose on him and
asserts that the true cause of his grief is the death of an animal whom he now views
not as an object to manipulate but as a companion or fellow subject. Figure 1.6,
meanwhile, underscores the degree to which Reklaw aligns himself with Jesse’s rec-
ognition of Boots’s own claim for recognition, at the same time revealing how the
older Reklaw’s self-narrative turns on a resituating of the self in a wider, transhuman
community. Again, metalepsis plays a key role: the way Boots pushes his head under
Jesse’s comic book to demand attention can be compared with Reklaw’s own incor-
poration of cats into the text itself (16). Here, though, because the metaleptic link
binds together the extradiegetic and diegetic levels (rather than, as in figures 1.4
Figure 1.6 Narrating I, experiencing I, and the transhuman space of selfhood.

Figure 1.7 Claiming agency by recognizing selfhood beyond the human.

and 1.5, the diegetic and hypodiegetic levels), the text suggests consonance between
Reklaw’s and Jesse’s ways of relating to Boots. By emplotting both Boots’s death and
Jesse’s burgeoning awareness of the significance of that death as formative events in
the story of how he came to be who he is, Reklaw amplifies the life-changing effects
of repositioning human selves in a wider, transhuman space of selfhood.28
Thirteen Cats of My Childhood is an attempt to document, retrospectively, the
nonhuman worlds whose qualitative richness and phenomenological specificity
the younger Jesse could only partially register. But what is more, the text is also a
self-narrative that explores how, precisely by coming to recognize the relational
ties that link him with and make him accountable to the inhabitants of those other
worlds, Reklaw has become the person whose profile emerges from his telling this
story in this particular way. Specifically, Reklaw profiles himself as a person who has
come to appreciate the possibilities for subjectivity, and the rights and obligations
attendant upon those possibilities, that cut across human and animal worlds—and
who orients to the otherness of his own past as both a model for and an outcome of
interspecies encounters. To put the same point another way, using narrative to map
out the domain of the self as one marked by modes of otherness emergent in time,
Reklaw also suggests how stories can be used to come to terms with continuities and
differences of subjective experience across as well as within the species boundary.
Through verbal-visual autodiegetic narration, Reklaw explores how a single human
individual can encompass different selves, and how those are distinguishable, in his
case, by the degree to which they display cognizance of possibilities for selfhood
beyond the human.
n T
RANS-S PECIES ALIGNMENTS AND
N A R R A T O L O G Y B E YO N D T H E H U M A N
The focal concern of the present chapter has been the modes of relationality that
at once bear on and emerge from the process of constructing, and revising, self-
narratives. Thus, even as they suggest something of the diversity of the storytelling
practices that fall under the remit of a narratology beyond the human, both “Above
and Below” and Thirteen Cats of My Childhood profile the relationality at issue as
ecological as well as social, since in both texts a human self takes shape in a larger
constellation of selves, many of them nonhuman. Despite the differences between
them, then, both narratives underscore that self-other relationships do not stop at
the species boundary.
Groff uses a fictional account to stage the dissolution and reconstitution of self-
narratives, and to suggest that this process both arises from and feeds back into a
critical engagement with the broader cultural ontologies in the context of which
selves are recognized as such. In the domain of nonfiction, Reklaw’s graphic memoir
combines words and images to narrate the intertwined life histories of humans and
their companion animals, tracing how a self ’s co-constitutive relationship with non-
human others unfolds over time. Groff ’s text makes visible, through a story about
a character caught between an obsolescent and an incipient self-narrative, a con-
test of ontologies in the culture of modernity, one parsimonious and one prolific
when it comes to allocating possibilities for selfhood across species lines. In Thirteen
Cats, Reklaw uses this same contest of ontologies to mark the shifting relationships
between narrator and protagonist, portraying his own capacity to situate himself
within a larger, transhuman ecology of selves—a going beyond the human—as a
threshold condition for the coming-into-being of the person who has authored this
very account. Further, just as Jesse begins to find his own voice when he testifies to
the strength of his bond with Boots, a central irony of Groff ’s text is that the protag-
onist begins to reacquire agential selfhood, defined in part as an ability to generate
a self-narrative, by recognizing her status as “only one lost thing among so many
others.”
Accordingly, in both texts, although a more parsimonious ontology would seem
to confer greater power and control on the select few selves admitted within its pur-
view, it is the more prolific ontology, with its distribution of selfhood across multiple
life forms, that empowers the protagonist and enables him or her to reclaim agency
in a world that extends beyond the human—a world in which the hierarchy of above
and below, a model of the human self as exceptional or paradigmatic, gives way to
space of selfhood that cuts horizontally across differences among species. In this
sense, both Groff ’s and Reklaw’s narratives suggest that the most sustainable self is
one that insists least on its own sovereignty, its specialness vis-à-vis other forms of
creatural life. My next chapter goes on to explore how other storytelling strategies
can be used to dramatize (and potentially promote) this sort of ontological reori-
entation, considering a range of case studies in which non-or anti-anthropocentric
self-narratives emerge via the process of identifying with—or even becoming—
another kind of animal.
2 Boundary Conditions
Identification and Transformation across
Species Lines
Each stroke of his tongue ripped off skin after successive skin, all
the skins of a life in the world, and left behind a nascent patina of
shining hairs. My earrings turned back to water and trickled down my
shoulders; I shrugged the drops off my beautiful fur.
—Angela Carter, “The Tiger’s Bride” (Carter 1979: 124)
Building on my discussion of self-narratives in the previous chapter, the present

chapter explores narratives that move beyond an understanding of self-other rela-
tionships in terms of trans-species alignments, whether generalized as in Groff or
particularized as in Reklaw. The case studies to be discussed here instead center on
human selves who, in ways that sometimes challenge or even erase the boundary
between humans and nonhumans, engage in acts of identification with—or as—
animal subjects.1 At the limit of such identificatory acts, or rather complementing
them, are hypothesized or fictional crossings-over from the realm of the human to
the domain of the nonhuman, or vice versa, whereby the human (or nonhuman)
self undergoes a temporary or permanent transformation of species identities—in a
process that I will refer to as biomutation.
Caroline Walker Bynum’s (2001) study of medieval concepts of metamorpho-
sis and identity provides historical context for the understandings of cross-species
relationships that are being worked out in the narratives to be discussed. Bynum, in
drawing a contrast between the acceptance of ideas of metamorphosis during the
ancient and modern periods versus medieval resistance to such ideas (179), posits
that around 1200 concepts of change themselves began to change, and that “two
images in particular, hybrid and metamorphosis . . . were sites of these competing
and changing understandings” (21). On the one hand, “The hybrid expresses a
world of natures, essences, or substances (often diverse or contradictory to other),
encountered through paradox; it resists change” (29–30). On the other hand,
“Metamorphosis expresses a labile world of flux and transformation, encountered
through story” (30). Accordingly, writes Bynum, “Metamorphosis is about process,
mutatio, story—a constant series of replacement-changes. . . . It is about one-ness left
behind or approached.” By contrast, the “hybrid is spatial and visual, not temporal.
It is inherently two. Its contraries are simultaneous, hence dialogic. Forever in the
present, the one plus one that we find together in the hybrid must be in conversation
with each other; each is a comment on the other” (30).2
The duality of the hybrid (the self in dialogue with an other) and the transmuted
one-ness of the metamorphized subject (the self becoming other): these two pos-
sibilities define boundary conditions for narratives that resituate the human self by
51
questioning or reconfiguring the human-nonhuman distinction as such. In what

follows, I discuss how these possibilities play out in both fictional and nonfictional
contexts, via self-narratives turning on identifications and transformations across
species lines.3 Although the narratives I discuss postdate Darwin’s decentering of
the human—his suggestion that humans are subject to the same evolutionary pro-
cesses that impinge on other animals, and his emphasis on differences in quality
rather than kind when it comes to humans’ and other animals’ ways of making sense
of the world (Darwin 1859/2009, 1871/1999)—some of the case studies I con-
sider manifest an ambivalence about convergences and crossings of species catego-
ries that can be traced back to developments in the medieval period, if not farther. As
Bynum puts it, “for all the new sense of mutability as possibility and vitality” bound
up with emergent notions of replacement-change in the Middle Ages, “we find deep
resistance to severing of body and soul, to metempsychosis, at the heart of exactly
that literature that might seem to encourage or propagate it,” including tales of were-
wolves and other shape-shifting beings (98). With Augustine having “taught that
metamorphosis of human beings into animals is impossible,” and that “what people
experience . . . is either illusion, produced by demons working on the imagination,
or a double (a phantasm), made by demons” (102), “body-hopping remained fasci-
nating yet suspicious in widely divergent discourses” (98) during the Middle Ages.4
Likewise, some of the narratives to be examined here, even as they reach across
the species boundary to sketch more or less far-reaching affiliative ties between
humans and other animals, reveal anxieties about the possibility that biomutations
might erode categorical distinctions between kinds of life, and in particular onto-
logical hierarchies that situate humans above other animals. Hence, as discussed
in my next section, the therian community’s negative reaction to members’ claims
about “p-shifting,” or physical rather than mental shifts by which humans are lit-
erally transformed into their nonhuman “kintypes”; hence too the anxiety about
humans becoming subject to predation, like other animals, that comes to the fore
at the conclusion of David Garnett’s Lady into Fox (1922/2003), or the fear about
being “trapped” in an animal’s body via reincarnation or metempsychosis that finds
expression in Robert Olen Butler’s “Jealous Husband Returns in Form of Parrot”
(1995). In other words, even as they situate themselves within a post-Darwinian
frame of reference, in which the distinction between human and nonhuman animals
must be retypified as gradient and fuzzy rather than binary and clear-cut (Darwin
1871/1999; Herman 2013: 252–62), some of the texts to be explored in this chap-
ter also remain within the gravitational pull of human-centric ontologies.
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I begin with a discussion of nonfictional examples, drawing on self-narratives

from several different domains that involve acts of identification with animals. The
domains at issue include stories told or enacted in therapeutic settings, memoirs
and nature writing, and the narratives circulating among the therian (also called
Boundary Conditions ■ 53
therianthrope) community—that is, the community of persons who identify as, and
believe themselves to be linked to, particular nonhuman animals, or else multiple
animals (Robertson 2013, 2015; “Therianthropy”). Therians constitute, in turn, a
subset of the larger community that refers to itself as otherkin, whose members iden-
tify as “kintypes” ranging from animal species to extraterrestrial beings to fictional
and mythological characters (Laycock 2010, 2012; Mamatas 2001; “Otherkin”;
Read 2012; Robertson 2013, 2015).5
Throughout the chapter, my discussions of particular example texts are meant to
be indicative rather than exhaustive. Many other narratives will need to be consid-
ered, in each (sub)genre, to build up a fuller account of how stories can be used to
explore boundary conditions for self-other relationships across species lines.
Children’s Identifications with Animal Subjects

in Therapeutic Settings
Caroline Case (2005) discusses the role of animal identifications in therapy involv-
ing children. In such therapeutic interventions, to broach issues that I return to from
another perspective in my next chapter, animals can be used as a means for describ-
ing and making sense of human traits—whether that involves projecting disfavored
characteristics onto other species or embracing the admired qualities of other kinds
of beings (32). As Case observes, when children identify as pets in the therapy room,
“They may be trying to elicit tender loving care from the therapist who they think
may find them more attractive in a pet form—you really could not reject, or treat
badly, this little kitten or puppy” (108). But there can also be a defensive aspect to
such identificatory acts, “in that the child seems to either project themselves or flat-
ten themselves into an animal form; which also means the taking on of animal-type
movement . . .. The lack of separation between self and other and pull to fusion, los-
ing oneself in another, suggests an adhesive identification/adhesive equation as well
as a second-skin type of muscular defence, literally, a jump into an animal skin” (97).
Identifying with animals affords other self-positioning strategies as well. Thus,
writing about a traumatized child who play-acts as a kitten, Case suggests that “tak-
ing the soft kitten animal form is a way of making herself pleasing, which she has
learnt to do, in fear of being hurt, but it also shows that . . . [she] is a stray in our
culture as the kitten that was taken into the foster home. . . . There is a sense that
she lives alongside other people, like the kitten, rather than in relationship to them”
(107). By contrast, in Case's encounters with children who identify with a dog in
therapy, their play-acting "has usually had to do with characteristics of expressing
attachment needs”—although the evolutionary, morphological, and cultural affilia-
tions between dogs and wolves mean that identificatory acts involving canines also
afford opportunities to express aggression (109).
Aaron Katcher (2002) and Gail F. Melson (2001) also discuss the nature and
functions of children’s cross-species identifications, both in therapy and more
generally. Focusing on the pervasiveness of children’s engagements with animals,
particularly in the narratives that they enjoy and tell, Melson argues for the impor-
tance of animals for children’s ontogenetic development. As she puts it, animals
are a first vocabulary for many aspects of oneself. When young children make up
stories, their animal descriptions often blur with descriptions of themselves. . . .
Animal dreams, stories, fantasies, and play can be viewed as central to young chil-
dren’s “self-work.” Rather than standing in for an already fully realized, self-aware
self, animal characters are the raw material out of which children construct a sense of
self. Children enlist both real and make-believe animal characters in a wide range of
developmental challenges—achieving mastery and a sense of competence, balancing
independence with dependence on parents and peers, exploring and integrating dif-
ferent facets of their emerging selves. (2001: 150–51)
For his part, Katcher draws on Victor Turner’s theory of liminality and D. W.
Winnicott’s work on transitional objects to hypothesize about the mechanisms
enabling animals to bring about beneficial effects in therapeutic settings. Drawing
on Winnicott’s description of transitional relationships as ones in which “a child or
an adult takes the attributes of a purely subjective object—a fantasy object—and
projects them onto some real entity in the external world” (2002: 193), thereby
moving closer to confronting unresolved issues in the public, dialogic space of
self-other encounters, Katcher posits that animals serve as positive transitional
objects in therapies involving troubled children. Specifically, his findings suggest
that “the absence of speech and obvious controlling strategies in animals permit-
ted them to serve as appropriate vehicles for the projection of positive feelings,”
with “the novel and playful ways that social attributes are recombined in the lim-
inal state (generated between people and animals) [destabilizing] ingrained pat-
terns of thinking and [enabling] the learning of new behavior patterns” (195; see
also Melson 2001: 102).
Play-acting, self-work, transitional play: these concepts highlight the hybrid
nature of child-animal identifications in therapeutic and other settings, or the way
these identifications involve a human self in dialogue with an animal other. Later in
this chapter, in a subsection on cross-species transformations in fiction targeted at
children and young adults, I focus on the complementary emphasis on mutability—
the human self becoming animal other—in a range of texts targeted at younger
readers.
Identifying with Animal Subjects in Memoir

and Nature Writing
In chapter 1, I discussed a number of memoirs about service and therapy animals

as well as pets, with Montalván, for example, making frequent, detailed attributions
of mental states to his service dog Tuesday in his memoir Until Tuesday (Montalván
and Witter 2011; see also chapter 6). Despite these mental-state attributions, how-
ever, the center of gravity of such accounts remains squarely within the human
domain. By contrast, in My Dog Tulip, J. R. Ackerley’s 1956 memoir based on his
experiences with Queenie, a female German shepherd with whom he lived for fif-
teen years, there is a distinctly dual—or hybrid—focus. Ackerley’s identifications
are, to be sure, anchored in his own frame of reference. Yet in moments made pos-
sible by the process of defamiliarization Ackerley nonetheless seeks to imagine the
world in other-than-human terms (see Kiang 2016: 131–35).
In some instances, Ackerley defamiliarizes human institutions and practices, as in
the scene where a person’s corpse is pulled out of the Thames and he thinks it wiser
to call Tulip off than pursue his own desire to observe how Tulip behaves around
the body:
Human beings are so arrogant. They think nothing of chopping off the head of some
dead animal, a calf or a pig, twisting its features into a ludicrous grimace, so that it appears
to be grinning, winking, or licking its cold lips, and displaying it in a shop window as a
comic advertisement of its own flesh. But any supposed indignity to their dead would
be a very different matter, though whatever statement Tulip had made on this occasion
would at any rate have had the merit of being serious. (Ackerley 1956/1999: 49)
At other moments Ackerley tries out a vantage point on events that he presents as
a perspective possibly adopted by Tulip. Thus in recounting how he failed to recog-
nize Tulip’s attempts to communicate to him her need to go outside to relieve herself,
Ackerley remarks that “to her it must have seemed that she had been unable to reach
me after all. How wonderful to have had an animal come to one to communicate
where no communication is, over the incommunicability of no common speech,
to ask a personal favor! How wretched to have failed!” (57–58). The text contin-
ues: “Did she try to wake me first? Or did she say to herself, ‘Alas, he wouldn’t under-
stand’? How I wish I knew!” (59). Later in the memoir, in interacting with Tulip’s
would-be suitors, Ackerley generalizes this hybrid focus, or anti-anthropocentric
identification, remarking that when he met “the mild, worried brown eyes that often
studied me and my friendly hand with doubt, I realized clearly, perhaps for the first
time, what strained and anxious lives dogs must lead, so emotionally involved in the
world of men, whose affections they strive endlessly to secure, whose authority they
are expected unquestioningly to obey, and whose mind they can never do more than
imperfectly reach and comprehend” (187).
Turning to the (sub)genre of nature writing, similar identificatory practices are at
work—though in this case the dual or hybridized focus typically stretches between
the human observer and more or less fully individuated members of nondomesticated
species, rather than between a memoirist and a particular companion animal. For
example, in Charles Dudley Warner’s “A-Hunting of the Deer” (1878), in a passage
that I will revisit in a different context in c hapter 6, Warner creates a split between the
hypothesized perceptions of the hunted deer, seeking to evade the pursuing hounds
as she also tries to lead them away from her fawn, and the evaluative stance of the
observer, who suggests that hunting practices give the lie to Christian religious values:
She heard a sound that chilled her heart. It was the cry of a hound to the west of her.
The crafty brute had made the circuit of the slash, and cut off her retreat. There was
nothing to do but to keep on; and on she went, still to the north, with the noise of
the pack behind her. . . . She bounded on; she stopped. What was that? From the val-
ley ahead came the cry of a searching hound. All the devils were loose this morning.
Every way was closed but one, and that led straight down the mountain to the cluster
of houses. Conspicuous among them was a slender white wooden spire. The doe did
not know that it was the spire of a Christian chapel. But perhaps she thought that
human pity dwelt there, and would be more merciful than the teeth of the hounds.
(Warner 1878: para. 20)
A more thoroughgoing hybridization of human self and animal other can be found
in The Peregrine, J. A. Baker’s 1967 account of the ten-year period he spent pursu-
ing and observing peregrine falcons, condensed into a diary format covering one
year.6 Indeed, broaching issues that have been taken up again more recently in texts
such as Charles Foster’s Being a Beast: Adventures across the Species Divide (2016)
and Thomas Thwaites’s Goat Man: How I Took a Holiday from Being Human (2016),
Baker at times imagines not just the doubleness of identification but the reconfig-
ured one-ness of transformation.7
From the outset, Baker uses an act of identification to articulate his desire to enter
into a transformative relationship with the nonhuman world: “I have always longed
to be part of the outward life, to be out there at the edge of things, to let the human
taint wash away in emptiness and silence as the fox sloughs his smell into the cold
unworldliness of water; to return to the town as a stranger” (28). Subsequent diary
entries recount powerful moments of identification with the falcons he observes,
many of them registering Baker’s sense of how, as apex predators, peregrines exem-
plify the untrammeled freedom of solitariness, the ability to break free of “mobs,” to
which Baker himself aspires. Thus Baker’s entry for October 24 reports how, as the
peregrine flies near them, “small birds were clamouring from the trees in a shrill hys-
teria of mobbing. The peregrine flew from cover, passing quite close to me, pursued
by blackbirds and starlings. . . . Long-winged, lean, and powerful, the hawk drew
swiftly away from the mob, and glided to north of the river” (64). Similarly, two
days later Baker sees another falcon “flying, starlings around him, rising from the
field and mounting over the river. . . . Darting and shrugging, he shook starlings from
his shoulders, like a dog shaking spray from his body. . . . Starlings buzzed about his
head, like flies worrying a horse” (65). In later entries, Baker explicitly compares
himself to a hawk when he describes the coming of the dusk—“Like a roosting
hawk, I listen to silence and gaze into the dark” (85)—and again when he expresses
his distaste for hunting season: “I avoid humans, but hiding is difficult now the snow
has come . . . I use what cover I can. It is like living in a foreign city during an insur-
rection. There is an endless banging of guns and trampling of feet in snow. One has
an unpleasantly hunted feeling. Or is it so unpleasant? I am as solitary now as the
hawk I pursue” (117).
At times Baker’s acts of identification extend to what might be described as a
proprioceptive sense of connectedness, his own bodily movements mimicking or
otherwise responding to the movements of the hawks he observes.8 Thus, in the
entry for March 10, Baker recounts how, “watching the falcon receding up into the
silence of the sky, I shared the exaltation and serenity of her slow ascension. . . .
This mastery of the roaring wind, this majesty and noble power of flight, made me
shout aloud and dance up and down with excitement” (135). Then Baker watches
the bird tilt downward, coming back toward the earth: “Bending over in a splendid
arc, she plunged to earth. My head came forward with a jerk as my eyes followed
the final vertical smash of her falling” (135–36). On another occasion, Baker has
the “pricking sensation at the back of the neck that meant I was being looked
at from behind” (129). He glances over his left shoulder and sees a hawk: “He
was facing north and glancing back at me over his left shoulder. For more than
a minute we both stayed still, each puzzled and intrigued by the other, sharing
the curious bond that comes with identity of position” (129). These moments
of enacted, embodied dialogue between human self and animal other lead up
to a scene in which Baker’s identificatory impulses escalate to a new level. Here,
through an act of controlled visualization, Baker attempts to breach the species
boundary; the diary entry in question stages a human-to-hawk transformation, in
which human-animal dialogue gives way to a frank expression of desire for out-
right replacement-change, the dynamic metamorphosis that, for Bynum (2001),
complements static hybridity:
By two o’clock I had been to all of the peregrine’s usual perching places, but had not
found him. Standing in the fields near the north orchard, I shut my eyes and tried
to crystallise my will into the light-drenched prism of the hawk’s mind. Warm and
firm-footed in long grass smelling of the sun, I sank into the skin and blood and
bones of the hawk. The ground became a branch to my feet, the sun on my eyelids
was heavy and warm. Like the hawk, I heard and hated the sound of man, that face-
less horror of the stony places. I stifled in the same filthy sack of fear. I shared the
same hunter’s longing for the wild home none can know, alone with the sight and
smell of the quarry, under the indifferent sky. I felt the pull of the north, the mystery
and fascination of the migrating gulls. I shared the same strange yearning to be gone.
I sank down and slept the feather-light sleep of the hawk. Then I woke him with my
waking. (131–32)
As suggested by the final line of this passage, the desired change remains just that—
desired. Despite the imagined moment of convergence, Baker and the hawk remain
separated by two-ness rather than joined in one-ness, with Baker’s waking consti-
tuting a disturbance for another, nonhuman subject that continues to be distinct,
autonomous.
Baker’s envisioning of a replacement-change, his staging of a human-to-hawk
transformation, in mind if not in body, resonates with the concept(s) of “shift” used
among members of the community or subculture whose self-narratives I turn to
next—namely, the community that refers to itself as therians. In parallel with aspects
of Baker’s account, members of this community use mental and phantom shifts (or
m-shifts and ph-shifts), among other sorts of identificatory acts, to negotiate what
they conceive as a hybrid human-animal identity.
Self-Narratives in Therian Communities
In Robertson’s (2013) account, the therian or therianthrope movement “is perhaps

best thought of as a subculture or community that exists almost entirely online, and
is based around the philosophies and spiritual ontologies of individuals who con-
sider themselves to be ‘other-than-human.’ Therians, for short, are persons who feel
such a profound connection with a non-human animal that they feel this animal is
an integral part of their identity” (8).9 Robertson links the rise of the therian com-
munity to the waning of institutionalized religion and the relocation of the sacred in
domains associated with popular culture. Using the term popular occulture, coined
by Christopher Partridge (2004) to designate syncretic modes of belief emerging in
the multimedia environments of mass culture, Robertson suggests that the therian
community exemplifies a de-traditionalized postmodern spirituality in which the
self functions “as the ultimate arbiter of truth. This ‘epistemological individualism’
or ‘self-spirituality’ indicates that today’s eclectic belief systems are rejecting meta-
narratives in favor of personal narratives and meta-empiricism” (8).10
Although Robertson (2013) traces therian beliefs and practices to narrative tra-
ditions involving shape-shifters, including medieval werewolf tales,11 in terms that
harmonize with the larger ecology of identificatory practices being explored here she
later highlights “the attraction of the anthrozoomorph, the animal-human hybrid”
(13). Pointing to evidence suggesting that therians may experience body dysphoria
and dysmorphia, such that they feel trapped in their human bodies, Robertson argues
for the relevance of what Gerbasi et al. (2008) call “ ‘Species Identity Disorder,’ a
phrase comparable to the term ‘trans-species,’ used in the Therianthropy commu
nity to express similar states of cognitive dissonance” (13). Many therians accord-
ingly tend to frame their self-narratives in terms of dualism and alterity: “Being both
animal and human, they are neither” (16).12 Along these lines, a self-identified the-
rian named Sonne Spiritwind, in a November 2008 blog post titled “Skin Deep: On
Being Animal and Human,” writes, “To be in the physical body of another creature
could not satisfy me, it would not bring me more happiness than I can and do expe-
rience being the mixed-animal-being I am currently, in this life, in this human body”
(para. 3). Yet community members have introduced a distinction between conthe-
rians and syntherians, articulated as follows in an October 2014 post to the Tumbler
blog maintained by theangrylionshark, to suggest differences in the balance or pro-
portion of the animal to the human (or rather the frequency of oscillations between
the two) for different individuals:
Contherians are therians who are in a constant state of human and animal. This bal-
ance between human and non human rarely, if ever, fluctuates and the individual
does not usually experience shifts.
Suntherians are therians who are in a constant state of human and animal, but the
balance between the two is more fluid and can change and they do experience shifts.
In these terms, the following post by foxboi to the Animal Quills website suggests
that the poster has a suntherian orientation to his vulpine theriotype, with the
human self being more or less convergent with its animal counterpart at a given
moment:
Sometimes we are one as one can be, just me with pointed flicked back (but usually
only one) ears; all my teeth at the ready to smell the wind and neatly flick-and-curl
around every leaf in the forest on my way home. Or persons in a crowd, more likely.
Sometimes, we are less we, but halfway only me, in an odd ephemeral place that
doesn’t really distinguish itself well to words or thoughts. Not an in-between point,
but still a liminality.
Sometimes, I’m just borrowing a little extra silence powder; my feet are no longer
all toes and flat, but tiny lit-in-the-night pinpricks of pressure. . . .
Fox is an intersection of body, physicality, tweaked and colourful mentality. Fox
is with me always, when I’m lonely, sad—maybe then I don’t feel so lonely, except
they-and-we also feel lonely so it’s twice as lonely sometimes. An odd distinguishing
thing, we are. (foxboi 2014)
This post, like theangrylionshark’s contrast between contherians and suntherians,
underscores the relevance of the concept of “shifts” for members of the subculture, as
mentioned in my previous discussion of Baker’s The Peregrine. Although Baker’s text
does not participate in the (largely Internet-based) field of discourse associated with
therianism, his tracking and observations of hawks, and the moments of identifica-
tion such investigative practices afford, can be compared with one of the processes
used by therians to identify their theriotypes, or animal others—namely, via care-
ful study of animal behaviors, habitats, and physical features (Robertson 2013: 19).
More directly relevant to the discourses of therianism, however, are Baker’s acts of
identification with peregrines’ ways of perceiving and acting, including the imagined
human-to-hawk transformation discussed before. These identificatory practices can
be mapped onto the practices of shifting described, and enacted, by therians.
As Robertson (2013) notes, three kinds of shifts are commonly discussed in the
therian community, namely “mental (m-shifts), phantom (ph-shifts), and physical
(p-shifts), although the latter is highly controversial within the community due to
its scientific improbability, if not impossibility” (20). M-shifts involve altered modes
of consciousness corresponding to those attributed to the target theriotype, such as
enhanced visual or olfactory capacities.13 In turn, ph-shifts are “often invoked by a
mental shift. In this case, therioside body parts are felt or sensed in the way a phan-
tom limb may be felt by an amputee” (20; see also Grivell, Clegg, and Roxburgh
2014: 119–20, 128–29).14 As for p-shifts, the sentiment registered on the web
page devoted to “Types of Shifting” on therian-guide.com expresses what might be
described as the consensus view, in which the anxieties about “body hopping” that
Bynum (2001) traces back to the Middle Ages again come into view: “There are
therian communities that promote this crazy idea of physical shape shifting. . . . If
this idea of physically shifting spreads, we will become even less acknowledged and
respected than most of us are already. Not only will it have friends, family, and pos-
sibly doctors questioning us but it can create frustration and anger within the indi-
vidual as well.”15
In the foxboi post, the first paragraph seems to hover been m-and ph-shifting, while
the third paragraph can be interpreted as moving closer toward ph-shifting. Likewise,
Sonne Spiritwind (2008) describes a theriotype in terms of phantom sensations:
I still tend to think that the wings aren’t completely avian because I get the feeling/
sense that they have fingers on them, like early avians, although I remain caught up
on the number of digits on each hand—I get the impression of four digits (which
correlates to my strange phantom sensations that my fifth/pinky fingers should be
gone, but not the fourth/ring fingers), though it could be three instead. . . . Unsure of
whether the arms are carried most often with the top of the fingers facing to the side
or facing forward (probably the former; I do, however, get sensations and do man-
nerisms of both when feeling avian-like).
At the same time, members of the community sometimes express misgivings about
the status of therian nomenclature vis-à-vis the phenomenology of cross-species
identification. Thus mountainghost, who asserts that he has “long felt more comfort-
able behind the pale grey-green eyes of a snow leopard,” wonders in a 2013 post to
Animal Quills whether the therian taxonomies have themselves given rise to his expe-
riences of human-leopard hybridity: “I experience the ‘shifts’ and ‘phantom limbs,’
so-to-speak, of those who feel deeply bonded with a species, though it’s at times exas-
perating to me to feel like I’m parroting back the same words I hear on forums.”
The majority position of therians regarding physical shifts suggests their com-
mitment to maintaining the fiction-nonfiction distinction, even as the community
works to reconfigure the boundary between humans and other kinds of animals.
Granted, as part of the “meta-empiricism” that Robertson (2013) associates with
post-traditional concepts of the sacred, therians’ self-narratives do seek to broaden
the scope of what counts as evidence when it comes to claims about the psycholog-
ical and ontological status of human (or more than human) selves. But for that very
reason, arguably, therians are keen to avoid having their self-narratives aligned with
fictional discourse—given that, in fictional contexts, the very idea of falsification
constitutes a category mistake.16 Here, then, the ambivalence about radical species
transformations assumes the form of an anxiety about the fiction-nonfiction bound-
ary. In the subsections that follow I turn to narratives that, by contrast, mobilize the
resources of fiction to explore the structure and dynamics of cross-species identifi-
cations, as well as full-on transformations of the sort that therians would call p-shifts.
These texts, too, sometimes register ambivalence when the focus moves from iden-
tification to transformation—depending on their orientation to established cultural
ontologies, with which they may engage more or less critically and reflexively.
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Groff ’s “Above and Below” provided an initial example of how fictional texts can
furnish a workspace for recontextualizing and reassembling self-narratives that are
premised on parsimonious allocations of possibility for selfhood beyond the spe-

cies boundary. By its nature, this fictional workspace can be readily reconfigured,
such that characters’ unfolding relationships with particular species or individual
animals, rather than their strategies for orienting to biotic communities more gen-
erally, become the focus of narrative interest. Thus, in Eric Knight’s 1940 novel
Lassie Come-Home, when the Carraclough family in Yorkshire has to sell their dog
Lassie due to the closure of the coal mine at which Joe Carraclough’s father works,
the young protagonist struggles to come to terms with Lassie’s absence. More spe-
cifically, what Knight reveals to be a tendency to engage in magical thinking, even
though (or rather precisely because) it inverts cause-effect relationships, reflects the
growing centrality of Lassie in Joe’s understanding of the family dynamic:
Joe felt nothing was as it used to be. And to him it added up to one thing: Lassie.
When they had had Lassie, the home had been comfortable and warm and fine
and friendly. Now that she was gone nothing was right. So the answer was simple. If
Lassie were only back again, then everything once more would be as it used to be.
(Knight 1940/1981: 63)
For his part, in Unsaid, Neil Abramson (2011) uses the fictional device of narration
from beyond the grave to trace out characters’ evolving attitudes toward individ-
ual animals. In mainly present-tense narration, Helena, the narrator-focalizer who
is attorney David Colden’s deceased spouse and a former veterinarian, provides an
account of David’s growing attachment to the animals that live on the farm he and she
once shared, and also to the chimp at the center of trial in which David seeks to have
the legal definition of nonhuman animals as property overturned (see Francione
2004). Recalling how in her practice she often worried that the animals she had
euthanized “would be waiting for me at the end . . . judging, accusing, and detailing
my failures” (2), Helena comes to the conclusion that she herself has been foolish
to run “through the forest searching for some profound and eclipsing life meaning
when it is the trees themselves that were bejeweled the whole time: . . . hundreds
of cats, dogs, and other creatures whom I treated, made better, eased into death, or
simply had the privilege to know” (346).
In other fictional texts, the focus is less on the emotional bonds that result from
identifying with particular animal others than on the way cross-species identifica-
tions can challenge understandings of the scope and boundaries of the human self.
For example, D. H. Lawrence’s 1925 novella St. Mawr explores the impact of the
eponymous horse on a group of characters based initially in England, especially the
young American woman Lou Witt, whose sense of self and hence of self-other rela-
tionships come into question after she encounters the horse. Published the same
year as Virginia Woolf ’s To the Lighthouse, Lawrence’s text shares with Woolf ’s novel a
coupling of heterodiegetic narration with variable internal focalization—as opposed
to the fixed internal focalization used by Groff in “Above and Below” (see Genette
1972/1980; Jahn 2007). The novella thereby allows for a many-sided exploration
of the felt, phenomenological texture of events via ascriptions of mental states to a
range of characters. In turn, the characters’ different ways of orienting to St. Mawr
furnish a yardstick for gauging their attitudes toward human-animal relationships
more generally. The novel situates the characters on a spectrum stretching from a
disavowal of animality, which Lawrence associates with the process of domestica-
tion and a repression of instinctual or vital forces (compare Freud 1930/2002), to
an embrace of animality, vitality, and wildness (Norris 1985: 170–94).17
Thus Lou discerns in her husband, Rico, who hates the indomitable St. Mawr and
“viciously [tries] to force him into a quiet, straight trot” (Lawrence 1925/2006: 59)
while riding him in Hyde Park, “a central powerlessness, that left him anxious” (51);
it is this powerlessness that Lou seems to have in mind when, in a conversation with
her mother, she remarks that far from today’s men being “too animal,” “it’s [that]
the animal in them has gone perverse, or cringing, or humble, or domesticated,
like dogs. I don’t know one single man who is a proud living animal” (81). By con-
trast, Lou’s mother notes that Lewis, St. Mawr’s Welsh groom, seems to her “just an
animal—no mind! . . . Now I come to think of it, he has the eyes of a human cat: a
human tom-cat . . . But what a strange look he has in his eyes! a strange sort of intel-
ligence! and a confidence in himself ” (79). Events demonstrating Lewis’s capacity
to attune himself to St. Mawr (among other creatures), again focalized through Mrs.
Witt, further affiliate him with animal worlds, which stand in stark opposition to the
hyperdomesticated world in which Rico feels most at home, sustained by “the talk,
the eating, the drinking, the flirtation, . . . [and] conjured up out of thin air, by the
power of words” (62):
[Lewis seemed] to inhabit another world than hers. A world dark and still, where lan-
guage never ruffled the growing leaves, and seared their edges like a bad wind . . . and
once, when she saw him pick up a bird that had stunned itself against a wire: she
had realised another world, silent, where each creature is alone in its own aura of
silence, the mystery of power: as Lewis had power with St. Mawr. (Lawrence 1925/
2006: 124)
With the two poles of domestication and wildness being marked off by Rico’s and
Lewis’s contrasting orientations to St. Mawr—that is, total opposition versus com-
plete convergence—Lawrence uses episodes featuring Lou as internal focalizer to
dramatize her halting, intermittent movement toward an untamed and untameable
world, manifesting itself at first in her thought processes and interactions with oth-
ers and later in her purchase of the Las Chivas ranch in New Mexico.18 Lou’s iden-
tification with the horse at once triggers and mirrors this movement, in the process
unsettling the story line in terms of which she has previously made sense of her rela-
tionships with others. Lou’s initial interaction with the horse, whom she deems “so
slippery with vivid, hot life” (50), exposes the incoherence and unsustainability of
the self-narrative that she had constructed around her marriage with Rico; yet the
encounter leaves Lou with more questions than answers when it comes to working
toward a new understanding of her place within a human world that she comes to
see as part of rather than separate from a more broadly creatural world:
As if that mysterious fire of the horse’s body had split some rock in her, she went
home and hid herself in her room, and just cried. . . . It was if she had a vision, as if the
walls of her own world had suddenly melted away, leaving her in a great darkness, in
the midst of which the large brilliant eyes of that horse looked at her with demonish
question . . .. What was his non-human question, and his uncanny threat? She didn’t
know. (50)
The question itself is enough, however, to make “the triviality and superficiality of
human relationships” unbearable, with Lou feeling that the horse “forbade her to be
her ordinary, commonplace self ” (51).
Other writers have drawn on other resources afforded by narrative fiction
to project similarly consequential acts of identification. In Disgrace (1999), for
example, J. M. Coetzee anticipates Groff ’s use of heterodiegetic narration with
fixed internal focalization and relatively extensive thought reports to explore how
cross-species identifications bear on a protagonist’s self-narrative, and vice versa;
but in this case the identificatory acts involve the unwanted dogs with whose
euthanasia David Lurie is assisting. Coetzee writes: “He had thought he would
get used to it. But that is not what happens. The more killings he assists in, the
more jittery he gets . . .. Tears flow down his face that he cannot stop; his hands
shake” (1999/2010: 142–43). Having been “more or less indifferent to animals”
up to this point, Lurie finds himself unable to account for his own empathetic
response to and desire to preserve the dignity of the euthanized dogs; these iden-
tificatory acts cut against the grain of the self-narrative in terms of which he has
made sense of, and justified, the less-than-empathetic attitudes and actions that
led to his coercive sexual encounter with a former student, resulting in Lurie’s
“disgrace.” But instead of reconfiguring his self-narrative to move beyond a diag-
nosis of the identificatory acts as irrational or insane in the context of Lurie’s prior
story of self—“Curious that a man as selfish as he should be offering himself to
the service of dead dogs . . .. He saves the honour of corpses because there is no
one else stupid enough to do it. That is what he is becoming: stupid, daft, wrong-
headed” (146)—Lurie seeks to block the threat of self-destabilization presented
by his engagements with the dogs. Or rather, he resists the radical reconstitution
of the self that, as suggested by Lou Witt’s acts of identification in St. Mawr, flows
from recognition of a fuller range of relational ties to others, human and nonhu-
man alike. Instead, Lurie allows a dog to be euthanized whose life he might have
extended at least another week (217–18), and whom he has “come to feel a partic-
ular fondness for” (214–15).19
Like Groff, then, Coetzee uses a fictional protagonist to probe how resituating
oneself vis-à-vis other forms of creatural life can alter one’s sense of who and what
one is. But Coetzee does so in negative terms, highlighting what might be called
the narrative inertia against which more radically relational conceptions of the self
sometimes come into conflict. At issue are fossilized ontologies that, embedded in
once-sustaining stories that assign the self a privileged position vis-à-vis others, ref-
use to dissipate even after the stories in question have lost their power to sustain a
way of life. Coetzee’s text thus stands as a photographic negative of Groff ’s, using
Lurie’s decision to “give up” the dog with whom he has formed a connection to
demonstrate how established narratives can impede the potentially transformative

power of cross-species identifications.
For her part, Karen Joy Fowler, in We Are All Completely beside Ourselves
(2013), suggests how the retrospective autodiegetic narration employed in
Reklaw’s Thirteen Cats, in the context of memoir, can also serve as a platform
for modeling identificatory practices in fictional contexts. Fowler’s novel uses
her narrator-protagonist, Rosemary Cooke, with whom a chimp named Fern has
been cross-fostered as part of a research study led by Rosemary’s father, to dram-
atize the difficulty of constructing a self-narrative that comes fully to terms with
radical relationality of the sort Coetzee’s Lurie proves unable to accommodate.
On the one hand, in delaying the revelation that Fern was a chimp, Rosemary
has, as she notes, purposely designed her account to offset narratives premised
on the singularity of human selves and instead promote in first-time readers the
same cross-species identification that she as a young child experienced with
Fern: “Some of you . . . may feel it was irritatingly coy of me to have withheld
Fern’s essential simian-ness for so long. In my defense, I had my reasons. . . .
I tell you Fern is a chimp and, already, you aren’t thinking of her as my sister.
You’re thinking instead that we loved her as if she were some kind of pet” (Fowler
2013: 77). Indeed, in contrast with Lurie’s tentative acts of identification across
species lines, Rosemary highlights how her relational ties with Fern were not just
salient but identity-constituting, remarking that “for me, Fern was the beginning.
I was just over a month old when she arrived in my life (and she just shy of three
months). Whoever I was before is no one I ever got to know” (107). Rosemary
evokes a powerful image of human-animal hybridity to underscore the identifica-
tory logic that has made her “the me I know—the human half of the fabulous, the
fascinating, the phantasmagorical Cooke sisters”:
Fern used to wrap her wiry pipe-cleaner arms around my waist from behind, press
her face and body into my back, match me step for step as we walked, as if we were a
single person. . . . Sometimes it was encumbering, a monkey on my back, but mostly
I felt enlarged, as if what mattered in the end was not what Fern could do or what
I could do, but the sum of it—Fern and me together. (108)20
But on the other hand, Rosemary also delays the revelation that it was her report-
ing to her mother that she felt afraid of Fern that caused Fern to be removed from
the Cookes’ home and confined to a cage in a research laboratory, where Fern is sub-
jected to abusive treatment by the lab’s director as well as the other captive chimps.
The unfolding of this second delayed revelation mirrors the temporal dynamics of
the uncanny, marked by a return of the repressed (Freud 1919/2001)—although
at the time of narration, as opposed to the earlier time-frames inhabited by the
experiencing I, Rosemary already has access to the de-repressed memory that she
portrays as moving “like a weather system through my body” (254) when it finally
comes to her, unbidden. In any case, in an effort to capture a phenomenology of
remembering wherein the vividness of a memory is no guarantee of its veridicality,
Rosemary herself invokes Freud’s concept of screen memory, which she defines as
“a compromise between remembering something painful and defending yourself
against that very remembering” (247; compare Freud 1899/2001). The idea of self-
defensive memory work in turn raises questions about the rhetoric of relationality
in Rosemary’s account.
In particular, because of the way they are contextualized by the narrating I, some
of the narrated scenes and events suggest that the younger, experiencing I ascribes
motives to Fern that reflect her own fears and anxieties—with these attributions
thereby manifesting a human-centric bias that can accrue to ascriptions in which the
otherness of nonhuman agents is not taken sufficiently into account (see chapter 7).
Thus Rosemary reports that when her mother becomes irritated with her for inter-
rupting her repeatedly as Mrs. Cooke tries to read a story to Rosemary and Fern,
Rosemary remembers herself at the time implausibly ascribing to Fern a kind of
smug self-satisfaction at obtaining definitions of terms such as rheumatism without
having to ask for those definitions explicitly, given that Rosemary herself poses such
questions and gets criticized by her mother for doing so (94).21 Similarly, when Fern
watches Rosemary over her brother’s shoulder as Rosemary looks for the kitten she
remembers seeing Fern kill, her younger self makes implausible attributions of men-
tal states to Fern, with the narrating I in this instance providing a hedge to mark
the attribution as problematic: “Fern watched from behind Lowell’s shoulder, her
huge amber eyes glittering and, or so I thought, gloating” (251, emphasis added).
If Rosemary’s delayed revelation of Fern’s species characteristics foregrounds the
importance of not inhibiting or derailing cross-species identifications when it comes
to grasping the radical relationality of the human self, Rosemary’s slow reveal of her
own role in Fern’s being sent away, together with the disparity between the experi-
encing I’s and narrating I’s interpretations of Fern’s conduct, places in an emphatic
position the potential dangers of such identificatory acts.
The concept of relationality entails differences as well as similarities; under-
standing of the self ’s being always-in-relation-to nonhuman others requires avoid-
ing both the Scylla of dichotomization (underidentification) and the Charybdis
of homogenization (overidentification). Rosemary’s account, taken as a whole,
demonstrates the difficulty of maintaining this middle course, with its attend-
ant emphasis on a dialectical interplay between human and nonhuman ways of
being. The account suggests that it has taken virtually the whole of Rosemary’s
life up to the point of telling to construct a narrative of the self vis-à-v is animal
others that steers clear of a tendency to overidentify, and hence to underappre-
ciate the alterity that is no less salient than the comparability bound up with
a trans-species conception of selfhood.22 The novel traces out how Rosemary’s
own homogenizing habits of mind have had consequences that are as devastating
for Fern, the Cooke family, and Rosemary herself as the dichotomizing mindset
because of which Fern can be viewed as the property of a university (213) and
hence transferred from one research project to another, without the experiential
impact of that transfer being taken into account.23
Other authors employ different but equally sophisticated strategies for modeling
cross-species identifications in fictional contexts. In A. S. Byatt’s Morpho Eugenia
(1992), for example, the use of narrative embedding provides a formal mirror of the
identificatory acts in which Byatt’s text prompts readers to engage, and with the help
of which the novella’s protagonist, William Adamson, can move beyond a limiting
self-narrative—a story of the self that originates, it seems, in Adamson’s attempt to
use the life stories of great naturalists such as Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel
Wallace as a template for understanding and justifying his own life course (10–13).
At the primary diegetic level, the unfolding of the action suggests that Adamson’s
research on the social organization of insects can serve as a frame for interpreting
Adamson’s courtship of and marriage with Eugenia Alabaster, whom Byatt portrays
as the human counterpart to the breeding queen ant in the hive-like “Bredely” Hall
(see Sturrock 2002/2003: 99–100; Vanderbeke 2003/2004). Interleaved with the
account of Adamson’s relationship with Eugenia, a series of hypodiegetic narratives
about insect life, authored by Matty Compton as well as Adamson himself, promote
a metaleptic or near-metaleptic conflation of narrative levels; this superimposition
of diegetic levels in turn reinforces the trans-species analogies set into play by Byatt’s
emplotment of events.
Ironies, however, abound. The liberating effects of Adamson’s decision to throw
off the self-narrative of the isolated (male) naturalist to embrace an open future
with Matty as his scientific collaborator stand out against the backdrop of quasi-
sociobiological modes of identification, which ground the human characters’ con-
duct in broader patterns of animal life. But at the same time the metaleptic interplay
between the embedded insect fables and the primary diegesis creates in the text an
antifoundationalist impetus, an ontological oscillation that undercuts the author-
ity of sociobiology as a master narrative for human and nonhuman life histories
alike.24 Byatt’s use of narrative embedding enacts how accounts of nonhuman ani-
mals’ ways of living, assumed by sociobiologists to be a source of evidence for claims
about the structure and evolution of human life, cannot be completely disentangled
from the human frames of reference from which those accounts emerge (compare
Vanderbeke 2003/2004).
n T
RANSFORMATIONS OF SPECIES IDENTITIES
IN FICTIONAL CONTEXTS
I turn now from narratives centering on the figure of the human-animal hybrid, at
once fostering and fostered by identificatory acts that cut across species lines, to nar-
ratives about human selves metamorphosed into animal others, or vice versa, with
those selves thereby undergoing the kind of replacement-change that caused such
anxiety among medieval commentators (Bynum 2001).25 Grouping these changes
under the rubric of biomutations, I explore how the structure of a given storyworld
allows for such transformations to be presented as a more or less radical challenge to
ontologies that segregate human and nonhuman agents, in part by making relatively
parsimonious allocations of possibilities for selfhood beyond the human.
A preliminary methodological issue should be registered here. Pace Bynum

(2001), as I go on to discuss in connection with the dual perspectives that structure
K. A. Applegate’s account of Jake’s experiences as a lizard in The Invasion (1996) and
Robert Olen Butler’s 1995 story about a jealous husband reincarnated as a parrot,
the process of transformation—or the specific transformative process that I am call-
ing biomutation—sometimes leaves room for hybridity. Conversely, some hybrids
hint at possibilities for transformation. Thus, Laurence Gonzales’s Lucy (2010) cen-
ters on an “interspecific hybrid” who resulted from an experiment with cross-breed-
ing humans and bonobos (45). Given that by the end of the novel Lucy is about to
give birth to a child fathered by her human partner, her life story raises the stakes of
a claim her own father made in his research notebooks, namely, “that humans can be
moved into a more favorable spot in the evolutionary matrix, a position in which we
may enjoy some of the superior qualities of our bonobo cousins” (48).26
Nonetheless the distinction between the hybrid subject (the self in dialogue with
an other) and the metamorphized subject (the self becoming other) functions as a
useful heuristic resource when it comes to analyzing boundary conditions for self-
narratives in a more-than-human world. Thus, as Kai Mikkonen (1996) notes, the
long-standing literary tradition centering on the figure of the metamorph “prob-
lematizes the boundary between the subject and its other” (309), raising “epistemo-
logical and ontological questions concerning the subject’s relationship to the world
and to others as well as the subject’s knowledge of itself and the world” (310).27
Exploring the dynamics of metamorphosis in posthumanist discourse, or contexts
where the centrality and preeminence of the human has been called into question,
Clarke (2002) suggests that “metamorphic stories imagine an uncanny accelera-
tion of human change,” in which, “amplified by the social complexities produced by
verbal languages and other technologies of communication, cultural developments
accelerate past biological evolution” (170).
Indeed, it should be noted here that because of advances in biotechnology,
including the creation of “chimeras” in which human cells are implanted in other
species (Danta 2012: 690–94; Fudge 2002: 105–11), processes leading to the trans-
formation of species identities are now no longer confined to the realm of fiction.
In a notice published in September 2015, the National Institutes of Health in the
United States placed a moratorium on the funding of “research in which human plu-
ripotent cells are introduced into non-human vertebrate animal pre-gastrulation
stage embryos while the Agency considers a possible policy revision in this area,”
and the NIH’s Office of Science Policy held in November 2015 a follow-up work-
shop, “Research with Animals Involving Human Cells.” The agenda for the work-
shop listed discussion questions that included “What scientific questions are best
addressed through the use of human/animal chimera models?”; “Does the research
discussed at the workshop raise unique animal welfare and safety issues?”; and “Are
there particular experimental outcomes that should be avoided?”28
But fictional texts have for centuries—indeed, millennia—provided a conceptual
space for thought experiments in metamorphic logic, affording means for engag-
ing with key questions raised by contemporary bioscience.29 Past what threshold
do cell implantations give rise, not to animals with some quotient of human DNA,
but rather to beings who can be viewed as humans morphed into nonhuman ani-
mals, or vice versa? In what ways is the engineering of such biomutations in ten-
sion with the broader cultural ontologies in which human-animal relationships are
situated, and interpreted? How do storytelling practices in the domain of fiction
engage with the tensions or contradictions arising from this de-synchronization of
contemporary bioscience and broader understandings of animal life? How can nar-
rative experiments with mutated species identities in literature targeted at children
and young adults, in particular, be squared with the way such literature contributes
to the ensemble of socializing practices to which young readers are exposed?30 In
addressing questions of this sort, I begin with a discussion of biomutations in fiction
for younger readers and then move on to an account of species transformations in
other fictional environments.
Biomutations in Literature for Children and Young Adults
Discussing issues also addressed by Melson (2001) in her study of the pervasiveness
of animals in stories produced for and by children, Cathrine Degnen (2011) points
to generational differences in perceptions of human-animal relationships. Degnen
writes that nonhuman animals “occupy a remarkable place in Western childhood,”
with those animals functioning as vividly personified characters “populating chil-
dren’s literature, toys, songs, clothing, films, and television programs” (677) in a
manner designed to inculcate forms of social etiquette or moral protocols (see also
Pedersen 2011: 12–13). Paradoxically, then, “Young children are . . . encouraged
daily to engage in the material world via representations of animals who are them-
selves portrayed as human” (677). But the foregrounding of animal characters in
narratives targeted at young readers gives rise, as Degnen points out, to a further
paradox:
Enmeshed in the material culture of childhood, animal representations are used to
transmit social lessons about human lives. And yet what also transpires is that young
children are actively encouraged to invert Western naturalist ontology (whereby
human beings and all other living beings are segregated into radically different
domains) and invest their imagination in a cosmos where human and nonhuman
animals are commensurate. It is perhaps not a coincidence that this occurs during
(and is used in part to demarcate) a period of the life course when human beings are
themselves not yet credited with full personhood. (677)31
Thus, although, as Pedersen (2011) suggests, the animals discussed or used in edu-
cational settings function contrastively as “a way of reinforcing the assumption of
human specificity, uniqueness, and superiority” (17), such that humanist educa-
tional ideals are grounded in “an expanded, multilayered ‘textbook’ of animal bodies
and tropes, an ‘animal script,’ or ‘biopalimpsest’ of teaching and learning—that is,
clusters of knowledge forms claiming access to the animal, materially or discursively,
as well as educational authority” (18), the paradox of this system for using animals
to highlight the distinctiveness or specialness of the human lies in the way the sys-
tem itself generates opportunities for imagining not the separateness but the confla-
tion of humans and other animals. In this manner, benchmarks of animal otherness,
designed to reinforce a sense of species difference, instead become reference points
for the full elaboration, the coming-into-its-own, of the human self.
As Ratelle (2014) puts it in her study of portrayals of animality in children’s liter-
ature and film, attempts to use animal others to establish “a notion of an exclusively
human subjectivity [are] continually countered in the very texts that ostensibly work
to configure human identity. Literature geared toward a child audience reflects and
contributes to the cultural tensions created by the oscillation between upholding
and undermining the divisions between the human and the animal” (4). Accounts
of species transformations in narratives aimed at young readers can be aligned with
one moment of this dialectic—the moment at which the use of animal stories “to
create a distinction between human beings and other animals” or to reinforce human
moral codes by providing them a basis in natural kinds (Tapper 1994, qtd. in Grier
2006: 343 n. 98) gives way to a flattening out of species hierarchies and a blurring or
rather dissolution of the category boundaries on which those hierarchies depend.32
Nowhere is this subversion of species categories more evident, in the context
of narratives targeted at younger readers, than in stories of biomutation, whether
the mutations involve human-to-animal or animal-to-human transformations. The
example texts to be discussed here engage in a more or less radical questioning of
ontologies that deny or minimize possibilities for selfhood beyond the human. In
order of increasingly far-reaching challenges to the dichotomization of humans and
other animals, these narratives of species change are anchored in dreamed, halluci-
nated, or otherwise imagined experiences of biomutation; in storyworlds that inter-
mix marvelous or supernatural shifts in species identity with details that link those
shifts to contemporary social settings; or in science-fictional storyworlds in which
technical innovations have made possible crossings of the species boundary that,
rather than being cast as an irruption of the marvelous into the world portrayed as
actual, grow out of present potentialities—and conform to the natural laws whose
causal structure remains rooted in contemporary models of the empirically availa-
ble world. As case studies illustrating each of these possibilities in turn, I use Paul
Gallico’s Jennie (1950), Philip Pullman’s I Was a Rat! (1999), and Peter Dickinson’s
Eva (1988) together with K. A. Applegate’s The Invasion (1996), the first book in
Applegate’s Animorphs series.33
Biomutation in Characters’ Subworlds: Gallico’s Jennie
Paul Werth (1999: 210–58) uses the term subworld to denote the worlds that char-
acters inhabit imaginatively when fantasizing, dreaming, or hallucinating, or for
that matter when they project storyworlds by performing narrational acts of their
own and thus take on the status of what Genette (1972/1980) termed intradiegetic
narrators. Genette situated such stories-within-the-story at the hypodiegetic level,

that is, at one remove from primary diegesis. Barring any metaleptic conflation of
diegetic levels, whereby situations and events pertaining to the main diegesis inter-
penetrate those taking place in embedded or hypodiegetic storyworlds, or vice
versa, the ontological contours of the primary storyworld remain unaffected by—
insulated from—events that transpire hypodiegetically.34 Thus if a human character
dreams or hallucinates that he or she has mutated into an earwig or an elephant, or
tells a story in which, counterfactually, he or she takes on this new species identity,
once the narration shifts out of this subworld and returns to the primary narrative
level, the biomutation at issue remains bracketed off from the domain that counts
as actual within the fictional universe, acquiring the profile of a thought experiment
rather than a more thoroughgoing dissolution of species boundaries and the hier-
archies they entail. In turn, this kind of narrative setup structurally mirrors how the
basic terms of a cultural ontology can remain relatively impervious to localized allo-
cations of selfhood beyond the human—allocations that are made possible by one-
off or self-contained projections of altered species identities.
Gallico’s Jennie exemplifies the narrative setup in question. In this novel, the pro-
tagonist, eight-year-old Peter Brown, runs out into the road impulsively because he
sees a kitten across the street warming herself in the sun and desires to hold and
stroke the animal (11). Peter is hit by a coal lorry while crossing the road, however,
and is knocked unconscious after sustaining serious injuries. When he awakes, or
thinks he awakes (while in actuality remaining in the dream-or fantasy-state associ-
ated with a coma), Peter mutates into a cat, the image of himself that he sees reflected
in Nanny’s eyeglasses changing from one with “reddish-brown curly hair and apple
cheeks” to one with “fur [that] now seemed to be quite short, straight, and snow
white,” “queerly slanted eyes that were now no longer grey but a light blue,” and a
mouth that “now curved downwards over long, sharp white teeth”—as well as hands
taking the shape of “pure white [paws], large and furred, with quaint, soft, pinkish
pads on the under side and claws curved like Turkish swords and needle-sharp at the
end” (16). As a result of this mutation Peter is taken for one of the stray cats he often
brings home, and driven out by Nanny when his efforts to plead his case fail because
of a loss of the ability to produce recognizably human language:
Ten times larger than she had ever appeared before, [Nanny was] standing over his
bed shouting in a voice so loud that it hurt his ears—
“Drat the child! He’s dragged anither stray off the street! Shoo! Scat! Get out!”
Peter cried out—“But, Nanny! I’m Peter. I’m not a cat. Nanny, don’t, please!”
“Rail at me, will ye?” Nanny bellowed. “’Tis the broom I’ll take to ye then.” She
ran down the hall, and returned carrying the broom. “Now then. Out ye go!” (17)
Threatened by the hostile urban environment—“It was a place that seemed to con-
sist wholly of blind feet clad in heavy boots or clicking high heels, and supplied with
legs that rose up out of them and vanished into the dark, rainy night above, all rush-
ing hither and thither, unseeing and unheeding” (19)—Peter meets a female cat
named Jennie who, through a series of adventures, schools Peter in the lifeways of
cats (66, 69, 107), even as Peter, having retained the capacity to understand human
language (71), assists Jennie by serving as a translator. After Peter defeats the tomcat
Dempsey in a fight to the death and lies wounded, Jennie cries out for him not to
leave her; at this moment the cat’s voice morphs into that of his mother and a reverse
mutation takes place:
Peter raised one of his paws, his left one, and saw to his intense surprise that there
were not sharp, curved claws at the end of it, but instead, five pink fingers . . .. Now he
knew for certain. He was cat no longer, anywhere. He was all boy. And then, rushing,
tumbling, cascading like water when the sluicegates are open, everything seemed to
come flooding back to him. (264)
Peter’s fluency in the language of cats now deserts him, but when he hears a kitten’s
“plaintive little mew” he gains one last glimpse of the world he experienced in his
transformed state: “It was as though the cry of the waif had made it possible just
once more for him to peer through the closing door into that other world he had left
for ever, to see the shadowy four-footed figures slipping soundlessly from cover to
cover in the streets of the hard city . . .. And then it was gone. The door shut and he
could see no more” (267).
By assigning blame to Peter’s mother for her son’s accident and injury, in the expo-
sitional material that precedes Peter’s transformation, Gallico reconsolidates gender
stereotypes that Peter’s gravitation toward cats rather than dogs might seem to dis-
rupt (compare McNeill 2007: 12–13; Rogers 1998: 165–85). Thus, although Peter
“had wanted a cat ever since he could remember” (12), his mother will not allow
it, and Nanny, on whom Peter’s mother relies to take care of Peter so that she can
maintain her busy social schedule, does not care for cats. The narrative reads: “All
of these things Peter knew and understood and put up with because that was how
it was in his world. However, this did not stop his heart from being heavy, because
his mother, who was young and beautiful, never seemed to have much time for him,
or prevent him yearning hungrily for a cat of his own” (13). Here Gallico explicitly
anchors Peter’s fantasized biomutation in the domain of wish fulfillment, and fur-
ther suggests an etiology in which the fantasy of species change compensates for a
lack of maternal nurturance. Overall, then, the narrative uses Peter’s real injury and
imagined change to underscore the need for strengthened bonds of affection and
empathy within as well as across species lines, but without presenting a radical chal-
lenge to the broader ontology in the context of which those lines have been drawn.
Semi-marvelous Metamorphoses: Pullman’s I Was a Rat!
In his study of the fantastic, Tzvetan Todorov (1975) characterizes the genre in
terms of the phenomenology of reading. More specifically, Todorov argues that in
experiencing a text as fantastic readers hesitate between situating that text in one or
other of the adjacent genres of the uncanny and the marvelous, which Todorov in
turn defines as “the supernatural explained” and “the supernatural accepted,” respec-
tively (42). A text like Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw (1898/2000) can be
used to illustrate Todorov’s approach, since in interpreting the governess’s narrative
about the ghostly apparitions at Bly readers are likely to hesitate between assuming
that these events can be explained naturalistically as the product of the governess’s
unsettled mind and assuming that the events in question do in fact lie outside the
domain of natural laws in the manner of fairy tales or ghost stories, where the occur-
rence of “supernatural events . . . provokes no surprise” (54). In these terms, and
in contrast with James’s novella, Philip Pullman’s young adult novel I Was a Rat!,
which can be read as a sequel to Charles Perrault’s fairy tale “Cinderella” ( Joosen
2009: 197; King 2009: 174), aligns itself with the genre of the marvelous—with
Pullman shifting the main focus of the narrative from the Cinderella counterpart to
the experiences of the rat whom the godmother character transforms into a coach-
man, or coach-boy in this case.
At the same time, as both Joosen (2009) and King (2009) observe, Pullman’s
text draws on late twentieth-century contexts and discourses, including simulated
tabloid news reports interspersed throughout the narrative, the 1981 marriage of
Charles and Diana (which provides a frame of reference for the engagement and
marriage of Prince Richard and Lady Aurelia Ashington, formerly Mary Jane the
kitchen maid, in Pullman’s storyworld), and discourses associated with schooling
and educational policy, public health and public safety, psychiatry, the institutions
and practices of science, and others.35 By interweaving these more or less veiled ref-
erences to recent and contemporary issues and events with a rat-into-human muta-
tion that falls outside established models of the natural causal order, Pullman’s text
projects what Pavel (1986) would describe as a salient or dual-level ontology, in
which, as in ancient Greek myth, the laws of nature are paralleled by a supernatural
domain—even if that domain comes directly into view only when Lady Aurelia and
Roger share memories about their former lives as a kitchen maid and the “Ratty” to
whom she fed scraps (Pullman 1999/2000: 165–69). The result is a text that injects
the marvelous into a world that otherwise adheres to the canons of probability, and
vice versa, and a concomitant unsettling of the scope and boundaries of the real.
In turn, this ontological unsettling creates an environment in which species cat-
egories, and the hierarchical patterns of thinking they support, come into question.
At a global level, in contrast with the insulation of Peter’s species change in a sub-
world in Gallico’s Jennie, the intermixture of the naturalistic and the supernatural in
Pullman’s text means that Roger’s biomutation has the same modal status as other
events at the primary diegetic level—in a way that affiliates Pullman’s text with the
mixed ontologies of magic realism (Faris 2004). The metamorphosis is not dreamed
or imagined but lived out by the rat-boy. Initially it is a tabloid account by “Kevin
Bilge” about a semihuman monster in the sewer that gives rise to a public outcry
concerning the need for the creature to be killed, ostensibly to protect “defense-
less” human children. The vehemence of this outcry, however, also suggests a desire
to purify the world of interstitial or category-challenging beings who threaten the
broader ontological order (119, 122, 132–33).36 Other characters, embodying the
discourses of science, participate in this same effort to recontain such disruptive

ontological energies by refusing to acknowledge the biomutation in one of two
ways: either by diagnosing Roger as a delusional human who never really had a
rodent past or by profiling him as a non-or subhuman creature, lacking any moral
claim to personhood with its attendant rights and privileges. Pullman ironizes both
of these strategies.
Thus the Royal Philosopher at first characterizes Roger as an insane boy with
“sensory-intellectual delusions, paranoid in nature” (55). Later, though, the Chief
Scientist construes Roger’s hand as a “filthy paw” and the rat-boy’s expression of
gratitude as a mere reflex vocalization37—with these interpretations suggesting how
politics can influence science, since they flow directly from the Prime Minister’s
directive that the Chief Scientist make the “Monster” as loathsome as possible, to
deflect attention away from problems with the current government (123–24). The
Royal Philosopher therefore shamelessly shifts to the second strategy of (re)con-
tainment, characterizing Roger as not-human in order to neutralize the threat he
poses to the established order. Now maintaining that “the creature is essentially a rat,
and not essentially a human,” the Philosopher asserts that there is “no moral contin-
uum between [Roger] and ourselves” (149).
In addition to ironizing the lengths to which the human characters will go to com-
pensate for anxieties about the destabilization of ontological categories, Pullman
uses the final conversation between Roger and the princess to undercut the priv-
ileged position assigned to humans by the dominant species hierarchy, as well as
other—related—socially embedded hierarchies of status. Hence when Roger asks
Mary Jane /Lady Aurelia whether he can go back to being a rat so as to avoid “ster-
mination,” she responds: “I don’t reckon you can . . . any more than I can. You’re
stuck as a boy, and I’m stuck as a princess” (167).
Biomutation as Cognitive Estrangement:

Animality, Animorphs, and Eva
If Gallico insulates species transformations in a bracketed-off subworld, and if

Pullman portrays them as, ambiguously, both the stuff of fairy tale and part of the
texture of the real, science fiction targeted at younger readers moves biomutations
squarely into the domain of the actual, contributing to what Darko Suvin (1972,
1979) would describe as a process of cognitive estrangement. The future-oriented
tendency of this process—the way science fiction re-envisions the potentialities of
the present as future actualities—gives to texts that use the conventions of science
fiction to explore the dynamics of species changes the capacity to pose substantive
challenges to existing cultural ontologies.
For Suvin, science fiction is a meta-empirical genre that comments critically on
contemporary models of what are taken to be the scope and limits of the real; it can
thus be placed on the far end of continuum stretching from “exact recreation of the
author’s empirical environment to exclusive interest in a strange newness, a novum”
(1972: 373)—that is, a hypothesized change in the structure of the world, whereby
what is merely possible becomes part of the domain of the actual via “extrapolating
[or modeling through fictional analogs] the variable and future-bearing elements
from the empirical environment” (375). With Suvin having adapted the idea of the
novum or strange novelty from Ernst Bloch (Suvin 1979: 43 n. 7), who viewed art
as an anticipatory illumination of the utopian potential that might be unlocked from
contemporary forms of life (1959/1988), Suvin draws an explicit contrast between
the estranging effects of the postulated novum in science fiction and the modes of
world projection associated with fairy tale and fantasy.38 On the one hand, fairy tales
project “a closed collateral world indifferent toward cognitive possibilities,” or the
possible future realization of present potentialities; on the other hand, fantasy (in
the sense of horror stories or weird tales) introduces “anti-cognitive laws,” or reso-
lutely inexplicable supernatural occurrences, into the empirical domain (375; see
also Csicsery-Ronay 2003: 118–19). By contrast, for Suvin the cognitive estrange-
ment enabled by science fiction stems from its “dynamic transformation” of cur-
rent empirical possibilities, with recent contributions to the genre moving “into
the sphere of anthropological and cosmological thought, becoming a diagnosis, a
warning, a call to understanding and action, and—most important—a mapping of
possible alternatives” (378).39
In her study of questions of animality in science fiction, Vint (2010) discusses
how texts that enact a role reversal by placing humans in the position of pets or
other kinds of domesticated animals vis-à-vis the alien species who control them
can stage a critique of dominant attitudes surrounding human-animal relationships
(158–81).40 K. A. Applegate’s Animorphs series, targeted at young-adult readers,
combines this trope of alien domination with literalized shifts in species identity,
whereby human characters take on the qualities and abilities of other animals in
their fight against earth-colonizing aliens called Yeerks, extraterrestrial parasites who
themselves inhabit and use humans’ and others’ bodies in the guise of “Controllers.”
Lassén-Seger (2006: 101–11; 2007), building on the ideas of Marina Warner (1994),
points to the Animorphs series as an example of contemporary popular culture’s
revalorization of human-into-animal transformations as empowering and liberating
rather than, as in earlier traditions, disempowering and demeaning—with Homer’s
narrative about Odysseus’s encounter with Circe in The Odyssey and Apuleius’s
The Golden Ass being classical cases in point. In other words, the modern-day reas-
sessment of metamorphosis has led to a resemanticization of the trope, whereby a
change from human to animal no longer expresses “a fall from human grace,” that is,
a shift downward in Aristotle’s scale of nature (Clutton-Brock 1995), but instead “a
desire for closeness to animal power” and an attempt to claim for human protago-
nists an image of themselves “under threat of extinction.”41
This pattern manifests itself throughout The Invasion (Applegate 1996), the first
volume in the young-adult literature (YAL) Animorphs series that went on to span
fifty-four books (not all of them authored by Applegate). In this novel, the group
of human adolescents who spearhead the insurrection against the invading Yeerks
use the morphing technology given to them by a benevolent alien named Prince
Elfangor, an Andalite who issues the initial warning about the planned takeover of
the earth, to transform into animals ranging from dogs, cats, horses, and hawks to
lizards, gorillas, elephants, and tigers, gathering information about and doing battle
with the Yeerks with the help of these altered species identities.42
Granted, the novel thus accords nonhuman animals a centrality, indeed indispen-
sability, that they do not possess in contemporary Western ontologies, and in that
way places a question mark next to established species hierarchies. Granted, too,
Applegate uses her animorphs’ experiences to project nonhuman ways of encoun-
tering the world, making relatively prolific allocations of possibilities for selfhood
beyond the human—as when Jake morphs into an anole lizard in order to spy on
the Yeerks and uses his previous human perceptual abilities to develop, along almost
synesthetic lines, a contrastive account of the lizard’s way of navigating the world
(113–14). Ultimately, however, the novel and the series as a whole can be read
as one in which humans are helped by aligning themselves more closely with and
recruiting powers and abilities from animals, but without demonstrating any real
concern about the empowerment of animals in return. In this instance, being moved
down in the hierarchy of dominant creatures does not induce the human characters
to question their own practices of domination vis-à-vis other terrestrial animals—as
is confirmed by Jake’s human-centric description of the process by which the ani-
morphs obtain the genetic information that is needed for morphing as a process
of acquiring other animals’ DNA (see, e.g., Applegate 1996: 26, 141). Yet the mor-
phing technology itself, even if the uses to which Applegate imagines it being put
are not radically empowering across species lines, suggests how such metamorphic
story lines could in principle give rise to estranging effects that are future-oriented.
Imported into the storyworld via an extraterrestrial civilization with more advanced
technoscientific capabilities, the novum of being able to assume the perspectives
and indeed the bodily forms of other animals ushers in possibilities for a more rad-
ical reconfiguration of species identities than Applegate’s own characters enact, in a
storyworld that finally remains tethered to the ontology of the here and now.43
Peter Dickinson’s Eva harnesses more fully the ontology-challenging poten-
tial of science fiction about species change. The novel is set in a dystopian future
in which human overpopulation has led to the extermination of many animal
species, with televised images of animals on “shaper” screens providing the last-
remaining route of access, for most people, to the nonhuman world. After Eva
sustains fatal injuries in a car accident, scientific research on “neurone memory”
(Dickinson 1988: 21–22) enables her identity to be implanted into a body that
once belonged to a young female chimp named Kelly, with Eva having previously
grown up with and gained inside knowledge of chimp behaviors and cultures
because of her father’s work as a zoologist. The narration registers Eva’s shock
at first seeing in the mirror what she gradually comes to recognize as her trans-
formed self: “For an instant all she seemed to see was nightmare. Mess. A giant
spider-web, broken and tangled on the pillows with the furry black body of
the spider dead in the middle of it. And then the mess made sense” (17). Here
Dickinson uses Eva as an internal focalizer to register, within the storyworld,
the kind of cognitive estrangement that the narrative as a whole is designed to
bring about for readers.44 Rooting in the potentialities of the present both the
novel’s dystopian future and the morphing technology that points a way beyond
it, Dickinson leverages Eva’s experiences to suggest how humans might begin to
resituate themselves within a broader ecology of selves—on whose preservation
the survival of human as well as nonhuman selves in turn depends.
Here key issues, which I return to in greater detail in the coda to the present
book, come into view. By having Eva mate with the chimps whose partial escape
from human control she enables, with his protagonist thus influencing the chimp
(sub)cultures in which she participates, Dickinson evokes a temporal loop or rather
spiral in which a human contribution to the evolution of nonhuman primates may
eventually lead to a re-emergence of the human with an altered and expanded spe-
cies identity—one better able to avoid the environmentally destructive behaviors
that eventuate in local as well as global acts of suicide (248). Once again, Dickinson
employs Eva’s thought processes, triggered by her attempts to come to terms with
her biomutation, to model the future orientation of the text’s own estranging effects.
Using the following passage as a benchmark, note the contrast between the asym-
metric privileging of the human in Applegate’s transformed animorphs, on the one
hand, and Eva’s anti-anthropocentric understanding of how to embrace her mutated
identity, on other hand; here too Dickinson’s use of narrative “you” (see also 153,
216, 218) promotes reader identification with the modes of self-estrangement that
Eva comes to see as imperative for survival, recast as a trans-species project (com-
pare Herman 2002: 331–71):
Kelly was dead, gone, would never come back, but something was still there . . .. You
couldn’t just invade a chimp body and take it over with your human mind, like a hero
in a history book—you’d never get to be whole that way. Eva’s human neurones might
have copied themselves into Kelly’s brain, but . . . that left a sort of join, an interface,
a borderland where human ended and chimp began. You couldn’t live like that with a
frontier in you, like a wall, keeping yourselves apart. The only way to become whole
was to pull the wall down, to let the other side back in, to let it invade in its turn, up
into the human side, the neurones remembering their old paths, twining themselves
in among the human network until both sides made a single pattern. A new pattern,
not Eva, not Kelly—both but one. (40–41)
Biomutations in Other Fictional Narratives
The previous subsection placed children’s and YAL texts along a spectrum ranging
from less to more radical questioning of established ontologies and their associated
understandings of self-other relationships across species lines. Other metamorphic
narratives, designed for mature readers rather than children or young adults, can
likewise be situated at various increments along this scale. The scope and variety
of such post-Darwinian fictional treatments of species change prohibits an exhaus-
tive survey of the relevant corpus of texts. Instead, I provide an indicative sketch of
works concerned with biomutation; building on Sternberg’s (1982) concept of the
Proteus Principle, or the plural, fluctuating correspondences between textual form

and representational function, my sketch suggests that there is no necessary connec-
tion between the taxonomy of genres outlined in my previous subsection and the
degree to which a given narrative engages critically with established ontological cat-
egories and related species hierarchies. Thus, authors such as Angela Carter (1979)
exploit the transgressive causality of the marvelous, as conceptualized by analysts
such as Todorov and Suvin, to imagine alternative ontologies—and thereby critique
dominant understandings of kinds of life and the value systems interlinked with
those systems of categorization. Furthermore, in grouping together these stories
of transformation, I shift from genre to narrational mode—in particular, the con-
trast between telling about another’s transformation versus recounting one’s own
experiences with metamorphosis—as a classifying principle. In this way I suggest
how, like the use of a given generic format, the choice of a specific narrational strat-
egy to recount fictional protagonists’ biomutations can be more or less ontology-
challenging or ontology-disrupting.
Tales of Others’ Transformations
In accounts of biomutation by tellers who did not themselves undergo the change or
changes in question, and irrespective of whether the metamorphosis exceeds or remains
within the horizon of what the text portrays as the natural causal order, key factors bear-
ing on degrees of ontological disruptiveness include the narrator’s stance toward the
narrated events as well as the text’s handling of the mutated agent’s perspective on the
storyworld. Depending on how these and other aspects of narrative structure are man-
aged, a text that portrays a species change as marvelous can be ontologically conserva-
tive overall, apart from the initial transformation, whereas a text in which no literal shift
of species occurs can adumbrate a wholesale revision of the categorization systems used
to understand self-other relationships across the species boundary.
For example, in David Garnett’s Lady into Fox (1922/2003), which recounts the
sudden vulpine transformation of Mrs. Silvia Tebrick (née Fox), the narrator takes
pains to stress the marvelous and inexplicable nature of this biomutation, even as
the narrative points to details that can be retrospectively construed as foretellings
of the species shift—creating something of the sense of inevitability that attaches
to fairy-tale transformations. The character’s surname, her upbringing in a relatively
wild place (compare the Latin meaning of her given name: “forest”), the streak of
red in her dark hair, and the way she is at one point made physically ill by the hunting
of a fox stand in as “reasons” for a metamorphosis that is, however, cast as “a mira-
cle; something from outside our world altogether” (1). When Mr. Tebrick, walking
hand in hand with Mrs. Tebrick in the woods, attempts to pull his spouse in the
direction of the hounds they hear baying at a fox, she resists and moves away: “Where
his wife had been the moment before was a small fox, of a very bright red. It looked at
him very beseechingly, advanced towards him a pace or two, and he saw at once
that his wife was looking at him from the animal’s eyes” (2). Although Mr. Tebrick
remains in love with and loyal to the transformed Silvia, dismissing his servants after
her change so that he and she can continue to live together, ultimately he has diffi-
culty moving beyond human-centric frames of reference to accommodate what has
become a new, trans-species relationship. What is more, the depth of his affiliative
ties with the mutated Silvia does not translate into a broader sense of connectedness
with the animal members of the larger biotic community, whom he still does not
recognize as part of a wider ecology of selves in which he, too, participates.
Thus Mr. Tebrick shoots his and Silvia’s dogs to prevent them from exposing
Silvia in her transformed state, and the distress that he feels when Silvia kills and eats
a rabbit that he sets in front of her by way of experiment stems not from the death
of another creature but from Silvia’s falling short of the human standards to which
he holds her: “Whenever his vixen’s conduct went beyond that which he expected
in his wife he was, as it were, cut to the quick, and no kind of agony could be greater
to him than to see her thus forget herself ” (12). Later, although Mr. Tebrick initially
refuses to criticize Silvia for being unfaithful when she mates with a male fox and
produces a litter of five cubs, being “convinced inwardly that she could no longer in
fairness be judged as a woman, but as a fox only” (29), subsequently he feels intense
jealousy toward the “dog-fox” who fathered the cubs. In a nightmare he turns “over
the names of schools in his mind,” disturbed by the thought that “Eton would not
do, nor Harrow, nor Winchester, nor Rugby” for the children to whom a pretrans-
formed Silvia (in the nightmare) has given birth as the result of an extramarital
affair. It is telling, too, that witnesses hear what they believe to be a woman’s scream
when at the end of the narrative Mr. Tebrick and Silvia are both attacked by the
pack of hounds that has been chasing her. Mr. Tebrick’s own memories of Silvia’s last
moments reflect not only sadness about her death but also anxiety about the desta-
bilization or abolition of categorical boundaries that work to keep humans sealed off
from the threat of predation: “The horror of that sight pierced him, for ever after-
wards he was haunted by those hounds—their eagerness, their desperate efforts to
gain on her, and their blind lust for her came at odd moments to frighten him all his
life” (38; see also Plumwood 2002b and chapter 7).
By contrast, T. Coraghessan Boyle’s “Dogology” (2002) features no miraculous
or supernatural biomutation, yet the life histories of several of Boyle’s human char-
acters challenge species classifications in ways that go beyond the acts of (psycho-
logical) identification discussed earlier in this chapter. The story interweaves two
main plot lines. One plot line centers on the fictional female “cynomorph” in subur-
ban Connecticut who, ostensibly continuing the research she did for a Ph.D. thesis
in biology that has been rejected by her doctoral supervisors, makes a bid to join
the community formed by the neighborhood dogs. This character gets “down on
all fours like a dog herself, sniffing” (130) as she works on “rebooting the olfactory
receptors of a brain that had been deadened by perfume and underarm deodorant
and all the other stifling odors of civilization” (131) while also “trying to train her
hearing away from the ceaseless clatter of the mechanical and tune it to the finer
things, the wind stirring in the grass, the alarm call of a fallen nestling, the faintest
sliver of a whimper from the dog three houses over, begging to be let out” (131). The
other plot line is taken from J. A. L. Singh’s nonfictional 1942 account of Kamala and
Amala, two Benghali girls reputed to have been brought up by wolves, published in
Singh and Robert M. Zingg’s Wolf-Children and Feral Man (1942). Having observed
a female wolf “slink off into the undergrowth, followed by a pair of wolf cubs and two
other creatures, which were too long-legged and rangy to be canids” (136), Singh
discovers in the she-wolf ’s burrow two female human children “in a defensive pos-
ture with the two wolf cubs, snarling and panicked, scrabbling at the clay with their
nails to dig themselves deeper” (140). Confined to a pen, the feral children, who
prove to be ignorant of all human languages and who communicate in grunts, snarls,
and whimpers, persist in going on all fours, flee from the sunlight, and lap water like
the beasts of the forest (142).45
This stereoscopic narrative setup allows Boyle to provide both inside and outside
views of humans being socialized into canid cultures, voluntarily in the first plot
line and (apparently) involuntarily in the second, and to create crossover between
fictional and nonfictional explorations of how animal cultures not only arise from
but also help (re)shape species identities (see Avital and Jablonka 2000; Jablonka
and Lamb 2005/2014; and the coda). With Singh observing how the feral children’s
“means of locomotion had transformed their bodies in a peculiar way,” whereby
Kamala and Amala develop thick calluses on their elbows and knees and a prefer-
ence for uncooked meat, in the fictional plot line Boyle employs internal focaliza-
tion to model the experiential aspects of tailoring one’s behavioral routines, mental
dispositions, and favored perceptual strategies so as to enter into another animal
community. Thus, the cynomorph observes the approach of her neighbor, Julian
Fox, from a dog’s-eye view: “Two shoes had arrived now . . .. She tried to ignore
them but there was a bright smear of mud or excrement gleaming on the toe of the
left one; it was excrement, dog—the merest sniff told her that, and she was intrigued
despite herself, though she refused to lift her eyes. And then a man’s voice was speak-
ing from somewhere high above the shoes” (136). More generally, Boyle uses these
intertwined stories to ironize efforts to draw a bright line between species categories
and thereby reinforce ontologies premised on the distinctiveness and hierarchical
superiority of the human vis-à-vis other forms of animal life. Singh’s and his wife’s
efforts to civilize the two feral children result in failure, with Amala dying of distem-
per and Kamala in the end “no more aware of what she was than a dog or an ass”
(148). Julian, having previously told the cynomorph that he could not allow her to
carry on acting like a dog because she had upset his wife (137), eventually lives up to
his own surname by joining her in a field where “things rose up to greet him, things
and smells he’d forgotten all about,” removing items of clothing, and sniffing at the
cynomorph while “a low throaty rumble escaped her throat” (148).
For its part, beginning with a protagonist awakening (or perhaps not awakening)
from sleep, and thus making it unclear whether the biomutations that it stages consist
of dreamed scenarios or rather actual storyworld events, Lucy Ives’s “Transformation
Day” (2015) uses possibly supernatural species changes to enact an extensive reframing
of human-centric ontologies. Cast as a picaresque tale of transformations that see the
protagonist, originally a young human female, morph first into a donkey and then into
a cat, a plant, a pencil, a dust mote, and an elderly woman who is an older version of the
protagonist’s initial self, Ives’s narrative ostensibly adheres to a hierarchical system of

ontological categories in which, as in Aristotle’s scale of nature and its descendants, ani-
mate beings take priority over inanimate beings, with humans having preeminent status
among the living, and human-made artifacts like pencils having priority over inchoate
matter such as dust motes (see Charles and Davies 2008: secs. 2.2, 2.4; Clutton-Brock
1995; Heidegger 1929–30/1995; Lovejoy 1936/1964; Serpell 1996: 147–68). Yet
Ives uses the resources of heterodiegetic narration coupled with internal focalization
to highlight contrasts between how the different variants or incarnations of the pro-
tagonist encounter the world, thereby extending possibilities for selfhood beyond the
human—possibilities that involve, recursively, an animal ascribing to humans species-
specific ways of being-in-the-world. Thus the narrator portrays the donkey as aware, as
she seeks to evade capture, that “her large body can be seen by a human. And so when
she enters the sight of a human she may graze this sight but must not pass through it.
She must cause herself to be treated as a matter of course” (59). By contrast, when trans-
formed from a donkey into a cat, the protagonist, beginning “to hear the humans, in
their work, around her,” is “now not afraid, as she was before. To be what she is is to be
of the world of men but to have no meaning for them, in their work. She is of their world
but means nothing to their efforts, and so they wish nothing of her” (63).
Narratives such as H. G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896/2005) and
Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Wife’s Story” (1979/1994) likewise suggest the ontology-
challenging potential of fictional texts in which narrators tell about their own experi-
ences with mutated others—whether the biomutations in question take the shape
of a novum, as in Wells’s early contribution to the emergent genre of science fic-
tion, or a supernatural deviation from established models of the real, as in Le Guin’s
postmodern animal fable. Wells’s Edward Prendick, even before he encounters the
transformed animals whom Moreau has altered mentally as well as physically in
experiments involving vivisection, has reason to view species identities as mutable
and probabilistic rather than fixed and categorical. Specifically, because of a ship-
wreck, Prendick experiences a breakdown of the ontology in which only nonhuman
animals can be considered edible prey, and with it the fracturing of his self-narrative
(again, see Plumwood 2002b and c hapter 7). When his shipmates fall overboard
after a violent struggle to determine who will be eaten by the others, Prendick’s own
laughter (at the irony of his cohorts’ sudden deaths after the difficult process of agree-
ing to engage in cannibalism) seems to catch him “like a thing from without” (3).
Prendick’s interactions with the mutated animals on the island further contribute
to this process of self-estrangement. Until he learns more about the life histories of
the “Beast People” on whom Moreau has experimented, including the indetermi-
nate figure whom Prendick confronts during his first foray into the island’s forests
(“What on earth was he—man or animal?” [43]), Prendick takes these “grotesque
caricatures of humanity” (62) to be animalized humans or “vivisected human
beings” (53). Here Prendick’s feeling that he is in danger (52) results not only from
his fear of being experimented on (and “animalized”) himself but also from broader
ontological anxieties to which the transformed humanimals have given rise—
anxieties about the existence of beings for which established species categories and
hierarchies cannot account. These broader anxieties explain why Moreau’s revela-
tion that the Beast People are, in fact, humanized animals contributes to Prendick’s
feelings of danger, rather than allaying them. With Moreau being interpretable as
a personification of the evolutionary process itself,46 when he acknowledges to
Prendick that “somehow the things drift back . . . they [the Beast People] revert.
As soon as my hand is taken from them the beast begins to creep back, begins to
reassert itself again” (80–81), Prendick becomes sensitized to the randomness or
value-neutrality of adaptive processes, the way the mutability of life forms opens
evolutionary pathways that might be deemed degenerative in cultural terms (see
Bowen 1976: 326; Glendening 2002: 579–82). Hence Prendick’s closing remarks,
that, when he returned to London, “I could not persuade myself that the men and
women I met were not also another, still passably human, Beast People, animals
half-wrought into the outward image of human souls; and that they would presently
begin to revert, to show first this bestial mark and then that” (138).
Wells thus uses Prendick’s engagements with metamorphs, engineered through
bioscience, to explore implications of evolutionary theory for understandings of
trans-species relationships. By participating in the subgenre sometimes referred to as
xenofiction—or fiction in which events are refracted through the perspective of a non-
human agent, whether alien or animal (Dowling 1978; Broderick and Ikin 2014)—Le
Guin’s “The Wife’s Story” uses a supernatural species change to prompt an equally far-
reaching reconsideration of established cultural ontologies. In this short story, Le Guin
employs conventions associated with werewolf tales to create what Jahn (1999) has
characterized as a garden-path narrative. In such narratives, a writer purposely leads
interpreters down a garden path from which they must subsequently depart, neces-
sitating a wholesale revision of their initial interpretive assumptions; this process of
revision can in turn parallel, and lend additional impact to, the reorientation of per-
spectives being worked out in the text itself, whether formally, thematically, or both.
Given the story’s opening—“He was a good husband, a good father. I don’t understand
it. I don’t believe in it. I don’t believe that it happened” (Le Guin 1979/1994: 67)—Le
Guin’s readers are likely to anticipate an account by a human narrator of a traumatic or
at least disturbing course of events involving a fellow human, possibly the narrator’s
own spouse and fellow parent. Further on, references to the moon and to the hus-
band’s unknown origins may activate expectations for a tale about supernatural events,
and perhaps even for a story about werewolves in particular. As it turns out, however,
the narrator is herself a wolf telling her story in the aftermath of her mate’s transfor-
mation into a human. In parallel with the revised interpretation required by the text’s
garden-path structure, the narrator’s account of the metamorphosis inverts the ten-
dency to use human models as a basis for judging the appearance and capabilities all
other animals; here lupine morphology becomes the standard from which human fea-
tures can now be seen to deviate, in a newly repulsive way:
I saw the changing. In his feet, it was, first. They got long, each foot got longer, stretch-
ing out, the toes stretching out and the foot getting long, and fleshy, and white. And
no hair on them.
The hair begun to come away all over his body. It was like his hair fried away in the
sunlight and was gone. He was white all over then, like a worm’s skin. And he turned
his face. It was changing while I looked, it got flatter and flatter, the mouth flat and
wide, and the teeth grinning flat and dull, and the nose just a knob of flesh with nos-
tril holes, and the ears gone, and the eyes gone blue—blue, with white rims around
the blue—staring at me out of that flat, soft, white face.
He stood up then on two legs.
I saw him, I had to see him, my own dear love, turned into the hateful one. (Le
Guin 1979/1994: 70)
More generally, as Payne (2007) discusses, in her animal fables Le Guin uses a dou-
ble logic of defamiliarization to stage the processes of othering or marginalization
through which human-centric ontologies consolidate themselves. In “The Wife’s
Story,” not only does the domain of the human assume a different shape because of the
narrator’s nonhuman perspective, but, what is more, this narrator casts human ways
of being-in-the-world as alien, defective, or worse (see Payne 2007: 172, 174–75).
Far from bracketing off biomutation by relegating it to the realm of the supernatural,
then, Le Guin highlights how transformations that depart from the natural causal
order can expose the values and priorities that undergird more or less dominant
models of the real. At the same time, Le Guin employs xenofiction—more specif-
ically, animal autobiography (DeMello 2012b; see also c hapter 5)—to create an
ironic inversion of anthropocentric storytelling practices and thereby question their
authority.
Tales by the Transformed
Robert Olen Butler’s 1995 story “Jealous Husband Returns in Form of Parrot”
can likewise be read as animal autobiography; in this case, however, the narra-
tor himself has undergone a process of metamorphosis—or, more precisely, a
process of metempsychosis, given that he has been reincarnated as a parrot after
falling to his death from the tree he climbed while still a human to spy on his wife,
whom he had suspected of having an affair.47 William Nelles (2001) subsumes
Butler’s text under the category of homodiegetic narratives that approach “the
paradox of the talking animal by creating a dual narrator, in which human and
animal elements are . . . closely integrated,” such that the narrator’s act of telling
“layers two focalizations in a single speech” (190). From this perspective, Butler’s
parrot might be aligned with Bynum’s (2001) figure of the hybrid (the self in
dialogue with an other) rather than the metamorphized subject (the self becom-
ing other). But since a (supernatural) species change is the premise of Butler’s
narrative, in an alternative interpretation the narrator can be read as a nonhuman
being who, despite being shifted downward in the species hierarchy, is left with a
significant portion of his formerly human consciousness intact, including memo-
ries from his past life and the self-destructively jealous disposition that leads to
his death—t wice.
The narrator himself, who wonders whether there are humans “trapped” in the
other parrots he sees, understands his altered form to be karmic retribution (80),
and his account of how he once locked himself in a cage-like bathroom in a jealous
rage (80), and also of how he often felt that he had more to say to his wife than he
could actually manage to articulate (81), confers on his biomutation something of
the feeling of inevitability that also attaches to Silvia Tebrick’s fairy-tale-like meta-
morphosis in Lady into Fox. As in Garnett’s text, however, Butler’s story projects a
one-off crossing of the species boundary that has no larger or more general impact on
established hierarchies of life—with the parrot-narrator’s feelings of powerlessness
increasing as he moves downward on the scale of nature. That said, just as Garnett’s
text registers anxieties about the weakening or even loss of the categorical boundar-
ies that in other ways the narrative works to maintain, in modeling the experience of
biomutation from the perspective of the nonhuman narrator Butler’s text remains in
tension with ontologies that curtail or even preclude selfhood beyond the human.48
Other autodiegetic accounts by narrators who have undergone biomutation
engage in more critical and reflexive ways with cultural ontologies that assume—
and work to reinforce—hierarchical orderings of species categories. Franz Kafka set
an early precedent in “Ein Bericht für eine Akademie” (“A Report to an Academy”),
first published in 1917, whose narrator, nicknamed Red Peter because of a red scar
from a gunshot wound inflicted by the hunting party that captured him (Kafka
1917/2015: para. 7), has been charged with giving a report to a learned body of
academicians about his previous experiences as an ape. Although Kafka writes in the
wake of Darwin’s account of humans’ mental capabilities as differing in degree rather
than kind from those of other animals (Darwin 1871/1999); and although Kafka’s
narrative can be read (like Wells’s Dr. Moreau) as a text that uses the resources of
fiction to provide a kind time-lapse model of the evolutionary process, as discussed
further in the coda; at the same time the narrator suggests that past a certain stage
his transformation entailed a sudden, quantized shift of selves, with the result that
his memories of his past life as a nonhuman “have increasingly closed themselves off
against me” (para. 3)—particularly since “I can portray those ape-like feelings only
with human words and, as a result, I misrepresent them” (para. 10).
But the gap that the narrator traverses in moving from experiencing ape to narrat-
ing human is not a gap between lower and higher increments on the scale of nature
(see DeKoven 2016: 21–27). If Butler ironizes the contrast between animal entrap-
ment and human freedom by suggesting that his parrot-narrator, while still a human,
was already trapped by his own obsessive jealousy, Kafka radicalizes and general-
izes this ironic treatment of species difference. The narrator’s account suggests that
membership in a species category hinges on the perfection of behavioral repertoires
or performative displays—using the handshake as a form of greeting, spitting care-
lessly, consuming alcohol “without hesitating, with my mouth making no grimace,
like an expert drinker” (para. 23)—that are as constraining as they are enabling and
that he undertakes only under duress, as his sole viable strategy for escaping human
domination, his only “way out” (Ausweg). Indeed, in parallel with Freud’s (1930/
2002) hypotheses concerning the links between civilization and self-repression, by
the end of his account it is clear that the narrator has traded one cage for another,
performing in front of the present learned audience to avoid having to perform, in a
nominally different register, as a zoo animal. Becoming human, the story suggests,
can be traced back to a ruse for escaping the forms of domination that accompany
being classified as a subhuman, particularly in ontologies that restrict or disavow
possibilities for selfhood beyond the human.
By broadening the focus of Red Peter’s account, such that it foregrounds ques-
tions about processes of biomutation at a species level in addition to the story arc of
his own, one-off metamorphosis, Kafka’s text intensifies the ontology-challenging
effects of autodiegetic narratives about transformation.49 Angela Carter’s “The
Tiger’s Bride,” included in her 1979 collection The Bloody Chamber, which as a whole
projects a fictional landscape marked by fluid and reversible movements across the
human-animal frontier, offers another antinormative account of species categories
and hierarchies, not by compressing evolutionary timescales into the life span of an
individual but by using the conventions of myth and fairy tale to call into question
the coherence or well-formedness of the concept of the human itself. Carter’s nar-
rator uses mythic tropes to suggest that this concept is itself a kind of myth, having
emerged in dialectical opposition to mythologized animals and also divided itself
from within.50
References in “The Tiger’s Bride” to pacts with the devil, the madness of trav-
elers from the north, and “the witches who let the winds out of their knotted
handkerchiefs up towards the Finnish border” (63) create an environment where
supernatural events are woven into the fabric of the real (see Pearson 1999); in this
environment the narrator recalls that her English nurse told her about a tiger-man
who would come and take her away—” Yes, my beauty! gobble you up!” (56)—
should she misbehave. By placing events that count as actual in the storyworld on
the same ontological plane as the cautionary tale of the tiger-man, the narrator’s
account underscores the revisability of conceptions of the real versus the imag-
ined. This narrative destabilization extends to ideas of the animal as the imaginary
other of civilization. Hence “The Beast,” the wealthy estate owner who wears a
mask painted with a human face and who instead of hands has “furred pads” and
“excoriating claws” (61), reveals “an odd air of self-imposed restraint, as if fighting
a battle with himself to remain upright when he would far rather drop down on all
fours” (53) while playing cards with the narrator’s father. By contrast, the father
shows a remarkable lack of restraint in gambling his daughter away. Humans, in
this world, thus take on the dangerous and threatening role ascribed to animals in
fairy tales and myths—and not just humans in general but fathers in particular, sug-
gesting the way patriarchal institutions, based on women’s abjection, interlock with
the dichotomization and hierarchicalization of species differences (Adams 1996;
Donovan 2016).
The narrator thematizes this interconnection in recounting how she, the Beast,
and his valet take a horseback ride through “a bereft landscape in the sad browns and
sepias of winter,” marked now and then by “the swoop of a bird, [with] its irrecon-
cilable cry” (62–63):
A profound sense of strangeness slowly began to possess me. I knew my two compan-
ions were not, in any way, as other men . . .. I knew they lived according to a different
logic than I had done until my father abandoned me to the wild beasts by his human
carelessness . . .. I was a young girl, a virgin, and therefore men denied me rationality
just as they denied it to all those who were not exactly like themselves, in all their
unreason. If I could not see a single soul in that wilderness of desolation all around
me, then the six of us—mounts and riders, both—could boast among us not one
soul either, since all the best religions in the world state categorically that not beasts
nor women were equipped with the flimsy, insubstantial things when the good Lord
opened the gates of Eden and let Eve and her familiars tumble out . . .. I meditated
on the nature of my own state, how I had been bought and sold, passed from hand
to hand. (63)
Given the patriarchal assimilation of women to the category of other-than-human

beings, and given too the way the narrator’s identity, to the extent that she is rec-
ognized as human, has been subordinated under and thus made coextensive with
her father’s,51 the domain of the nonhuman becomes for the narrator the space of
freedom. Mutating into patriarchy’s other, she, building on the precedent set by the
wagoner’s daughter who gives birth to a son fathered by a bear (56), now embraces
the “different logic” that generates the sense of strangeness mentioned in the passage
just quoted.
This counterlogic is based on the recognition of humans’ place within, and
ties to, the larger animal world; it disrupts jointly speciesist (Ryder 2000) and
patriarchal institutions and practices whereby both women and animals, “in the
market place, where the eyes that watch you take no account of your existence,”
are transubstantiated into “the cold, white meat of contract” (66). Reversing the
direction of movement across the porous boundary between human and animal
that Carter had traced at the end of the previous story in the collection, “The
Courtship of Mr Lyon,” in which Beauty’s tears “fell on [Beast’s] face like snow
and, under their soft transformation . . . it was no longer a lion in her arms but a
man” (51), at the conclusion of “The Tiger’s Bride,” as the narrator’s nonhuman
suitor licks her, “each stroke of his tongue ripped off skin after successive skin,
all the skins of a life in the world,” and “my [diamond] earrings turned back to
water and trickled down my shoulders; I shrugged the drops off my beautiful fur”
(67). Diamonds turning back into water: there could be no more apt image of
the way narratives like Carter’s stage a deconstitution of the cultural ontologies
with which they engage, and, by replacing fixed, apparently adamantine limits
with fluid processes of cross-category intermixture and change, suggest alterna-
tive logics for self-other relationships across the species boundary.
Drawing on Bynum’s (2001) distinction between hybridity and transformation as a

heuristic resource, the present chapter has, in parallel with c hapter 1, used an indic-
ative sample of genres and storytelling situations to suggest how narrative provides
conceptual space for reconsidering human-animal interactions and relationships.
My focus here has been on how this space affords scope for (1) more or less thor-
oughgoing acts of identification across species lines, and (2) the modeling of human-
to-animal as well as animal-to-human biomutations—with these biomutations
impinging more or less disruptively on normative species categories and the hier-
archies they embed. I have argued that, in remapping or even dissolving established
boundaries between human and nonhuman forms of life, stories of identification
and transformation figure forth a wider ecology of selves—a trans-species com
munity in which the stories’ human characters participate, and by which they are
shaped in turn. At issue is an expanded realm of relationality that remains occluded
by more parsimonious allocations of possibilities for other-than-human selfhood,
modes of being-in-the-world that, cutting across species differences, involve being
recognized and oriented to as a who and not just a what.
My next chapter continues to explore such expanded relationality in sto-
rytelling environments that focus on or emerge from therapeutic contexts—
specifically, memoirs about autistic children’s interactions with animals and
accounts of trans-species relationships that are elicited through family therapy.
Grounding affiliations between humans and animals in kinship networks that
cut cross the species boundary, narratives produced in these storytelling envi-
ronments suggest the need to reframe the very idea of family as a transhuman
concept.52
3 Entangled Selves,
Transhuman Families
In time you saw lab animals differently. Each one was me, heart
quickened in fear.
—Carol Guess and Kelly Magee,
With Animal (Guess and Magee 2015: 60)
With the previous two chapters having laid groundwork for investigating how a vari-
ety of fictional and nonfictional narratives open pathways for exploring the place of
the human self in a larger ecology of selves, a broader context of trans-species inter-
actions and relationships, the present chapter zooms in on questions of human-ani-
mal relationality in narratives told in or about therapeutic situations. The first part
of the chapter uses two autism memoirs—Rupert Isaacson’s The Horse Boy (2009)
and Nuala Gardner’s A Friend Like Henry (2007)—to discuss how stories about ani-
mal assistants reveal complex, multilayered entanglements between humans and
the animals cast as their nonhuman helpers. These entanglements in turn become
intertwined, in Isaacson’s and Gardner’s narratives, with questions about the role of
animals in families; hence my focus, in the second part of the chapter, on how stories
produced in therapeutic environments engage with kinship networks that cross the
species boundary.
I begin by surveying work on animal-assisted interventions for persons with
autism, among other target populations. Using Isaacson’s The Horse Boy and
Gardner’s A Friend Like Henry as examples, I then explore how a “mixed methods”
approach—one that integrates ideas from fields such as multispecies ethnography,
critical animal studies, disability studies, and narratological work on character and
characterization—brings into view a range of issues that are pertinent for the study
of stories about animals assisting children diagnosed with autism. After comparing
how these two narratives portray interactions between animals and the authors’
autistic sons, I turn to scholarship on kinship networks as well as studies of stories
about animals produced in the context of family therapy. Research in these areas
affords insights into how narratives about human-animal relationships bear on the
very concept of family, and vice versa. In addition to exploring practices of pet keep-
ing vis-à-vis cross-disciplinary work on family, including studies of the concept of
“fictive kin,” I discuss a range of narrative-based or narrative-generating techniques
used in family therapy. Relevant techniques include participants’ creation of geno-
grams, or maps of family structures, that feature companion animals. Relevant,
too, is the telling of stories about family dynamics by means of animal attributions,
whereby unresolved family conflicts can be staged via (cultural models of) animal
families—and potentially renarrated in ways that allow for resolution.
87
More generally, in focusing on trans-species entanglements revealed in and cre-

ated by storytelling environments of the sort discussed in the present chapter, a
narratology beyond the human can contribute to efforts to establish new routes
of exchange between the domains of medical science and research in humanistic
fields of inquiry—efforts being pursued under the headings of the medical humani-
ties and now the critical medical humanities, as well as subfields such as narrative
medicine.1 Cole, Carlin, and Carson (2014) define the medical humanities as “an
inter-and multidisciplinary field that explores contexts, experiences, and critical
and conceptual issues in medicine and health care, while supporting professional
identity formation” among physicians and other healthcare professionals (12).
Here exploring contexts means drawing on disciplines such as history and anthro-
pology to investigate “the temporal and cultural dimensions of medicine” (12);
exploring experiences means using disciplines such as literature and psychology
to “understand how it feels to be a patient, a doctor, or a community affected by
an epidemic” (13).2 Along similar lines, Hurwitz (2011) characterizes narrative
medicine as “a practice and an intellectual stance” that looks “beyond the biological
mechanisms at the centre of conventional approaches to medical practice, towards
domains of thought and ways of telling that focus on language and representation,
on the emotions and relationships which illuminate health care” (73)—with this
approach resulting in a kind of stereoscopic perspective that recognizes both the
physical basis and the lived experience of illness, that is, the physiological as well
as the biographical and existential aspects of living with disease (74). In the same
spirit, beyond engaging with questions about the efficacy of treatment protocols
involving animal assistants, animal-including genograms, or storytelling via animal
attributions, and beyond exploring how understandings of trans-species relation-
ships at once shape and are shaped by the narratives circulating within or about
such therapeutic contexts, the present chapter considers ways in which these two
sets of questions are imbricated, historically as well as conceptually, in practice as
well as theory.
I close this introductory section with a comment about the title of chapter, and
the concept of entanglement threaded throughout my discussion. Drawing on Karen
Barad’s work (2007, 2012), Fitzgerald and Callard (2015) use the term entanglement
to refer to the “more-or-less bounded ways of producing knowledge [that] might in
fact come after—and not before—awkward mixtures of knowledge and material” in
research practices that cut across established disciplinary lines; such mixtures can
give rise to modes of inquiry and ways of knowing not associated with any of the
constituent disciplines taken individually, prior to their being brought into more or
less uneasy relationships with one another via boundary-crossing investigative work
(see also Callard and Fitzgerald 2016: 38–41). The present chapter pursues the same
modus operandi, triangulating multiple frameworks for research around stories of
human-animal relationships—stories that cannot be exhaustively characterized
using any one of those frameworks taken alone.3 But I also develop a kind of topo-
graphic analysis of layers or levels of entanglement at work in (or on) the narratives
at issue, in an effort to capture the multiplex nature of the cross-species relationships
Entangled Selves, Transhuman Families ■ 89
in question. As discussed below, these multilayered trans-species entanglements

stretch from particular human-animal interactions to the larger cultural institutions,
discourses, and practices by which such interactions are framed—and normalized.
A key task for narratology beyond the human is coming to terms with all of the levels
at stake, and also with the interrelations among these levels.
n A
NIMAL ASSISTANTS IN NARRATIVES
ABOUT AUTISM
In Isaacson’s The Horse Boy, a 2009 memoir about Isaacson’s and his spouse’s experi-
ences raising their autistic son, Rowan, Isaacson suggests that Rowan has a special
connection with animals. Having observed Rowan’s way of relating to the family’s
cat, Isaacson remarks that “strangely, she tolerated anything he did to her, as did
friends’ dogs and other pets. He seemed to have a thing for animals, and they for
him. I mean, I was good with animals too, especially horses, but not like him. He
seemed to have a direct line” (Isaacson 2009: 14). Later, in his portrayal of an inter-
action between Rowan and Betsy, the horse Rowan rides on a neighbor’s farm,
Isaacson recounts how
without hesitation, Rowan opened his arms and hugged Betsy’s great brown head,
which was hanging low enough for him to reach. Then he gave her a kiss. As he did so,
an expression of extraordinary gentleness came over her—a certain softening of the
eye, a blissful half-closing of the eyelid with its long black lashes. Something passed
between them, some directness of communication that I, a neurotypical human,
could never experience. Not this side of the spirit world, anyway. (34)
Similarly, in Gardner’s 2007 autism memoir A Friend Like Henry, blurbed as “the
remarkable true story of an autistic boy and the dog that unlocked his world,”
Gardner portrays her autistic son, Dale, as being especially attuned to animals—
in this case, the family’s golden retriever, Henry. Recounting the first time Dale
encounters a dog, Gardner writes that “Dale was focused, switched on to [the dog’s]
needs” (Gardner 2007: 124). On the basis of this successful interaction, Gardner
and her partner decide to adopt Henry, who proves himself capable of breaking into
“Daleyworld” and interrupting the autistic mannerisms that in Dale’s case include
staring and flapping of the hands (146).
In aligning autistic characters with nonhuman animals in this way, Isaacson’s
and Gardner’s memoirs parallel other recent accounts, such as Dawn Prince-
Hughes’s Songs of the Gorilla Nation and Temple Grandin’s Animals in Translation,
that are premised on the idea that persons on the autistic spectrum and mem-
bers of other species share a special affinity or bond.4 In turn, such accounts root
themselves in a longer conceptual genealogy—an extensive field of discourses
stretching back for millennia—that links animals to persons who embody non-
normative traits, dispositions, or capacities. The present analysis explores how
this linkage plays out in narratives that, like Isaacson’s and Gardner’s, cast animals
in the role of assistants, recruited for therapeutic purposes as part of a formal
or informal treatment protocol for persons with autism. In such narratives,

the oppositions human/nonhuman and able/disabled become intertwined—
entangled—in complicated, multilayered ways. A narratology beyond the human,
I argue, can provide tools for coming to terms with this complex intertwining or
entanglement.
Thus, extending the framework for inquiry that c hapters 1 and 2 have begun to
outline, my analysis seeks to address these further questions: How do narratives
about the use of animal assistants to treat persons with autism bear on the more
or less inclusive understandings of communities of selves—that is, the more or
less prolific or parsimonious allocations of the possibility for selfhood beyond
the human—that are associated with the contradictory ontologies at work in
the cultures of the West? To what extent, in what specific ways, and with what
consequences do these contradictory ontological energies manifest themselves
in the two memoirs that I use as case studies in the first part of the present chap-
ter, as well as the other narratives that I discuss in the second part? To come
to grips with such questions, it is necessary to engage with existing approaches
to research on animal assistants in therapeutic settings, before resituating those
approaches in the expanded investigative framework afforded by a narratology
beyond the human.
I should also emphasize, however, that addressing these questions entails a reas-
sessment not just of animality but also of autism. The fifth edition of the Diagnostic
and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (or DSM 5) groups autism spectrum
disorder, along with communication disorders, specific learning disorders, motor
disorders, and other diagnostic categories, under the rubric of developmental dis-
orders. Yet autism activists, disability theorists, and other commentators have taken
issue with pathologizing constructions of autism, among other developmental or
cognitive modalities that diagnosticians distinguish from (or contrast with) the
neurotypical. Instead, exemplifying what Rapp and Ginsburg (2011) term “new
cultural understandings of human cognitive diversity” (379), Savarese notes that
“the neurodiversity movement and organizations such as the Autistic Self-Advocacy
Network . . . [have insisted] on the right to self-determination and advancing a
notion of autism as neurological difference, not pathology” (Savarese and Zunshine
2014: 18). Such a perspective, which Savarese goes on to christen as neurocosmo-
politanism, “understands each neurotype as a particular set of cognitive strengths
and weaknesses, and it explores the extent to which a given task might be performed
in divergent ways” (18), leading not just to “an openness to neurological difference”
but furthermore to “a denaturalization, even a dethronement, of privileged neuro-
typicality” (20). Along similar lines, Lydia Brown (2014) argues that “the pathology
paradigm of disability demands adherence to a single template for human existence
defined as normative and therefore ideal,” with any deviation from that template
being construed as “deficiency, defect, or disorder” (33). I return to these issues in
my discussion of how ideas from disability studies can shed light on narratives about
animal assistants, and vice versa, and also in my analysis of the film adaptation of
Isaacson’s The Horse Boy.
Contextualizing Animal-Assisted Intervention (AAI)
Some analysts distinguish between animal-assisted activities and animal-assisted

therapy. Thus, for Aubrey H. Fine (2002), “activities” are practices in which animals
are brought into contact with people “for motivational and recreational benefits to
enhance quality of life,” whereas “therapies” are goal-oriented interventions “deliv-
ered by a health or human service professional” in which “an animal meeting specific
criteria is an integral part of the treatment process” (49). However, given that there
are substantial areas of overlap between these areas of practice, in the present anal-
ysis I follow Merope Pavlides (2008) and Marguerite E. O’Haire (2013) in using
the rubric animal-assisted intervention (AAI) as a cover term for all cases where ani-
mals are recruited for what are taken to be therapeutic purposes as part of a formal
or informal treatment protocol—in this case, for cognitive and behavioral patterns
associated with autism.
Melson (2001: 99–131) reviews ancient and more recent notions of animals
as healers. As she notes, a turning point in the history of animal-assisted interven-
tions was the founding of the York Retreat, established in 1792 by William Tuke
in England in association with the Society of Friends, also known as the Quakers.
Tuke, as Melson remarks, “believed that as patients cared for small animals, the
animals’ dependence would elicit greater self-control and responsibility in the dis-
ordered minds of their caretakers. Caring for animals and tending animals would
draw patients’ attention outward, away from their own inward distress, toward
engagement in the world” (105–6; compare Tuke 1813/1996). Later on, Florence
Nightingale likewise argued that companion animals could help the sick (Fine
2002: 49). However, it is psychologist Boris Levinson’s work, starting with his
groundbreaking 1962 article “The Dog as a ‘Co-therapist,’ ” that has perhaps most
influenced modern-day uses of AAI in therapeutic contexts, including those involv-
ing persons with autism.
Reporting an accidental encounter between his dog Jingles and a boy who had
recently become his patient, Levinson (1962) identifies several potential benefits of
using animals in psychotherapeutic contexts. For example, he suggests that includ-
ing a dog in the initial session can cause disturbed children to open up and, eventu-
ally, place more trust in the therapist (60). Further, in confiding to a dog the child
can experience, and possibly come to understand, a greater range of emotions than
he or she will embrace in other contexts (64). In later work, Levinson outlined fur-
ther benefits of what he came to call Human /Companion Animal Therapy and,
drawing on John Bowlby’s attachment theory and D. W. Winnicott’s concept of
“transitional objects,” pinpointed mechanisms associated with ontogenetic devel-
opment as possible explanations of those benefits. Thus Levinson comments on the
physical proximity made possible by touching another creature who becomes, in
effect, a mother substitute—contact with the adult caregiver having led infants to
“associate soft, pleasing touch sensations with the availability of security” (Levinson
1984: 133; see also Melson 2001: 103). Relatedly, animals can come to be seen as
transitional objects that comfort the child in lieu of the absent mother, and enable
him or her to make the transition from the circumscribed world of the self to the
wider world of self-other relationships (Levinson 1984: 134–36; see also Levinson
1962: 65; Katcher 2002: 193).
Melson (2001) suggests that, despite his cautionary remarks about the need for
further studies, in pioneering the field Levinson may have contributed to exaggerated
expectations about the efficacy of AAI (117). In any case, his work raises questions
about possible explanatory mechanisms for the benefits ascribed to interventions
involving animals. Aaron Katcher and Gregory Wilkins (1993), for their part, fol-
low Levinson in asserting that children find speaking with animals less stressful than
speaking with humans, and that this aspect of AAI may explain why animals facil-
itate talk—and promote the therapeutic benefits of engaging in social interaction
with others. In a later study, Katcher (2002) synthesizes the Winnicottian idea of
animals as transitional objects with Victor Turner’s concept of liminality to propose
another account of how AAI achieves therapeutic results. Because animals neither
speak nor seek to control children’s behavior, they can serve as “appropriate vehicles
for the projection of positive feelings” that can then be generalized to humans. In
turn, “The novel and playful ways that social attributes are recombined in the limi-
nal state (generated between people and animals) destabilize ingrained patterns of
thinking and permit the learning of new behavior patterns” (195).
By contrast, the biophilia hypothesis affords an explanation of the supposed
benefits of AAI that foregrounds the domain of phylogenetic evolution over that
of ontogenetic development—or for that matter the variable experiences of human
individuals. In Kellert’s (1993) account, the biophilia hypothesis “asserts the exist-
ence of a biologically based, inherent human need to affiliate with life and lifelike
processes” (42). More specifically, the hypothesis suggests that because animals
functioned as sentinels who could warn early hominids about potential dangers in
their immediate environment, it was evolutionarily advantageous for our species
to develop a preference for orienting to other kinds of animals—a preference that,
anchored in humans’ phylogenetic history, also plays itself out in their ontogenetic
development. For this reason, “The human/nature bond fosters our potential for
relationship, connection, and stewardship” (Kellert 1997: 112; see also Gawande
2014: 127–43). Melson (2001) draws on these ideas to explain the frequency of
animals in narratives targeted at younger audiences, as well as the importance ani-
mals have in children’s developmental processes more generally (19–20). She then
extrapolates from her account to propose a biophilia-based explanation of the ben-
efits ascribed to AAI:
Biophilia addresses the calm that distressed and out-of-control children report as
well as the focused attention seen in children with emotional and cognitive impair-
ments. Watching animals at peace may create a coupling of decreased arousal with
sustained attention and alertness, opening the troubled child to new possibilities of
learning and growth. (Melson 2001: 130)5
Critics of the biophilia hypothesis, however, have argued that its very wide scope
makes it virtually nonfalsifiable. Thus Joye and de Block (2011) assert that because
statements of the hypothesis lack explicit criteria for what counts as lifelike, “almost
any possible affective attitude towards life-like entities could . . . be accommodated
within a biophilic framework. Biophilia thereby seems to become almost entirely
immune to possible counterexamples” (193). Joye and de Block also critique
appeals to the biophilia hypothesis to account for the benefits attributed to AAI in
particular, suggesting that “the bulk of the ‘philia’ in ‘biophilia’ is the result of culture
and (social) learning” rather than in-built predispositions acquired via evolutionary
processes (198–99).
In any case, a range of studies, appealing to a variety of explanatory mechanisms,
assert that AAI benefits human participants, both in general and also in treatment
protocols for persons with autism or with intellectual disabilities.6 But what is the
evidentiary basis of these claims? For O’Haire (2013) the evidence is weak; she
argues that “the research base for AAI is . . . scattered, with few high-quality studies,
many methodological weaknesses [e.g., the lack of longitudinal data accumulated
through follow-up studies and the absence of appropriate control conditions], and
limited replication” (1619). In another highly critical study, focusing on dolphin-
assisted therapy in particular, Marino and Lilienfeld (2007) cite the problem of non-
specific effects—that is, placebo and novelty effects, with the latter effect involving
an initial positive outcome caused simply by a change in routine, rather than any-
thing specifically related to the new treatment regime (241–43).
Crucially, O’Haire (2013) draws a contrast between anecdotal evidence in sup-
port of AAI and what she characterizes as more robust evidence based on statisti-
cally significant differences in the outcomes of treatment protocols that involve AAI
versus those that do not (1607). O’Haire does not consider, however, what might
account for the power and persuasiveness of the anecdotal in this context. Why do
anecdotes—stories—about the positive effects of animal assistants for persons with
autism find purchase in the discourses circulating within the culture? Further, what
distinguishes an anecdote from a (potentially generalizable) case study, and how
can use of the term anecdote itself lead to the trivialization and neglect of narratives
that deserve closer scrutiny? How might accumulating individual stories about
human-animal relationships in general, animal assistants in particular, result in dif-
ferent understandings of the multilayered trans-species entanglements that are the
focus of the present section—for example, by suggesting new questions for research
that cut across established academic disciplines? To explore these and other issues,
I return now to my two main case studies, using The Horse Boy and A Friend Like
Henry to demonstrate the need for more cross-disciplinary work on narratives about
animal helpers.
Levels of Entanglement in Stories about

Animal Assistants
In engaging with Isaacson’s and Gardner’s texts, I distinguish among four layers or
levels of entanglement in narratives about AAI for persons with autism, while also
considering ways in which these levels are interconnected.
1. Cross-species entanglements arising from the particular human-animal inter-

actions that feature in narratives about animal-assisted interventions.
2. Further trans-species entanglements stemming from the situation of those
local interactions within a broader set of cultural practices that cut across
species lines.
3. A third level of entanglement that, emerging from level 2 and linking up with a
range of discourses about animals and human-animal relationships, manifests
itself in narratives in which the oppositions human/nonhuman and ability/
disability become intertwined.
4. And finally, another, “meta” level of entanglement—or rather, a layer threaded
through all the others. This fourth level arises from the interaction between
the analyst’s own frames of reference and the human-nonhuman relationships
featuring in the narratives under study.7
In what follows I suggest how an integrative approach to storytelling beyond the
human—an approach that draws on ideas from fields ranging from ethnography to
disability studies to narratological work on character—can illuminate not only the
particular, localized encounters between humans and nonhumans that writers like
Gardner and Isaacson dramatize (level 1), but also the broader contexts in which
those encounters become intelligible as such, and on which they have a reciprocal
effect (levels 2–4).
Stories of AAI and Ecologies of Selves
Ethnographic approaches to human-animal interactions of the sort recounted by

Gardner and Isaacson—approaches mentioned preliminarily in the introduction to
this book—afford a first framework for studying how these cross-species entangle-
ments unfold in broader cultural settings. Having emerged at the intersection of
environmental studies, science and technology studies, and animal studies, mul-
tispecies ethnography, as Kirksey and Helmreich (2010) describe it, focuses on
“contact zones where lines separating nature from culture have broken down, where
encounters between Homo sapiens and other beings generate mutual ecologies and
coproduced niches” (566). Kohn’s trans-species anthropology (Kohn 2007), or
anthropology beyond the human (Kohn 2013), likewise seeks to capture not just
human attitudes toward nonhuman animals but also the webs of interaction that
give rise to forms of intersubjectivity cutting across the human-nonhuman bound-
ary. Kohn, too, seeks to develop an “analytical framework that goes beyond a focus
on how humans represent animals to an appreciation for our everyday interactions
with these creatures and the new spaces of possibility such interactions can create”
(2007: 4; see also Haraway 2003, 2008).
When it comes to AAI in general, and Gardner’s and Isaacson’s portrayal of ani-
mal assistants in particular, this work allows important questions to be formulated;
the questions are situated at the boundary between the first and second levels of
entanglement enumerated above.
• How have understandings of animals as assistants changed over time?

• How do the relationships emerging from AAI relate to other sorts of co-
produced niches, whether in the West or elsewhere in the world?
• What is the best way to describe the ecologies of selves to which AAI gives
rise? What positions and relationships are entailed by, or responsible for,
these multispecies constellations of agents?
• Relatedly, through what procedures do participants in AAI make ascriptions
of subjective experiences, or allocate possibilities for selfhood, across the
human-nonhuman boundary?
Neither Isaacson nor Gardner comments in detail on the wider history of using ani-
mals as helpers and healers, but one strategy for exploring both texts through the
modes of inquiry being pursued in multispecies ethnography would be to conduct
a diachronic, cross-generic study of relevant narratives. Although it lies beyond the
scope of the present analysis (but see my discussion of disability studies below),
the aim of such a study would be to compare the animal assistants featuring in
these and other autism memoirs with nonhuman agents portrayed in a variety of
myths, in news reports dating from different eras, and in fictional and nonfictional
accounts of animal heroes (and, for that matter, animal opponents). Another rele-
vant strategy would be to conduct cross-cultural comparisons of contemporary uses
of AAI. Isaacson does mention his prior experiences with the shamanistic practices
of the bushmen of the Kalahari Desert in South Africa; however, his memoir’s focal
concern with Rowan’s autism means that potential comparisons are left underde-
veloped, with Isaacson’s main emphasis being the apparently salubrious effects of
interactions between Rowan and the specific horses (and other animals) he happens
to encounter during the family’s travels through Mongolia and elsewhere.8
A focus on ecologies of selves and on ascriptions of subjective experiences across
the species boundary can likewise suggest how accounts of localized human-animal
interactions in autism memoirs, among other accounts of AAI, both reflect and
help shape broader cultural assumptions, institutions, and practices (for a fuller dis-
cussion of mental-state attributions in interspecies encounters, see c hapter 6). It is
debatable whether an extended, transhuman community of selves in fact emerges in
narratives like Isaacson’s and Gardner’s; in some contexts, at least, the various non-
human agents involved remain occluded, cut off from the modes of relationality in
the context of which the notion of a self comes to have meaning in the first place.
Further, these occlusions tap into, and help reinforce, the understandings of autistic
human selves that are also projected by the narratives in question. In both texts, the
boundaries of the community of selves shift and fluctuate; over the course of each
narrative, the autistic protagonists as well as the animals they interact with move
from a position outside the community to a position within it—in large part as a
result of these same human-animal encounters.
Thus, when Henry first appears in Gardner’s memoir, the dog’s subjectivity
remains gapped out; he comes across less as an autonomous locus of experience
than as part of the general background in which Dale seeks to acquire agential
selfhood, his own reasons for acting remaining opaque until Henry comes on the
scene. In such contexts Gardner effectively instrumentalizes Henry; indeed, she
explicitly characterizes him as a “living educational resource” (Gardner 2007: 135),
recounting how Dale learns about the concept of hunger through Henry’s need for
regular feeding, and comes to feel less aversion toward having his hair brushed by
seeing how much Henry enjoys being groomed (136–41). Yet Henry eventually
achieves the status of a (transhuman) family member, whose interventions in Dale’s
life complement—and enhance—Dale’s own growing capacity for legible forms of
agency. Henry becomes a kind of proxy self when Gardner and her spouse ventrilo-
quize Henry’s voice for the purpose of communicating with Dale, for example. He
enters even more fully into the community of selves by virtue of his repeated interac-
tions with Dale—and also when he shows himself able to “understand that I was not
myself ” (228) during Gardner’s difficult second pregnancy.9
Similarly, in The Horse Boy, the interactions between Rowan and Betsy, the neigh-
bor’s horse, enable both of these agents-in-the-making to enter the community of
selves from a position outside that community. Isaacson for the most part elides
nonhuman phenomenology when recounting Rowan’s interactions with the horses
and other animals he encounters; however, in reporting his son’s first meeting with
Betsy, Isaacson does ascribe to the horse complex dispositions and traits: “She was
on the quiet side but was famously grumpy towards the other horses, over whom she
was the unquestioned boss” (Isaacson 2009: 26). He also imputes to Betsy an aware-
ness that Rowan is special and that he needs to be protected. Rowan’s specialness
derives, in turn, from his ability to form a direct, quasi-mystical bond with Betsy:
She dipped her head to Rowan’s soft, writhing form, so close and so dangerously
exposed to her hammer-hard hooves. Dipped her head, and mouthed with her lips.
The sign of equine submission . . .. In all the years I had been training horses, I had
never seen this happen. My son had some kind of direct line to the horse. (22)
Isaacson had remarked previously, “I had to find a way into his world, into his mind.
I found it, amazingly, through a horse, Betsy” (5). Thus, like Dale’s interactions
with Henry, Rowan’s interactions with Betsy result in the assimilation of both a
human and a nonhuman agent into the community of selves, which in these sto-
ries of AAI only sometimes cuts across species lines. Indeed, as I discuss in my next
subsection, the membership criteria for inclusion in such more-than-human com-
munities remain unstable, because of contradictory attitudes toward animals more
generally—attitudes that constitute an important research focus in the field of crit-
ical animal studies.
Accounts of AAI, Critical Animal Studies,

and Animal Geography
Cross-disciplinary conversations being conducted under the headings of critical

animal studies (McCance 2013) and human-animal studies (Marvin and McHugh
2014) also bear importantly on the multilayered trans-species entanglements
that feature in narratives like Gardner’s and Isaacson’s. One relevant strand of
work in this domain involves the reassessment of ideas of the human—and of the
nonhuman—in light of research undercutting earlier assumptions about the distinc-
tiveness of humans vis-à-vis other animals when it comes to language and tool use,
cognition, and complexity of cultural organization (Herzing and White 1998). This
work has led in turn to a rethinking of the scope of the concept “person,” along with
a wider, posthumanist re-examination of value hierarchies premised on the central-
ity of the human (Braidotti 2013; Cavalieri 1998; Francione 2004; Wolfe 2010).
Ideas emerging from this reassessment have resulted, in turn, in critiques of attempts
to use rights-based discourse to promote better treatment of nonhuman animals
(Opotow 1993; Regan 1983; Singer 1975/1990), in favor of “a bioegalitarian turn
encouraging us to relate to animals as animals ourselves” (Braidotti 2009: 526). Still
other researchers focus on intersections among attitudes toward animals and norms
relating to gender and sexuality. This work investigates the cross-mapping of species
and gender constructs, already touched on in my discussion of Angela Carter’s work
in chapter 2; it explores how women and animals become marginalized as other in
interconnected ways by masculinist ideals of the self and, conversely, how a con-
cern for animals gets coded as feminine. Analogous cross-mappings are the focus
of research on animal geographies. This field, to anticipate ideas discussed in more
detail in c hapter 4, studies (culture-specific) divisions between human and nonhu-
man places, and how those divisions both reflect and help shape broader under-
standings of human-animal relationships.10
These lines of inquiry again raise important questions about accounts of AAI in
narratives like Gardner’s and Isaacson’s:
• How do understandings of gender and sexuality bear on narratives about AAI,
and vice versa?
• Where do animal assistants fit within animal geographies, and might stories
about animal assistants reshape those geographies?
• Do accounts of AAI, by focusing on the potential benefits of human-animal
interactions for humans, challenge or reinforce ideas of human exceptionalism?
• More broadly, how does the use of animals as assistants relate to the broader
contradiction identified by Erica Fudge (2002: 8), whereby people treat some
animals as part of a larger, transhuman family while treating others as objects?
Both Gardner’s and Isaacson’s accounts focus on young autistic males; but ques-
tions of gender could be explored through a cross-comparison of narratives featur-
ing male versus female human participants in AAI. Also relevant are questions about
how, in accounts featuring animal helpers, gender identities bear on the attitudes
and practices of the family members, therapists, and others who organize and super-
vise the use of AAI in a given instance.
At the same time, in ways that fall under the remit of animal geography as well
as critical animal studies, Gardner’s and Isaacson’s texts broach issues addressed by
Rebecca Skloot in her account of recent legal disputes in the United States center-
ing on the definitions of “service animals” versus “therapy animals” (2009: MM34).
Whereas therapy animals (sometimes called “comfort animals”) are used in hospitals
and facilities for elderly or disabled people, they are not categorized as service ani-
mals, since they have not been trained to provide a specific service for a person with a
recognized disability, such as functioning as a guide animal for a blind or deaf person.
Whereas the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) requires accommodations to be
made for service animals in public spaces such as restaurants, stores, or buses, no such
legal requirement is in place for therapy or comfort animals. In consequence, disputes
have arisen about the boundaries of the concept of service, and also about the range
of species that can potentially perform services for persons with disabilities.11
If a dog provides the range of assistive functions that Gardner portrays Henry
as performing for Dale, does the sheer quantity of those functions shift Henry into
a different qualitative category, from therapy animal to service animal—such that
Henry should be able to accompany Dale anywhere a seeing-eye dog accompanies
a person with impaired vision? Given that the triggering mechanisms and phenom-
enological correlates of autism and of intellectual disabilities such as attention def-
icit disorder (ADD) and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) are less
well understood than those associated with some physical disabilities, can autism
memoirs and related narratives lead to a more capacious legal definition of service
animal? For that matter, can narratives about less commonly used animal assistants
lead to an increase in the number of species considered as legitimate service ani-
mals? More generally, how might stories about animal assistants provide means to
interrogate norms grounded in a more or less dominant animal geographies, under-
standings of (non)neurotypicality, and legal statutes such as the ADA?
Narratives like Gardner’s and Isaacson’s also bear closer scrutiny when it comes to
their portrayal of the experiences of animal helpers, apart from the assistive functions
attributed to them. For example, practical guidelines for animal welfare underscore
the necessity of attending to species-specific capabilities, dispositions, and prefer-
ences in therapeutic contexts—for instance, dogs’ olfactory acuity or their need for
a place they can retreat to after extended periods of contact with humans (see Glenk
et al. 2014). By contrast, although Gardner does recount Henry’s health problems
late in his life, neither she nor Isaacson registers the distinctive capabilities and pref-
erences of the animal agents whose individual experiences are subordinated under
their role as assistants to human protagonists. This omission, and the underlying cul-
tural contradiction it reflects, contributes to Henry’s and Betsy’s oscillating status in
the two memoirs. Whereas the animals sometimes function as subjects in their own
right, as members of an expanded community or ecology of selves, in other contexts
they remain instrumentalized as objects, defined not through their interconnected-
ness with but their usefulness for the human selves who rely on them.12
Longer Cultural Histories of AAI: Perspectives

from Disability Studies
Ideas from critical animal studies, then, help illuminate factors bearing on the unsta-
ble position of animals within the ecology of selves. Work in disability studies for its
part suggests how humans who have specific physical impairments, which are coded
as dis-abling, can be slotted into the category of the nonhuman, itself interpreted as
the less-than-human. As previously indicated, autism activists dispute the patholo-
gization of neurotypes associated with the autism spectrum, with Savarese using the
concept of neurocosmopolitanism to argue against accounts that construct differ-
ence as deficiency (Savarese and Zunshine 2014). Yet ideas developed by disability
theorists shed light on the longer cultural histories, as well as the current-day biases
grounded in ableism, in which trans-species entanglements like those portrayed by
Gardner and Isaacson can be situated.
Goodley (2011) notes that the concept of disability lends itself to both inclusive
and exclusive interpretations.13 In one sense, disability implies a kind of marginali-
zation, or exclusion—caused by more or less widely shared interpretations (or stig-
matizations) of physical impairments that dis-able persons from full participation in
the social order. But the explosion of diagnostic categories, along with higher rates
of diagnosis, has vastly increased the number of persons considered to be disabled.
Running in parallel with Goodley’s analysis of disability discourse are Midgley’s
(1994) comments on inclusive and exclusive uses of the term animal, as evidenced
in locutions such as Humans are animals too versus Their children behaved like ani-
mals. Indeed, this parallelism points to an isomorphism between discourse about
disability and discourse about animals. In both domains, two countervailing logics
operate simultaneously: a logic of kinship and inclusion, and a logic of difference
and exclusion.
But not only are the discourses of animality and disability isomorphic, or gov-
erned by parallel logics; what is more, they have historically been and continue to
be mapped onto one another. Thus, in his genealogy of concepts of intellectual dis-
ability, C. F. Goodey (2011) argues that those concepts have centered on issues
of species identity from the start. As Goodey discusses, some theories of disabil-
ity bound up with medieval and early-modern religious thought were devil-based;
these theories held that the devil would sometimes substitute for a human infant a
child belonging to a different species (281). Such devil-based theories of disability,
in addition to being “about not having the child one expected but having a different
one, supplied perhaps by the devil,” are also “tacitly also about having a child who
perhaps belongs not to the human species but to a different one” (281). By the same
token, from around 1200 onward, intellectual ability, and in particular the ability to
engage in logical reasoning and abstraction, came to be seen as the defining trait of
the human species (282–312).14 According to Albertus Magnus (ca. late twelfth /
early thirteenth centuries), writes Goodey,
The rational soul distinguishing man from the other animals had to indicate some-
thing more than just a species difference, since other animal species did not differ
from each other by anything so significant. With his aspiration to ascend the dizzying
path of the intellectus and join the immaterial beings above him, man’s greatest anxi-
ety was the interstitial abyss between himself and the mere animals below: whatever
you do, don’t look down. (301)
Here Goodey refers to discourses informed by the cosmological model, or cultural

ontology, that became known as the Great Chain of Being (Lovejoy 1936/1964)
and that also structures Lucy Ives’s “Transformation Day” (2015), as discussed in
chapter 2. Stretching back to Aristotle’s scale of nature (Clutton-Brock 1995; Serpell
1996: 147–68), this linear, hierarchical model projected a horizontal axis of mor-
phological difference onto a vertical or hierarchical model of ontological status—
with the different sorts of beings located at different levels of the model (for example,
God, angels, male humans, female humans, nonhuman animals, inanimate matter)
being assigned different degrees of moral worth. This model’s mapping of species
characteristics onto degrees of ability and ontological status is reversible; hence if
a being otherwise identifiable as human proves deficient in the forms of reasoning
deemed to be threshold criteria for species identity, then the absence of those rea-
soning abilities in itself constitutes grounds for denying that being membership in
the category of the human.
This complex, centuries-old entanglement of understandings of species differ-
ence with judgments about cognitive aptitudes structures Gardner’s and Isaacson’s
accounts. Initially, at least, the narratives frame Dale’s and Rowan’s nonnormative
responses to verbal and other cues as irrational, or motivated by no reconstructible
reason for acting, and this irrationality in turn leads to their expulsion from the cate-
gory of the human. Thus, in reporting one of Dale’s early tantrums, Gardner recounts
how “I had no alternative but to carry this kicking, screaming, seemingly alien being
the whole mile back to the flat, blood running down my face where he had managed
to dig his nails in” (38). Similarly, Isaacson reports feeling “as if I had somehow cursed
this child by giving him my faulty genes, condemned him to a lifetime of living as an
alien because of me” (5). Yet Gardner and Isaacson both claim for their autistic sons
forms of intelligence that fall outside the narrow band of reasoning abilities that are
considered to be prototypically human, or rather are associated with the neurotypi-
cal among humans, and conversely they integrate animal assistants into an expanded
community of selves. In this way, their accounts simultaneously broaden the scope of
the cognitive aptitudes and modalities that define the human and blur the line that,
in hierarchical models of species difference, separates human and nonhuman ways of
being. Narratological approaches to character and characterization can further illumi-
nate these aspects of my two case studies—and what they suggest about the multilay-
ered trans-species entanglements at work in stories concerned with AAI.
Animal Assistants, Characterization,

and Narrative World making
In a previous study, Storytelling and the Sciences of Mind (Herman 2013), I propose
a two-sided approach to narrative world making, considering storyworlds, or the
worlds projected via storytelling practices, as both a result of and a support for
efforts to make sense of experience. On the one hand, I use the expression world-
ing the story to refer to the process by which interpreters of narratives (in whatever
medium) engage with narrative under its profile as a target of interpretation. On
the other hand, I use the term storying the world to refer to the process of using sto-
ryworlds to make sense of experience, and in particular the conduct of persons.
Worlding the story, or making sense of narratives, entails using textual designs to
explore when, what, where, who, how, and why dimensions of mentally con-
figured worlds or storyworlds. Interpreters specify or “fill out” these dimensions in
more or less detail—to the extent required by their purposes in engaging with a
given text. When it comes to storying the world, or using narrative as an instrument
of mind, the converse issue is at stake: how building narrative worlds can scaffold
efforts to make sense of experience. For example, stories can be produced in order
to account for one’s own or someone else’s conduct—by linking that conduct to rea-
sons for acting that might not otherwise be evident. At a more macro or supraper-
sonal level, stories can be used to intervene in a field of discourses or a constellation
of ideological positions.
From this perspective, the study of narratives about animal assistants can be recast
in terms of questions concerning character-pertinent aspects of storyworlds; the key
issue is how cross-species character relationships shape the interpretation and use of
narrative worlds. With respect to narrative interpretation, Ralf Schneider’s (2001)
work on characters sheds light on this issue and the layers of entanglement at stake
(see also Herman 2013: chap. 5). Schneider suggests that engaging with (human)
characters in stories often involves categorization, whereby preexisting models of
persons are brought to bear, in a top-down fashion, on agents in narrative worlds—
as when I interpret a particular character as a boastful coward, a loyal friend, or a
compulsive gambler. In turn, the hierarchical understanding of species difference
that can be traced back to Aristotle’s scale of nature and the Great Chain of Being
constitutes an important source domain for models of persons. Encapsulating the
species-blending characterization strategies used by Isaacson and Gardner, figures
3.1 and 3.2 illustrate how those strategies invite specific kinds of categorization
processes. Figure 3.1 suggests how in attributing forms of disability to their human
protagonists, these autism memoirs effectively recategorize the affected humans (at
least in some contexts) as nonhuman. Figure 3.2 illustrates the converse process,
whereby ability-demonstrating nonhuman characters such as Betsy and Henry are,
if not completely recategorized as human, at least admitted into an expanded com-
munity of selves, as part of a transhuman family.
But another passage from Isaacson, more fully elaborated in a sequence from the
film version of The Horse Boy (Scott 2009), suggests how cross-species character rela-
tionships in narratives can also have an impact on the process of storying the world—
that is, on the use of narratives as a resource for sense making. Here Isaacson’s account
Human Ability
Nonhuman Disability
Figure 3.1 Characterization as categorization: human disability as species transformation.

Human Ability
Nonhuman Disability
Figure 3.2 Characterization as categorization: nonhuman ability as species

transformation.
Human Ability
Nonhuman Disability
Figure 3.3 Characterization as recategorization: disability as ability.
suggests how narratives can be leveraged to reframe dominant understandings of the

ability/disability distinction vis-à-vis models of species difference. In the memoir,
Isaacson recounts his interview with the developmental psychologist and autism
expert Simon Baron-Cohen, whom Isaacson quotes as making (in terms reminiscent
of Savarese’s idea of neurocosmopolitanism) the following statement: “perhaps in the
future . . . it is going to be increasingly controversial whether autism is something
that needs to be cured or not. Perhaps it is more a personality type” (Isaacson 2009:
313). In the film adaptation, this interview is part of a longer sequence that begins by
re-emphasizing Rowan’s special rapport with animals and highlighting his uncanny
ability to group his animal toys by species. Then Baron-Cohen appears, asserting
that traits associated with autism, such as the ability to focus intensely on a partic-
ular topic or task, may have contributed to the evolutionary success of the human
species. Here, in a first step, Baron-Cohen recasts disability as a kind of ability, and
then in a second step moves away from any hierarchical model of species difference
and instead embraces a horizontal model, in which humans as well as nonhumans are
subject to evolutionary processes that shape their phylogenetic heritage. Figure 3.3
captures how, in part because of their place within a larger narrative sequence, Baron-
Cohen’s comments reconfigure understandings of autism, and ideas about disability,
vis-à-vis questions of species identity.
In highlighting how engaging with narratives involves an interplay between the
processes of worlding the story and storying the world, figures 3.1–3.3 also suggest
the relevance of scholarship on narrative for the fourth layer of trans-species entan-
glements. On the one hand, prior models of species identity and human-animal
relationships—models circulating more or less pervasively in the culture(s) of which
I am a member—guide my interpretation of stories about animal assistants and
persons with autism. On the other hand, stories of this sort can in turn reshape the
models in question; telling different kinds of narratives about humans’ relationships
with nonhuman others has the potential to alter understandings of our place within
a more-than-human world, and hence of what constitutes or defines the human
(see also chapter 7). Thus, by oscillating between a focus on stories as a target of
interpretation and an emphasis on narrative as a resource for sense making, it is pos-

sible to bring within the scope of analysis the way an analyst’s own frames of reference
interact with human-animal relationships in narratives like Gardner’s and Isaacson’s.
n S
TORYTELLING PRACTICES, KINSHIP
N E T WO R K S , A N D T H E T R A N S H U M A N F A M I LY
As I have sought to emphasize thus far in the present chapter, an important task
for a narratology beyond the human is assembling an inclusive corpus of narratives,
told in a variety of settings and media, about human-nonhuman entanglements in
contexts of AAI. The goal is to move from viewing these stories as isolated, discon-
nected “anecdotes” to interpreting them as part of a larger, community history of
trans-species relationships, which shares with the project of oral history the poten-
tially revolutionary, paradigm-changing energies of “history from below” (Ritchie
2003; see also Ritchie 2011). At the same time, I have outlined several directions
for inquiry when it comes to research on the multilayered trans-species interactions
and relationships that feature in such narratives, as represented by Gardner’s and
Isaacson’s texts. Each of these investigative routes warrants further exploration, and
other routes need to be opened up as well—for example, through frame-by-frame
analysis of video-recorded interactions between autistic persons and animal assis-
tants, or by studying blogs and other online testimonials by parents, facilitators, or
former participants in AAI.
I turn now to a discussion of how approaches to family therapy, and research
on families more generally, provide further means for investigating human-animal
entanglements of the sort revealed by narratives such as The Horse Boy and A Friend
Like Henry. These two texts situate autism in a shifting ontological landscape
in which concepts of the human and the nonhuman, and also of the neurotypes
that can be viewed as normative versus nonnormative for different kinds of ani-
mals (humans included), become intertwined and sometimes transposed. In con-
sequence, the centrality of animal assistants to Isaacson’s and Gardner’s narratives
leads in both cases to a widened family network that crosses species lines. In other
words, in accounts of autistic persons’ participation in more-than-human activities
and relationships, storyworld agents such as Betsy and Henry can begin to take on
more-than-animal profiles. In a dynamic that resonates with work on “fictive fami-
lies” as well as ideas from family systems theory and tools used in family therapy, this
extension or rather distension of kinship networks in turn suggests how narratives
about entangled selves are often also stories about transhuman families.15 Or rather,
such narratives highlight the need to reconceive the idea of family itself in cross-or
rather multispecies terms. Accordingly, the research to be considered here antici-
pates issues that will be brought to the fore in c hapter 4 in my discussion of graphic
adaptations of Franz Kafka’s 1915 novella The Metamorphosis (Die Verwandlung).
Kafka’s narrative, too, resituates family ties in a broader network of relationships that
includes but also extends beyond the human, and conversely makes cross-species
affiliations a family matter.
Fictive Families and Trans-species Affiliation
The sociologists Nickie Charles and Charlotte Aull Davies (2008), while conduct-
ing 193 interviews with Welsh informants that centered on patterns of family forma-
tion and kinship relations, found that a number of informants asked, unprompted,
whether their pets or companion animals could be included within the family net-
works they were describing (sec. 1.1). Informants, male as well as female, placed
these animals in diagrams used to map out their family networks, sometimes in
the inner circle of the three concentric circles that signified the relative central-
ity or importance of the family relationships in question (sec. 5). Remarking that
“the boundaries between relationships that are ‘given,’ in terms of consanguineal
and/or affinal links, and those that are ‘chosen’ are not necessarily salient in under-
standing how definitions of family and kin are constructed” (sec. 9.2), Charles and
Davies extrapolate from their findings as follows: “Family and kinship are socially
constructed and . . . different rationales are used to justify the choices made . . . this
construction may ignore the species barrier thereby recognising the possibility of
kinship between humans and other animals” (sec. 9.3).16
This possibility is implicit in the concept of fictive kinship, developed by anthro-
pologists to describe “individuals unrelated by birth or marriage who label and treat
one another as kin” (Qirko 2011: 310) and used to examine relationships such as
godparenting and fostering (310–11).17 As Qirko (2011) points out, the concept
of kinship itself, let alone fictive kinship, varies widely across cultures, making it dif-
ficult to identity a shared set of definitional criteria across cultural and subcultural
understandings of family relatedness (311–12). But the very fuzziness of families
is what broaches the possibility of nonhuman kin, since animals as well as humans
can be slotted into kinship roles that are inherently flexible—or unstable—across
space and over time (Wilson et al. 2013: 229, 233). Thus Serpell and Paul (2011),
exploring the possibly adaptive functions of pet keeping for humans, despite the
apparent costliness of entering into relationships with animals who are kept “prima-
rily for social, emotional, or sentimental reasons” rather than for economic or practi-
cal purposes (297), point to evidence suggesting that companion animals as well as
humans can provide stress-buffering social support (302–3), of the kind once found
in infrahuman family networks that have now become dispersed geographically or
attenuated for other reasons (303).18 Grier (2006) likewise discusses the histori-
cally variable situation of companion animals in kinship networks. Specifically, using
diary entries about companion animals’ death, advertisements for lost animals, and
details of the educational programs sponsored by early animal welfare organizations,
Grier trace changes in discourse about animals in the United States during the nine-
teenth century (154–61). As compared with a more separatist discourse on animals
earlier in the century, “In a culture where an idealized family life set the standard
for human relationships, the domestic ethic of kindness defined the place of the
household animals by using metaphors that transformed them into members of
those families” (155). Animal companions became “beloved children who, within
the limits of their capacities, were entitled to the same care and attention as human
offspring” (155), and animals’ own families were represented as a parallel to human
families (162–66). In turn, in a move reminiscent of the sociobiological arguments
with which A. S. Byatt critically engages in Morpho Eugenia (1992), as discussed in
chapter 2, “Comparing human families and animal families, and ‘finding’ monogamy
and loving care of infants in both, reinforced the cultural norms of domesticity by,
paradoxically, giving the virtues of middle-class family life origins in the [natural]
world” (162–63).
Other indicators of altered and expanded kinship networks include the practice
of featuring companion animals in family photographs (Ruby 1982); the use of pets
as a resource for family interactions, as in the exchange of stories involving a fam-
ily’s companion animals or coordinated acts of speaking to, about, or in behalf of
those animals (see Tannen 2004; Tovares 2010); the introduction of pet hospice
programs by veterinary hospitals and clinics (Bishop et al. 2008); the establishment,
beginning in the late nineteenth century, of pet cemeteries (Desmond 2016: 81–
124; Howell 2015: 125–49; Kean 2013); the proliferation of pet testimonials and
memorials, online and elsewhere (Ambros 2010, 2012: 124–55; DeMello 2016);
and the inclusion of details about animals in obituaries of their deceased human
companions (Desmond 2016: 125–40; Wilson et al. 2013). Also relevant are the
accounts of “wild messengers,” or members of nondomesticated species appearing
after the death of a family member and interpreted by the bereaved as avatars of lost
loved ones (see Holland 2014, as well as the further stories about such animal ava-
tars in the comments posted by readers).19
But even more fundamental alterations in kinship networks are, as Bartowski
(2008) notes, now pointing up the need for a new, transhuman concept of fam-
ily. Citing developments in bioscience and biotechnology of the sort discussed
in chapter 2, including those bearing on practices of surrogacy and egg donation,
Bartowski identifies an infrahuman crisis of kinship that has been precipitated
largely by “the unforeseen destabilization of maternity and motherhood that we are
witnessing in the early years of the twenty-first century” (13). At the same time, ever
more proximate relationships between humans and other animals—relationships
being revealed by work in fields such as anthropology and primatology and effectu-
ated by developments in stem-cell research—are giving rise to a rethinking of kin-
ship networks that extend beyond the species boundary. As Bartowski puts it,
There is a literature both scientific and popular, and growing exponentially, on our
commonalities with nonhuman primates. Cross-species medical technologies, trans-
genic identities, and other chimeric beings force us to rework, rethink, rewrite our
epistemological categories. . . . These “hot zones” of contact, connection, and conflict
between humans and our closest animal kin reward contemplation and speculation
for the ethical and intimate issues they raise. (2008: 60)
Carol Guess and Kelly Magee, in their story collection With Animal (2015), use
the resources of fiction to imagine such human-animal hot zones; the volume features
a constellation of microworlds in which forms of kinship—more precisely, modes of
mothering (and fathering)—breach the species boundary. Indeed, in this fictional

text, the concept of fictive kin takes on whole new meaning. The individual stories are
titled after the species of animal (horse, fox, fish, spider, sparrow, human, etc.), kind of
mythical creature (dragon, unicorn), or type of object, artifact, or phenomenon (rep-
lica, nebula, stone lion, storm, plague of locusts, etc.) with which the characters are
pregnant. Yet Guess and Magee’s use of prepositional phrases in their story titles—
“With Fox,” “With Dragon,” “With Storm,” and so on—not only evokes the condi-
tion of being pregnant with a nonhuman creature or entity, but also suggests how
giving birth to these progeny requires learning how to live alongside them, that is,
with them, as fellow members of biotic communities that extend beyond the human.
These stories, then, are fables of transhuman families; more precisely, the tales at once
evoke the transhuman reach of the concept of family and draw on concepts, meta-
phors, and associations linked to families to figure forth more-than-human worlds.
A mother who adopts a spider after a car accident kills her human daughter
(66–70); another mother who is disappointed when she learns that her baby is
human, as it “rattled inside her, fearless and furless, alphabet of bones and thumbs”
(25); a narrator whose partner becomes a feral fox after shooting up with heroin,
and whose daughter, though she herself takes shots to prevent another vulpine
transformation in the family, gives birth to fox cubs (111–17); a rat whose human
mother works in a lab engaged in genetic experimentation, and who finds the lab
by tracing the mother’s scent, “smells of death and wrong, the sizzle of panic, and
of mutation, everything inside out, twisted messages and nonsense. They could
not cry for help. They could not comprehend not-pain or read their own labels”
(64); a new version of the Immaculate Conception, titled “With Animal” (142–
47), in which “what emerges is a bundle of fur and claw that immediately scurries
further into the back of the barn and hides,” with the mother naming this “big
pig-sloth-dog” (145) Mary Todd Lincoln and concluding that “this is what par-
enting is . . . you stuff your animal into human clothes. You walk into the world
disguised” (147)—in focusing on such cross-species kinship networks, and more
specifically parent-child relationships in which the offspring occupy a position on
the phylogenetic tree that is sometimes widely separated from (or indeterminately
situated with respect to) humans’ own, these stories use an expanded model of the
family to reimagine our relational ties with, and responsibilities to, the full range
of creatural life.
Family Therapy and Transhuman Families
Research and practice in the domain of family therapy further illuminate storytell-
ing practices that bear on kinship networks extending beyond the human. Citing
the work of family-systems theorist and family therapist Murray Bowen (1978),
Melson (2001) notes that pets may become part of the process of “triangling,”
whereby “intense emotions between two persons deflect onto a third person, issue,
or, in this case, animal” (41). As Walsh (2009b) puts it, thanks to such deflective
and, in this instance, kinship-building processes, “When pets are treated as family
members, feelings of jealousy, anger, control, guilt, and fear can all play out through
them” (486). The concept of triangling sheds new light on the relational dynamics
recounted in A Friend Like Henry: Gardner’s and her partner’s ventriloquizations
of Henry’s voice can be viewed as emerging, in part, from an attempt to displace or
diffuse frustrations that arise during their interactions with Dale. Similar processes
of transhuman triangling structure the dynamics at work in other accounts of fami-
lies, whether in fictional contexts (e.g., Lassie vis-à-vis Joe Carraclough and both
of his parents in Knight’s Lassie Come-Home, or Fern vis-à-vis Rosemary and other
members of the Cooke family in Fowler’s We Are All Completely beside Ourselves) or
in nonfiction (e.g., Tulip vis-à-vis Ackerley’s interactions with his cousin in My Dog
Tulip, or Boots vis-à-vis Jesse’s tense relationship with his father in Reklaw’s Thirteen
Cats of My Childhood).
In her overview of work on pets in family systems and in family therapy, Walsh
(2009b: 490–94) distinguishes between exploring the role of companion animals
in a family’s functioning and relational dynamics, on the one hand, and engaging in
symbolic uses of animals to represent family members’ understandings of their own
roles and relations, on the other hand. Innovative methods have been developed
to capture orientations to animals in both contexts—methods that that can con-
tribute to research and clinical practice conducted emically, or from a participant-
oriented perspective, as opposed to etically, or via categories imposed by the analyst
irrespective of those categories’ relevance for participants (see Pike 1982). Thus,
whereas Melson (2001) suggests that “the precise quality of children’s relation-
ships with pets remains elusive,” with “much of children’s emotional life with ani-
mals [remaining] hidden to us” (42), genograms or diagrams of family networks
can be used to uncover children’s as well as mature family members’ understandings
of and bonds with companion animals.20 By the same token, methods such as sand-
play enactments (Carey 2010), animal kinetic family drawings ( Jones 1985), and
the animal-attribution storytelling technique (Arad 2004) recruit from identifica-
tory tendencies discussed in my previous chapter, in connection with Case’s (2005)
research on children’s identifications with animals in therapeutic settings. All of this
work thus provides independent support for Lévi-Strauss’s (1962/1964) character-
ization of animals as good to think with, in totemic systems and beyond (see also
Daston and Mitman 2005).
As Huss and Cwikel (2008) write, “The genogram can capture family history
by noting relationships between births, losses, connections, patterns, roles, occu-
pations, and communications within a family unit over generations” (172). Or as
McGoldrick, Gerson, and Petry (2008) put it, by recording information about fam-
ily members and their relationships over at least three generations, genograms “dis-
play family information graphically in a way that provides a quick gestalt of complex
family patterns; as such they are a rich source of hypotheses about how clinical prob-
lems evolve in the context of the family over time” (2). Figures 3.4–3.6, taken from
Hodgson and Darling (2011), show the symbols used to represent (human) fam-
ily members, the nature of family relationships, and the quality of family members’
connections with one another.
Male
Female Index Person
Pregnancy
Deceased
Figure 3.4 Genogram symbols for family members.

Credit line: Reprinted with permission from Hodgson and Darling’s “Pets in the Family:
Practical Approaches” (JAAHA, September–October 2011), 299–305. Copyright ©
2011 American Animal Hospital Association (aaha.org).
Married
Unmarried relationship
Separated
Divorced
Figure 3.5 Genogram symbols for the nature of family relationships.

Strong bond
Overclose relationship-
fused
Conflict
Relationship cut-off
Figure 3.6 Genogram symbols for the quality of family members’ connections with
one another.
Practical Approaches” (JAAHA, September–October 2011), 299–305. Copyright
© 2011 American Animal Hospital Association (aaha.org).
Cat Horse
Dog Rabbit
Bird Fish
Turtle Pocket Pet
Snake
Figure 3.7 Genogram symbols for kinds of animals.

In turn, by incorporating companion animals into genograms, children and other

participants in family therapy can express their understandings of trans-species kin-
ship structures, facilitating the co-construction of narratives that (re)interpret family
dynamics in light of relationships and affiliations that unfold within but also extend
beyond the realm of the human. To that end, Hodgson and Darling (2011) have
refined earlier genogrammatic methods, in which all pets were subsumed under a
simple diamond symbol (302), by creating a range of symbols for different kinds of
companion animals, shown in figure 3.7.
A primary goal for Hodgson and Darling is to use the new symbols to help pre-
vent the spread of zoonotic diseases. Thus the family case study presented in the
genogram included as figure 3.8 reveals that the index female’s two young children
are at risk from intestinal parasites that might be transmitted by the family’s Great
Dane and also from salmonella infection via their paternal grandfather’s turtles and
snakes (303–4). As Walsh (2009b) suggests, however, animal-including genograms
can also be used to generate narratives about the past importance of family animals,
about the emotional impact of a pet’s recent or anticipated death, or about the sig-
nificance of human-animal relationships when it comes to life transitions such as
divorce and the creation—and negotiation—of stepfamilies (491–92). Thus, Walsh
(2009b) includes a young girl’s genogram, reproduced as figure 3.9, that reflects her
understanding of her family situation.
Although Walsh notes that the drawing indicates the strength of the child’s bond
with her dog in her transition to a new family structure that includes her stepfa-
ther, the genogram also recruits from the symbols featured in figure 3.5 to suggest
other storytelling possibilities. Potentially, the drawing could be used as a basis for
co-constructing a family narrative in which the child feels closer to her father than
either her mother or her stepfather, in part because of ongoing tensions or conflicts
that her relationship with her dog has created, perhaps because of her stepfather’s
disapproval of the dog or of pet keeping as such. In this scenario, the dog’s posi-
tion within the family at once results from and impinges on emergent relationships
Figure 3.8 Sample genogram of a trans-species family system.

Figure 3.9 A young girl’s genogram, reflecting her orientation to her dog within the larger
family structure. From Froma Walsh (2009b: 491).
Credit line: © Family Process Institute and John Wiley and Sons.
among other, human family members, highlighting links between concepts of kin-
ship and forms of trans-species relationality. More generally, genograms constitute
an important resource for any narratology beyond the human, affording means to
map out relationships, and thereby bring to light more or less tacit or implied story
lines, in fictional as well as nonfictional accounts of kinship networks that cut across
The use of animal toys in sandplay enactments of family situations and
dynamics (Carey 2010), animal kinetic family drawings ( Jones 1985), and the
animal-attribution storytelling technique described by Arad (2004) establish

other sorts of trans-species ties; in these storytelling environments, cultural mod-
els of the nonhuman world, and more specifically of animals’ social and familial
worlds, provide a basis for reflecting back on family-level systems and processes
in the human cultures from which those models originate. Thus Carey (2010)
discusses how, by using toy animal figures to construct models of family roles
during sandplay, bereaved children can better process how a significant (human)
death affects them and their relationships with other family members. Jones
(1985) discusses the potential benefits of converting kinetic family drawings—
that is, drawings in which children draw their family members engaged in some
activity, with the focus on movement or activity mobilizing the child’s feelings
about himself or herself (188)—into animal kinetic family drawings. Although
as it turns out Jones’s pilot-study did not confirm this hypothesis (190–91),
by having children draw a family of animals it may be possible to create a more
distanced, less personalized, and potentially less emotionally fraught narrative
environment for working through self-concepts in the face of challenging family
events, such as divorce.
Along similar lines, Arad (2004) situates what she terms the animal attribu-
tion storytelling technique, designed as a therapeutic intervention for families
with children diagnosed with conduct disorder, oppositional defiant disorder,
and/or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, in the broader context of family
play therapy (see Gil 2015), in which participants engage in forms of creative
activity as an adjunct to family talk. Arad relates animal attribution storytelling
to the use of puppets, kinetic family drawings and other drawing techniques, and
more generic forms of therapeutic storytelling, in which children’s, therapists’,
and other family members’ versions of a story are put into dialogue with one
another, with a view to developing new resolutions to the issues on which the
story-versions focus (252–53). At the same time, Arad suggests that using ani-
mal identifications to generate family stories allows participants to “integrate the
world of symbols and metaphor with the world of experience by modeling fan-
tasy alternatives to real-life stress” (253), enabling them to externalize and work
through feelings of low self-esteem and reclaim a sense of agency (254). As Arad
describes the technique, using animal attributions to generate stories in family
therapy
requires all family members to attribute an animal to all other family members,
including themselves, and to then tell a short story about the animals. . . . After the
stories are complete, the clinician goes back to the first story and reads it out loud.
The therapist asks questions and invites discussion by asking about likes and dis-
likes, challenging beliefs and outcomes of the story, and so on. The therapist can also
explore which characteristics (physical, symbolic, or behavioral) of the selected ani-
mal appeal or do not appeal to the giver and receiver of the attribution. The animal
image can then be expanded to incorporate new and positive characteristics, thus
reframing a potentially derogatory image. (Arad 2004: 254–55)
Table 3.1 summarizes the different animal attributions made by the family members
discussed by Arad as a case study. This summarizing table suggests, for example, how
Dana framed her own aggressive conduct toward her brother, Roy, by casting herself
as a wolf and Roy as a chicken, while Roy profiled his father as a careless, destructive
elephant, wreaking havoc everywhere he goes.
Accordingly, in addition to facilitating active participation by children as well as
their parents, and providing a playful storytelling environment for addressing poten-
tially volatile issues, such animal attributions allow family members as well as the
therapist “to get a picture of the family system from each family member’s point
of view, and to identify perceived family structures such as hierarchy, coalitions,
distancing, rules, and so on” (260). Once again, as with the work on genograms,
research on the use of animal attributions in stories told in therapeutic contexts
bears directly on the development of a narratology beyond the human. This research
suggests new strategies for interpreting animal fables and allegories, for example, as a
more or less displaced working-through of family-level systems and processes (com-
pare Le Guin 1987/1994; Payne 2007). Likewise, other animal narratives can be
read as mediated by cultural models grounded in kinship networks—networks that
themselves emerge, dialectically, from understandings of self-other relationships
both within and across the species boundary.
n C
ONCLUDING REMARKS
In all of these storytelling environments, from autism memoirs involving animal

assistants to stories told about or by means of animals in contexts of family ther-
apy, tellers must manage a fundamental contradiction or antinomy between two sets
of cultural norms: on the one hand, norms based on a dichotomization of human
and nonhuman beings, according to which the concept of a nonhuman person, and
hence a transhuman family, would be incoherent and potentially threatening to a
variety of anthropocentric traditions, institutions, and practices; on the other hand,
norms that permit members of other species to be considered as part of one’s fam-
ily, in effect broadening the ecology of selves to include animal agents, nonhuman
subjects. By the same token, to the extent that a given narrative embraces the second
set of norms, and accommodates members of other species in more-than-human
families, it also profiles humans themselves as part of a larger family of living beings,
a kinship network that spans multiple kinds of kin.
TA B L E 3 .1 Animal attributions in stories by four family members

Mommy’s AASTT Daddy’s AASTT Roy’s AASTT Dana’s AASTT
Mommy Bear Penguin Dog Horse

Daddy Dolphin Chimp Elephant Squirrel
Roy Lemur Moose Cat Chicken
Dana Bunny Mountain goat Cockroach Wolf
Source: From Diana Arad (2004: 258). © Family Process Institute and John Wiley and Sons.
Note: AASTT = Animal Attribution Story-Telling Technique.
In chapters 6 and 7, I return to clashes between norms like the ones just men-
tioned and discuss how they affect the design and interpretation of narratives about
animals and human-animal relationships. More specifically, I explore how such nor-
mative systems bear on attributions of mental states to nonhuman agents in story-
worlds. But first, I open Part II with two chapters that, by focusing on questions
about storytelling media and narrative genres, provide additional context for the
broader project of developing a narratology beyond the human. Indeed, chapters 4
and 5 argue that issues of medium as well as genre are foundational for any inquiry
into how stories both shape and are shaped by engagements with more-than-human
worlds.
n P A RT II
Narrative Engagements
with More-Than-Human Worlds
4 Multispecies Storyworlds
in Graphic Narratives
bad coat. coat. is coat not “bandit.”
—grant morrison and frank quitely, WE3
(Morrison and Quitely 2005; see figure 4.16)
In a recent article, “Animal Subjects of the Graphic Novel,” Michael A. Chaney
(2011a) remarks that despite ample historical contextualization of the funny ani-
mal comics that have helped shape later traditions of graphic storytelling, includ-
ing texts such as Art Spiegelman’s Maus, “very little scholarship exists that casts the
animal of the comics in the dawning theoretical light of concepts known variously
as animality, becoming-animal, or animetaphor” (130). In the years since Chaney’s
article was published, several relevant studies have appeared, including a critical
monograph (Willmott 2012), two special issues of Antennae titled “The Illustrated
Animal” (Brown 2011) and “Literary Animals Look” (McHugh and McKay 2013),
and a number of individual journal articles and book chapters centering on pertinent
texts and topics.1 That said, however, attempts to leverage the cross-disciplinary con-
versations being conducted under the headings of critical animal studies (McCance
2013), human-animal studies (Marvin and McHugh 2014), and related rubrics (see
Herman 2014) for the purpose of analyzing graphic narratives featuring nonhuman
agents remain in a nascent state (but see Herman 2018c). Nor does the term animal
appear in the index of studies focusing on the history and theory of graphic narra-
tives more generally, such as Baetens and Frey’s The Graphic Novel: An Introduction
(2015), Gardner’s Projections (2012), or Hatfield’s Alternative Comics (2005).
What is more, although comics and graphic novels now figure importantly in
research on storytelling across media, or the subfield of narrative inquiry sometimes
called transmedial narratology, this research has not yet taken fully into account
how graphic narratives in which animal characters play a more or less central role
may necessitate a rethinking of paradigms for narrative analysis. Reciprocally, tools
developed by narratologists have not been exploited as fully as they might be when
it comes to the study of animal comics, among other storytelling media in which
narratives about animals and human-animal relationships circulate (see, however,
Baetens 2018; Herman 2018a). The present chapter, building on my discussion of
Jesse Reklaw’s Thirteen Cats of My Childhood in chapter 1, outlines how developing
a narratology beyond the human can help generate strategies for addressing these
lacunae in the scholarship on graphic narratives that concern animal agents. After
providing a fuller overview of issues raised by the study of comics and graphic novels
via frameworks for inquiry grounded in transmedial narratology as well as research
117
118 ■ Narrative Engagements with More-Than-Human Worlds
on animals and human-animal relationships, I highlight two key questions deserving

further investigation. I articulate these questions in dialogue with example texts that
include Shirley Hughes’s 2009 wordless comic Bye, Bye Birdie; several graphic adap-
tations of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis (Die Verwandlung) (1915); Nick Abadzis’s
Laika, about the test dog used by the Soviets in their early space exploration pro-
gram; Grant Morrison’s and Frank Quitely’s dystopian sci-fi comic WE3; and other
narratives. The first question I explore via these case studies is how such animal com-
ics both bear the impress of and also comment reflexively on animal geographies,
or cultural understandings of where animals belong relative to the places associated
with human institutions, practices, and activities. The second question, anticipat-
ing issues on which chapters 6 and 7 provide additional perspectives, concerns the
techniques used in comics and graphic novels to evoke animal experiences; at issue
here is the extent to which, and the specific ways in which, narrative constitutes a
transmedial resource for engaging with forms of nonhuman subjectivity. More spe-
cifically, I investigate how graphic narratives provide means for projecting Umwelten,
the experiential worlds explored by the philosopher-biologist Jakob von Uexküll
and subsequently defined by Thompson (2007) as a human or nonhuman “animal’s
environment in the sense of its lived, phenomenal world, the world as it presents
itself to that animal thanks to its sensorimotor repertoire” (59).
It may be helpful to define several keywords that will be used in the analysis that
follows: namely, multispecies storyworlds, graphic narratives, and animal comics.2 The
first of these terms does not refer to any particular semiotic medium, given that nar-
rative worlds can be projected by—and transferred among—any number of media
(see Harvey 2014, 2015; Herman 2013: 8–15; Kladstrup and Tosca 2004, 2014).
That said, the descriptor multispecies does delimit the range of narratives being con-
sidered, honing in on those in which intersections or interrelations between the
experiential worlds of humans and of other kinds of animals structure, more or less
explicitly and overtly, the unfolding of events. The other two terms, meanwhile, refer
more or less inclusively to the medium of graphic narration, designating word-image
combinations being used for any storytelling purpose, on the one hand, and the sub-
set of verbal-visual narratives used to project worlds in which animals feature as focal
participants, on the other hand.
n T R A N S M E D I A L N A R R A T O L O G Y,
ANIMAL COMICS, AND STORYTELLING
B E YO N D T H E H U M A N
The development of transmedial narratology is part of a broader reassessment of

the way models of narrative are necessarily based on specific corpora of stories, and
how the stories included in a given corpus therefore shape analysts’ claims about the
forms and functions of narrative itself (Gardner and Herman 2011; Prince 1995a).
In parallel with feminist narratologists who consider whether literary corpora con-
sisting mainly of male-authored texts might lead to an androcentric bias in frame-
works for narrative inquiry (Lanser 1986, 1995), transmedial narratologists explore
Multispecies Storyworlds in Graphic Narratives ■ 119
whether narratives presented in a variety of media may likewise require a recontex-

tualization and recalibration of existing methods for the study of stories. Thus, in a
way that has contributed to the emergence of “postclassical” approaches to scholar-
ship on stories (Herman 1999; Alber and Fludernik 2010)—that is, frameworks for
narrative inquiry that build on classical, structuralist models but supplement those
models with concepts and methods that were unavailable to earlier theorists such
as Roland Barthes, Claude Bremond, Gérard Genette, A. J. Greimas, and Tzvetan
Todorov—transmedial narratology explores how the constraints and affordances
associated with particular media bear on the design and interpretation of stories,
and also how storyworlds can give rise to other accounts, presented in different
media, of the characters, situations, and events rooted in the inaugural (or tradition-
inaugurating) narrative world.3 From this perspective, the ongoing evolution of
what Gardner and Herman (2011) term graphic narrative theory, which investigates
how medium-specific properties of comics and graphic novels contribute to their
structure, meaning, and overall effect (see also Stein and Thon 2013), can be seen
as an organic outgrowth of the continuing reflection on issues of methodology—
in particular, the fit between corpus and theory—that constitutes a basic part of
research in the field of narrative studies.
In the present chapter, however, I focus on a narrower question: namely, how
work on graphic narrative theory can, when brought into dialogue with comics and
graphic novels concerned with animals and human-animal relationships, contribute
to the development of a narratology beyond the human. In other words, although
animal comics raise questions that also apply to other members of the larger class
of multimodal narratives, or stories that exploit more than one semiotic channel
to evoke a narrative world (Herman 2013: 107–12), my chief concern here is with
how animal narratives told in words and images foreground issues that are cen-
trally important for the framework for inquiry being outlined over the course of the
present study.
In a given graphic narrative (or a segment of one), how are human and nonhu-
man actions parceled out between the image track and the verbal track, respectively,
and how does this management of information bear on the process of building a
multispecies narrative world? To put the same question another way, when it comes
to comics and graphic novels concerned with animals, how exactly do readers use
verbal-visual affordances as scaffolding for the construction of storyworlds that
extend beyond the human, and how do the world-making practices enabled by such
graphic narratives relate to the practices associated with animal narratives presented
in other media—and for that matter with graphic narratives that do not focus on
animal agents? To what extent do prior accounts of narrative phenomena (focaliza-
tion, characterization, dialogue, consciousness representation, and so forth) devel-
oped with reference to monomodal or single-channel narratives need to be adjusted
to accommodate graphic storytelling, with the interplay between semiotic channels
that it allows, and what are the implications of such adjustments for the study of ani-
mal comics in particular? Furthermore, do graphic narratives about animal agents
afford different storytelling possibilities than other kinds of multimodal narratives
that exploit different semiotic channels, such as the utterances and gestures used
in face-to-face narration, or the moving images and soundtrack used in cinematic
narratives?
Before beginning to address these questions, I pause to provide additional con-
text for the specific kind of verbal-visual storytelling about animals on which I focus
in the present chapter.
Animal Comics in Context
As indicated previously, I use the term animal comics to refer to graphic narratives
in which nonhuman animals are focal participants in storyworld events; thus in my
usage this generic category is not limited to comics featuring an exclusively non-
human cast of characters. From the “funny animal” tradition that gave rise to such
characters as Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, and others (Rifas 2010; Yezbick 2018), and
that was preceded by George Herriman’s influential, long-running strip Krazy Kat;
to the use of animals for allegorical purposes in Spiegelman’s Maus; to texts, such
as David B.’s Epileptic and Jonathan A’s Alcoholic, that use animal imagery to project
onto animal others aspects of human selves that prove difficult to understand or
accept (compare Chaney 2011a); to texts that engage more directly with animals’
perspectives and experiences, including nonhuman viewpoints on human institu-
tions and practices, such as the Animal Man series, Sue Coe’s Pit’s Letter (2000),
and Adam Hines’s Duncan the Wonder Dog (2010)—what accounts for the long-
standing popularity, and self-renewing generativity, of graphic narratives that feature
animals in these and other ways?
Drawing on the work of Groensteen (1987), Baker (1993/2001) discusses
whether animal comics (rather than literature or film) might be viewed as the favored
site for fictional portrayals of nonhuman animals (131). Though Groensteen’s study
predates the advances in computer-generated imagery that have led to a prolifer-
ation of animated films featuring nonhuman characters, from A Bug’s Life (2003)
and The Lion King (2003) to Finding Nemo (2003) and Kung Fu Panda (2008), his
explanation for why fiction animalière (animal fiction) has found a home in graphic
narratives still merits consideration. As Baker notes, Groensteen focuses on what
he characterizes as the hybrid generic profile of animal comics (bande dessinée ani-
malière); for Groensteen, this form of storytelling lies at the meeting point of chil-
dren’s literature, on the one hand, and satire and fable, on the other hand (Groensteen
1987: 10). Because of this confluence of generic traditions, animal comics allow for
the expression of “animals’ disruptiveness in narrative”—since neither children’s lit-
erature nor satire “is bound by the ‘rules’ of orderly, rational narrative” (Baker 1993/
2001: 131). But a narratology beyond the human provides means for refining this
claim, and hence for developing an alternative research agenda when it comes to
studying graphic narratives featuring nonhuman animals. Arguably, animal fiction
finds a home in animal comics not because of the genre’s inherited tendency to
violate the rules of orderly narrative, but because the genre exploits what can be
described as capacities that inhere in narrative viewed as a representational system,
that is, a system for building storyworlds. Specifically, animal comics exploit narra-
tive’s capacity to construct storyworlds inhabited by nonhuman agents, and in some
instances to place the modeling of those agents’ moment-by-moment experiences
at the center of narrative interest—to anticipate once more issues that I take up not
only later on in this chapter but also in chapters 6 and 7.
Thus, rather than transgressing the rules of orderly narrative, animal comics can
be described as texts that use the narrative system, implemented on a multimodal
platform of words and images, to explore understandings of where and how animals
should be placed in cultural as well as physical territories, and to model what it may
be like for nonhuman others to negotiate those territories—in ways that have the
potential to reshape concepts of the human, and human places, in turn. The sec-
tion that follows focuses on animal comics concerned with (constructions of) the
boundary between human and nonhuman worlds; these texts invite reflection on
how cultural institutions and practices may be invested in maintaining and policing
this boundary—by attempting to separate out human experiences from those of the
rest of creatural life. How can this dividing line be conceptualized, and how do the
narrative strategies used by the creators of comics and graphic novels index ways of
understanding the boundary in question—for example, as sharply defined or fuzzily
gradient, impermeable or porous, fixed or variable?
In chapter 2, I discussed narratives turning on processes of identification as
well as transformation across species lines, with the storyworlds projected by such
accounts featuring characters who lose human traits and acquire nonhuman attri-
butes, or who, conversely, shape-shift from the nonhuman to the human domain,
or who straddle both realms. Such hybrid and metamorphized characters can be
used to construct the human-nonhuman boundary as gradient and porous rather
than clear-cut and impermeable. For their part, graphic narratives have a visual track
in which such understandings of species boundaries and relationships can be pre-
sented, and potentially reconfigured, in literally spatial terms, even as the spatial
organization of panels and pages can both reflect and help forge inferred or expe-
rienced temporal links between events (Chute 2011). As discussed in chapter 1,
Reklaw in Thirteen Cats of My Childhood uses the visual track to link the spatial
boundary imposed by a wall and the temporal boundary imposed by the process of
retrospective narration (see figure 1.1); Reklaw’s text thus cross-maps the human-
nonhuman distinction onto the distinction between Reklaw’s past (experiencing)
and present (narrating) selves, undercutting notions of either contrast as fixed and
categorical. In my next section I explore how Hughes’s Bye, Bye Birdie and graphic
adaptations of Kafka’s Metamorphosis likewise use visual resources to foreground
spatial relationships between humans and animals, but in this case to call attention
to how animal geographies—cultural understandings of where animals belong rel-
ative to humans—entail contradictory strategies for emplacing nonhuman others.
At the same time, graphic narratives featuring animal agents can be viewed as
both the manifestation of and a resource for what might be termed “folk etholo-
gies,” or understandings of animal behavior that circulate more or less widely in the
culture. The study of animal comics can thus shed light on how the members of a
culture or subculture engage in informal theorizing about nonhuman minds, reveal-

ing ways in which such theorizing has become entrenched in (and enabled by) the
storytelling traditions associated with that (sub)culture.4 As Lisa Brown (2013)
puts it, “Comics is a virtually untapped source of insight into cultural paradigms
about animals,” providing a window onto “how we humans believe animals think
and behave, and also how we treat them as a result” (6). A key issue here is how
creators of animal comics use visual and verbal resources to enable interpreters to
draw inferences about the structure and quality of their characters’ experiences, and
how these inferences connect up, in turn, with understandings of animal Umwelten
as well as human-animal relationships. As my case studies suggest, any aspect of the
narrative system can be recruited for the purpose of exploring how different sorts
of beings encounter the world. Thus, whereas Reklaw’s Thirteen Cats demonstrates
how narrative temporality can be used as a kind of template for rethinking human-
centric ways of orienting to nonhuman experiences, the example texts discussed
later in this chapter exploit other aspects of the narrative system to project forms
of animal subjectivity, including the configuration of objects in storyworld spaces,
the appearance and comportment of characters, dialogue (i.e., speech balloons), the
perspective structures encoded within and across panels, and other means of comics
narration.
n A N I M A L G E O G R A P H I E S
IN MULTISPECIES COMICS
In this section I use Hughes’s Bye, Bye Birdie and several graphic adaptations of
Kafka’s Metamorphosis to explore areas of intersection between transmedial narra-
tology and the study of animal geographies, or cultural schemes for situating non-
human beings relative to the places to which humans lay claim. In her overview of
recent work in this domain of geographical research, Julie Urbanik (2012) notes that
“how we treat nonhuman others is fundamentally rooted in the places in which we
can, or cannot, interact” (4).5 Whereas zoogeographical studies (e.g., Allee, Hesse,
and Schmidt 1924/1937) early in the twentieth century “catalogued species and
their current and historical distributions and also studied how the environment
influenced species’ adaptations” (28), and whereas cultural ecological approaches
that emerged in the mid-twentieth century focused mainly on the emplacement of
domesticated animals vis-à-vis humans (38; compare Bennett 1960), more recent
work on animal geographies seeks to take into account how questions of location,
landscape, and scale, for example, bear on humans’ interactions with the full range of
animal species, with research in this area suggesting the usefulness of a broader def-
inition of animal geography as “the study of where, when, why, and how nonhuman
animals intersect with human societies” (Urbanik 2012: 38).6
Thus, as Philo and Wilbert (2000) conceive it, animal geography studies “the
complex entanglings of human-animal relations with space, place, location, environ-
ment and landscape,” focusing both on “the conjoint conceptual and material place-
ment of animals, as decided upon by humans in a variety of situations” and on “the
disruptions of these placements as achieved on occasion by the animals themselves”

(qtd. in Urbanik 2012: 36). In Lorimer and Srinivasan’s (2013) reformulation, Philo
and Wilbert (2000) use the rubrics of “animal spaces” and “beastly places” for these
two foci of analysis, with the first category describing research that examines “the
geographies of how people relate to animals and what these relations tell us about
the characteristics of different human groups and processes” and the second cate-
gory describing “work concerned with the bodies, ecologies, and lived experiences
of animals themselves . . . [and exploring the] practical, ethical, and political impli-
cations of their interactions with humans” (333). Lorimer and Srinivasan further
remark that this second focus on beastly places encompasses different scales for
analysis, ranging from political approaches to animal welfare that engages with the
lived experiences of animals viewed as individual beings, to work in the domain of
conservation that considers animals as members of populations of species or breeds
“whose aggregate survival and flourishing are paramount,” to studies of animals as
agents of trans-species ecological processes ranging from infection to evolution
(2013: 338).7
Comics projecting multispecies storyworlds, like Hughes’s Birdie and the adapta-
tions of Kafka, afford scope both for animal spaces and for beastly places, and they
also raise issues pertinent for the various frames for analysis described by Lorimer
and Srinivasan. Hughes manipulates spatial imagery—in particular fluctuations in
size or scale, and strategic conflations of contained and containing spaces—to map
out mind-bending geographies in the storyworld. Her text uses such anomalous
locales to suggest, in turn, the difficulty of situating the human-nonhuman boundary
in logical space, despite cultures’ investment in establishing and maintaining a strict
demarcation between these domains of animal life. For their part, the adaptations of
Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, in visualizing Gregor and thereby assigning species attri-
butes to a being that Kafka characterizes as an uncategorizable vermin, might on the
face of it seem to contradict or undermine the larger aims of Kafka’s tale of transfor-
mation, particularly its deconstruction of value hierarchies bound up with distinc-
tions between humans and other animals. But the adaptations can be interpreted as
furthering Kafka’s anti-anthropocentric critique. By recruiting from the multimodal
resources of graphic narrative to imagine a verminous other co-inhabiting the most
intimate spaces of the home, the comics versions project an alternative, biocentric
animal geography, in which exclusively human spaces are reterritorialized, at least
temporarily, as sites of trans-species kinship—of the sort discussed in chapter 3.
The Spaces of Species—and Species

of Space—in Bye, Bye Birdie
I argued in chapter 1 that in Reklaw’s autodiegetic account in Thirteen Cats of My

Childhood, the fluctuating psychological distance between the narrating I and expe-
riencing I functions as both a yardstick for and a result of the variable nature—and
partial permeability—of the human-nonhuman boundary. By contrast, Bye, Bye
Birdie narrates interspecies encounters heterodiegetically, and employs the social and
material spaces of the storyworld to question the conceptual foundations of species

difference itself. A wordless thirty-two-page comic, Birdie was authored by Shirley
Hughes, a British writer and illustrator of children’s books who however targeted
an adult readership in this instance—what with the text’s recasting of (potential)
sexual relationships in terms of predator-prey interactions and its use of sometimes
violent imagery. What is more, by figuring a world in which the inside seems to be
outside and vice versa—an M. C. Escher–like milieu in which humans control and
contain nonhuman animals but also the reverse—Hughes uses species of space to
destabilize the spaces of species. By projecting a byzantine storyworld geography,
the text suggests the logical incoherence of attempts to categorize humans as seg-
regated from other species of animal life. At the same time, Hughes’s narrative fig-
ures the human-nonhuman boundary as the symptom of an anxiety—specifically,
a human anxiety about the sustainability of efforts to locate, contain, and thereby
control nonhuman others.
The narrative opens with a man meeting and proposing marriage to what appears
to be a woman wearing a hat with a bird on top of it and also carrying a stole osten-
sibly made of dead birds. Even on the first page of the comic, however, the female
character’s large, oval eyes suggest an unusual bodily morphology. When the man
takes her home, carrying her over the threshold after the fashion of newlyweds, the
female character reveals herself to be a bird in the guise of a human: the stole of dead
birds, which turn out to be alive after all, had been hiding her beak, and her “hands”
(which had also been hidden by the stole) are now shown to be talons. The bird-
woman begins chasing the male character around the house, initiating the pattern of
(nonhuman) pursuit and (human) flight that constitutes the basic action structure
of the narrative as a whole.
The text thus features a double role reversal, with the gender and species attri-
butes of the male human character, who is initially in the dominant position, becom-
ing liabilities that not only diminish his status but also jeopardize his life. Indeed, in
addition to using the bird-woman to portray a transformation across species lines,
or rather an unmasking of species identity by a character whose ploy to hide that
identity paradoxically calls it into question, Hughes also sketches complex map-
ping relationships between gender difference and (cultural paradigms of) species
difference. As indicated in the Oxford English Dictionary, the term birdie functions
in modern-day English as “a term of endearment for a child or a young woman”
(the first attested instance of this usage is from 1889); this disjunctive definition,
which suggests an equivalence between women and children, reflects infantilizing
conceptions of women in the broader culture. The title of Hughes’s text, coupled
with the trope of the pursued female becoming the pursuer, may thus be an indict-
ment of gender stereotypes and of their failure to capture lived realities.8 At the same
time, it is significant that Hughes attributes nonhuman qualities to the female char-
acter, rather than the male. In this respect, the text can be read as reproducing—and
ironizing—long-standing cultural associations between the feminine and the physi-
cal or the “animalistic,” as explored by theorists ranging from Beauvoir (1949/1993)
and Le Guin (1987/1994) to Adams (1990; see also Adams and Donovan 1995).9
As the Oxford English Dictionary also indicates, however, birdie has been used in
English (at least since 1790) to denote more literally a small bird—or, as the OED
puts it, “a dear or pretty little bird.” Given the dizzying shifts of scale deployed by
Hughes in figuring the birds over the course of her narrative, the title of her text
generates additional ironies, in this case ironies directly linked to questions of spe-
cies difference. As should already be apparent, the primary bird-woman character
is anything but “a dear or pretty little bird,” and the human character subsequently
encounters, in succession, a bird that, many times his size, swallows him (9–10);
a flock of blackbirds that (as in the nursery rhyme “Sing a Song of Sixpence”)10 is
concealed within a pie and that pursues him aggressively after the bird-woman cuts
the pie open with a triumphant gesture (12); a group of characters in coats and hats
that on closer inspection proves to be a cluster of human-sized birds, potentially
threatening in their demeanor (15); a sculpture or monument that turns out to be
a massive egg, from which the bird-woman emerges and re-engages in her pursuit
of the human character (18); and another (or the same?) dinosaur-sized bird that,
having apparently reswallowed the character, flies high above the bird-woman, who
now takes on a diminutive size because of the distance involved (25). In the context
afforded by this sequence of encounters, the phrase bye bye birdie could refer to the
human character’s repeated attempts to get free of the birds that pursue and some-
times attack him. Alternatively the title could allude to the way the constant shifts
in the birds’ scale, comportment, and locale compel the human character (the only
human in the narrative) to abandon his original assumptions about how he himself
relates to the birds—among other forms of animal life.
In broaching issues of size or scale in Hughes’s portrayal of the birds, I have
already introduced questions about the storyworld’s complex geography. Indeed,
that geography is not merely complex but difficult to conceptualize, let alone inhabit
imaginatively. More specifically, the text engages in strategic deformations of every-
day Euclidian space to challenge cultural paradigms for understanding the human-
nonhuman boundary—and the logico-spatial relationships that those paradigms
entail. Insofar as humans occupy the position of the dominant species in a culture’s
ontology, the human domain can be seen as encompassing or containing nonhu-
man species, with those species subserving human ends. But as discussed in Part
I of this book, in connection with Groff ’s “Above and Below” as well as other narra-
tives, this way of figuring the spaces of the human and the nonhuman—respectively,
as containing and contained—is offset by other, anti-anthropocentric understand-
ings of humans as themselves members of the broader domain of creatural life, in
which nonhumans participate on an equal footing. Hughes’s text stages the con-
flict or antinomy between these two ways of imagining the spaces of species, by
manipulating—one might even say “cross-breeding”—species of space: namely,
containing and contained spaces within the storyworld.
Mark Johnson (1987) has characterized the contrast between containing and con-
tained spaces as an “image schema,” which can be defined as a “recurring, dynamic
pattern of our perceptual interactions and motor programs [arising from “orienta-
tional feats” that humans perform in spatial environments and giving] coherence
and structure to our experience” (qtd. in Dannenberg 2008: 75). Further, drawing

on a range of such image schemata to explore aspects of space in fictional narra-
tives, Dannenberg (2008) notes that containment or boundedness is an especially
salient feature of fictional worlds: “This schema is used to evoke surfaces as walls
containing or enveloping further areas of space and their contents. . . . In narrative
fiction the container schema often involves the depiction of rooms, interiors, and
other walled structures” (75–76). Hughes’s narrative, however, conflates containing
and contained environments, undercutting readers’ attempts to situate humans and
nonhumans in one or the other species of space.
Thus, in a striking sequence early in the narrative, when the gigantic, dinosaur-
sized bird swallows the human character, he is portrayed as occupying succes-
sively larger and egg-like oval spaces inside the huge bird (next to worms also
contained within the bird), until those spaces gradually morph into a human-
scale sitting room that is then entered by the bird-woman, who reinitiates her
chase of the human character—the same chase that previously took place in
the “outer” world by which the giant bird was also contained. It is not just that
Hughes uses shading to suggest, via her text’s visual design, continuity between
the bird-internal and the bird-external, built spaces with which the human char-
acter is familiar and comfortable; what is more, given that the human charac-
ter never exits the bird-internal space, the text, in the manner of a Möbius strip,
situates the subsequent action as both containing and contained by the domain
inside the bird. Additional layers of spatial ambiguity thus attach themselves to
other sectors of the storyworld as the narrative continues to develop—for exam-
ple, when the bird-woman cuts open the pie containing the blackbirds, when she
hatches out of the sculpture or monument, or when the (or another?) dinosaur-
sized bird reswallows the human character, and he again finds himself contained
within a small, egg-shaped space.
In turn, when examined through the analytic lens afforded by a narratology
beyond the human, the dreamlike indeterminacy of the storyworld’s geography—
the way the narrative underspecifies where human-animal encounters should be
situated in a nested structure of bounding and bounded spaces—can be glossed as
a strategy for interrogating cultural paradigms of humans’ relationship with other
species. If Reklaw uses narrative time to trace out the consequences of appreciat-
ing commonalities-within-differences as they unfold across as well as inside spe-
cies lines, Hughes uses narrative space to suggest the need to disentangle concepts
of species difference from ideas of human exceptionalism, so that differences in
kinds of animal life do not get automatically translated into hierarchies of value.
In other words, in twisting storyworld space into a Möbius strip, and thus inter-
twining human and nonhuman domains, Hughes counters the logic of what ear-
lier epochs had figured as a Great Chain of Being (Lovejoy 1936/1964), which
projected a horizontal axis of morphological difference onto a vertical or hierar-
chical axis of ontological status—and moral worth (see Clutton-Brock 1995 and
chapters 2 and 3).
Hughes’s text thus uses features of her text’s visual design, including shading; the
arrangement of characters, objects, and places within the mise-en-scène of individ-
ual panels as well as the mise-en-page established by multipanel sequences (compare
Lefèvre 2011); and shifts in size or scale as well as perspective to enact and thereby
call into question the logical structure of contemporary animal geographies. More
precisely, Bye, Bye Birdie translates into the spatial organization of its image sequences
the incompatible geographies entailed by the clash between anthropocentric and
biocentric understandings of human-animal relationships described in chapter 1—
with anthropocentric ontologies prescribing a vision of nonhuman spaces as separate
from, contained within, and dominated by human spaces, and biocentric ontologies
enabling human and nonhuman spaces to be seen, instead, as overlapping domains
with the larger realm of creatural life.11 In turning now to several comics adaptations
of Kafka’s fable of species transformation, The Metamorphosis, I continue to explore
how medium-specific properties of graphic narrative can be used to project but also
interrogate the creatural emplacements prescribed (or proscribed) by the multiple,
sometimes incompatible animal geographies circulating within a culture.
Biocentric Visualization: Adapting Kafka’s

The Metamorphosis
Although Stanley Corngold (1973) has memorably dubbed Franz Kafka’s 1915
novella The Metamorphosis (Die Verwandlung) “the commentator’s despair,” one
thing about Kafka’s text—or at least its publishing history—remains relatively cer-
tain. Kafka would have in all likelihood disapproved of graphic adaptations of his
narrative, given his resistance to any attempt to visualize Gregor Samsa’s transforma-
tion into an ungeheuren Ungeziefer, a monstrous vermin. Dean Swinford notes that
when Kurt Wolff, the publisher of the first edition of Kafka’s text, told Kafka that he
had commissioned the artist Ottomar Starke to create an illustration for the fron-
tispiece, Kafka replied: “It occurred to me that . . . [the artist] might want to draw
the insect itself. Please, not that—anything but that! . . . The insect cannot be drawn
here. It cannot even be shown in the distance” (qtd. in Swinford 2010: 217). Why
would Kafka seek to impose this interdiction on any visual rendering of his vermin-
ous character? And how do adaptations of the text that do include images as well as
words, such as the three graphic adaptations to be discussed here (Corbeyran and
Horne 2009; Kuper 2004; and Mairowitz and Crumb 1994), bear on the issues that
may have informed Kafka’s resistance to visualization?
In an analysis of the role of metaphor in The Metamorphosis, Corngold broaches
ideas that may help explain Kafka’s resistance to illustrations or visualizations of
his protagonist. Corngold (2004) argues that Gregor’s status as vermin undercuts
interpretations of the text that read Gregor as a metaphor come alive—for exam-
ple, a metaphor for alienated labor or for some version of the Freudian id (compare
Swinford 2010: 214–18). A metaphor, Corngold suggests, requires some definite
entity for its vehicle,
so that by means of this entity, which has recognizable characteristics, something

else—often something higher, something that cannot be directly pictured—can be
grasped by “carrying over” to it some properties of this more definite entity; this way
the more elusive, the higher entity can be perceptually spelled out and, indeed, made
to appear in boldface. (1973: 61)
Vermin are unsuitable candidates for metaphoric transference of this sort, or what
Lakoff and Johnson (1980) would characterize as the projection of a source domain
(here the domain of pests or vermin) onto a target domain (here the domain asso-
ciated with Gregor’s life history, family context, and post-metamorphosis experi-
ences). As Corngold (2004) puts it, “The concept of a vermin is not a natural thing,
it has no predictable visual identity, it is not literally a thing: ‘vermin’ is a shifting
social construction” (60). Corngold’s account harmonizes with Fissell’s (1999)
suggestion that the category of vermin, encompassing all those “animals whom it is
largely acceptable to kill,” has included different kinds of animals at different times—
such that in seventeenth-century England, for example, “birds and animals whom
we now consider rare or beautiful—kingfishers, herons, osprey and otters—were
labelled vermin, and methods were developed to kill them” (1). The malleability
or amorphousness of the category of vermin, besides limiting Gregor’s metaphoric
potential, also impinges on issues of visualization. Insofar as the category of vermin
corresponds to a shifting assemblage of disfavored species—an assemblage that may
vary across cultures and also different phases of a given culture—to use the member
of any one species as a stand-in for the whole category would be to trade polysemy
for particularity, a matrix of ideas and attitudes for a single value within that matrix.12
Indeed, work by Fissell (1999), Nicholas Holm (2012), Colin Jerolmack (2008),
and others suggests that the idea of vermin plays, in the context of human-animal
relationships, a role analogous to what in the context of linguistic communication
Roman Jakobson (1957/1990) called “shifters.” Shifters, which modern-day lan-
guage theorists discuss under the heading of deictic or indexical terms, include
expressions such as I, here, and now; the meaning of these expressions depends on
who is uttering them and in what discourse context. Analogously, creatures cast
as vermin index shifting conceptions of the boundary between humans and other
forms of creatural life, and also different ideas about which animal agents consti-
tute a threat or at least nuisance to their human counterparts.13 The essential muta-
bility of the category of vermin derives from the changing circumstances in which
various species come to be seen as evading or resisting human control and thereby
acquire the status of problem animals, animals that must be killed, expunged from
the human scene.
In other words, animals become a problem—as the presence of Gregor in the
Samsas’ apartment suggests—when they infiltrate spaces that are understood to be
reserved for and controlled by humans. As the configuration, density, and scope of
these spaces change, so too do membership criteria for the category of vermin.14 Thus,
in developing his account of how pigeons came to be viewed as “rats with wings”
in North American cities, Jerolmack (2008) draws on Philo and Wilbert’s (2000)
work to explore how, in any culture, the imaginative geography of animals imposes
expectations concerning the spatial distribution of species. As Jerolmack puts it,
“Animals that disgust us, such as rats, are often associated with the most unde-
sirable urban interstices such as sewers”; by transgressing the boundary between
human-dominated and “natural” spaces, such pests stir up feelings of disgust “by
entering sidewalks and homes” (2008: 74). The horrified reaction of the chief clerk
from the bank when Gregor makes his initial appearance in his verminous state, his
mother’s trepidation about entering Gregor’s room, his father’s and sister’s angry
disavowal of kinship with Gregor when the three lodgers refuse to pay rent because
of Gregor’s presence in the apartment—all of these details from The Metamorphosis
suggest how aversive reactions called up by (and constitutive of) vermin are
anchored in violations of spatial boundaries, incursions of the nonhuman into
ostensibly human territories. In this sense vermin can be defined as species enter-
ing spaces where they are not supposed to be, with norms based on hierarchical
understandings of species difference translating into a normative model of animal
geography.15 Hence even as Kafka’s text remains strategically vague about Gregor’s
monstrous morphology, it provides precise details about the internal organiza-
tion of the Samsas’ apartment, as well as the contents and layout of Gregor’s room.
Kafka thereby suggests that it is the shocking incongruity between space and spe-
cies, and not a clearly demarcated range of species characteristics, that underlies
the aversion, distancing, and disavowal that are emotional and practical correlates
of categorizing a being as vermin.
Arguably, then, Kafka de-essentializes Gregor’s species identity in order to high-
light the particular salience of space in the construction of animal geographies, situ-
ating the concept of vermin in a larger process of territorialization in which humans
attempt to assert biotic dominance and control.16 To this extent, assigning to Gregor
a definite, identifying morphology—for example, through visualization of the pro-
tagonist as a dung beetle, cockroach, or other insect species—would seem to run
counter to Kafka’s purposes in The Metamorphosis. The text is concerned less with
any specific vermin than with the effects (on humans as well as animals) of a crea-
ture’s inclusion in the category of vermin, and with the triggering conditions that lead
to such acts of categorization.17 If visualization cuts against the grain of Kafka’s text
in this way, however, it also supports Kafka’s broader project of reassessing his cul-
ture’s indigenous, normative animal geography. All three of the graphic adaptations
to which I now turn are constrained by the medium of comics to assign to Gregor
a distinctive species identity, or at least distinctive species characteristics, and they
thus abrogate one of Kafka’s own procedural rules in the story; yet at the same time
these narratives exploit the visualizing affordances of the medium to model an alter-
native animal geography. With individual scenes figuring human characters and the
member of a disfavored species as co-inhabitants of the same physical spaces, the
adaptations momentarily arrest Kafka’s overarching narrative sequence, which tells
the story of the violent expulsion of Gregor from human territories. Such medium-
enabled moments of arrest or stasis suggest an alternative, biocentric spatial logic,
in which humans and their verminous others share a common space haunted by
residual (or could it be future?) kinship relations, of the sort discussed in c hapter 3
in connection with narratives about other transhuman families.
Two moments from The Metamorphosis—or rather, the way these moments are
figured through scenes included in the graphic adaptations—demonstrate how the
medium of comics can scaffold Kafka’s project of reframing animal geography in bio-
centric rather than anthropocentric terms. One moment occurs in the second sec-
tion of the story, in which Grete enlists her mother’s help to clear out the furniture
from Gregor’s bedroom, ostensibly for the purpose of giving him more freedom of
movement, but in a way that Gregor interprets as contributing to the further atten-
uation of his link to his human past, and also his further alienation from human ter-
ritories. The second moment occurs when Gregor, severely weakened by the wound
from the apple that (having been hurled at him by his father) is now lodged in his
back, listens to Grete’s violin playing and fantasizes about supporting her musical
studies—with the hoped-for result that “his sister would be so touched that she
would burst into tears, and Gregor would then raise himself to her shoulder and kiss
her on the neck” (Kafka 1915/2006: 413). Figures 4.1 and 4.2 reproduce Mairowitz
and Crumb’s (1994) and Corbeyran and Horne’s (2009) representations of the
scene in Gregor’s bedroom, respectively; figure 4.3, taken from the adaptation by
Figure 4.1 Gregor Samsa clings to the picture frame in his room.

Credit line: From Introducing Kafka, by David Mairowitz and Robert Crumb (1994).
Reproduced with permission from the authors.
Figure 4.2 Gregor Samsa clings to the picture frame in his room.
Credit line: Originally published in French under the following title: Métamorphose, de
Franz Kafka, Corbeyran—Horne © Editions DELCOURT, 2009.
Figure 4.3 Human-roach reunion, as imagined by Gregor Samsa.

Credit line: Originally published in French under the following title: Métamorphose, de
Franz Kafka, Corbeyran—Horne © Editions DELCOURT, 2009.
Corbeyran and Horne, shows Gregor’s fantasy about supporting and being reunited
with his sister.18
Mairowitz and Crumb (1994) assign Gregor the morphology of a dung bee-
tle, though as compared with Kuper’s (2004) portrayal of Gregor as half beetle,
half human, they exploit a different, less angular drawing style and a strategy for
integrating the verbal and visual tracks that uses, overall, a higher proportion of ver-
bal text. Corbeyran and Horne 2009, meanwhile, select for Gregor the species iden-
tity of a cockroach, “un enorme cafard” (1). On the one hand, these visualizations
delimit interpretive possibilities by indicating a token vermin rather than the general
type of verminousness. On the other hand, however, by staging scenes in which a
verminous creature that is roughly the size of a dog co-inhabits the most intimate
spaces of the home, all three adaptations open up momentary possibilities for imag-
ining animal geography otherwise. These images recast as companion animals—in
an extended sense—members of species presently excluded from what might be
called the transhuman family, which in its current form encompasses only the select
few animal kinds treated as pets or companions. Kuper (2004) chooses to draw
Gregor as a dung beetle with a human face, whereas the other adaptations effect a
more thoroughgoing transfer of Gregor from the human to the animal domain. In all
three versions, by affording a glimpse of Gregor’s continued participation in family
affairs despite his more or less radically transformed appearance, these visualizations
call into question the partitioning of human and nonhuman spaces, in a manner
consonant with Kafka’s (and also Hughes’s) rethinking of the value hierarchies
linked to recognized differences among forms of life. The images thereby project an
alternative animal geography, in which Gregor’s presence challenges the norms and
expectations that exclude him from the human scene.
The second image from Corbeyran and Horne (2009), figure 4.3, likewise sug-
gests that the adaptations’ use of images can further potentiate the shift from an
anthropocentric to a biocentric animal geography. The corresponding moment from
Kuper’s (2004) adaptation portrays a diminished and incapacitated Gregor fantasiz-
ing about his reunion with Grete. In the verbal track Kuper uses thought balloons
to present the hypothetical scenario of cross-species connection, even as the visual
track highlights the difficulty of actually crossing the species boundary, here literal-
ized as a threshold that Gregor inches toward in his weakened state (65). The final
panel, however, shows Gregor to be within reach of the wished-for reunion, his fore-
leg nearly touching what appears to be Grete’s foot. For their part, Corbeyran and
Horne in figure 4.3 visualize the imagined scenario itself; but like Kuper they juxta-
pose the fantasized embrace against Gregor’s actual situation. On this page the size,
placement, and striking anomalousness of the roach-human reunion underscore the
disparity between the forms of relatedness made possible by biocentric affiliation,
on the one hand, and the strict spatial partitioning entailed by anthropocentric dis-
tancing and disavowal, on the other hand. The spatial logic of this scene again offsets
the chrono-logic of Kafka’s plot, which moves inexorably toward the consequences
of a model based on the dichotomous and hierarchical separation of humans and
vermin—a model defining the verminous not just as non-but as antihuman. But
rather than critiquing this model by simply reversing the polarity of the value system
that underlies it, in the manner of Jonathan Swift’s treatment of humans as yahoos
in the fourth part of Gulliver’s Travels, figure 4.3, along with the other images I have
discussed, uses visualization to reinforce and extend Kafka’s project of dismantling
the value system itself. The scene suggests that an anthropocentric animal geogra-
phy, in which only a select few companion animals are allowed to co-inhabit human
spaces, might be countered with an alternative, biocentric geography informed by

the concept of an extended transhuman family.
This alternative animal geography, which Mairowitz and Crumb (1994),
Kuper (2004), and Corbeyran and Horne (2009) all use the medium of com-
ics to project in various ways, opens the center of human territories, the place
called home, to a diversity of species—and not just to the favored few admit-
ted into the family circle as, in effect, honorary Homo sapiens. In its sequential
unfolding Kafka’s narrative enacts the imperatives of a closed kinship system
based on the denial or severe curtailment of trans-species affiliations and, con-
comitantly, a strict demarcation of human and animal places.19 Exploiting the
visual resources of the comics medium, Kafka’s adapters display cross-sections of
this system and show, with a microgeographic precision that extends to the level
of furniture arrangements and postural orientations within domestic spaces, the
system’s unsustainability at any given moment for the human as well as nonhu-
man animals who fall within its purview. Kafka’s text asks, Who is harmed more
by the abjection of beings deemed unworthy of admission into territories identi-
fied as human: those who are barred from these places, and die from the resulting
deprivations, or those who police the borders of such territories and define them-
selves in opposition to what lies on the other side? The graphic adaptations of The
Metamorphosis reinflect this question in a manner that, if anything, amplifies its
unsettling effects. By using the visual track to figure human-vermin co-placement
as at least a momentary possibility within a dominant logic of separation and
exclusion, and by thus opening a path to new forms of trans-species affiliation
and hence new spatial regimes, the adaptations provide impetus for readers to
ask: “In what ways is my home—and the family I belong to—something other
(and more) than I had always assumed?”
In arguing that Hughes organizes narrative space to expose the logical incom-
patibility of anthropocentric versus biocentric animal geographies that are none-
theless co-present in the culture; and in arguing that Kafka’s adapters exploit the
comics medium to model an alternative animal geography, in which Gregor’s
verminous presence disrupts or at least arrests human attempts to territorialize
and thereby dominate larger biotic communities, this section has highlighted the
mutually informing relationships between animal comics and animal geographies,
or the systems by which animal agents “are ‘placed’ by human societies in their
local material spaces (settlements, fields, farms, factories, and so on), as well as
in a host of imaginary, literary, psychological and even virtual spaces” (Philo and
Wilbert 2000: 5). My next section, by contrast, explores ways in which medium-
specific properties of comics and graphic novels bear on another key aspect of nar-
ratology beyond the human: namely, the study of how storytelling practices across
media engage with questions of animal subjectivity, or nonhuman ways of expe-
riencing the world. In using the multimodal storytelling environment afforded
by comics to begin addressing some of the issues bound up with animal minds,
I will also be laying foundations for the more sustained treatment of those issues
in chapter 6.
n S T O R Y WO R L D /U M W E L T : N O N H U M A N
EXPERIENCES IN GRAPHIC NARRATIVES
Narratologists have argued that it is part of the nature of narrative to focus on the
impact of events on experiencing minds (Herman 2009: 137–60; see also Fludernik
1996 and, for arguments that the experiential impact of narratives unfolds in the
interplay between storyworlds and the larger background assumptions that inter-
preters bring to their engagements with narrative texts, Caracciolo 2014a). In the
terms set out in Herman (2009), across differences of genre, communicative con-
text, and storytelling media, instances of the narrative text-type share a common
focus on the what-it’s-like dimension of consciousness—to adapt the ideas of
Thomas Nagel (1974) that I discuss in more detail in c hapter 6. As Nagel has argued,
part of the definition of a conscious being is that it is possible to ask what it is like to
be—or experience the world as—that sort of being, whether it is a bat or a butterfly,
a hummingbird or a human. In turn, narratives more or less explicitly foreground
what it is like for characters to undergo particular experiences—how a character’s
mind is affected by events taking place in the narrated world, or storyworld. A key
question to be addressed here, however, is whether graphic narratives, in recruit-
ing from more than one semiotic channel to evoke storyworlds, afford possibilities
for representing experiential worlds not afforded by monomodal or “single channel”
print texts, and vice versa. Another key question: What sorts of issues come into
focus when the experiences portrayed in words and images are those of nonhuman
rather than human agents?
Take Nick Abadzis’s Laika (2007), a graphic narrative based on historical events
surrounding the use of dogs as “test pilots” in the early days of the Soviet space pro-
gram. The titular character is a dog originally named “Kudryavka,” or “Little Curly,”
after the shape of her tail (27).20 Subsequently renamed “Laika” (“Barker”) by Sergei
Korolev, a rocket designer who had been imprisoned in the Gulag during Stalin’s
purges in the late 1930s but went on to become the architect of the Sputnik missions,
the dog is conscripted into “an experimental scientific program to loft animals on ver-
tical rocket flights into the upper atmosphere” (80). As part of this program, Laika,
who forms a bond with a research assistant named Yelena Dubrovsky, is strapped
into a massive centrifuge and also subjected to zero-gravity conditions during a par-
abolic jet flight. When Khrushchev demands that Korolev launch Sputnik II just
one month after Sputnik I, to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of the Russian
Revolution and underscore the superiority of the Soviet space program vis-à-vis its
US counterpart, Laika is rocketed into orbit with no provision for recovery, dying
(probably from stress and overheating) only hours into the flight—notwithstanding
the Soviet government’s claims that a system for painlessly euthanizing the dog had
been put into place (189–90).21
In the two-page sequence reproduced as figure 4.4, Abadzis uses a complex layer-
ing of words and images to suggest what Laika’s final moments may have been like.
Setting Laika’s diminutive size against the hulking Soviet rocket in orbit around the
earth, the sequence also draws a starkly ironic contrast between two scenarios, one
imagined and the other actual. On the one hand, the imagined scenario involves
a dream or fantasy in which Laika is cared for and spoken to compassionately by
the woman who originally adopts her, and with whom the dog appears to associ-
ate “Mistress Yelena” of the space program; in this embedded dreamworld, Laika
is empowered to fly on her own volition (see also 51–55). On the other hand, the
actual scenario involves the dog’s final confinement, isolation, and painful death
after Laika, for reasons of personal as well as political ambition, is shot compulsorily
into space.
More precisely, in part because of the way it is situated in a larger narrative context,
figure 4.4 involves a layering of no fewer than four experiential frames. Interpreting
the sequence as a whole requires mapping individual images onto these (and poten-
tially other) frames and also assessing the functions of shifts among frames.
Frame 1: One frame corresponds to the inferences about Laika’s condition that, in
the pages that follow, the launch crew formulates on the basis of information received
via medical telemetry. This telemetry, made possible by sensors that have been surgi-
cally implanted in the dog (Abadzis 2007: 147, 180–84), reduces the qualitative rich-
ness of Laika’s experiences to quantitative data based on her physiological responses
to events.22
Figure 4.4 Experiential frames in Laika.

Credit line: From LAIKA © 2007 by Nick Abadzis. Reprinted by permission of First
Second, an imprint of Roaring Brook Press, a division of Holtzbrinck Publishing
Holdings Limited Partnership. All Rights Reserved.
Frame 2: Green-bordered images, echoing the color of the rocket itself, project what
Laika’s own experiences may have been like on board the spacecraft. On the one hand,
the green borders serve to mark which images (in this sequence as well as the pages that
follow) correspond to Laika’s experiences in the present moment, in contrast with the
unbordered images marking other, noncurrent or nonactual domains of experience.
On the other hand, the borders also evoke, through the metonymic associations of the
color green in this context, the larger Soviet military-industrial complex that launched
the rocket in the first place. Hence the borders suggest how Laika’s final moments are
bounded or limited by the technological apparatus that now contains her.
Frame 3: As already mentioned, the images featuring the woman interacting with
Laika harken back to the earlier dream or fantasy (is it Laika’s, the woman’s, or the
narrator’s?) in which the dog is being cared for and at the same time set free.
Frame 4: Bookending the first two images of the woman holding Laika are two
unbordered images showing the dog in the present moment. The absence of green
suggests a partial uncoupling of Laika, by the dog herself or by the narrator, from the
physical environment of the spacecraft; here she is situated in a threshold frame that
precedes and follows her imaginary transposition into the empowering world of the
fantasy. By contrast, farther to the right in the sequence of small panels, and anchored
in frame 2, two green-bordered images bookend Laika’s imagined flight through the
night sky (itself situated in frame 3). The first of these two images shows Laika begin-
ning to grimace in discomfort and the second, placed directly above Laika’s imagined
flight, represents the brutal reality of her actual flight, her body listless, her head lying
in a pool of vomit.
Through its use of color, shifts in scale, and spatial layout, this sequence thus figures
how one and the same set of events can take on multiple, sometimes radically diver-
gent experiential profiles for intelligent agents in storyworlds. More than this, the
overall impact of the sequence arises from the way it narrates what can happen when
the quality or specificity of animal experiences is undervalued or ignored. The abil-
ity of graphic narratives to engage with such differences of experience, and prompt
a rethinking of the value hierarchies in which they have been embedded, is the focal
concern of the present section—and an important topic for narratology beyond the
human more generally.
In what follows, to explore the range of ways graphic narratives depict the experi-
ences of animals like Laika, I supplement my discussion of Abadzis’s text with addi-
tional case studies, including installments of Animal Man comics (1965–), Grant
Morrison and Frank Quitely’s WE3 (2005), and other narratives. To prepare the
way for an approach that integrates scholarship on storytelling practices across
media, research on the nexus of narrative and mind, and the study of animals and
human-animal relationships, I begin by describing, at first in medium-neutral terms,
a scale or continuum of techniques for presenting nonhuman experiences in narra-
tive contexts. This continuum stretches from animal allegory, at one end, to texts
that, like Abadzis’s, use words and images to engage in an exploratory modeling of
the distinctive texture and ecology of nonhuman experiences, at the other end. After
describing this continuum in more detail and connecting it with recent work in nar-
rative theory as well as the sciences of mind, I then turn to the question of how
medium-specific properties of graphic narratives impinge on methods for present-
ing animal subjectivity. At the same time, I suggest how the projection of nonhuman
experiences in animal comics provides grounds for rethinking prior claims about the
nature of narrativity itself. These comics call into question claims that part of what
makes a text or a discourse amenable to being interpreted as a narrative is its focus
on human or human-like characters.
Presenting Animal Experiences in Storyworlds
In an earlier study (Herman 2011b; see also Herman 2011c), I argued that prior
narratological work on techniques for presenting characters’ subjective experiences
is premised on a Cartesian polarity between the mind in here and the world out
there—a polarity expressed as an internal-external scale separating the interior,
immaterial domain of the mind from the wider, sociomaterial world of action and
interaction. In lieu of this scale, I outlined a spectrum stretching between, not inner
and outer worlds, but rather relatively fine-grained and relatively coarse-grained
representations of how intelligent agents negotiate opportunities for action in their
surrounding environments. In other words, I argue for resituating in a broadly post-
Cartesian framework for inquiry versions of the continuum or cline used by narra-
tologists and stylisticians to capture different methods of thought presentation (see,
e.g., table 6.1).23
Thus, the use of what Stanzel (1979/1984) terms authorial narration, where
the recounting of events ranges freely over the entire world of the narrative rather
than being anchored in a particular mind situated somewhere in that world, enabled
novelists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries such as Henry Fielding and
Charles Dickens to portray agent-environment interactions at a relatively gross scale
or global level of detail. By contrast, in what Stanzel called figural narration, which
is more preponderant than authorial narration in modernist and proto-modernist
writers such as Kate Chopin, Franz Kafka, and Virginia Woolf, narrative reports
dramatize the impact of events on a particularized center of consciousness, with
heterodiegetic narration being used to highlight how characters’ subjectivities are
enmeshed with broader circumstances in storyworlds. This modernist emphasis on
how minds interlock, on a moment-by-moment basis, with surrounding experien-
tial environments—via the particular affordances or opportunities for action that
those environments provide24—undercuts the critical commonplace that modern-
ist fiction turns inward to probe psychological depths. Instead, modernist narration
stages how the mind is spread abroad, or situated in the worldly environments that
it at once helps constitute and is constituted by.
Figure 4.5 suggests how this framework for analysis, originally proposed to cap-
ture the range of narrative techniques used to present human experiences, can be
extended beyond the species boundary. This diagram maps the scale just described
Maus Pride of Baghdad Animal Man Laika, We3
AA HSAT Projections ASHT Projections UM
Coarse-grained Representations Fine-grained Representations

of Nonhuman Experiences of Nonhuman Experiences
AA = Animal Allegory
HSAT = Human-Source-Animal-Target Projections
ASHT = Animal-Source-Human-Target Projections
UM = Umwelt Modeling
Figure 4.5 A continuum of strategies for presenting nonhuman experiences in narratives.
onto a parallel continuum, in this case a continuum of strategies for projecting non-
human experiences in storyworlds.25
At one end of the scale, in parallel with techniques such as authorial narration,
are methods for presenting animal experiences in relatively summative, global-
izing terms—as refracted through human-centered practices and values. At the
other end are methods designed to anchor interpreters in a conception or model
of what it might be like for nonhuman agents to interact with their environment on
a moment-by-moment basis; using the resources of narrative to elaborate a coun-
terfactual conditional of the sort If I were a member of species X, I would engage with
the world along the following lines, these methods project nonhuman experiences
in a less summative, more detailed or granular way.26 Granted, increased granular-
ity does not suffice to detach a given narrative from anthropocentric imaginings
of animal experience. An account could conceivably present nonhuman subjec-
tivity via a highly textured superimposition of human frames of reference—as is
sometimes the case in Hosler’s Clan Apis (2000), for example, described on the
author’s website as “the biography of a honey bee named Nyuki . . . Nyuki has a lot
to learn about life in the hive and not much time to do it. But, with help of her sister
Dvorah, a dung beetle named Sisyphus and a sarcastic flower named Bloomington,
she might have a chance to figure it all out.”27 But when it comes to what I am call-
ing the exploratory modeling of animal experiences, a high degree of detail is a
necessary condition. Counterfactual modeling of this sort is tantamount to ascrib-
ing to animal agents, on the basis of their distinctive sensorimotor repertoires,
other-than-human perceptual discriminations, or possibilities for interaction with
their surrounding environments, social as well as material. In turn, attempting to
imagine how other animals negotiate, on a moment-by-moment basis, the world
we share with them may not be an inherently anti-anthropocentric enterprise; but
it does provide means for rethinking value hierarchies that confer normative status
on human modes of sense making.
To use the terms of metaphor theory (Lakoff and Johnson 1980), the strate-
gies for mind presentation situated at the left end of the continuum map the source
domain of human experience more or less fully onto the target domain of nonhu-
man minds. In animal allegory, nonhuman animals function as virtual stand-ins for
humans, by way of cultural associations that have accrued around particular spe-
cies (compare Aesop’s fable of the ant and the grasshopper). In HSAT projections,
or Human-Source-Animal-Target mappings, relative to animal allegory there is an
ostensible shift of focus away from the human to the nonhuman; but human motiva-
tions and practices continue to be used as the basic template for interpreting non-
human behavior.28 Moving rightward along the continuum to what I have termed
ASHT or Animal-Source-Human-Target projections, here (cultural understandings
of) animal experiences and capabilities are again translated into human terms, but
now for purposes of comparison rather than explanation; this narrative strategy
shows what it might be like for human characters to take on nonhuman attributes.
ASHT projections belong to the right of HSAT projections in figure 4.5 because
they ask interpreters to use the framework of their own experience as a basis for
staging and thereby reassessing animals’ qualities and abilities, rather than impos-
ing human frames of reference unidirectionally on animal worlds. This process of
translation, comparison, and reassessment may be partial and temporary, as in some
of the Animal Man comics discussed below, or more thoroughgoing, as in the tra-
dition of transformation stories discussed in chapter 2, extending from Apuleius’s
The Golden Ass to Kafka’s The Metamorphosis and beyond. Finally, in what I have
labeled Umwelt modeling, or UM, there is once more a shift of gravity relative
to its neighbor, in this case ASHT projections. In describing this fourth strategy,
I draw on Uexküll’s Umwelt concept to suggest how the emphasis is less on map-
ping human-generated understandings of animal worlds back onto the domain of
the human than on using narrative thought experiments to construct models of the
lived, phenomenally experienced worlds of nonhuman animals themselves. Such
exploratory modeling has the potential to reshape humans’ ways of engaging with
their own worldly environments—and hence with the other kinds of animals who
inhabit those environments.
The relevance of this approach can be demonstrated initially by bringing it to
bear on the sequence from Abadzis’s Laika discussed previously. Here the post-
Cartesian continuum presented in figure 4.5 helps account for the power and
impact of the text’s engagements with Laika’s subjective experiences on board
Sputnik II. The use of the first, framing image of the rocket, a representational
mode positioned toward the left end of the scale, portrays the isolated and isolat-
ing nature of Laika’s overall situation. But the inclusion of the smaller images of
Laika corresponds to a shift rightward along the scale; this sequence of minipanels
portrays in a more fine-grained way what it may have been like for Laika to expe-
rience the deteriorating conditions inside the cockpit. There is then a shift back
toward the left end of the continuum: as one moves through the last of these mini-
panels in sequence, they diminish in size, not only underscoring Laika’s tiny stat-
ure relative to the rocket but also suggesting the dying, uncomprehending dog’s
ever more circumscribed agency within the storyworld as a whole. In this way,
the text highlights the cultural, institutional, and political structures bound up
with asymmetrical allocations of agency—or possibilities for selfhood—across
Several issues raised by this framework for analysis need to be addressed at this
juncture, however. The first issue concerns the potential for variable interpretations,
whereby different readers might subsume a given text under different analytic cat-
egories. My own placement of a given text under one or another rubric in figure 4.5
(and also in figure 4.6 below) amounts to a hypothesis concerning the texts or tex-
tual segments at issue. In making these assignments, I ipso facto invite interpreters
with different intuitions to propose other assignments, or at least articulate why my
proposed placements are invalid. Second, the question of falsifiability arises in con-
nection with Umwelt modeling. As one of the reviewers of an earlier version of this
study put it, “How do we know that the representation of an animal’s experience is
accurate or even plausible? . . . If this is Umwelt modeling, whose Umwelt is being
explored? Why would this exploration carry any implications for scientific research
on animals?” Here, however, it is important note the way modeling practices in
general, the use of counterfactual models in particular, require a critical and reflex-
ive approach to issues of accuracy or plausibility vis-à-vis what is being modeled.
Likewise, the domain covered by “scientific research on animals” is wider in scope
than the reviewer’s comment seems to imply, and requires a correspondingly more
nuanced concept of falsifiability.
In lieu of making once-and-for-all judgments of accuracy when it comes to the
counterfactual scenarios generated via UM, it is more productive to ask what pur-
pose such modeling techniques serve, in what sorts of contexts, and with what
overall effects or consequences. To build on arguments outlined in an earlier study
(Herman 2012), the use of narrative to engage in an exploratory modeling of ani-
mal worlds need to be situated within the broader history of modeling practices—
practices that have been informed by and also given rise to different understandings
of the concept of “model” itself. As Hodges (2005) observes, the English word
model derives from the late Latin modellus, which denotes a measuring device; and
over time this term generated three English words: mold, module, and model (sec. 5,
The Call of the Wild Black Beauty Metamorphosis Flush
AA HSAT ASHT UM
Coarse-grained Representations Fine-grained Representations

of Nonhuman Experiences of Nonhuman Experiences
AA = Animal Allegory
HSAT = Human-Source-Animal-Target Projections
ASHT = Animal-Source-Human-Target Projections
UM = Umwelt Modeling
Figure 4.6 A dynamic representation of strategies for presenting nonhuman experiences

in narratives.
para. 45). For model alone the OED lists definitions ranging from “a summary, epit-
ome, abstract; the argument of a literary work,” through “an object or figure made
in clay, wax, etc., as an aid to the execution of the final form of a sculpture or other
work of art; a maquette,” to “a person or thing eminently worthy of imitation; a per-
fect exemplar of some excellence.” Complementing these etymological and seman-
tic variations are the different types of models that have been identified, on the basis
of form as well as function, by historians and philosophers of science, among others.
The philosopher Max Black (1962), for example, proposes a classification scheme
that distinguishes among theoretical models (i.e., models specifically exploited for
purposes of theory construction),29 scale models (such as a model airplane or car),
analog models (such as hydraulic models of economic processes, e.g., “trickle-down
economics”) and archetypes, or implicit or submerged models that inform a dis-
course (such as the archetype of the virus in discourse about the spread of images or
ideas on the Internet). In addition, as investigated by historians, political scientists,
and others (see Byrne 2005; Ransom 2005; Roese and Olson 1995), and as dis-
cussed further in the coda to the present study, the construction of counterfactual
scenarios has become an important modeling technique in its own right. This tech-
nique allows practitioners of alternate history to create a counterfactual antecedent
(e.g., the Confederate army won the US Civil War) and use the hypothesized con-
sequent or consequents to evaluate the relative importance of past events or even to
predict future historical trajectories.
A given instance of Umwelt modeling must be situated within this broader his-
tory of modeling practices—and the associated array of understandings of what
constitutes a model and of how and for what purpose models can be used. To con-
tinue with the example of Laika: Abadzis’s counterfactual presentation of the dog’s
subjective experiences resonates with a number of the conceptions of models just
reviewed, including those linked to the use of contrary-to-fact conditionals for pur-
poses of reassessing the significance of past events and predicting future develop-
ments. For example, the use of UM contributes to Laika’s being intrepretable as
an aid to (or mocked-up version of) a fuller imaginative realization of nonhuman
subjectivity—one that might be achieved over time by additional elaboration of the
already-extensive tradition of engagements with animal minds, in graphic narratives
as well as other storytelling environments. Black’s taxonomy likewise comes into
play here, given the polysemousness and polyfunctionality of the text’s exploration
of Laika’s subjective experiences. Thus the portrayal of Laika’s last hours can be con-
strued not only as a theoretical model (how did the nonhuman “test pilots” used in
the Soviet as well as US space programs in the mid-twentieth century in fact experi-
ence the conditions to which they were compulsorily exposed?), but also as a scale
model (in what ways does the life story of one such test subject figure forth how
multitudes of nonhuman lives have been impacted by research involving animals?)
(see Herman 2018a). For that matter, Black’s analog models and archetypes are also
relevant here. Modeling Laika’s experiences on board Sputnik II can be viewed as a
way of using the member of a species with which humans have had extensive interac-
tions as an analog for the members of other species with which we have had fewer
or shallower interactions—and thereby gauging anthropogenic impacts across the

full range of creatural lives. And Abadzis’s text can likewise be read as an interro-
gation of the archetype of the experimental animal, the animal used for scientific
research, in modern-day discourses of science and technology (see also c hapter 7;
Field 2010, 2016).
As this last remark suggests, the “scientific research on animals” that the reviewer
alludes to in the comment I quoted previously, rather than providing the ultimate
standard for modeling practices used to explore nonhuman Umwelten, instead fore-
grounds one subtype of model construction within a broader universe of possibili-
ties for model building. Even my cursory discussion of Laika suggests how UM can
in a given instance extend out across that larger universe, such that it engages with
but is not limited to what Black described as the process of theoretical modeling.
Further, one of my working assumptions in the present book is that the scientific
study of animals—in fields such as evolutionary biology and behavioral ecology,
for example—does not stand apart from but rather participates in wider cultural
contexts. Scientific ontologies, or models of the entities and of their properties
and relations in a given domain of inquiry, not only shape but also are shaped by
the larger cultural ontologies in which they take rise, with bioscientific research on
animals and life processes more generally being subject to ethnographic, sociolog-
ical, and other modes of investigation (see, e.g., Crist 1999; Daston and Mitman
2005; Latour 1991/1993; Latour and Woolgar 1979/2013). Investigations of this
sort can highlight, in particular, how work in the biosciences relates to broader cul-
tural tendencies when it comes to allocating possibilities for selfhood beyond the
human—tendencies that, as discussed in c hapter 1, result in contradictory orienta-
tions toward animals both as objects to be used and as autonomous subjects in their
own right.
A further aspect of the framework for analysis illustrated in figure 4.5 needs to be
addressed as well. For convenience of reference, figure 4.5 associates whole narra-
tives (i.e., entire texts) with various positions along the scale. However, as my earlier
analysis of the sequence from Laika suggests, any given text may use a range of strat-
egies for projecting animal-environment interactions, presenting those interactions
in a more or less human-centric manner and with different degrees of detail—that is,
at different levels of granularity. Hence figure 4.5 is itself a relatively low-resolution
map; it provides a bird’s-eye view of storytelling methods that also need to be stud-
ied at the ground level, via shifts of narrative strategy within individual texts. Figure
4.6 is designed to register possibilities for these dynamic shifts over the course of
one and the same narrative, while still capturing which strategy has overall pre-
ponderance within that text. In using a different set of (monomodal) narratives as
indicative examples in figure 4.6 as compared with 4.5, I underscore the medium-
neutral generality or transmedial reach of the model, before re-engaging with issues
of medium-specificity below.
Figure 4.6 suggests that Jack London’s The Call of the Wild, like Spiegelman’s
Maus in figure 4.5, can be placed under the rubric of animal allegory. London uses
the sled dog Buck’s experiences to allegorize the need for humans to throw off the
shackles of civilization and embrace the more primordial ways of living that London
associates with the Alaskan wild (see Bruni 2007 and also c hapter 6).30 As the dia-
gram further indicates, however, elements of London’s account can also be aligned
with Human-Source-Animal-Target projections, insofar as London sometimes uses
figural narration, or in Genettean terms heterodiegetic narration filtered through the
perspective of Buck as an internal focalizer (Genette 1972/1980), to portray in a
relatively human-centric manner the dog’s struggle for dominance within the pack,
his feelings of loyalty to John Thornton, and other aspects of this more-than-human
storyworld. For its part, Anna Sewell’s 1877 text Black Beauty, discussed in more
detail in chapter 5, is a foundational text in the (sub)genre of animal autobiography;
as such, Black Beauty has a human or human-like capacity for verbal narration, and
furthermore Sewell uses the human institution of slavery as a source of analogies
for practices such as breaking up families of horses, selling horses at auctions, and
the like (Ferguson 1994; Guest 2010). But though the text’s preponderant strategy
for presenting Black Beauty’s experiences consists of HSAT projections, Sewell also
engages in Umwelt modeling in the narrative, as when she imagines what it might be
like for horses to have to wear the “bearing rein” that forced their heads to remain
in an unnaturally and painfully upright position (Sewell 1877/2007: 35–36, 108–
9),31 and also what it might be like to experience cruel treatment by unscrupulous
grooms and heedless or downright sadistic riders.
Turning next to The Metamorphosis, as suggested earlier in this chapter Kafka
initially uses Gregor as a human frame of reference for modeling nonhuman (spe-
cifically, insectoid) ways of encountering the world. But as Gregor’s ties with the
human world become more and more attenuated, and he begins to forget his human
past, Kafka’s strategies for presenting Gregor’s experiences undergo a concomitant
shift, from ASHT projections to Umwelt modeling. Finally, as my placement of Flush
in this diagram would suggest, I disagree with Jutta Ittner’s (2006) argument that
in Woolf ’s semifictional biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s cocker spaniel,
discussed more fully in chapter 5, “[Flush’s] animal existence is diminished to an
anthropomorphized caricature—animal alterity turned into a literary device. . . .
Since the mind behind the animal gaze differs from human consciousness only
in what it perceives, not in how it perceives and processes experience, the radical
potential of the animal perspective remains untapped” (189). Woolf ’s portrayal of
Flush does feature some HSAT projections—for example, Flush’s eating stale cakes
to signal his belated acceptance of Robert Browning as Elizabeth Barrett’s suitor in
London, and then subsequently recalling that episode in accepting the Brownings’
newborn son in Italy (Woolf 1933/1983: 71–72, 127). Yet Flush and Black Beauty
can be described as mirror opposites in this respect: in Sewell HSAT projection is
the preponderant mode and Umwelt modeling fleeting and sporadic; in Woolf ’s text,
the proportions are reversed.
Thus far I have characterized the scale shown in figures 4.5 and 4.6 in largely
medium-neutral terms, although in commenting Abadzis’s use of the visual track to
enact shifts in his strategy for presenting Laika’s subjectivity I have begun to intro-
duce issues of medium-specificity into my analysis. It is time, however, to engage
with these issues more directly, using particular case studies in the graphic portrayal
of animal experiences.
Graphic Portrayals of Animal Subjectivity
As Kai Mikkonen (2008) notes, graphic narratives stimulate “the viewer’s engage-
ment [with] the minds of characters by recourse to a wide range of verbal modes
of narration in dynamic relation with images that show minds in action” (302).
Besides examining how styles of focalization project mental states and dispositions
in graphic narratives told in the third as well as the first person, Mikkonen explores
how the visual channel can be used to prompt inferences about characters’ minds by
situating them in particular physical and social contexts, with or without additional
verbal cues. But what about graphic narratives featuring the experiences of nonhu-
man characters? In comics portraying human characters, story creators can focus
on intraspecies variation in human Umwelten—as when Alison Bechdel, in Fun
Home (2006), juxtaposes her family members’ different ways of experiencing the
circumstances and events unfolding in the storyworld. Animal comics, for their part,
use words and images (or image-sequences alone, as in Hughes’s Bye, Bye Birdie)
to engage in more or less detail with differences in the texture of experience across
species lines. In such comics, the focus can be on different nonhuman species’ ways
of experiencing events in the storyworld or on the contrast between human and
nonhuman Umwelten—or both, as in Hakobune Hakusho’s manga series Animal
Academy (2005–8), in which the human protagonist attends a school where cats,
foxes, and other animals are able to shape-shift into human form.
In graphic narration generally, individual panels encapsulate time-slices of an
unfolding storyworld, with the design of panels as well as panel sequences afford-
ing a more or less detailed model of how characters’ encounters with situations
and events in the storyworld (may) have unfolded. Although, as noted previously,
factors other than degree of detail determine whether UM is in fact being instanti-
ated in a given case, the more fine-grained a graphic narrative’s portrayal of how
an intelligent agent engages with its surrounding environment, the greater that
text’s potential for setting into play the representational strategy that I have labeled
Umwelt modeling, located at the right end of the continuum in figures 4.5 and 4.6.
Accordingly, to tailor the continuum to medium-specific attributes of graphic nar-
ratives, one needs to determine the degree to which the visual-verbal organization
of panels and larger sequences seeks to capture the phenomenology or experiential
texture of characters’ engagement with the storyworld—and thereby model what
it might be like for one or more animal agents to encounter the world on other-
than-human terms. Readers must therefore assess to what extent the design of
panels and panel sequences zooms in on the moment-by-moment quality of non-
human experiences, and to what extent the narrative presents those experiences in
a more globalizing or summative way. Also at issue, whatever the degree of granu-
larity involved, is the extent to which a given account remains anchored in human-
centric frames of reference or alternatively fleshes out a nonhuman experiential
world—by elaborating a counterfactual conditional that involves, in effect, a shift

of species identities.
Such assessments require a holistic approach, whereby any one element of the
text is properly contextualized within its larger, multimodal environment. Compare,
for example, the use of speech balloons in the sequence from Reklaw’s Thirteen Cats
of My Childhood reproduced as figure 1.2 in chapter 1 and in the images from Adam
Hines’s Duncan the Wonder Dog (2010) shown in figures 4.7 and figure 4.8—Hines’s
text being itself a kind of compendium of graphic methods for engaging with animal
experiences. On the face of it, a narrative or narrative segment attributing speech to
animal agents would seem to position that narrative or narrative segment toward
the left side of the continuum in figures 4.5 and 4.6—if not in the region of animal
allegory, then in the region of Human-Source-Animal-Target projections. But note
that in the case of figure 1.2, Reklaw explicitly marks the sequence as a fabrication
or imagined scenario, in which Frosty and Gene are reunited at the construction site
where Jesse’s father dumped Gene. As noted previously, this is the one sequence in
Reklaw’s text in which he attributes the capacity for speech to the family cats; here
the fabricated or hypothesized “romantic ending” provides a platform for HSAT
projections via verbal utterances. These projections map understandings of kinship
relations (“daughter”) and gnomic generalizations about relationships more gener-
ally (“There’s nothing so bad you can’t go back and say you’re sorry”), grounded in
the domain of the human, onto the cats’ social and affective worlds. Yet the mappings
are explicitly marked as such, in part by Reklaw’s extradiegetic narration at the top
Figure 4.7 Empty speech balloons and trans-species semiotics in Duncan the Wonder Dog.
Credit line: © Adam Hines; reprinted with permission of Adhouse Books.
Figure 4.8 Empty speech balloons and trans-species semiotics in Duncan the Wonder Dog.
Credit line: © Adam Hines; reprinted with permission of Adhouse Books.
of the first panel and in part by the incongruity between the verbal and visual tracks,
with Frosty imploring Gene to reconnect with his daughter, and Gene agreeing,
even as Gene eats garbage from an overturned trash can. In this way, Reklaw ironizes
his own presentation of the cats’ experiences, and brackets what could otherwise
be construed as human-centric elements of the sequence. The absence of speech
attributions elsewhere in the text also bears on efforts to position this sequence on
the continuum. Reklaw’s sparing, reportage-like account of the cats and the fam-
ily’s interactions with them in the rest of his narrative diminishes any allegorizing or
HSAT-like effects that might otherwise accrue to the sequence.
By contrast, because a basic premise of Hines’s Duncan the Wonder Dog is that
animals (including birds, bats, dogs, llamas, wild boar, seals, frogs, cats, deer, rab-
bits, monkeys, tigers, and others) can use verbal language to communicate with one
another as well as with humans, the text features a variety of speech attributions to all
sorts of storyworld agents. But what is more, speech balloons are used in non-or anti-
conventional ways, as when balloons containing different national flags are attached
to ships clustering around Ellis Island in New York City (6), balloons indicating the
interests of apartment dwellers (typewriters, bathtubs) float outside their high-rise
windows (7, 11), a radio to which a cat is listening generates a balloon containing
the visage of the “animal terrorist” Pompeii on whom news reports are focusing
(192), and a balloon with an image of an injured cat inside is positioned next to a
child whose whining one of the characters mistakes for the cries of an animal (266).
Hines also uses empty balloons throughout the text—for example, to mark when
an interlocutor’s words are being ignored or are no longer within perceptual range
(131, 266–67), to indicate when an infant’s vocalizations do not take the form of
words (82), and, crucially, in contexts where an animal’s communicative signals do
not seem to be translatable or understandable, whether for humans or for other ani-
mals (or both) (48, 63, 148, 172).
Figures 4.7 and 4.8 must therefore be interpreted in the context of Hines’s use of
speech balloons to develop what might be characterized as a trans-species semiotics
(see also Kohn 2013: 131–52). Here the distribution and contents of the balloons
suggest different conditions of possibility for, and different modalities of, intra-and
interspecies communication, depending on the particular animals, circumstances, and
creatural relationships involved. In this context, figure 4.7, featuring an empty speech
balloon floating over a male deer or buck, suggests not a general but rather a localized
nontranslatability of nonhuman communicative signals, perhaps for a hypothetical
human focalizer (a hunter?) who could in principle have observed, or be observing,
this scene. For its part, figure 4.8 gaps out human speech but not the frogs’ interchange,
nor the cricket’s (or grasshopper’s) poetic utterance in the center-left portion of the
page. Significantly, in the verbal track, the most vocal frog asserts that there being a
word for a situation, object, or event does not make it “true.” Here the text stages a
critique of human languages’ putative superiority over other species’ communica-
tive abilities (see also Calarco 2014: 619–21)—a critique that paradoxically under-
cuts the HSAT projection that makes this very critique possible. Furthermore, in the
frogs’ communicative world, humans, shown here bending over the riverbanks, pre-
sumably as they hunt for frogs to capture, are known only as “takers.” This label sug-
gests that humans’ asymmetrical stance toward the biotic communities from which
they only take, without giving in return, may account for the incomprehensibility of
their communicative signals for other participants in those larger ecosystems—and
vice versa.32 As in Reklaw’s text, then, the larger ecology of techniques for present-
ing human as well as nonhuman subjectivity means that the attribution of speech to
animals cannot be taken in and of itself as a marker of human-centrism, just as the

absence of such attribution does not necessarily mark a movement rightward along
the scale shown in figures 4.5 and 4.6.
But I am getting ahead of myself, having jumped to difficult cases before discuss-
ing in a more systematic way the spectrum of possibilities for engaging with ani-
mal experiences in graphic narratives. Accordingly, in the subsections that follow,
I backtrack and move rightward along the continuum, providing further indicative
examples of graphic narratives—or segments of graphic narratives—positioned
near each increment on the scale.
Animal Allegory
Art Spiegelman’s Maus at once exemplifies the case of graphic animal allegory and
comments reflexively on the deployment of nonhuman agents for allegorical pur-
poses. Using the visual track to present Nazi soldiers as cats, Jews as mice, non-
Jewish inhabitants of Poland as pigs, soldiers in the US Army as dogs, and so forth,
Spiegelman does not focus on these nonhuman agents per se, but rather uses cul-
tural associations and attested behavioral patterns of the animals to structure his
narrative about Vladek Spiegelman’s and others’ experiences during the atrocities
of the Holocaust.33 Here there is no detailed engagement with the lives of nonhu-
man animals; rather, the animals provide a kind of actantial infrastructure—based,
for example, on predator-prey interactions between cats and mice—supporting
Spiegelman’s portrayal of the human institutions, practices, and experiences that
constitute his core concerns. Thus, in a sequence in which Vladek boards a streetcar
filled with Nazis, including fellow Poles unsympathetic to the plight of their Jewish
compatriots, the storyworld is clearly human-scale, with street cars, swastikas, and
posters offering a reward for Jews in hiding.
In this sequence, Vladek can be seen wearing a pig mask to evade capture, and on
board the streetcar itself the masked Vladek is seated near cat-faced Germans as well
as a Pole (= pig) in a Nazi uniform. In other words, the animal faces are used in the
visual channel as a rapid, economical way to encode patterns of conflict (and dan-
gerous, life-threatening encounters) in the human domain—situations and events
that would otherwise have to be spelled out in more prolix fashion in the verbal
channel. At the same time, by having a mouse feign the appearance of a pig to gain
acceptance (or at least escape detection) in a storyworld controlled by ferocious
cats, Spiegelman includes a metanarrative comment on the logic of masking that
underlies his own animal allegory. Maus is, in short, self-consciously removed from
the lived, phenomenal worlds of the creatures it uses as means for representing—
and interrogating—structures of conflict in the human world.
HSAT Projections
Keen (2011) discusses the human-like faces and behavior of the lions featured in
Brian K. Vaughan and Niko Henrichon’s Pride of Baghdad (2006), which focuses
on a pride of lions that escaped from the Baghdad zoo after an American bombing
raid during the invasion of Iraq in 2003.34 Whereas Keen explores how portraying
the lions’ experiences via human capacities, institutions, and practices, including the
use of verbal language and the reliance on the nuclear family as a basic unit of social
organization, relates to issues of narrative empathy, my concern here is with how
such methods of narrative world making fit within a larger array of strategies for
projecting animal experiences.
It is important to note the contrast between graphic animal allegories like
Spiegelman’s and texts that, like Pride of Baghdad, use Human-Source-Animal-
Target projections to engage with nonhuman experiences. In such texts, as figure 4.9
suggests, nonhuman animals are no longer used merely as a foil for represent-
ing human institutions and practices; rather, the center of narrative gravity shifts
at least somewhat, producing a more textured portrayal of a storyworld-as-
encountered-by-other-animals—that is, a more detailed model of what it might
be like for nonhuman agents to participate in events whose quality or experien-
tial impact arises, in part, from those agents’ organismic structure. Thus the large
size of the first panel in this two-page sequence figures the initial shock effect that
the exploding bomb must have had for the lions, even as the motion lines in this
Figure 4.9 Human-Source-Animal-Target (HSAT) projections in Pride of Baghdad.

Credit line: PRIDE OF BAGHDAD © Brian K. Vaughan and Niko Henrichon. All
characters, the distinctive likenesses thereof and all related elements are trademarks of
DC Comics.
panel and the next convey the physical impact of the explosion and violent force
with which it propels the lions through space. Likewise, the final panel in the
sequence is organized along a diagonal axis, suggesting the disorienting, world-
disrupting power of a second bomb explosion, which sends the lions careening
toward safety.
At the same time, however, Vaughan and Henrichon draw on a long tradi-
tion of human-centric animal representations when they use speech balloons to
confer on the lions a capacity for human language (but see my previous remarks
about Reklaw’s Thirteen Cats of My Childhood and Hines’s Duncan the Wonder
Dog and also my discussion of Morrison and Quitely’s WE3 below). The lions’
use of verbal language, coupled with the human-like facial expressions noted by
Keen (2011), offsets the other, Umwelt-modeling elements of the panels and
panel sequences mentioned above. Accordingly, despite sketching a ground-level
presentation of what the bombing of the zoo may have been like for the lions, the
text also invites readers to construe their experiences via frameworks for under-
standing drawn from the human domain—at the risk of flattening out, or even
voiding, the phenomenological specificity of nonhuman encounters with the
world.35
ASHT Projections
In what I have labeled Animal-Source-Human-Target projections, there is another

shift in the center of narrative gravity. Here, instead of being imposed as an explana-
tory template on the domain of the nonhuman, as is the case (to different degrees)
in animal allegory and HSAT projections, human practices and experiences become
a way of modeling, by analogy, what it may be like for nonhuman agents to engage in
the opportunities for action presented by their larger environments, and vice versa.
The Animal Man comics series exemplifies how the resources of graphic storytelling
can be used to narrativize—or rather make possible via acts of narration—cross-
species analogies of this sort.
Animal Man was a comic first created in 1965, by writer Dave Wood and artists
Carmine Infantino and George Roussos, as part of the Strange Adventures series. It
was then revived in the late 1980s by the Scottish writer Grant Morrison, in collab-
oration with (among others) artists Chas Truog and Doug Hazlewood.36 The hero
of Animal Man, Buddy Baker, is exposed to radiation after an alien spaceship crashes
near him in the woods. It so happens that, at the same time, a train carrying ani-
mals bound for a zoo derails, and Buddy thereby discovers his ability to take on the
powers of the animals in his immediate environment—including, over the course of
his adventures, a bird’s ability to fly, a gazelle’s leaping ability, the perceptual capaci-
ties of a fly, and even the virus-fighting powers of white blood cells. Though these
human-animal blends are often the subject of Buddy’s retrospective narration as
well as the thought balloons representing his efforts to strategize his way out of tight
situations, the lived, physical effects of such cross-species hybridizations feature
especially prominently in the visual track. For example, on one page from a 1967
installment of the comic, a jagged yellow halo represents the force field that Buddy
Baker acquires from an electric eel, with the subsequent panels dramatizing what
opportunities for action would present themselves if one possessed an eel’s power to
transmit powerful electric shocks—for instance, in order to stun fleeing criminals.37
But it is not just Buddy Baker who participates in human-animal blends in these
comics. In the fourth installment of Grant Morrison’s revival of the Animal Man
series (originally published in 1988), a character named B’Wana Beast has the abil-
ity to communicate with other species and also merge species together to create
composite creatures in his own right. When his companion ape, Djuba, dies as a
result of animal experimentation, B’Wana Beast merges Djuba’s dead body with
Dr. Myers, the scientist in charge of the research project that exposed Djuba to a
lethal dose of anthrax. Djuba-Myers then learns firsthand what it is like to be subject
to the kinds of experimentation performed on nonhuman animals—as shown in the
two-page sequence reproduced as figure 4.10.
Here the mode of human-animal blending associated with ASHT projections is
literalized in the visual channel (see, e.g., the fourth panel on the first page); and in
conjunction with the verbal track, the image track also underscores the contrasts
between HSAT and ASHT types of projection. If using human worlds as a source
Figure 4.10 Animal-Source-Human-Target (ASHT) projections in Grant Morrison, Chas

Truog, and Doug Hazelwood’s Animal Man.
Credit line: Animal Man, Vol. 1 © DC Comics.
domain allows for a familiarization of the target domain of animality, using animal
worlds as a source domain promotes a defamiliarization of the human—as when
the second panel of the second page juxtaposes the merged Djuba-Myers, strapped
down on a gurney, against the image of the former Myers in his family portrait.
Likewise, if HSAT projections entail the imposition of human language on species
that communicate otherwise, ASHT projections can entail the loss of language by
the species assumed to be its rightful possessor—thereby staging a different way
of being in the world. Thus, in the final panels of the sequence, as she-he makes a
desperate attempt to protest being wheeled into the operating theater, Djuba-Myers
cannot enunciate Myers’s former name, managing to say only “Ma Urrs.” The vis-
ual track focalizes events in a way that hews close to Djuba-Myers’s interactions
with an environment in which she-he, like Laika on board Sputnik II, experiences
severely circumscribed agency. But here the reduction of agency is doubly profound,
because Djuba-Myers is aware of having been moved down in the species hierarchy
that Myers had exploited and helped maintain—a hierarchy whose topmost level
is occupied by the beings who use human languages and the forms of domination,
technological and other, that they enable.38
Umwelt Modeling
In a previous study (Herman 2011b), I characterized early twentieth-century liter-

ary writers as, in effect, intraspecies Umwelt explorers, using methods of mind pres-
entation to examine variations in the way differently situated humans encounter or
enact different phenomenal worlds. Here my concern is with strategies for repre-
senting interspecies rather than intraspecies variations in experience. In this vein,
the strategies that I group under the heading of Umwelt modeling are methods used
in graphic narratives to imagine what it might be like for other animals to engage
with their surrounding world.
In my opening discussion of Laika, I suggested that Abadzis uses color, shifts
in scale, and panel arrangements to model what it may have been like for Laika
to be launched into space—that is, to evoke her Umwelt in the context of a larger
environment that was experienced very differently by the humans who conducted
the launch. Another graphic narrative engaging in Umwelt modeling of this sort is
Morrison and Quitely’s WE3 (2005), which uses a variety of techniques to elab-
orate the similar counterfactual conditional that lies at the heart of this narra-
tive: namely, that of inhabiting the experiential worlds of animals conscripted into
humans’ scientific-technological endeavors. In this case, the story concerns three
pets who have gone missing—a dog named Bandit, a cat named Tinker, and a rabbit
named Pirate. These pets have been transformed by the US Air Force into computer-
enhanced “biorgs,” as part of an army of “efficient animal slaves” designed to take the
place of humans in warfare. Their bodies encased in armor and pumped full of med-
ication enabling them to tolerate their biorg enhancements, the animals are set free
by the woman charged with their care when she learns that they are to be “decom-
missioned.” Portraying a scenario strikingly similar to the one depicted in figure 4.9,
from Pride of Baghdad, figure 4.11 shows the dog (now known as “1”) and the cat
(or “2”) fleeing from the security forces who pursue them. (The rabbit, or “3,” has
already been killed at this point in the narrative.)
As with the lions in Pride of Baghdad, speech balloons indicate that 1 and 2 have the
capacity for human speech. Here, however, that capacity derives from computer aug-
mentation, and it produces the minimal vocabulary and irregular syntax reminiscent
of cruder speech-synthesis systems—or perhaps of the text fragments that are gener-
ated through interaction with a computer console. In other words, the premise of the
narrative is that 1’s and 2’s computer-mediated utterances are the result, not of older
storytelling conventions associated with animal tales, but rather of actions plausibly
and naturalistically rooted in the alternative givens of—that is, the “novum” intro-
duced by—a science-fictional storyworld (see Suvin 1972, 1979, and also chapter 2).
In the context of that narrative world, Morrison and Quitely portray 1’s and 2’s
experiences as taking shape in the way they do because of the characters’ species-
specific sensorimotor repertoires and the affordances that those repertoires make
possible. The smell of helicopter exhaust, for example, affords 2 an opportunity for
flight—with the second panel visually reinforcing the fear-causing proximity of the
Figure 4.11 Umwelt modeling in WE3.

Credit line: WE3 © Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely. All characters, the distinctive
likenesses thereof and all related elements are trademarks of Grant Morrison and Frank
Quietly. VERTIGO is a trademark of DC Comics.
pursuers and the third panel conveying the headlong urgency of 1’s and 2’s downhill
run. Yet as the characters’ speech performances also suggest, WE3 thematizes what
happens when human technologies alter the manner in which other organisms are
coupled with their environment. Hence, in the penultimate panel in the sequence,
1 registers the exogenous quality of the experiences to which the now-damaged
armor or “bad coat” has given rise. 1 characterizes the armor as “not ‘Bandit’ ”; here
the scare quotes around the dog’s former name underscore the disorientation that
comes from 1’s having to straddle multiple phenomenal worlds, differently struc-
tured Umwelten. These different experiential worlds include that of a canid whose
species’ evolutionary history has both shaped and been shaped by the history of
Homo sapiens, but who may or may not engage in extensive individual interactions
with humans; that of a particular dog who in being assigned the name of Bandit
enters into the intimate forms of cross-species “becoming with” that characterize
our interactions with companion animals; and that of an interstitial creature who,
once a companion to humans, has been abducted and compelled to participate as
an experimental animal within the military-industrial complex. This experimental
animal now stands at one remove from the identity that, as the use of square quotes
around “Bandit” suggests, has been recontextualized as the artifact or byproduct
of a specific, contingent mode of being with—a mode that can be reinterpreted as
involving a covert form of the domination that operates in a more explicitly violent
way when the dog named Bandit is transformed into the biorg referred to as 1.39
Overall, then, the text reveals a fundamental tension between its structure and its
themes. At a thematic level, the narrative suggests that human technologies are pre-
mised on, or aim for, a subjection of the nonhuman. But the design of WE3 reveals
how, as a kind of cultural technology in its own right, narrative itself provides means
for imagining human-animal relationships otherwise. As a system for creating,
transforming, and aggregating constellations of experiential worlds that cross spe-
cies lines, narratives like Morrison and Quitely’s can help promote two key patterns
of thinking described by Plumwood (2002a) under the rubric of “environmental
culture,” as discussed in my introduction. At issue is a culture that, through forms
of imaginative writing as well as philosophical, political, jurisprudential, and other
discourses, fosters, first, a process whereby humans come to recognize themselves as
inextricably embedded in and dependent on more-than-human environments, and
second, a process whereby other animals come to be recognized in turn as part of
human culture(s).40 I therefore disagree with a reviewer of an earlier version of this
study who suggested that the novum of WE3—namely, that their characters live in
a world in which animals can communicate using speech-synthesis technology—
amounts to a “hopelessly anthropomorphizing move.” There is no suggestion by
the authors that the animals are incomplete or deficient without access to human
languages; rather, after the manner of Adam Hines in Duncan the Wonder Dog, the
authors use the creatures’ synthesized speech as an imaginative bridge for two-way
traffic of the sort Plumwood calls for—the double movement that simultaneously
undercuts assumptions of human exceptionalism and valorizes other-than-human
ways of experiencing the world.
n C O N C L U D I N G R E M A R K S : N O N H U M A N
EXPERIENCES AND NARRATIVITY
Exploring how graphic narratives engage with animals’ experiential worlds as well as
human-animal relationships, this chapter has outlined how, going forward, a narra-
tology beyond the human can both inform and be informed by developments in the
study of storytelling across media as well as fields such as (animal) geography, the
history and philosophy of science, ethology, and phenomenology and the philoso-
phy of mind. What is more, although it is only a preliminary sketch, the previous sec-
tion’s discussion of issues raised by the presentation of nonhuman minds in animal
comics already provides grounds for rethinking one of the core concepts of narrative
theory: namely, the idea of narrativity, or what makes a text more or less amenable to
being interpreted as a narrative in the first place.41
There is now an extensive body of narratological literature devoted to the con-
cept of narrativity, or “the formal and contextual features making a (narrative)
text more or less narrative” (Prince 2003: 65). Although theorists have articu-
lated a variety of positions on what features or factors are most salient (see Pier
and García Landa 2011 for a comprehensive overview), many commentators
share with analysts such as Bruner (1991) and Fludernik (1996) the presuppo-
sition that a key factor contributing to narrativity is a focus on human or human-
like individuals experiencing events in storyworlds. As Fludernik (1996) puts
it, narrative “reflects a cognitive schema of embodiedness that relates to human
existence and human concerns. The anthropomorphic bias of narratives and
its correlation with the fundamental story parameters of personhood, identity,
actionality, etc., have long been noted by theoreticians of narrative and have been
recognized as constituting the rock-bottom level of story matter” (9).42 Likewise
Werner Wolf (2005) argues that anthropomorphic characters, functioning as
“promoters and experiencers of multiphase actions that unfold in time,” con-
stitute a basic building block of narrative (325). Gerald Prince, too, holds that
“the degree of narrativity of a given narrative depends partly on the extent to
which that narrative fulfills a receiver’s desire by representing oriented tempo-
ral wholes [that are] meaningful in terms of a human(ized) project and world”
(65). Although I pursued a similar line of argument in previous work (Herman
2009: 105–36), ideas broached in the present chapter and in my study as a whole
instead suggest that it falls under the remit of narrative to model what it may be
like for animal others—and not just human beings—to function as “promoters
and experiencers of multiphase actions that unfold in time.”
In other words, the detailed modeling of other-than-human experiences, in nar-
ratives or segments of narratives situated toward the righthand side of the scale
shown in figures 4.5 and 4.6, does not necessarily result in a loss of narrativity rela-
tive to accounts centering on prototypically human characters. Rather, as indicated
by some of the graphic narratives that I have discussed in this chapter, in stories
in which nonhuman animals feature as focal participants, narrativity can be consti-
tuted on different grounds: in the very attempt to imagine how a different kind of
intelligent agent might negotiate the world.
5 Life Narratives
beyond the Human
He slept in this hot patch of sun—how sun made the stone reek! he
sought that tunnel of shade—how acid shade made the stone smell!
—Virginia Woolf, Flush (1933/1983: 131)
Complementing the previous chapter’s focus on questions of medium, the present

chapter considers how issues of genre bear on narrative engagements with animal
experiences in more-than-human worlds. More specifically, laying groundwork for
chapter 6’s investigation of the way norms for mental-state attributions cut across
the fiction-nonfiction distinction, I examine forms of generic hybridity, as well as
broader questions about generic status, in post-Darwinian life writing centering on
nonhuman subjects—with my discussion spanning not only life narratives written
about animals, that is, animal biographies, but also life narratives attributed to ani-
mals, that is, animal autobiographies.
I first use Virginia Woolf ’s 1933 semifictional biography Flush to consider how
modernist explorations in the theory and practice of life writing, and in particular
experiments with fiction-biography blends, opened up new pathways for interpret-
ing and engaging with animal lives; such blends can be seen as emerging from and
feeding back into the project of imagining cultural ontologies otherwise, by recon-
figuring hierarchies of kinds of minds as, instead, constellations of intersecting cog-
nitive ecosystems. Then I turn to the problems and possibilities raised by classic
as well as contemporary animal autobiographies, ranging from Anna Sewell’s Black
Beauty (1877) to Ceridwen Dovey’s Only the Animals (2014), a collection of life sto-
ries posthumously narrated by a variety of animal tellers. Pushing back against the
assumption that all animal autobiographies are, by their nature, fictional, I argue for
a two-dimensional approach to what I characterize as acts of speaking-for that cross
the species boundary. From the perspective afforded by this approach, which builds
on the framework for analysis discussed in connection with fi gures 4.5 and 4.6 in the
previous chapter, animal autobiographies, on the one hand, embody more or less
human-centric priorities and interests. On the other hand, they also promote differ-
ent kinds of stances toward the nonhuman experiences they recount, casting those
experiences as subject to falsification, marking them as hypothetical, or bracketing
them off as elements of fictional worlds, as the case may be.
n M O D E R N I S T L I F E W R I T I N G
AND NONHUMAN LIVES
As commentators such as Lewis (1983), Monk (2007), Reynier (2003), and

Saunders (2010) have suggested, Virginia Woolf ’s 1933 text Flush: A Biography takes
157
its place alongside Orlando (1928) as a key modernist experiment with the norms
and conventions of life writing, growing out of Woolf ’s own critical engagement
with contemporary biographical practices. Having taken stock of Lytton Strachey’s
and Harold Nicolson’s innovations in this genre, Woolf drew on the resources of
modernist narration to broaden the scope of life writing—in part by grafting onto
biographical discourse modes of consciousness presentation conventionally associ-
ated with fictional narratives, and in part by moving once-marginalized experiences
to the forefront of biographical attention, whether the experiences in question are
those of women categorized as invalids, members of the servant class, or nonhuman
animals like Flush.1 The result, in Flush, is a metabiographical text; this is a narra-
tive that in presenting its protagonist’s biography explores the consequences for life
writing of what Woolf reveals to be an inextricable entanglement not just of male,
female, upper-, and lower-class life histories, but also of human and nonhuman ways
of encountering the world.
In particular, Flush recounts how the life stories of Elizabeth Barrett and the
cocker spaniel who was her companion animal came to be intertwined, at first in
the dark, stifling confines of Barrett’s bedroom when she lived as an invalid in her
father’s house in London and then in the freer, warmer, sun-drenched spaces of Italy
after Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning eloped there. The text begins
with a tongue-in-cheek genealogy of the spaniel breed, and a mock etymology of
the name spaniel itself, before zooming in on the life history of one specific dog: “All
researches have failed to fix with any certainty the exact year of Flush’s birth, let alone
the month or the day; but it is likely that he was born some time early in the year
1842” (Woolf 1933/1983: 9–10). Basing her account in part on the Brownings’ cor-
respondence, Woolf uses the coordinate system established by the Bildungsroman
form—a system involving “a biographical narrative, problems of socialization, the
influence of mentors and ‘instrumental’ women, [and] the problem of vocation”
(Castle 2006: 4; see also Boes 2006: 231–33)—to map out the many vicissitudes of
this dog’s life. Thus, after recounting Flush’s difficult relocation from a rural cottage
near Reading, where he was born, to the Barretts’ house on Wimpole Street where
“door after door shut . . . on freedom; on fields; on hares; on grass” (21–22), Woolf
traces Flush’s initial antipathy to Robert Browning; the harrowing incident of Flush’s
being held for ransom by dognappers, during which time his “past life and its many
scenes . . . faded like snowflakes dissolved in a cauldron” (97); his enjoyment of the
“rapture of smell” on the streets of Florence (130–32); and the sad irony of Flush’s
last days with Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Having had a vision during a séance of
an otherworldly hand “as white as snow,” the poet loses sight of Flush’s own “hand”
when he paws her in an attempt to elicit her recognition and affection (156). Shortly
thereafter, it is Browning who fails to be recognized: “She looked at Flush again. But
he did not look at her. An extraordinary change had come over him. . . . He had been
alive; he was now dead” (161).
Serialized in the Atlantic Monthly and also chosen as a Book-of-the-Month Club
selection, Flush proved to be an atypically popular work in the context of Woolf ’s
oeuvre.2 But the reasons for the text’s wide appeal remain to be explored, given
Life Narratives beyond the Human ■ 159
its intermixing of genres (is it primarily biography or primarily fiction?) as well

as its use of the modernist methods of consciousness presentation that Woolf had
honed in earlier works such as Jacob’s Room, Mrs. Dalloway, and To the Lighthouse.
Is it Flush’s dog’s-eye view of the two poets’ famous courtship that generated such
strong reader interest—notwithstanding Woolf ’s characteristically modernist use of
multiple voices and perspectives to emphasize the relativity of perceptions, beliefs,
and values? Or is it that the narrative’s focus on a nonhuman protagonist obscured
or defused what readers might otherwise have registered as an off-puttingly exper-
imental profile, confirming Le Guin’s (1987/1994) observation (as well as Woolf ’s
own prediction) that texts featuring nonhuman characters tend to be automatically
slotted into the category of nonserious literature?3
Arguably, in addition to other factors that may have contributed to Flush’s favor-
able reception, the text’s initial appeal and ongoing relevance stem from the way it
is embedded in an evolving network of assumptions and beliefs about nonhuman
animals—and about their relationship with humans. Flush suggests how literary
narratives, among other cultural practices, constitute an important resource for
ethnozoology, “the study of local knowledge of fauna, and the culturally mediated
relationships between communities of people and other animals” (Hunn 2011: 83).
Narratives such as Woolf ’s provide insights into and indeed help mold a culture’s way
of theorizing about the nature and experiences of animals, with individual texts stag-
ing modes of theorization in the more localized domains of ethnoornithology, eth-
noprimatology, ethnoentomology, and so forth (Hunn 2011: 83–84; see also Brown
2013 and McHugh 2011: 211–19).4 Ultimately, these indigenous frameworks for
understanding animals, together with frameworks emerging from specialized sci-
entific discourses, both shape and are shaped by the methods of Umwelt modeling
discussed in chapter 4. But a more specific, genre-based relationship is also at stake
here. Flush’s self-reflexive engagement with biography’s conventions highlights the
particular salience of life writing for research on the folk ethologies—the everyday
assumptions and beliefs about animals—circulating within a culture. And within
this generic context, early twentieth-century life writing like Woolf ’s affords espe-
cially important opportunities for investigating such everyday knowledge about
the nonhuman, since literary modernism overlaps with foundational studies in the
field that would become comparative ethology, including Frisch’s (1927/1955) and
Uexküll’s (1934/1957).
Thus, in addition to anticipating the work of Carol Adams (1990), Le Guin,
and other ecofeminists who have pointed to interconnections between patriarchal
institutions that foster the subordination of women and humans’ broader attempts
to control nonhuman life forms, Flush can be aligned with more recent efforts to
rethink the scope and nature of human-nonhuman relationships, including what
Kirksey and Helmreich (2010) term multispecies ethnography and what Kohn
(2007) describes as a trans-species anthropology of life. Likewise, the text resonates
with ideas propounded by Zapf (2016), who has developed a cross-disciplinary
approach to “literature as cultural ecology.” As noted in chapters 1 and 3, for Kirksey
and Helmreich, multispecies ethnography focuses on “contact zones where lines
separating nature from culture have broken down, where encounters between Homo
sapiens and other beings generate mutual ecologies and coproduced niches” (546;
see also Kirksey 2014). As a radically non-or rather anti-anthropocentric enterprise,
multispecies ethnography builds on the ideas of Tim Ingold (1990) in working to
reframe the relationship between the fields of biology and anthropology. In so doing,
the approach parallels the way Kohn’s trans-species ethnography, or anthropology of
life, investigates what Kohn calls an “ecology of selves” (2007: 4; 2013: 16–17): like
Kirksey and Helmreich’s, Kohn’s approach encompasses not just human attitudes
toward nonhuman animals but also the webs of interaction that give rise to forms
of intersubjectivity cutting across the human-nonhuman boundary. For Zapf, liter-
ature can be viewed as a medium for cultural ecology, another cross-disciplinary
endeavor that interweaves ideas and methods from the biosciences with those per-
taining to the study of culture. One of Zapf ’s guiding assumptions is that “imagina-
tive literature deals with the basic relation between culture and nature in particularly
multifaceted, self-reflexive, and transformative ways and that it produces an ‘ecolog-
ical’ dimension of discourse precisely on account of its semantic openness, imagina-
tive intensity, and aesthetic complexity” (2016: 4; see also 11–14, 27–35, 89–94).
Narratives that engage with nonhuman lives provide a route of access to the strat-
egies for imagining human-nonhuman relationships that are central to multispe-
cies ethnography, trans-species anthropology, cultural ecology, and other emergent
frameworks for inquiry5—even as those frameworks promise to shed new light on
the genre of life narrative itself. In other words, texts like Woolf ’s can both illuminate
and be illuminated by a focus on ways in which life histories crisscross human and
nonhuman worlds. In turn, to build on Zapf ’s (2016) remarks about literature as a
medium for cultural ecology, and to broach issues that I discuss in my concluding
section and also in c hapter 6 and the coda to this book, research on narratives about
nonhuman lives can promote “transdisciplinary” convergence among fields within
the biosciences, the social sciences, and the humanities.
After exploring in more detail how Flush grew out of Woolf ’s broader engage-
ment with the theory and practice of life writing, I focus on the strategies she
employs to present Flush’s ways of experiencing events in the storyworld, the world
that Woolf ’s textual designs enable interpreters of Flush to co-construct and imagi-
natively inhabit. Woolf ’s use of a nonhuman protagonist as an internal focalizer, or
what Stanzel (1979/1984), borrowing from Henry James, called a reflector, creates
a hybrid discourse, in which narrative techniques conventionally associated both
with fiction and with nonfiction cross-pollinate. I situate this genre-bending or
genre-blending exploration of nonhuman phenomenology within its broader mod-
ernist mindscape, the larger ecology of mental experiences for which authors like
Woolf developed distinctive methods of presentation. At the same time, suggesting
how Woolf ’s treatment of Flush reveals links between modernist writing methods
and the concept of the Umwelt developed in the early twentieth century by one of
the pioneers of modern-day ethology, Jakob von Uexküll, and anticipating issues to
be discussed in more detail in c hapters 6 and 7, I argue that Woolf ’s generic experi-
ments can be viewed as a strategy for engaging with normative assumptions about
the status of animal minds—about the nature and scope of subjective experiences
beyond the species boundary.
Flush, Fictionality, and “The New Biography”
Evidence from her correspondence, diaries, critical essays, and reviews suggests that
Woolf designed Flush as something of a spoof or parody—in particular, a sendup of
Lytton Strachey’s biographical methods, including his tendency to speculate on his
subjects’ unexpressed thoughts, memories, and impressions, as when he hypothe-
sizes, at the end of his best-selling 1921 biography of Queen Victoria, about what the
queen may have been thinking on her deathbed.6 In Flush, Woolf extrapolates from
Strachey’s methods to detail perceptions, memories, inferences, and emotions that
cannot be (dis)confirmed via cross-comparison with other evidentiary sources—
in this case, not just because those experiences in fact remained unverbalized and
hence unattested, but also because Flush could not have articulated his experiences
in human language. But Woolf extends Strachey’s methods in another way as well.
Specifically, as Ray Monk (2007) has discussed (22–23), Strachey was careful to use
hedges such as “perhaps” and “possibly” to indicate where he was diverging from the
norms of nonfictional (because potentially falsifiable) discourse, and instead provid-
ing a plausible conjecture about the way events may have unfolded. Monk notes that
in Strachey’s hypothetical foray into Queen Victoria’s last thoughts, “the repeated
use of the word ‘perhaps’ . . . serves to establish that this is biography and not fic-
tion, and to make it clear to the reader that Strachey does not claim to know these
to have been Victoria’s dying thoughts” (2007: 23; see also Cohn 1999: 117–23).7
By contrast, although it does feature some hedged constructions, as I discuss below,
Woolf ’s account of Flush’s life experiences largely lacks these modalizing expres-
sions, and with them one of the generic markers associated with nonfictional dis-
course. The net effect is to destabilize generic categories, in particular the distinction
between life writing and fiction. Within the frame of a biographical narrative about
historically attested personages, situations, and events, Woolf reports details of
Flush’s mental life without evidentiary backing, and also without overtly marking
these reports as hypothetical or conjectural.
Woolf ’s biographical practices in Flush were also shaped by Harold Nicolson’s rad-
ical experiments with the conventions of life writing in his 1927 book Some People.
In the “Author’s Note” that prefaces the original edition, Nicolson writes: “Many of
the following sketches [of the persons whose names are listed in the table of con-
tents] are purely imaginary. Such truths as they may contain are only half-truths”
(1927: vii). Nicolson expands on this comment in the introduction to the second
(1957) edition, remarking that “although the central characters [of the sketches] are
often composite or even fictional, the minor characters, the episodes, and the inci-
dents are real” (xi). Woolf keys in on the difficulty of reconciling the two proposi-
tions contained in Nicolson’s further elaboration of his method—namely, that some
of the people in Some People are made up, but that the “facts and descriptions” fea-
tured in the sketches are not (xi)—in her 1927 review essay “The New Biography.”
In a striking turn of phrase, Woolf suggests that “Some People is not fiction because it
has the substance, the reality of truth. It is not biography because it has the freedom,
the artistry of fiction” (1927/2008: 98). She also remarks that by using “a method of
writing about people and about himself as though they were at once real and imag-
inary” (97–98), Nicolson “has succeeded remarkably, if not entirely, at making the
best of both worlds” (98). Woolf later explains her caveat (“if not entirely”), argu-
ing that when fictional characters are intermixed with historical personages, at least
under the banner of biography, the irreality of fiction casts suspicion on the truth
status of claims about the life histories of the real-world individuals.8 Or as Woolf
puts it: “Let it be fact, one feels, or let it be fiction; the imagination will not serve
under two masters simultaneously” (100).9
As commentators like Lewis (1983: 305–6), Marcus (1994: 116–31), and
Saunders (2010) have discussed, however, modernist writers, including Woolf
herself in Orlando as well as Flush, sought to create just this sort of hybrid of fic-
tion and nonfiction by grafting aspects of fictional narration onto practices of life
writing, or vice versa. Saunders uses autobiografiction as a cover term for modern-
ist experimentation along these lines, describing Flush and Orlando as fictional
parodies of the earlier biographical conventions that Woolf had critiqued in “The
New Biography” (442). Significantly, by limiting the extension of the term auto-
biografiction to “fictional works in auto/biographical form” (9), Saunders’s account
pre-decides the generic status of works that, like Flush, combine fictional and nonfic-
tional elements—to the point where the overall generic identity of the text becomes
destabilized, and perhaps indeterminate. Is Flush a fictional narrative that takes the
form of a biography in order to parody the conventions of biography itself, or is it an
instance of life writing that interweaves elements of biographical and fictional nar-
ration in order to suggest how biographical methods might need to be modified to
accommodate nonhuman lives? Finn (2007), for his part, leaves room for both ways
of interpreting texts like Flush. Focusing on modernist women writers, Finn argues
that these authors at once avowed and disavowed autobiographical impulses in their
texts, leveraging fictional discourse to work through contradictions arising from the
sense of unfulfilled potential that haunted their own life histories (191–92).
Not every assessment of the fusion of fictional and nonfictional discourse in mod-
ernist life writing has been so positive, however. Monk (2007) interprets Woolf ’s
account of the new biography and her reassessment of the possibilities and limits of
life writing as an unfortunate result of her own vested interest in ascribing to fictional
narrative knowledge-yielding powers superior to those of nonfictional discourse.
For Monk, only Some People, and not early twentieth-century life-writing practices
more generally, exemplifies the kind of generic hybridity that Woolf associates with
then-contemporary biography (6). At the same time, Monk mines Woolf ’s writings
for evidence that she viewed “life, real life (as she often puts it), [as] essentially inter-
nal and therefore (as facts are essentially external) beyond the reach of nonfiction”
(6).10 This view is, according to Monk, Woolf ’s “most pernicious legacy for the the-
ory of biography” (28), since an internalist approach of this sort entails that “the
self can be truthfully described only in fiction” (29). His argument, in short, runs as
follows: rather than mixing fictional and nonfictional discourse in metabiographical

fashion, Woolf in both her theory and practice of life writing effectively subsumes
nonfiction under fiction, because for Woolf the truth of self is internal and only fic-
tion provides unfettered access to the inner life that constitutes true subjectivity.
In previous work (Herman 2011a, 2011b), I have disputed key assumptions on
which Monk’s argument rests—both with respect to Woolf ’s and other modernists’
writing practices and with respect to the relationship between fictional minds and
everyday minds more generally. I argue that, whatever Woolf ’s stated views on the
nature of the mental or on the goals of narrative fiction (as expressed in essays such
as “Modern Fiction” [Woolf 1919/1984]), her fictional practice foregrounds the
way conscious experiences arise from the interplay between embodied intelligent
agents and their surrounding cultural, social, and material environments. Thus, in
contrast to earlier characterizations of Woolf ’s oeuvre and modernism more gen-
erally as participating in a broader “inward turn,” to use Kahler’s (1973) phrase, my
claim is that the upshot of modernist experimentation was not to plumb the depths
of human psychology, but rather to spread the mind abroad—to suggest how minds
have the profile they do because of the way intelligent behavior is interwoven with
worldly circumstances. This modernist emphasis on the way conscious experiences
arise from agent-environment interactions in turn provides a basis for rethinking
claims about fiction as the only means of access to another’s subjectivity. If there
is no Cartesian dichotomy between the mind in here and the world out there; if
minds are not closed-off, inner spaces but rather lodged in and partly constituted
by the social and material structures that scaffold people’s encounters with one
another and the world; then access to other subjectivities is no longer uniquely
enabled by engagement with fictional narratives. It is not that fictional minds are
external and accessible while actual minds are internal and hidden; instead, minds
of all sorts can be more or less directly encountered or experienced, depending on
the circumstances.11
Woolf ’s methods for portraying Flush’s experiences highlight the intercon-
nectedness of these issues and issues pertaining to the study of animal lives; in
particular, her narrative suggests that a rethinking of assumptions about fictional
minds can reshape ways of orienting to forms of subjectivity across the species
boundary, and vice versa. To put the same point another way, the text’s use of
generic experimentation to model nonhuman phenomenology resonates with a
rejection of Cartesian dualism—a rejection that calls into question accounts of
fiction as the sole means of access to the I-originarity of another, within as well
as across species lines. From this perspective, Woolf combines features conven-
tionally associated with life writing and with fictional narrative not to swamp
nonfictional genres with fictional practices, nor to imply the epistemological
superiority of fiction, but rather to interrogate boundaries between (discourses
about) kinds of minds, everyday and fictional, human and nonhuman. Flush sug-
gests, first, how coming to know another intelligent agent’s mind requires tak-
ing stock of that agent’s life history, and second, how Umwelt modeling of the
sort discussed in chapter 4 allows a life history to be inhabited, counterfactually,
“from the inside”—w ithout, however, impinging on the autonomy of the agent
in question. Woolf uses internally focalized or figural narration to engage with
nonhuman experiences in a metabiographical manner, employing in an account
based in part on documentary sources wide-scope mental-state attributions that
previous analysts have associated with fictional accounts specifically. In this way,
in parallel with some of the graphic narratives discussed in c hapter 4, Flush uses
self-reflexive narrative methods to hold up for scrutiny normative assumptions
bound up with judgments about what constitutes a falsifiable claim concerning
animal minds.
Ecologies of Experience: Nonhuman Phenomenology

in Modernist Mindscapes
Woolf presents Flush’s experiences using methods that she had perfected in pre-
vious works, methods in use among fellow modernists such as Henry James,
Katherine Mansfield, James Joyce, Dorothy Richardson, and others. Just as she
does in texts like Mrs. Dalloway, in Flush Woolf employs heterodiegetic narra-
tion but filters events through a particular character’s vantage point on the
storyworld.12 Genette (1972/1980) called this narrative technique internal
focalization; Stanzel (1979/1984), using a different analytic system and descrip-
tive nomenclature, characterized the method as figural narration, noting that the
technique involves both a more or less fully realized teller who is the source of
the narration and a reflector or center of consciousness through whose vantage
point the narrated events are presented. Exemplifying this technique is the fol-
lowing passage from early in Flush, in which the narrative recounts what it was
like for Flush when he was taken on walks near the rural cottage where he was
born:
As she [Miss Mitford] strode through the long grass, so he [Flush] leapt hither and
thither, parting its green curtain. The cool globes of dew or rain broke in showers of
iridescent spray about his nose; the earth, here hard, here soft, here hot, here cold,
stung, teased and tickled the soft pads of his feet. Then what a variety of smells inter-
woven in subtlest combination thrilled his nostrils; strong smells of earth, sweet
smells of flowers; nameless smells of leaf and bramble; sour smells as they crossed
the road; pungent smells as they entered bean-fields. But suddenly down the wind
came tearing a smell sharper, stronger, more lacerating than any—a smell that ripped
across his brain stirring a thousand instincts, releasing a million memories—the
smell of a hare, the smell of a fox. (12)
Or compare the following passage, recounting what goes on in the very differ-
ent environment in which Flush finds himself in the house on Wimpole Street in
London:
So the long hours went by in the back bedroom with nothing to mark them but the
sounds of steps passing on the stairs; and the distant sound of the front door shutting,
and the sound of a broom tapping, and the sound of the postman knocking . . .. But
sometimes the step on the stair did not pass the door; it stopped outside. The han-
dle was seen to spin round; the door actually opened; somebody came in. Then how
strangely the furniture changed its look! What extraordinary eddies of sound and
smell were at once set in circulation! How they washed round the legs of tables and
impinged on the sharp edges of the wardrobe! (39)
Both teller and reflector manifest themselves in these two passages. The teller sets
the scene, even as Flush’s vantage point on events shapes the presentation of the
experiences that unfold within that scene. Curtains of grass, globes of dew, spin-
ning door handles, and wardrobes constitute elements of the world as experienced
and described by humans. But in the first passage Flush’s perceptions organize the
account of the earth as “here hard, here soft, here hot, here cold,” while Woolf ’s use
of free indirect discourse in the second passage—note the exclamation points index-
ing Flush’s surprised or excited response to the unexpected visitors—likewise marks
the presence of an experiencing agent who stands apart from the teller.13
As already indicated, two significant issues arise from Woolf ’s use of internal
focalization, or figural narration, in Flush: on the one hand, how her use of the tech-
nique bears on the generic classification of the text (biography or fiction?); on the
other hand, what it means for Woolf to employ a nonhuman reflector as focalizing
agent. In connection with the first issue, narrative analysts have drawn attention to
a range of hybrid texts that combine features conventionally associated with fic-
tion and nonfiction. Relevant here are counterfactual or alternate histories, which,
as noted in chapter 4, trace out the consequences of events that might have hap-
pened but did not.14 Relevant, too, are nonfiction novels or instances of faction (for
example, accounts affiliated with the new journalism or literary journalism), with
narratives like Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood and Norman Mailer’s The Armies
of the Night depicting “actual contemporary events . . . using the styles and tech-
niques of fictional discourse”; such accounts typically include “dialogues and dra-
matic scenes . . . from the point of view of the people involved (rather than from
an objective, distant point of view)” (Zipfel 2005: 397; see also Dardenne 2005;
Hellmann 1981). Grounding itself in the historical record of the Brownings’ court-
ship and subsequent life in Italy even as it creates “an immersive context in which the
narration of actual events is as lively as the presentation of fictional worlds” (Zipfel
2005: 397), Flush can be read as a forerunner of the generic experimentation found
in the nonfiction novel. For example, in recounting key incidents the text resorts
extensively to scenic methods of presentation, as opposed to the summarizing meth-
ods commonly used in biography. Thus when Flush and Elizabeth Barrett encounter
one another for the first time, “Each was surprised. Heavy curls hung down on either
side of Miss Barrett’s face; large bright eyes shone out; a large mouth smiled. Heavy
ears hung down on either side of Flush’s face; his eyes, too, were large and bright: his
mouth was wide. There was a likeness between them” (23).
A mixed generic picture also emerges from the way the narrative handles attribu-
tions of mental experiences (perceptions, memories, emotions) to Flush—to broach
issues that will be the focal concern of c hapter 6. Again using modernist techniques
to present extended, unhedged attributions of experiences for which there is no evi-
dentiary backing, the text details what was passing through Flush’s mind during his
horrible experience of being stolen and held for ransom in Whitechapel:
Was it better to be killed or to stay here? Which was worse—this life or that death?
The racket, the hunger and the thirst, the reeking smells of the place . . . were fast
obliterating any clear image, any single desire. Fragments of old memories began
turning in his head. Was that the voice of old Mitford shouting in the field [near the
cottage where he grew up]? . . . There was a rattling in the room and he thought he
heard Miss Mitford tying up a bunch of geraniums. But it was only the wind—for it
was stormy today—battering at the brown paper in the broken window pane. It was
only some drunken voice raving in the gutter. . . . He had been forgotten and deserted.
No help was coming. (88)
Such extended reports about Flush’s mental life violate the criterion of falsifiability
that normatively distinguishes nonfictional genres such as biography from fictional
narratives—as Monk (2007) emphasizes in his discussion of Strachey’s life-writing
practices. Yet the narrative also features hedged reports of Flush’s experiences, in
a manner characteristic of more straightforward biographies. Thus, in recounting
Flush’s arrival at the house on Wimpole Street, the biographer-narrator speculates
that “the effect on Flush must have been overwhelming in the extreme” (17, empha-
sis added). Or again, in a passage focusing on the importance of Flush’s sense of
smell when it comes to navigating Italy, Woolf writes: “The biographer must per-
force come to a pause. Where two or three thousand words are insufficient for what
we see . . . there are no more than two words and perhaps one-half for what we smell”
(129). Accordingly, to “describe [Flush’s] simplest experience with the daily chop or
biscuit is beyond our power” (130).
As this last passage suggests, the generic hybridity of Woolf ’s life-writing meth-
ods in Flush needs to be considered alongside the narrative’s focus on nonhuman
lives. More than just intermixing techniques associated with both fictional and
nonfictional genres, Woolf ’s text is distinctive for its use of a nonhuman focalizer
as a vantage point on storyworld events. In texts like Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf employs
multiple focalizers to suggest intraspecies differences in ways of experiencing the
world. At issue is how intelligent agents of the same basic kind will experience a
shared environment in different ways, because of their contrasting life histories.
Septimus Smith, Rezia Smith, and Peter Walsh all converge on Regent’s Park in the
same moment; but the park affords very different modes of encounter for each of
them, because of Septimus’s psychological trauma from the war, Rezia’s feelings of
loneliness and cultural displacement, and Peter’s preoccupation with events from
his and Clarissa Dalloway’s past. By contrast, in the situational frame elaborated by
the human teller in Flush, Woolf uses a nonhuman reflector to suggest interspecies
differences in ways of encountering the world—including dogs’ greater acuity of,
and reliance on, their sense of smell, as compared with humans.15
By including extensive reports of Flush’s unverbalized thoughts and perceptions

in a text that also affiliates itself with biographical narratives, Woolf registers these
cross-species contrasts. She also leaves open the question of how far the stretches of
figural narration included in the text are meant to be read under the rubric of fiction,
and how far they constitute an example of what I describe in chapter 4 as Umwelt
modeling. Under the latter interpretation, Woolf, in Flush, leverages modernist tech-
niques as an imaginative aid or modeling tool—that is, as a resource for modeling
how the biophysical structure as well as the life histories of nonhuman agents might
impinge on their ways of engaging with environments inhabited, in other ways, by
human agents. In short, Flush can be read as a text that, rather than endorsing the
fictionalizing and anthropomorphizing of animal others, in the manner suggested
by Jutta Ittner (2006), gives scope to an exploratory modeling of nonhuman ways
of experiencing the world.16 Using figural narration to ascribe to Flush mental expe-
riences he might plausibly have had, Woolf, on this account, makes hypothesized
attributions of perceptions, feelings, and other responses to which Flush’s organis-
mic makeup, coupled with the circumstances he encounters, might have given rise.
Woolf ’s focalization strategies in Flush as well as other texts, and in particu-
lar her experiments with the relativity of perspective, resonate with the concept
of the Umwelt being developed around the same time by the German-Estonian
philosopher-biologist Jakob von Uexküll. Like Woolf, Uexküll was interested in
both intra-and interspecies variation in Umwelten. One sequence of illustrations in
his study contrasts how the knot in an oak tree may be encountered by a fright-
ened child, who sees the knot as a monstrous face, versus a forester, who calculates
how much wood the tree might yield with the knot factored in (Uexküll 1934/
1955: 127). Here Septimus’s, Rezia’s, and Peter’s different ways of engaging with
Regent’s Park, in Mrs. Dalloway, come to mind. As a biologist and a pioneer of the
field of ethology, however, Uexküll’s particular concern was with the way Umwelten
vary across species; hence his inclusion of a sequence of images illustrating how
the oak tree provides different affordances for a fox, owl, ant, bark beetle, and wasp
(128–32). Analogously, given its use of a nonhuman reflector, Flush can be viewed
as a thought experiment that explores interspecies differences in ways of being-in-
the-world. Woolf ’s text, by fleshing out the cross-species relevance of the Umwelt
concept, dramatizes the limits of Heidegger’s characterization of nonhuman animals
as “poor in world.”17 It replaces the evaluative hierarchy that underwrites Heidegger’s
account with an ecological approach foregrounding the plurality and diversity of
ways of world making—across as well as within species.
Indeed, the innovative profile of Flush highlights how these and other issues raised
by the text are interconnected—such interconnections being ones into which imagi-
native writing like Woolf ’s can, by its nature, provide special insights (see Plumwood
2002a: 54; Plumwood 2007; Zapf 2016; and chapter 7 for a fuller discussion). The
issues in question include, in this case, (1) generic experimentation in the form
of metabiography, that is, the reflexive use of biography to interrogate the fiction-
nonfiction boundary in contexts of life writing—both in general and in writing
about animal lives in particular; (2) a corresponding rejection of broadly Cartesian
assumptions according to which, because actual minds are hidden and inaccessible,
the I-originarity of another (whether human or nonhuman) can be accessed only
in fiction; (3) the use of narrative to facilitate, per issue (2), the exploratory model-
ing of animal worlds via nonhuman focalizers; and (4) the staging, through (3), of
a critique of anthropocentric hierarchies of kinds of minds—hierarchies in which
human modes of consciousness take precedence over nonhuman modes (compare
Turner 2009). Here it should be noted that other imaginative texts raise some of
these same issues, but without exploring them in their totality or holding up for
inspection the web of relationships among them. For example, to mention a narra-
tive nearly contemporaneous with Woolf ’s, Henry Williamson’s 1927 novel Tarka
the Otter makes extensive use of animal focalization along what can be interpreted as
non-or anti-anthropocentric lines. The text critically defamiliarizes cars and roads,
for instance, and also human-caused pollution, by presenting them from Tarka’s per-
spective, as the otter desperately seeks to evade the hounds who are pursuing him
during human-organized hunts. Tarka thus broaches issues (3) and (4) from the
previous list. Insofar as it consistently demonstrates its generic affiliation with the
category of the (modernist) novel, however, relative to Flush Williamson’s narrative
backgrounds issues (2) and particularly (1).
By contrast, revealing the extent to which issues (1)–(4) are intertwined, Woolf ’s
reflexive engagement with biographical methods in Flush harmonizes with ongoing
efforts to retool ethnographic and life-history research to accommodate nonhuman
ways of living, as well as complex intersections among human and nonhuman lives.
Her intermixing of techniques for mind-presentation—techniques associated with
both fiction and nonfiction—play a central role in this reframing and recontextu-
alizing of life-writing practices. By mobilizing extensive reports of Flush’s unver-
balized thoughts, Woolf implies not that fiction trumps biography when it comes
to capturing the truth of the self, but rather that whatever makes the self what it is
cannot be captured via Cartesian models of mind, according to which perceptions,
memories, emotions, and other experiences remain locked up inside impervious
bodies that contain or enclose them. Instead, situating Flush in a richly detailed life
history, Woolf uses modernist methods for presenting minds to model how nonhu-
man as well as human ways of being-in-the-world acquire their distinctive character-
istics because of the manner in which they unfold over time and across space. The
text thus underscores not just contrasts but also fundamental continuities between
human and nonhuman experiences: members of different species (and different
members of the same species) encounter the world in ways that may differ in their
quality but not their basic structure. Flush suggests how conscious experiences, by
their nature, arise from agent-environment interactions that depend on the sensori-
motor capacities of the agent, the configuration of the environment, and the history
of the specific interactions between them.
This cross-species homology in the structure of experience, in addition to giv-
ing the lie to accounts of the fiction-nonfiction distinction premised on the radi-
cal inaccessibility of another’s subjective experiences outside the domain of fiction,
also undercuts hierarchies of kinds of minds—hierarchies in which human modes
of consciousness take precedence over nonhuman modes. Woolf instead works in a

more horizontal way, suggesting how human and nonhuman experiences unfold in
the context of—and collectively constitute—a wider ecology of minds. The passage
quoted earlier, about how dogs’ acute sense of smell affords perceptions to which
humans do not have access, evokes an ecology of this sort. So too do other contrasts
that Woolf draws between canine and human ways of experiencing the world, by
using Flush as a reflector enabling her to model what it may be like to be a dog.
On the one hand, in her account of Flush’s observation of Elizabeth Barrett at work
on her writing, Woolf emphasizes Flush’s inability to grasp the purpose of writing
implements, or the symbolic functions of writing itself:18
There she would lie hour after hour passing her hand over a white page with a black
stick; and her eyes would suddenly fill with tears; but why? . . . Then again Miss
Barrett, still agitating her stick, burst out laughing. . . . What was there to laugh at in
the black smudge that she held out for Flush to look at? He could smell nothing; he
could hear nothing. There was nobody in the room with them. (37)
On the other hand, however, Flush displays remarkable, literally superhuman sen-
sitivity to tone of voice, thanks to which he can track changes in the two poets’ con-
versations during their courtship:
Flush lay there with his eyes wide open, listening. Though he could make no sense of
the little words that hurtled over his head from two-thirty to four-thirty sometimes
three times a week, he could detect with terrible accuracy that the tone of the words
was changing. Miss Barrett’s voice had been forced and unnaturally lively at first.
Now it had gained a warmth and an ease that he had never heard in it before. And
every time the man came, some new sound came into their voices—now they made a
grotesque chattering; now they skimmed over him like birds flying widely; now they
cooed and clucked, as if they were two birds settled in a nest. (60)
This passage suggests not only an ecology of minds, because of which a dog can
glean in its own, species-specific manner information about the trajectory of human
relationships, but also the way minds of all sorts work ecologically. Thus the bird
comparisons imply that Flush makes sense of what is going on by drawing analo-
gies between the two poets’ conduct and other behavioral patterns with which he is
already familiar from his native environment.
Overall, then, Woolf uses modernist methods of narration to resituate the prac-
tice of biography in a trans-species context, revealing the extent to which life writ-
ing necessarily becomes entangled with the broader endeavor of writing life—the
endeavor of documenting and engaging with nonhuman as well as human ways
of encountering the world. In the process, she suggests how stories can be viewed
as key instruments for developing the ecological (and hence non-or rather anti-
anthropocentric) approach to conscious life outlined by the philosopher Alva Noë
(2009: 40–41). Noë, like Woolf in a different register of discourse, suggests that
nonhuman and human experiences occupy not different levels within a hierarchy
of kinds of minds, but rather different niches within intersecting cognitive ecosys-
tems (see Hutchins 2010)—with stories providing means for mapping out relation-
ships among these ecosystems. But whereas Noë is limited to stating the relevance
of narrative for this mapping project, Woolf can demonstrate narrative’s power
when it comes to modeling dynamic, emergent interrelations among organisms’
environment-bound life histories.
Hence the intermixture of genres in Flush, along with its other innovative features,
can be read as a means for calling into question normative assumptions about how
Flush’s, Elizabeth Barrett’s, and other intelligent agents’ experiences should be situ-
ated within a wider realm of creatural life, a larger ecology of selves. In this respect, it
is no accident that the author of A Room of One’s Own (1929) also wrote Flush. In her
earlier text Woolf began from the premise of a basic continuity—a difference with-
out hierarchical separation—between men’s and women’s minds. Flush extends this
difference-without-hierarchy model from questions of gender to questions of spe-
cies (see also Kendall-Morwick 2014). By emphasizing the entanglement of human
and nonhuman experiences—by suggesting how all experiences emerge from agent-
environment interactions that may differ in their history and distinctive qualities but
remain homologous in their structure—Woolf’s text counters the logic of what ear-
lier epochs had figured as a Great Chain of Being.19 As discussed in chapters 2 and 3,
this linear, hierarchical model, stretching back to Aristotle’s scale of nature, projected
a horizontal axis of morphological difference onto a vertical or hierarchical model of
ontological status—with the different sorts of beings located at different levels of the
model (for example, God, angels, male humans, female humans, nonhuman animals,
inanimate matter) assigned different degrees of moral worth. By contrast, Woolf uses
reflexively modernist methods of narration to underscore fundamental continuities
across human and nonhuman ways of negotiating the world; she thereby models a
form of life writing that resists conferring special status on human lives in particular.
I return to issues raised by the writing of life later in this book, with chapter 7 and
also the coda again exploring life histories from a transhuman perspective—a per-
spective that necessarily crosses disciplinary as well as species lines. In the remain-
der of the present chapter, however, I shift to another, neighboring area of narrative
experimentation—namely, the domain of animal autobiography—to continue my
engagement with questions situated at the intersection of life-writing practices,
developments in genre theory, concepts of animal biographies or life histories, and
established as well as emergent forms of inquiry in fields such as multispecies eth-
nography, ethnozoology, and cultural ecology.
n A N I M A L A U T O B I O G R A P H Y; O R , N A R R A T I O N
B E YO N D T H E H U M A N
In animal autobiography, a nonhuman teller provides an account of situations and

events in which he or she has, over the course of the life history leading up to the
current moment of narration, participated as an experiencing self. As in other kinds
of autobiographical acts (Marcus 1994: 11–55; Smith and Watson 2010: 63–102),
these earlier experiences at once shape and are shaped by the assumptions, values,
and priorities that, it can be inferred, now lie at the heart of the nonhuman narra-
tor’s self-conception, and that manifest themselves not only through the substance
of the story that the animal tells but also through the animal teller’s manner of telling
(compare Ritivoi 2005, 2009). In such contexts—to build on ideas discussed in Part
I of this book—questions that have crystallized around the study of self-narratives
told by human selves apply mutatis mutandis to animal autobiographies, where a
kind of doubled or layered relationality is at work: that between the human author
of the narrative and the nonhuman agent whom the author projects as telling it, and
that between the animal narrator and the range of others, human as well as non-
human, to whom the animal teller in turn orients in recounting, contextualizing,
and explaining or justifying the actions and reactions that make up the story of the
teller’s life. But what is more, in engaging with acts of self-narration that cross species
lines, creators of animal autobiographies also broach questions about genre, truth
status, and the structure as well as the politics of narrative representation—in this
case, the practice of narrativizing the experiences of subjects who communicate via
resources that extend beyond human language systems.
In what follows, after reviewing previous approaches to the study of animal auto-
biography, I redescribe texts that fall within this (sub)genre as the result of acts of
speaking-for that cross the species boundary. I also draw on ideas from the fields of
linguistic semantics, politeness theory, and discourse analysis to profile the struc-
ture, modalities, and implications of such acts.
Approaches to Animal Autobiography
DeMello (2013a) remarks that for the most part “the animals who we allow to speak
in Western culture today are companion animals, who play such an important role
in our lives” (4)—although the scope of contemporary animal autobiography is
being extended by writers such as Ceridwen Dovey (2014), whose multispecies
cast of narrators I discuss below, and by Guess and Magee (2015), who, as noted in
chapter 3, likewise use a variety of humanimal narrators. DeMello also comments
on the range of purposes informing autobiographies by nonhuman tellers, in effect
situating instances of this narrative mode along the spectrum discussed in chapter 4
and shown in figures 4.5 and 4.6:
These animals often speak for us—allowing writers to discuss concepts like loneli-
ness, alienation, or slavery, through the voices of animals—helping us understand
what it is to be human. But speaking animals today are much more than simply alle-
gorical devices. Increasingly today, animals are allowed to speak for themselves, dem-
onstrating a new awareness of animal subjectivity, and a desire on the part of many
animal lovers to give that subjectivity a voice. (DeMello 2013a: 4)
Dwyer (2015) demonstrates the fruitfulness of investigating how animal autobiog-

raphies situated near the more explicitly human-centric end of the spectrum can
be used to allegorize unresolved tensions and contradictions in the broader culture.

Focusing on the production and reception of such narratives in post–Civil War
America, Dwyer suggests that even as they adopted the conventions of slave narra-
tives, these animal autobiographies remained entangled in social and species hierar-
chies that are consonant with slavery—such that in “appropriating and repurposing
slave narrative, the animal autobiography in fact creates and upholds new modes
of racial figuration, new mechanisms of racial subjugation” (4). More specifically,
argues Dwyer, in cross-mapping species difference onto racial difference, animal
autobiographies in this context helped give rise to a “discourse of black criminal-
ity crucial to the reconsolidation of white hegemony after the formal end of racial
slavery” (4–5).
For nonhuman autobiographies situated at the other end of the spectrum out-
lined by DeMello, a key question is the following: To what extent does the voicing
of animal subjectivity, despite the participation of autobiography (as a generic cate-
gory) in the domain of nonfictional discourse, necessarily remain a fictional enter-
prise?20 Do such accounts, by virtue of their shared premise of a nonhuman agent
using human language to tell that agent’s life story, always and everywhere exemplify
the mode Saunders (2010) calls autobiografiction, or “fictional works in auto/bio-
graphical form” (9)? Colombat (1994), for her part, answers in the affirmative, sug-
gesting that “writing the autobiography of an animal is indeed a wonderful idea, and
a great temptation and challenge to a writer. . . , but it just cannot be. It can never be
anything but fiction” (48). By contrast, Savvides (2013), in her account of canine
autobiographies used to promote the welfare of street or “soi” dogs in Bangkok,
Thailand, finds in those animal autobiographies a more thoroughgoing hybrid-
ity of the sort that I have attributed to Woolf ’s semifictional biography of Flush.
Drawing on Franklin’s (2006) sociological studies of human-canine relationships
vis-à-vis domestic living arrangements (compare Irvine 2013a, 2013b), Savvides
describes such accounts as a product of identifications that result in ontological as
well as generic hybridization. She argues that these canine autobiographies “allow
their human readers to understand . . . soi dogs as not-unlike-humans, or, perhaps,
to understand that humans are not-unlike-soi dogs” (241; see also chapter 2). From
this perspective, the hybrid status of animal autobiographies can be aligned with
what Schwalm (2014) describes as the broader hybridity of autobiographical dis-
course as such: “While autobiography on the one hand claims to be non-fictional
(factual) in that it proposes to tell the story of a ‘real’ person, it is inevitably construc-
tive, or imaginative, in nature and as a form of textual ‘self-fashioning’ ultimately
resists a clear distinction from its fictional relatives (autofiction, autobiographical
novel), leaving the generic borderlines blurred” (para. 1; see also Marcus 1994,
1995; Smith and Watson 2010: 204–10).
Indeed, the variety of critical positions on animal autobiography reflects the com-
plexity of the issues raised by this storytelling mode. Ratelle (2014), in her study
of animality in literary works and movies targeted at children, suggests that in ani-
mal autobiographies “the animal’s-eye view compels the human reader into a close
emotional bond with the animal as it relates the story of its difficult life” (10; see
also DeMello 2013a: 8)—such affective bonds being fostered by texts ranging from
Sewell’s Black Beauty (1877/2007); to Le Guin’s “The Wife’s Story” (1979/1994),
discussed in chapter 2; to the dog autobiographies analyzed by Savvides (2013), and
created in an effort to improve canine welfare in Bangkok by promoting interest in
a local not-for-profit organization’s capture, neuter, and release programs. By con-
trast, Huff and Haefner (2012), in their discussion of “animalographies” included
on websites maintained by organizations and corporations across the political spec-
trum, from the Animal Liberation Front to the Purina pet food corporation, attrib-
ute only limited scope and resonance to accounts presented as if they were authored
by nonhuman animals. Adapting the ideas of Bart Simon, Huff and Haefner contrast
the “popular posthumanism” that they see in such animalographies with the “crit-
ical posthumanism” at work in texts such as Donna Haraway’s When Species Meet
(2008), a mixed-genre text combining analyses of humans’ inextricable intercon-
nections with companion species, a narrative about Haraway’s father’s career as a
sports writer with prosthetic legs, and an (auto)biographical account of Haraway’s
own experiences co-participating in competitive agility trials with Cayenne, an
Australian shepherd. Although I go on to argue in what follows that some animalog-
raphies demonstrate more complexity than Huff and Haefner’s discussion would
suggest, the authors claim that popular posthumanism of the sort exemplified by the
websites’ ventriloquized animalographies “aims to describe and colonize, through
human language and perception, the subjectivities of other species.” By contrast,
the critical posthumanism embodied in Haraway’s text “analyzes the relationships
between subjectivities, and studies how those subjectivities transform in the process
of engaging each other” (155).
Along similar lines, Armbruster (2013), in a study entitled “What Do We Want
from Talking Animals,” hypothesizes that “a yearning to genuinely know the other-
ness of nonhuman animals runs through most, if not all, talking animal stories,” even
if “this desire is sometimes almost completely overshadowed by or absorbed back
into the human tendency to gaze—whether lovingly or critically—at our own reflec-
tion when we look at other animals (or, more properly, to hear our own voices when
we listen to them)” (19). Thus, whereas attributing voices to nonhuman animals can
be viewed as a form of “connection and inclusion” (22), unless it is situated within
what Huff and Haefner would describe as a critical-posthumanist versus popular-
posthumanist perspective, this narrative practice raises the specter of paternalism.
Such voicing also poses the threat of a subordination of difference under the logic
of the same—an emptying out of the specificities of experience that can obscure
relational ties across species lines—cautioned against by postcolonial theorists and
feminists in intraspecies contexts (23; see also Mohanty 1988; Spivak 1985/1988).
Accordingly, for Armbruster, in literary representations of animals “The key . . . is for
the literary creation to somehow remind the reader of the real animals that hover
outside the human-created text, both inviting the reader to identify with the non-
human animal as a fellow living being and reminding him or her of the inevitable
differences between humans and other species” (24; see also Ittner 2006; J. Smith
2015: 237). Harel (2013) suggests that Kafka achieves just this kind of balance in
stories such as “Investigations of a Dog” (1922)—even though Kafka’s use of auto-

diegetic narration, by virtue of which the nonhuman protagonist also takes on the
role of narrator, would seem to make “an authentic representation of nonhuman
experience . . . necessarily unachievable,” since the narrator uses human language
(49). In this case, argues Harel, Kafka goes over the top in creating a dog who lit-
erally does not see humans, such that in ironizing the narrator’s “canine-centric fal-
lacy” and holding it up for critique, Kafka undermines, by analogy, human-centric
worldviews (57)—with their equal and opposite denial of nonhuman experiences’
ontological significance and moral value.
For their part, Bernaerts et al. (2014) have established an important precedent
for inquiry into narration by nonhuman agents, laying foundations for a narratology
beyond the human more generally. Arguing that narratives told by nonhuman narra-
tors engage readers in a dialectic of defamiliarization and empathy—defamiliarizing
(at least in some instances) human-centric frames of reference while also promot-
ing empathy with other-than-human ways of being-in-the-world (72–74)—the co-
authors go on to write,
What is often at stake in non-human narration is the ability to acknowledge similarity

and otherness at the same time, to recognize the ratness of the rat, the monkeyness of
the monkey and the humanness of the rat and the monkey as well as the ratness and
the monkeyness of humans. In that way, stories narrated by non-human animals can
destabilize anthropocentric ideologies. By giving a voice to non-human animals and
facilitating empathy, these narratives can place them on a continuum with humans,
rather than constructing them as opposites. (Bernaerts et al. 2014: 75)
However, Bernaerts and his co-authors, in describing nonhuman narration as a super-

category containing the subcategories of tales told by animals and the tradition of it-
narratives (82–88), or narratives presented by inanimate objects (Flint 1998; Wall
2006), downplay the differences between these two kinds of narrative situations.
Using Annie Carey’s 1870 Autobiographies of a Lump of Coal; a Grain of Salt; a Drop of
Water; a Bit of Old iron; a Piece of Flint as a case study, they motivate their double focus
on animate and inanimate tellers by attributing more or less radically defamiliarizing
effects to the use of object as well as animal narrators. In this way, the co-authors
in effect follow Latour (1991/1993) in making the flattening-out move mentioned
in chapter 1, whereby animals and other sorts of actants that can be categorized as
nonhuman (artifacts, built structures, etc.) are lumped together. By conflating animal
and object narrators, in a manner that threatens to obscure the contrasting meanings
that these kinds of beings have in the broader cultural ontologies in which they fig-
ure, insofar as they populate distinctive subregions of the realm beyond the human,
Bernaerts and his co-authors become vulnerable to the critique articulated by Kohn
(2007): “The distinction Latour makes between humans and nonhumans . . . fails to
recognize that some nonhumans are selves” (5; see also Kohn 2013: 7, 91–92).
At the same time, because all of their examples are fictional autobiographies, that
is, texts that squarely belong to the genre of fiction, the fundamental hybridity that
accrues to autobiography in general, animal autobiography in particular, receives

short shrift in Bernaerts et al.’s (2014) analysis. Thus the authors’ account, as I see
it, both undergenerates and overgenerates necessary analytic distinctions. On the
one hand, it does not make sharp enough ontological discriminations between ani-
mals and other kinds of beings; on the other hand, by relegating (all) nonhuman
narrators to the domain of fiction, it draws too sharp a border within the landscape
of narrative genres, and obscures how acts of animal telling can, when resituated in
the larger context of autobiographical acts, be viewed as collaborative, trans-species
narrational performances cutting across the fiction-nonfiction divide.
In order to explore these issues in more detail, in the discussion that follows
I draw not just on scholarship on (animal) autobiography but also on ideas from
the fields of linguistic semantics, politeness theory, and discourse analysis, includ-
ing the “framing and footing” approach that focuses on talk emerging in contexts
of face-to-face interaction and that derives most directly from the work of Erving
Goffman (1974, 1981). I use this approach to profile autobiographical acts that
extend beyond the human as acts of speaking for or in behalf of animal others, situ-
ating such acts within their broader sociointeractional and institutional—as well as
narratological—contexts.
Nonhuman Narration Reframed: Finding

One’s Footing in Animal Autobiographies
As Goffman (1981) has argued, participants in the forms of talk that emerge from
face-to-face interaction regularly change how they align themselves with one another
and with the utterances being produced. Goffman characterizes such changes—that
is, changes to “the alignment that [discourse participants] take up to [themselves]
and others present in the way [they] manage the production or reception of an utter-
ance” (128)—as changes of footing, with “a change in our footing being another
way of talking about our frame for events” (128). Such frames can be defined in turn
as more or less fully shared understandings of what kind of interaction is unfolding,
and what kinds of moves, conversational and other, are expected or normative given
the kind of interaction participants take themselves to be involved in and contribut-
ing to.21 Thus very different sorts of discourse contributions are expected in a service
encounter—for example, an exchange with the cashier at the grocery store—than in
an academic debate, the delivery of a eulogy at a funeral, or for that matter interac-
tions with a companion animal.
In the pioneering analyses that have informed more recent research into fram-
ing and footing across different settings for and kinds of conversational interac-
tions, Goffman sets out concepts and distinctions that have proved foundational
for research in discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, and related fields.22 Crucially,
Goffman proposes “breaking up the primitive notion of hearer and speaker,” which
constitute folk imagery associated with communicative interchanges, “into more
differentiated parts, namely participation framework and production format”
(1981: 153). The terms speaker and hearer, on this view, are insufficiently nuanced to
capture the many (and fluctuating) statuses that one can have as a discourse partici-
pant at once contributing to and making sense of emergent frames for talk. Relevant
statuses include, when it comes to production format, that of author, or “someone
who has selected the sentiments that are being expressed and the words in which
they are encoded” (144); animator, or “the talking machine, a body engaged in
acoustic activity, or, if you will, an individual active in the role of utterance produc-
tion” (144); principal, or “someone whose position is established by the words that
are spoken, someone whose beliefs have been told, someone who is committed to
what the words say” (144);23 and figure, Goffman’s term for contexts in which speak-
ers represent themselves through personal pronouns such as “I,” hedges and qualifi-
ers such as modal auxiliaries (“would,” “could”), remedial statements or corrections
of previous utterances, or accounts of what they said on past occasions, such that
the speakers in question become figures in a statement, that is, “a protagonist in a
described scene, a ‘character’ in an anecdote, someone . . . who belongs to the world
that is spoken about, not the world in which the speaking occurs” (147). The pos-
sibility of adopting the status of figure, in other words, allows for embedding one’s
own or others’ past, future, or hypothetical utterances into a current stretch of talk,
including quotations, ironic revoicings, and maxims, as well as stage performances
and recitations (150). Such embeddings, which can be recursively nested within
one another, also lead to changes of footing, since in reporting what someone else
said or reproducing sentiments one used to espouse but no longer condones, one is
taking up a different alignment to the ongoing discourse than the alignment entailed
by reporting “the [current] feelings of the ‘addressing self ’ ” (151).
When it comes to what Goffman calls participation frameworks, relevant sta-
tuses include orienting to the unfolding discourse as an addressee, an unaddressed
but ratified participant, or an unaddressed and unratified participant—for example,
an eavesdropper or a bystander. For Schiffrin (1993), participation frameworks,
which in her definition overlap somewhat with Goffman’s production formats, con-
cern “the way speaker and hearer are related to their utterances and to one another”
(233). The frameworks in question are anchored in what Tannen and Wallat (1993)
term interactive frames, or “what people think they are doing when they talk to each
other” (Schiffrin 1993: 233).
In analyses that elaborate on these general ideas, and that provide a basis for
rethinking the forms and functions of animal autobiography, Schiffrin (1993,
1994: 106–36) examines microinteractional details associated with “speaking for
another.” In this mode of alignment, one expresses knowledge of and sometimes
solidarity with the person—more precisely, the discourse participant—whose voice
one animates. Depending on the circumstances—and to invoke an indicative range
of stances or alignments it will be important to discriminate among, in intra-as well
as interspecies contexts—in being animated the voice in question may be assumed,
remembered, inferred, hypothesized, or imagined. Further, as Schiffrin suggests, in
multiparty talk, speaking for another can be a way of “chipping in” (engaging in a
display of what Brown and Levinson 1978/1987 term positive politeness and what
Goffman 1967 calls positive face wants, whereby one signals that one shares so
much with another discourse participant that one can take up his or her position
in talk, building solidarity) or else “butting in” (engaging in a violation of negative
politeness requirements or negative face wants, whereby one fails to respect anoth-
er’s desire not to be intruded upon, threatening solidarity). In other words, “speak-
ing for another can be seen as either deferential, or demeaning, to the one spoken
for” (Schiffrin 1993: 234). What is more, such transfers of the responsibility for
speaking can be institutionally allocated, as when a lawyer enters a plea for his or her
client in court, and also performed on the fly by conversational peers who thereby
signal (and potentially reconfigure) their understandings of gender-related, ethnic,
and other aspects of identity—as researchers working in the tradition of Critical
Discourse Analysis have explored.24
For their part, building on some of the sociological and discourse-analytic schol-
arship that informs Schiffrin’s approach, Arluke and Sanders (1996: 61–81) use
human-canine interactions in a veterinary hospital as well as a guide-dog training
program to underscore the relevance of practices of speaking-for in constellations of
social agents that extend beyond the human. Arluke and Sanders identify a variety
of reasons that may motivate human caretakers to speak for their companion ani-
mals in such settings, whether through first-person, ventriloquizing constructions or
through more distanced, third-person attributions of experience. Relevant motives
include using the animal as a means to transmit, in a more or less oblique way, possi-
bly face-threatening directives or complaints to a spouse or another family member;
offering “surrogate explanations” for behavior that caretakers construe as needing
to be excused, whether because of its potentially disruptive or transgressive effects
or because of how, in the caretaker’s estimation, the behavior at issue might bear
on interlocutors’ assessments of the kind of person he or she is; and empathically
identifying with—and giving voice to—the suffering of a nonhuman being in order
to obtain appropriate treatment for a sick or injured animal. As this range of motives
suggests, and as my case studies in the next section confirm, acts of speaking-for
that cross the species boundary are as much subject to fluctuations between what
Schiffrin (1993, 1994) calls butting in and chipping in as are intraspecies acts—that
is, acts in which both the speaking and the spoken-for parties are human.
This line of inquiry, which connects ideas from discourse analysis and interac-
tional sociolinguistics with work in human-animal studies, and which the present
chapter further seeks to link up with scholarship on animal autobiography, under-
scores reasons for diverging from Bernaerts et al.’s (2014) account—more specifi-
cally, from their conflation of object and animal narrators as well as their relegation
of (all) animal tellers to the domain of fiction. The ascription of self-narratives to
nonhuman tellers should, rather, be situated within a multiplicity of discourse prac-
tices that involve speaking in behalf of another being who is assumed, inferred, or
hypothesized to have a perspective on and interest in situations and events—with
such acts of speaking-for encompassing a range of practices that cut across the
fiction-nonfiction contrast.
Before I elaborate on the implications of this last claim, I should address a crit-
icism made by one of the reviewers of an earlier version of this study. Specifically,
the reviewer argued that that the very attempt to leverage Goffman’s ideas is mis-
guided in this context, because “nonhuman animals are not and cannot be aware of
their participation in” episodes of communicative interaction with humans, there
being, as a result, “no shared discourse context as in instances of ‘butting in’ or ‘chip-
ping in’ ” and “no positive or negative ‘face wants’ as far as this kind of discourse is
concerned.” I dispute the claim, however, that there is no shared discourse context
in scenes of cross-species interaction. Granted, the kinds of species involved make
a difference in this connection, with human-canine interactions probably afford-
ing more possibilities for shared participation than human-insect interactions, for
example. But it begs the question to assert that no shared participation is possible
in any human-animal encounter, and that the concept of face wants, even narrowly
construed, is therefore inapplicable.
Such question begging is the target of Val Plumwood’s (2002a) critique of what
she describes as a hyperseparation between humans and the larger biotic com-
munities to which they belong; for Plumwood, this hyperseparation mirrors or
finds expression in the division between the sciences, when they are constructed
around a subject/object division, and the humanities, which are subject/subject
in orientation and which treat “the other studied as a mindful, intentional or ‘sub-
jective’ being who is the subject of a life narrative, and with whom we can expe-
rience solidarity and sympathy” (52). Because this second orientation typically
sees its subject matter as confined to the human, and extending to the nonhuman
only in indirect and derivative ways; and because the nonhuman “is supposed to
be the sphere of the ‘objective,’ of ‘hard science’ where subject/object construc-
tions reign supreme,” the orientation to nonhuman others as mindful participants
in trans-species encounters in effect falls into the gap between the humanities
and the (natural) sciences. I suggest that the extension of a framing and footing
approach to human-animal interactions, as outlined in the present analysis, con-
stitutes a strategy for rethinking this division of intellectual labor and the broader
cultural ontology with which it is interlinked. Indeed, a rethinking of this sort
falls directly under the remit of a narratology beyond the human, given that, as
Plumwood puts, “the ground of the ‘eco-humanities’ and the subject-subject sci-
ences we wish to reclaim [for the study of trans-species interactions and relation-
ships] has been artfully disappeared by these disciplinary divisions” (52; see also
56, 59–60).
To return to the specifics of the approach being proposed: As my initial charac-
terization has already begun to suggest, when it comes to acts of speaking-for that
cross the species boundary, and that turn on perspectives and interests that other
animals are assumed, inferred, or hypothesized to possess, questions of modality
intersect with those of framing, footing, and genre. Accordingly, it is advantageous
to shift from the fiction-nonfiction polarity, a binarized distinction, to another
continuum—in this case, the continuum that linguists have developed to map out
the degree to which a speaker is committed to the truth of the proposition expressed
in an utterance, with such degrees of commitment falling under the heading of “epi-
stemic modality” (Frawley 1992: 387–89).25
At issue are the expressive resources—including, in English, sentential adverbs

such as “undoubtedly,” modal auxiliary verbs such as “may” or “would,” and statement
types such as interrogatives and imperatives—that are used by speakers to signal
where their attitude toward a proposition falls on a scale stretching from the epi-
stemic modality of certainty to that of uncertainty (Bussmann 1990/1996: 307–8;
Herman 2002: 310–11). One end of the continuum corresponds to the “realis”
mode, in which an interlocutor is strongly committed to truth of the proposition
about which he or she makes a claim; the other end of the continuum corresponds
to the “irrealis” mode, in which an interlocutor is weakly committed to the truth or
factual status of the proposition—or even, as in fictional discourse, not committed
at all.26 Acts of speaking for another can occupy various positions along this scale.
Practices of speaking-for that cluster toward the realis end of the continuum include
collaboratively written autobiographies (Iadonisi 1994; Lejeune 1989: 185–215),
the co-production of discourse in interactions between persons with and persons
without aphasia (Simmons-Mackie, Kingston, and Schultz 2004), acting in the for-
mal capacity as a court-appointed attorney making a plea in behalf of a defendant
accused of a crime (Cosslett 2006: 81–82), or taking someone’s side in a conver-
sation in which one defends an absent or present party against the criticisms ven-
tured by an interlocutor. Practices of speaking-for that cluster toward the irrealis end
include conjecturing about what a person from a different culture (or even an extra-
terrestrial being) might say about current world affairs, predicting one’s own future
reactions to contemporary events, or projecting oneself into the role of the homo-or
autodiegetic narrator presenting a fictional account, whether within or across the
species boundary. The point to emphasize here is that, like acts of speaking-for more
generally, animal-autobiographical acts can fall at different increments along this
scale—even as an extended animal autobiography can span different segments of
the continuum over the course of its telling.
A number of commentators have stressed the hybrid generic status of autobi-
ography; animal autobiography piggybacks on this hybridity, taking advantage of a
flexible narrative environment in which the whole range of modes—from realis to
irrealis—can be exploited when it comes to presenting an account of the situations
and events that make up a given storyworld. In turn, these movements along the
continuum of epistemic modalities in the context of animal autobiography trans-
late into changes in the framings and footings entailed by acts of speaking-for that
cross species lines. Regarding autobiography’s generic hybridity, Marcus (1995), for
example, points to classificatory schemes that have been proposed to contain “its
instability in terms of the postulated opposites between self and world, literature
and history, fact and fiction, subject and object” (14). Not only does autobiogra-
phy’s emergence against the backdrop formed by the use of the fictional narrating-I
in the eighteenth-century novel raise questions about its claims to truth or factuality
(Marcus 1994: 13–14); what is more, psychologists’ growing interest, in the nine-
teenth century, in the structure and dynamics of introspective experience meant
that autobiography in effect became a contested terrain to which literary studies and
the sciences of mind both laid claim. Autobiography itself thus took on a profile that
combined features of what I. A. Richards (1926) had divided into referential and
emotive uses of language, or statement and pseudo-statement (Marcus 1994: 68, 78).
At the same time, as Loesberg (1981) notes, this debate over the generic status of
autobiography impinged on, and was shaped by, “the debate over the existence and
the locus of the self, which is after all the concern and possibly the root of whatever
the genre autobiography is” (qtd. in Marcus 1994: 229).
Who or what, then, is the self for whom claims are being made in autobiograph-
ical writing, and what is the status of those claims?27 These questions are already
challenging ones, and they become even more complex and multidimensional when
such acts of speaking-for-a-self extend beyond the realm of the human. As Cosslett
(2006) notes, Lejeune’s (1989) work on collaborative autobiographies anticipates
some of the issues at stake in animal-autobiographical acts. For Lejeune, the writer
of another’s life story creates a narrative that would otherwise have remained rel-
egated to silence, and thereby takes on the role “a mediator between two worlds”
(qtd. in Cosslett 2006: 88). Describing the practice of collaborative autobiography
as one in which the writer tries to imagine himself as the model, or the autobio-
graphical subject whose story is being told, Lejeune argues that collaborative life-
writing gives the lie to the apparent unity and coherence of autobiographies that do
not result from explicit collaboration: “A person is always several people when he is
writing, even all alone, even his own life. By relatively isolating the roles, the collab-
orative autobiography calls into question again the belief in a unity that underlies,
in the autobiographical genre, the notion of author and that of person . . .. Anyone
who decides to write his life story acts as if he were his own ghostwriter” (Lejeune
1989: 188). From this perspective, the structure of the animal autobiography not
only mirrors the practice of collaborative (interhuman) autobiography, with the dif-
ference that the writer projects himself or herself into the position of a nonhuman
model, but also roots itself in the necessity for ghostwriting, or self-displacement,
even in cases where, to revert to Goffman’s model, the roles of author, animator,
principal, and figure would all seem prima facie to coincide.
Case Studies in Cross-Species Speaking-For
With this additional context in place, consider again how Goffman’s approach to
framing and footing can be brought to bear on acts of speaking-for that cross the
species boundary. These acts can be situated on a continuum that parallels the one
stretching between “butting in” and “chipping in” in the domain of face-to-face inter-
action among human interlocutors (Schiffrin 1993, 1994). In this domain—and
taking into account the complexities of authorship noted by Lejeune (1989) and
Iadonisi (1994)—by butting in a speaker voices an utterance of which he or she
is not only author but also the principal, whereas by chipping in a speaker voices
an utterance in which the spoken-for party or parties function as principal(s). As
the previous discussion suggests, however, the role of principal is no more atomic
or indivisible than the role of author. To accommodate the nonprimitive nature of
principals, or the way an utterance can be voiced in behalf of multiple parties or a
single party of more or less uncertain preferences and predispositions, a second con-
tinuum can be posited; this continuum, which cross-cuts the one that spans butting
in and chipping in, corresponds to a scale of epistemic modalities whose increments
fall between the realis and irrealis poles. By situating acts of speaking for nonhuman
others on both continua, those acts can be profiled along two dimensions—not
only as embodying more or less human-centric interests (determined in large part
by the nature of the author-principal relationship in a given instance), but also as
reflecting, and helping consolidate, a stance that marks those interests as ones about
which it is appropriate to make assumptions, draw inferences, engage in hypotheses,
or bracket as elements of fictional worlds, as the case may be.
Nonfictional Animal Autobiographies
This two-dimensional model helps explains why, in part because of the hybrid status
of autobiographical discourse in general, not every act of speaking-for that crosses
species lines should be categorized as fictional, or for that matter as centering pri-
marily on human interests and concerns. Some of these acts, rather, can be situated
closer to the realis pole of the continuum of epistemic modalities than fictional
projections accomplished through storytelling acts, and also as more analogous to
chipping in than to butting in when it comes to the framings and footings involved.
Animal riddles, for example, are rooted in an animal’s attested habitats and behav-
ioral patterns, and to that extent they can be falsified; such riddles therefore stand
apart from the category of fiction. Thus, on a website containing animal riddles writ-
ten by Jerry Jindrich for young children,28 the riddle whose answer is “frog” reads:
My skin is green and slippery.
I have four legs and webbed feet.
I eat bugs and little fish.
I can swim under water and hop on land.
I am a . . .
Similarly, the riddle whose answer is “whale” reads as follows:
I live in the ocean.
I swim wherever I want.
I sing to my family.
I can breathe through a hole in the top of my head.
I am a . . .
Arguably, the acts of speaking-for associated with such riddles sometimes go
beyond cross-species paternalism, or forms of human-centric butting in that can be
assumed to violate nonhuman creatures’ (inferred or inferable) negative face wants
(Brown and Levinson 1978/1987; Goffman 1967). Rather, those acts may result
from a hypothesized human-animal interchange, in which the sentiments expressed
in the riddle are, in effect, shared between a human author and a counterfactual
nonhuman co-author—sentiments that the human designer of the riddle infers and
seeks to reinforce via an act of co-telling driven by positive face wants. The subject
of the riddle, which I am characterizing as a nonhuman co-author, contributes to a
model or profile that derives from what humans know about the animal in question
coupled with hypotheses concerning what kind of self-narrative the animal would
tell if it were equipped with the capacity for verbal language. The role of principal is
likewise split, or hybridized, in such contexts. Thus the telling of the riddle can be
interpreted both as an act of speaking-for that constitutes cross-species chipping in
and—particularly when the riddle is targeted at children learning about the lifeways
of animals—a puzzle designed in behalf of a human addressee.29
The same proximity to the realis pole and the same dual or hybrid footing are
evident in the student-created riddles that were uploaded to a website titled “Mrs.
Hyland’s Third Grade Classroom.” The site contains materials for the 2011–12
school year, including riddles composed by the children as part of the process of
learning about various animal species.30 Again, the students’ riddles result from what
can be described as trans-species co-authorship; and again the riddles were created
both to build up (self-)profiles for the animals involved and to support the students’
own educational purposes. One such riddle, the answer for which is “dolphin” and
which is titled “Abigail’s Animal Riddle,” reads as follows:
splash!!!! I swim by you going 25 miles an hour. I am slippery, sleek, and fast. Don’t
blink or you might miss me swim by you. I eat fish and crabs. We are very noisy ani-
mals and like to chirp, whistle, and squeak. I am a warm-blooded mammal. I have
more teeth than any other animal. Most of my kind have dark colors on the upper
body, and on the underside we have lighter colors. I live in the ocean. I have a back-
bone. My tail helps me swim. What am I???
Indeed, as this example suggests, animal riddles form part of a broader category of non-
fictional instructional narratives that serve the purpose of modeling animals’ behavioral
routines, capabilities, and (potential) viewpoints on their environments. For instance,
in the first volume of his multivolume Curious Critters series, targeted at readers aged
three to eight, David Fitzsimmons includes, along with an image of the animal with its
claws extended toward the reader, the following profile for “Ohio Crawfish”:
Do you know why I’m waving my giant claws? I’m warning you: Don’t come any
closer.
Snap! Snap! Snap!
I catch my food with these claws. I also attack and defend myself with them.
Snap! Snap! Snap!
Do you want to know something really cool? If any of my legs gets hurt, including my
giant claws, I can grow new ones. Pretty neat, huh? Now, enough chitchat. Back off!
Snap! Snap! Snap! (Fitzsimmons 2011: 4)

This narrative profile, like the ones emerging from the adult-and student-designed
animal riddles, can be viewed as the product of trans-species co-authorship. Here
too the crayfish’s attested display behaviors, habits of predation and self-defense,
and recuperative powers contribute to an account that, although it is mock-voiced
by a crustacean in dialogue with child readers who are cast in the role of direct
addressees, remains within the domain of falsifiability.31 But note how the foot-
ings associated with this act of cross-species speaking-for change over the course
of the ventriloquized self-profile. Some of the crayfish’s projected utterances can be
taken as the result of chipping in on the part of the human co-author of the pro-
file, whose positive face wants motivate him to infer and co-articulate, on the basis
of the animal’s observed dispositions and behavioral tendencies, what he takes to
be the crayfish’s preferences and priorities. Other utterances contained in the pro-
file, however, including the interrogatives “Do you want to know something really
cool?” and “Pretty neat, huh?” as well as the locution “Now, enough chitchat,” can be
glossed as originating from a human—rather than hybrid—frame of reference. Such
utterances can be construed as imposing upon negative face wants that may, given
the evidence available, be more or less plausibly attributed to the animal. These ele-
ments of the profile extend beyond any extrapolation from observed behaviors, or
for that matter any technique for Umwelt modeling; instead, they can be interpreted
as strategies for enhancing readability through an engagement with forms of dialogic
exchange anchored in humans’ own communicative practices.32
In a different vein, at least some parts of the animal autobiographies included on
the website maintained by the Animal Liberation Front (ALF), although dismissed
as instances of “popular posthumanism” by Huff and Haefner (2012), can be disso-
ciated from human-centric butting in, or acts of speaking-for that violate inferred
or hypothesized negative face wants of nonhuman interlocutors. At the same time,
the ALF autobiographies belie the assumption that all acts of animal telling are
equally and everywhere aligned with fictional forms of speaking-for. For example,
the post titled “I Am an Elephant,” written by Philadelphia Daily News columnist
Stu Bykofsky, gives voice to sentiments that are mediated by human observational
acts but that also represent (falsifiable) hypotheses concerning elephants’ own pro-
clivities and predispositions, as when the elephant remarks, “My long legs are built
to move. I walk a dozen or more miles a day, when I am free to” and that “for ele-
phants, every herd is a ‘village’ in which the baby is cared for by its mother, and her
sisters, and her mother.”33 Further, in parallel with the human-animal co-authorship
of the post, a dual or hybrid principal, manifested through shifts of footing, is once
again involved. This act of speaking-for is performed both for the sake of the abused
nonhuman teller/protagonist and for the sake of the human addressee whose desire
to see elephants in circuses and zoos is largely responsible for their confinement,
suffering, and mistreatment. Thus, whereas the formulations mentioned previously
center on elephants’ own patterns of behavior and lifeways, locutions such as “I was
not born for your amusement any more than you were born for mine,” and “You
are thinking about yourself—what you want, what you like. Please think about me”
engage chiefly with human assumptions and attitudes.
Similar shifts of footing are at work in another ALF post, “Interview from an
Animal Shelter,” which likewise presents hypotheses about (rather than fictional-
izing) the lived experiences of shelter dogs, and in the process reveals fluctuating
degrees of alignment with human frames of reference. The premise of the post is
that the journalist narrator has elicited life stories from the dogs she interviewed at
her local animal shelter, with a border collie named Popper, for example, reporting,
I am not certain why I am here. I think maybe my family will come back for me. . . .
They were very excited at first. The little ones played with me all the time. But the
trouble with little Masters is, they refuse to stay in a group. I constantly had to nip
their heels to keep them together. . . . Why won’t they stay in a group? . . . So I did what
I thought I should do. I am not quite sure why the little ones screamed when I did
my job, but they did, and the Masters got very angry at me. They also got angry when
I had to relieve myself, and did so in the house. I am not sure where they expected
me to go.
Although some of the details of Popper’s life history being ventriloquized in this
account no doubt lie beyond his ken, both the dog’s current state of uncertainty
and his earlier bafflement regarding his caretakers’ angry reactions fall within the
domain of plausible (inferable) mental-state attributions. In another autobiograph-
ical account more explicitly aligned with human frames of reference, and perhaps
attributed to the animal on the basis of a separate (unreported) interview with
one or more of the shelter’s attendants, the same ALF post portrays a female Jack
Russell terrier named Patsy recounting how “my owner surrendered me. She said
she wanted a cute little dog like the one on the TV show, Frasier. She didn’t bother
to look into the type of dog I am. . . . I suppose she expected me to just lie about
and only need a short walk each day, just like Eddie [the dog on the TV program],
but my energy was so high that I needed to run and play.”34 But though the mode of
telling here somewhat occludes the experiential texture of the dog’s life story, events
with implications extending beyond the realm of the human do once again enter
into the composition of the narrative. Thus the account attributed to Patsy suggests
how animal autobiographies, even when ventriloquized by tellers familiar with tel-
evision serials and animal actors, can nonetheless reveal traces of trans-species co-
authorship. Such hybrid authorial agents take their place within production formats
that feature a more-than-human principal—in this case, a principal that oscillates
between the mistreated dog and a human concerned about those who may be prone
to adopting (or abandoning) a companion animal for ill-thought-out reasons.
Fictional Animal Autobiographies
A model integrating research on framing and footing also helps account for the
variety of animal autobiographies clustering at the other pole of the continuum of
epistemic modalities, with these nonhuman self-narratives framing propositions
about the animals’ experiences not just in a provisional or hypothetical mode but
furthermore as fictional, or nonfalsifiable. There are indeed significant differences
among fictional animal autobiographies, confirming that a second analytic dimen-

sion (in addition to modal status) is needed to account for variation in such virtual
acts of cross-species speaking-for. As with the nonfictional examples discussed in
my previous subsection, when fictional animal narrators recount their life stories the
author-principal relationship determines degrees of human-centrism; at issue is the
extent to which the account can be read as one that, having been co-authored across
species lines and motivated by the human designer’s positive face wants, attempts to
avoid any violation of inferred or assumed nonhuman negative face wants. And once
again, shifts of footing entailed by the foregrounding of different aspects of hybrid-
ized, humanimal authors and principals can obtain not only across various fictional
animal autobiographies but also over the course of a single text’s unfolding.
Thus, at a macroanalytic level, provisional distinctions can be drawn between the
following kinds of accounts:
• Classic and contemporary animal autobiographies designed to promote
more humane treatment of companion animals, such as Sewell’s Black Beauty
(1877), Margaret Marshall Saunders’s Beautiful Joe (1893), and Ann Martin’s
A Dog’s Life: The Autobiography of a Stray (2005).
• The more or less collaboratively composed autobiographies of members of
species that have been subjected to scientific experimentation or exposed to
the abusive treatment associated with factory farming or industrialized agri-
culture. Examples range from the autobiography told by Nicodemus the rat
in Robert C. O’Brien’s Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH (1972), who was
injected with an intelligence-enhancing serum in a fictionalized research lab-
oratory maintained by the National Institute of Mental Health, to some of the
life stories told by the animals who feature in William Kotzwinkle’s Doctor Rat
(1976/2014).
• Texts in which writers, sometimes working in different storytelling media,
have enlisted the resources of fictional animal autobiography to unsettle in an
even more concerted way broader assumptions about cross-species relation-
ships that both shape and are shaped by practices of giving voice to animal
experiences. Examples include Red Peter’s narration of his life story in Kafka’s
“Report for an Academy” and the life narratives presented by nonhuman tell-
ers in texts such as Sue Coe’s Pit’s Letter (2000) and Dovey’s Only the Animals
(2014).
At a more microanalytic level, different modalities of speaking-for manifest them-
selves within (and not just across) texts falling into subcategories of the sort just
listed.
Take Black Beauty, for example. As discussed in chapter 4, Sewell’s preponderant
strategy for presenting animal experiences is the one I’ve named Human-Source-
Animal-Target (HSAT) projections, as when Beauty draws on a topos of slave narra-
tives in recounting how the identity of a horse whom he never knew was his brother
was revealed to him after the horse’s death (“It seems that horses have no relations;
at least, they never know each other after they are sold” [Sewell 1877/2007: 23]).
Sewell also engages periodically in the technique of Umwelt modeling (UM), how-
ever; thus she has Black Beauty narrate how he is affected by a long, taxing ride:
Soon I began to shake and tremble, and turned deadly cold, my legs ached, my loins
ached, and my chest ached, and I felt sore all over. Oh! how I wished for my warm
thick cloth as I stood and trembled . . .. After a long while I heard John at the door;
I gave a low moan, for I was in great pain. He was at my side in a moment stooping
down by me; I could not tell him how I felt; but he seemed to know it all. (88)35
But given that Black Beauty is an animal autobiography, a framing-and-footing
approach can shed additional light on Sewell’s dominant use of HSAT projec-
tions as well as her intermittent reliance on UM. As with other fictional autobiog-
raphies featuring nonhuman tellers, it would be a category mistake to attempt to
falsify Sewell’s acts of cross-species speaking-for; but here again attending to the
specifics of the author-principal relationship allows for a finer-grained analysis of
the text. Specifically, Sewell’s discourse can be positioned at various increments
on the continuum of self-other alignments stretching between butting in and
chipping in, depending on the scope and quality of the humanimal co-author-
ship in a given segment of the narrative and also the degree to which Sewell
can be read as seeking to uphold the inferred negative face wants of the animal
agent(s) involved—in this case, the species of whom Beauty is a representative.
To be sure, Sewell’s frequent interactions with and close observations of horses
maximized opportunities for a cross-species compositional dynamic, in which
possibilities for chipping in rather than butting in were increased.36 Yet the text’s
reliance on institutions and practices that include slavery as it was constituted in
the nineteenth century, ideas about filial relations based on the concept of the
nuclear family, and other artifacts of its culture can be read as a superimposition
of human frames of reference on equine experiences.
For their part, Saunders’s Beautiful Joe and Martin’s much later A Dog’s Life are
marked by an even more thoroughgoing use of HSAT projections, with the attend-
ant risk of a desire for trans-species solidarity trumping equally exigent, and species-
specific, needs for autonomy. Both texts can be read as containing co-authored
propositions about dogs based on attested canine behaviors and dispositions, as
when Saunders has Joe report that “dogs love variety and excitement, and like to
see what is going on outside as well as human beings” (40) and Martin’s nonhu-
man narrator-protagonist recounts how he and his fellow stray dog, Moon, sur-
vive by foraging for food in the small town in which they spend a winter (135).
Yet human frames of reference preponderate in both texts, and the frequency with
which Saunders and Martin rely on such frames as a source domain for fictional
world building in effect privileges human positive face wants over (inferred) nonhu-
man negative face wants; depending on the cultural ontology in which a given nar-
rative is grounded, these wants not to be intruded upon will be more or less richly
ascribed to the animal agents involved. Thus Beautiful Joe is able to quote, verba-
tim, an extended discussion about animal treatment that he overhears while travel-
ing on a train (132–41), while Martin’s canine teller grasps the concept of spaying
(167), uses the names of tree varieties (179), and refers to specific pieces and styles
of human clothing (192).
Other animal autobiographies, in projecting the experiences of animals subject
to scientific experimentation or the methods of factory farming, leverage human
frames of reference in order to subvert anthropocentrism; they thereby reconfigure
acts of butting in, via ironic or self-reflexive modes of telling, as a kind of chipping
in.37 In O’Brien’s Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH (1971), for example, Nicodemus
the rat takes on the role, for part of the novel, of an intradiegetic narrator, present-
ing his autobiography as a story-within-the-story (120–210). Nicodemus recounts
how he and some fifty-nine other rats, along with eight mice, were captured and
conscripted for an experiment designed to test “whether certain injections could
help us to learn more and faster” (129). Nicodemus does not explain how he is
able to understand conversations among the human scientists about experimen-
tal procedures even before he and the other members of the non-control groups
of rodents are injected with the potentially intelligence-enhancing serum. Further,
after Nicodemus and the other rats escape from the laboratory, they arrange their
affairs in a way that appears to mirror human architectural, technological, and more
broadly cultural practices, creating an underground meeting hall and library, build-
ing an elevator and using electric lights, stockpiling seeds for the purposes of crop
production, transmitting to their offspring the ability to read that they acquired after
being given the serum, and so on.
Yet Nicodemus’s account also reflects the rats’ awareness of their own interstitial,
between-species status, and hence the limitations of human models for other-than-
human social collectivities. As Nicodemus's fellow experimental subject puts it, “We
don’t know where to go because we don’t know what we are. Do you want to go back
to living in a sewer pipe? And eating other people’s garbage? Because that’s what
rats do. But the fact is, we aren’t rats any more. We’re something Dr. Schultz has cre-
ated. Something new” (160). Nicodemus also recounts how he and the other rats
were glad to leave an abandoned estate they had taken over for several months: “We
were never really comfortable there. Everything in it was designed for animals who
looked, moved and thought differently from the way we did” (191–92). Hence in
creating this autobiography of a laboratory subject O’Brien has, as Ratelle (2014)
suggests, portrayed the lab as “a site of intersection between human and animal
that . . . serves to undermine an exclusively human notion of subjectivity” (103).
Indeed, O’Brien’s focus on rats’ experiences, like Kotzwinkle’s in Doctor Rat
(1976/2014), enables his fictional animal autobiography to comment critically on
a cultural ontology in which possibilities for selfhood beyond the human are differ-
entially allocated, often for pragmatic or instrumentalizing reasons, across different
forms of animal life. As Ratelle (2014) puts it, “Unlike companion animals, rodents
had few advocates to speak against their inclusion in laboratories, and their small
size and easily facilitated breeding made them ideal laboratory denizens” (100).
But whereas Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH was written for younger readers38
and resorts to a subtly self-subverting overextension of human frames of reference
vis-à-vis the story of Nicodemus’s life, with the embedded rodent autobiography
invoking human-centric conceptions of societies or civilizations in order to imagine

other-than-human social collectivities, Kotzwinkle’s text, targeted at an adult audi-
ence, engages in blunt, sometimes brutal irony to stage its own anti-anthropocentric
critique via animal autobiography.
Rather than presenting Doctor Rat’s life story as an embedded narrative,
about which readers (along with the rat’s intradiegetic narratees) learn sec-
ondhand, Kotzwinkle uses retrospective autodiegetic narration—not only by
his rodent protagonist but also by the other animals whose autobiographical
vignettes alternate with Doctor Rat’s account of his life history. Taken together,
these narratives tell the story not just of a variety of nonhuman lives but also of a
worldwide animal uprising together with its devastatingly violent suppression by
humans. Disturbingly, Doctor Rat, or at least the older, narrating I who produces
the account on which judgments about what transpires in the laboratory must
be based, appears to have internalized (and perhaps amplified) the instrumental-
izing attitudes of the human experimenters. It is not just that Doctor Rat is, at
least in his own mind, a recipient of the Claude Bernard Animal Experimentation
Award (27), or that he aligns himself with humans by using the first-person plural
in his account of the human scientists’ experiments on rats and other animals—
as when he reports, “Naturally, we cut the dogs’ vocal cords as soon as they enter
the lab” to prevent them from howling or screaming in pain (7). What is more,
the narrating I admits that he has come to “enjoy the smell of formaline—a 5%
solution is satisfactory for removing all the soft parts of a rat’s body. Yes, the smell
is pleasing to my nose because I know the bones aren’t mine” (1). In one of many
echoes of Holocaust narratives found throughout Kotzwinkle’s text, Doctor Rat
refers to this 5% formaline solution as “the Final Solution,” which “after all is said
and done . . . is death, and death is freedom” (1).39
Similarly, the narrating I, who at one point addresses his conspecifics by assert-
ing, “You’re all just basic models, fellow rats!” (18), recounts the following dialogue
he has with a rat whose brain is scheduled to be “sucked out by a pneumatic tube”:
“Help, help!”
“Please, young fellow, there’s no need to get so worked up about your little con-
tribution to science. Have a bit of pressed biscuit before you die. Eat hearty and
remember—death is freedom!” (4)
He also describes as hysterical and as “not showing the scientific attitude” a young
female rat who has had a hole cut into her stomach and a plastic window inserted
there so that scientists can use a strand of hair to tickle “the little ratlings as they grow
inside her” (13).
It is thus entirely in character for Doctor Rat to tell his fellow rats to ignore the
revolutionary message being broadcast, on a nonvocalized, intuitive wavelength,
by the dogs and other animal subjects. As he puts it, “I would much prefer micro-
scopic worms in my intestines to these blasted dogs in my eardrums with their slob-
bering tale of freedom” (23)—any given dog being, for Doctor Rat, “just a basic
model. A convenient evolutionary offshoot expressly designed for the laboratory”

(29). The degree to which Doctor Rat has internalized human values and priori-
ties as normative (in contrast with Nicodemus and the other experimented-upon
rats in O’Brien’s text) is evident when he shouts out in response to a group of rebel
rat mothers calling for the liberation of laboratory animals: “Close your ears, fel-
low rats! Don’t listen to these irresponsible rabble rousers. Remember that you are
contributing to research, to saving the lives of human beings” (32). Kotzwinkle uses
his rodent narrator, then, to ironize practices of speaking-for that disregard possibili-
ties for selfhood beyond the species boundary, and the negative face wants that can
plausibly be associated with such other-than-human perspectives on the world. The
very sophistication of Doctor Rat’s account gives the lie to the unrelenting—and
perverse—anthropocentrism that he endorses at every turn. Indeed, Kotzwinkle’s
use of Holocaust references suggesting an analogy between this narrator’s pro-
animal experimentation stance and Jewish self-hatred—or even the desperate
attempts at collaborationism undertaken by Jews seeking to ingratiate themselves
with their captors and executioners in the Nazi death camps during World War II.
At the same time, Doctor Rat either does not hear or else derisively dismisses
the voices of the other animals whose life stories can be interpreted both as
embodying human positive face wants—that is, humans’ desire to show soli-
darity with other kinds of creatures—and as respecting the autonomy of non-
human agents, with their (imagined or inferred) perspectives thus entering into
the composition of these alternate animal autobiographies in a significant and
sustained way. Relevant here is the vignette produced by the dog forced to run
on a treadmill in a superheated cage, supposedly to test the effects of heat exhaus-
tion (“Run. Tongue out, dry and cracked. Run. Legs burning, my skin blistering,
I retch up my bilious guts” [17]). Relevant, too, is the autobiographical sketch of
the chicken recounting how, confined to a cage in a factory farm in which she and
the other chickens are called egg machines, “we live in eternal day. It makes us
lay more. . . . Our beaks have been cut off. And we’re cancerous . . . Twenty-seven
thousand of us sit here, our only exercise the laying of an egg, which rolls away
from us, down a little chute. . . . How I wish I could stop the egg from growing
so that I wouldn’t have to know these tender feelings” (25). There is also the
story told by the bull or steer who, in another echo of Holocaust testimonies, tells
how, “We traveled all night in rumbling cars, our bodies pressed tightly together”
(44)—and then how “our hoofs sound loud on the runway and the air is filled
with our stupid grunts . . . The machinery is loud and dark red objects swing
along, hanging from the ceiling . . . I—mother! help me, mother! My brothers
hang there with their stomachs cut open and their heads cut off!” (44).
The pig who has never been outside the tiny cell in which he was born recounts
his life story in equally, if not more, disturbing terms:
Our bodies are white and fat. We have no exercise [ . . . ] often I feel that I don’t exist at
all, that I am just a dream. [ . . . ] I’m always eating. I’ve nothing else to do. I’ve grown
so fat I can hardly stand.
What am I? [ . . . ]
A jumble of images invades me, memories that are my most sacred possession: a
little patch of green grass and a bit of a winding path. I saw these once, when the great
doors swung open. And I see them now, once again, in my mind. For that’s what a
savior would mean to me—the green grass and a little path struck by warm gentle
light. [ . . . ]
We’re all being moved. Weak-kneed, stumbling, we walk. Waddling, falling,
I make my way toward the door. There is the grass! There is the little winding path!
Has the savior really come? [ . . . ]
The path has ended. A ramp lies before me, leading to another room, a little dark-
ened room. No! [ . . . ]
That path was so wonderful and already it’s gone. This dark room is horrible. I’m
standing on someone’s face. I think he’s dead. What does it matter. [ . . . ] But what is
it to be me, this ball of fat in the halls of darkness? [ . . . ]
If I weren’t real, if I were some sort of unfeeling mechanical creature, then my
blood would not now be bubbling so painfully. I feel pain. I know that I’m suffering.
So I must be real! [ . . . ]
Are the guards educating me? [ . . . ]
Wrenched upside down! One leg in the air! My fat pulls against the chain. I’ve
split open somewhere . . .. There’s some mistake . . . don’t you see . . . you wouldn’t
want to do this to me . . . to the one who knows the little path and the sky . . . no, you
don’t realize that I’m completely awake . . . completely . . ..
[ . . . ] They take hold of me. No, you wouldn’t do that to me! Let me go! No, not
to me! If you knew me . . . if you knew that I am me . . . if only you knew . . . (50–55,
all nonbracketed ellipses in original text)
This fictional animal autobiography at once derives from and helps give shape to a
biocentric cultural ontology in terms of which the narrator is constituted as a “me”
who can be known, and whose capacity for subjective experiences sets that me apart
from “some sort of mechanical unfeeling creature.” Thus, as with the nonfictional
animal autobiographies discussed previously, here too both the author and principal
roles span the species divide, with the autobiography emerging from humanimal co-
authorship. This life story is told for the sake not only of the nonhuman protagonist
but also of the human addressees being enjoined to engage in a more prolific alloca-
tion of possibilities for selfhood, with its attendant rights and obligations, than that
allowed by industrialized agriculture, among other institutions and practices based
on anthropocentric normative systems.
In this respect, Kotzwinkle’s text aligns itself with other norm-challenging ani-
mal autobiographies that use the resources of fiction—and the affordances of dif-
ferent storytelling media—to explore possibilities for anti-anthropocentrism in
acts of speaking-for that extend beyond the human. Such texts bear the traces of
trans-species co-authorship, arising from the hypothetical or counterfactual projec-
tions driven by humans’ positive face wants (compare chipping in); but they also
model how to avoid infringing on other creatures’ inferred or assumed negative face
wants (compare butting in). In turn, autobiographies of this sort not only reflect but
also help support a repositioning of the human self within a wider ecology of selves,
which cuts across species lines.
For example, Kafka’s “Report to an Academy” (1917/ 2005), discussed in
chapter 2 as an autodiegetic tale of biomutation that challenges the norms and values
associated with hierarchies of kinds of life, can also be read as an animal autobiogra-
phy exploring, in a highly reflexive way, the limits and possibilities of acts of speaking-
for that extend beyond the human. Kafka uses a doubly hybridized discourse—in
Saunders’s (2010) terms an autobiografiction that embeds within a fictional context
the genre-blending act of autobiographical telling—to give voice to Red Peter’s pecu-
liarly double perspective, situated both inside and outside the human community
because of the massively accelerated process of evolution that Kafka uses his narrator-
protagonist to stage. At the same time, anticipating recent work on animal cultures,
Kafka suggests how, in addition to genetic and epigenetic factors, relatively localized
traditions of behavior or lifeways can be drivers of evolutionary change (see Jablonka
and Lamb 2005/2014, as well as my coda, for further discussion). The story implies
that, at least in part, one becomes a specific kind of creature by acting in the ways
other creatures of that kind act, with Red Peter providing an inside view of the dif-
ficulties he experiences in attempting to imitate his captors’ drinking habits so as to
avoid being treated as subhuman: “I’ll say it again: imitating human beings was not
something which pleased me. I imitated them because I was looking for a way out, for
no other reason” (para. 24). Here Kafka not only follows Darwin in positing continu-
ity between forms of life, but uses the resources of narrative fiction to explore what it
might be like to morph from one form into another—that is, to experience firsthand
changes of the sort typically studied at the scale of whole species.
Yet in a manner that undercuts or attenuates his own act of cross-species speaking-
for, Kafka also uses hedges to emphasize how any attempt to model such interstitial
experiential worlds remains just that—an exercise in modeling. From the start, Red
Peter stresses that he is unable to comply with the request by the members of the
academy that he provide an account of his previous life as an ape: because his met-
amorphosis was made possible precisely by his having forgotten what he describes
as the memories of his youth, Red Peter now finds himself “enclosed in the world of
human beings” (para. 3). In effect, then, Kafka signals to his readers that they can
gain access to situations and events lived through by the experiencing I only at two
removes, with the narrating Red Peter serving as a ventriloquist for his earlier, non-
human self and Kafka ventriloquizing a narrating I capable of giving only a partial
account of the process whereby he became human, or rather humanimal.
One of the posthumous animal autobiographies included in Dovey’s 2014 col-
lection Only the Animals provides a sequel to Kafka’s narrative. In “Red Peter’s Little
Lady: Soul of a Chimpanzee (Died 1917, Germany),” Dovey creates an epistolary
fiction in which Red Peter corresponds not only with the half-tamed female chimp
mentioned toward the end of Kafka’s text (and here given the name of Hazel by Red
Peter himself), but also with Frau Evelyn Oberndorff, the wife of Hazel’s trainer,
Herr Oberndorff, who is eventually killed in battle during World War I. Dovey
adds metafictional play to the hedging devices used in the original text, with Red
Peter recounting in one of his letters to Hazel that he met Franz Kafka in Prague
in 1910 and that that encounter “was no moment of communion. He was envi-
ous of me, I think, of my small existence, and my ability to become almost invisi-
ble to humans at certain times” (loc. 577).40 But what is more, in ventriloquizing
additional (female) voices, one human and one being enculturated in the ways of
humans, Dovey’s sequel sheds additional light on the complex relationship between
Red Peter’s past and present selves—and, by extension, between animal experiences
and Kafka’s doubly distanced ventriloquization of those experiences.
What emerges over the course of the correspondence is a love triangle, with
Hazel seeking to consolidate the romantic relationship with Red Peter for which
she is being “prepared” by Herr Oberndorff, and Red Peter eventually expressing his
love for Evelyn Oberndorff, with whom he seems to have had a previous affair. After
Hagenbeck flees war-torn Germany for the relative safety of Africa, Red Peter, despite
having written to Hazel about his intention to marry her, remarks in a letter to Evelyn,
“I feel sorry for Hazel, truly I do, but now that Hagenbeck is gone, I won’t be forced
into it [i.e., the prearranged marriage with Hazel] anymore. Not just writing to her,
but everything, the whole terrible partnership he dreamed up for me” (loc. 739). By
the end of the story, Red Peter has been locked up in a cage vacated by Hazel, ostensi-
bly for his own protection during the food shortages brought on by the war; disturbed
by Hazel’s lingering smell, her “apish presence” (loc. 838), in the cage, Red Peter begs
Evelyn to “unlock this cage, let me out, let me into your bed!” (loc. 845). A key irony
is that the putative animality of Hazel, against which Red Peter reacts so vehemently,
is belied by the increasing sophistication of her letters. In those letters she proves her-
self capable of nuanced scene-setting (“The trip into the city. Frau Oberndorff ’s face.
She runs her fingers through her hair, wipes her nose, yawns with hunger. Her hair has
gone dull, no colour in her lips, bloodless” [loc. 765]); mocks Red Peter for his ethi-
cally motivated vegetarianism when he has been so unkind to her; and anticipates her
own violent death, presumably when she is killed for food (loc. 839).
But there is a deeper irony here. Hazel’s growing mastery of the behavioral reper-
toires that Red Peter has himself imitated to gain acceptance into the human com-
munity suggests that Red Peter’s brutal rejection of Hazel and gravitation toward
Evelyn stem from an anxious disavowal of his own animal heritage, with Red Peter
and also Evelyn orienting to a conception of the human based on the repression of
the similarities and continuities across kinds of life that Darwin had emphasized.41
Dovey’s sequel thus elaborates on the reasons for Red Peter’s report, in Kafka’s story,
that “during the day I don’t want to see her [i.e., the female chimp], for she has in her
gaze the madness of a bewildered trained animal” (para. 29). Dovey’s text suggests
that the chimp proves so disturbing to Red Peter because she reminds him of his own
status (and the status of the human being in general) as an animal-still-in-training. In
turn, Red Peter’s forgetting of his ape past can be read as an act of disavowal that par-
adoxically aligns him with the human community from which, in Dovey’s sequel, he
is ultimately excluded. Thus Dovey’s reframing of Red Peter’s revulsion toward the
chimp resonates with Beauvoir’s (1949) account of the way patriarchal institutions
associate the feminine with the animalistic. But what is more, the text emphasizes
how, to qualify as anti-anthropocentric, an animal autobiography must work to
unmask the structures of repression to which human (co-)authors are themselves
subject—structures of repression that cut against the grain of attempts to infer nega-
tive as well as positive politeness wants anchored in nonhuman experience.
The other autobiographies included in Dovey’s collection are told by deceased
animals who, like Hazel, die as a result of human projects and—especially—
conflicts. Among these autobiographies is the life story told by the soul of SS leader
Heinrich Himmler’s one-time German shepherd, after the dog has been killed in
Poland in 1941, an explosive pack meant to blow up a tank having been strapped on
his back. Other tellers include the soul of a mussel killed after the battleship to which
he is attached has been destroyed during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, also
in 1941; the soul of Plautus the tortoise, who, having lived with Tolstoy’s daughter,
Virginia Woolf, George Orwell, and Tom Stoppard, dies after being rocketed into
space in 1968 for an experiment designed to test the effects of space travel on living
creatures; the soul of an elephant who dies while trying to come to the aid of her
twin sister, after she is shot by militants during a 1987 civil war in Mozambique;
and the soul of a female dolphin who, having been trained by the US Navy to detect
underwater mines and participate in other military operations, writes a letter to
Sylvia Plath about how she too committed suicide—after learning that she had
unknowingly attached a lethal weapon to an enemy diver during the invasion of Iraq
in 2003.42 Overtly (meta)fictional in their use of animal narrators who are already
dead at the time of telling, these autobiographies also oscillate between human-
centric and biocentric frames of reference.
Thus, although capable of tracking references to vegetarianism, Hesse’s
Siddhartha, and the Bhagavad Gita, Himmler’s German shepherd is also able to sense
an intruder’s neck artery pulsing as he frames his jaws around the intruder’s throat
(loc. 972). Similarly, the roving mussel and his conspecifics are caught up in a wan-
derlust with distinct echoes of that experienced by Kerouac and the other members
of the Beat Generation; yet they are also able to detect subtle changes in the tem-
perature and salinity of seawater (loc. 1328). For his part, Plautus the tortoise can
quote Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s 1892 address to the US House Judiciary Committee
concerning women’s rights, as well as passages from Woolf ’s Flush, but also hiber-
nate for months at a time and detect smells humans cannot perceive, including
the icy smell of space outside his capsule’s walls. As for the navy-trained dolphin,
even as she develops detailed interpretations of Ted Hughes’s animal poems and
converses (metafictionally) with the soul of Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello (Coetzee
1999, 2004), she also embodies, as a “toothed whale” (loc. 2430), distinctive ceta-
cean capacities that she adduces as a counterargument against humans’ declarations
that they are “a special-case animal,” and that part of what makes them special is that
they “ask the very question, Am I human or animal?” (loc. 2437):
So I ask them in turn, Can you use echolocation to know exactly what curves the
ocean floor makes in every conceivable direction? Can you stun the creature you
would like to eat using sound alone? Can you scan the bodies of your extended fam-
ily and immediately tell who is pregnant, who is sick, who is injured, who ate what
for lunch? The tingling many humans report feeling during an encounter with us isn’t
endorphins, it’s because we’ve just scanned you to know you in all dimensions. We
see through you, literally. Special case indeed. Perhaps you should be asking yourself
different questions. Why do you sometimes treat other people as humans and some-
times as animals? And why do you sometimes treat creatures as animals and some-
times as humans? (locs. 2437–44)43
In keeping with issues raised by the dolphin’s closing questions, by creating oscil-
lating alignments via (different sorts of) acts of speaking-for, Dovey’s text invites
reflection on the limits as well as the possibilities of animal autobiography, and on
how this narrative mode bears on author-principal relationships that include but
extend beyond the human. Here again I must disagree with the reviewer whose
comments I cited earlier. Arguing that the study of animal autobiographies gains
nothing from terms such as chipping in and butting in, this same reviewer also sug-
gested that it all “comes down to how narratives can condemn human practices that
are at odds with animals’ well-being, and how these narratives advance an oppo-
site, pro-animal agenda.” But this gloss fails to register the distinctions among kinds
of animal autobiographies of which the present analysis makes it possible to take
stock, including, in the case mentioned, differences among animal-autobiographical
acts involving paternalistic assessments of animal welfare, acts using more reflexive
methods of narration to raise questions about received notions of what constitutes
well-being beyond the human, and acts falling into either of these two categories
that are structured around realis modalities versus those that are structured around
irrealis modalities.
In short, some life stories told by nonhumans can be read as co-authored acts of
narrating in behalf of equally hybrid (or humanimal) principals; these experiments
with narration beyond the human afford solidarity-building projections of other
creatures’ ways of being-in-the-world—projections that enable a reassessment, in
turn, of forms of human being. But other animal autobiographies, or at least seg-
ments of them, correlate with acts of telling for which humans themselves remain
the principals as well as authors, with their animal animators relegated to the role of
commenting on human institutions, values, practices, and artifacts. To the extent that
it incorporates this second, more human-centric strand of animal-autobiographical
discourse, the form of Dovey’s text mirrors one of its key themes: namely, the way
anthropocentric ontologies deny proper selfhood to nonhuman beings, configuring
them as so much collateral damage when they are killed or harmed as a result of
human projects and conflicts. Yet the other way of engaging in acts of speaking-for
across species boundaries, closer to chipping in than butting in, manifests itself when
the elephant narrator describes her herd’s response to discovering the dead body of
the group’s matriarch, with the group in their grief “moving backwards towards her
body and gently touching her with our hind legs, then moving away to circle and
hover around her, then forward to touch her again . . . keening and throwing sand
over the body, then covering her with branches” (loc. 2087). This same strand comes
into view when the dolphin narrator observes that her species’ echolocation abilities
surpass those afforded by human-built radar systems (loc. 2704). In such moments,
Dovey’s ventriloquizing acts both reflect and help constitute an alternative ontol-
ogy; this other way of configuring creatural life allocates to a whole range of animals’
possibilities for selfhood that more restrictive ontologies limit to humans—or even
to just a subset of the larger human population.
Genre Meets Medium: Multimodal Acts

of Cross-Species Speaking-For
As mentioned at the outset, the present chapter focuses predominantly on questions

of genre, using the genre of life narrative as bridge between chapter 4’s investiga-
tion of storytelling media vis-à-vis the projection of more-than-human worlds, on
the one hand, and c hapter 6’s discussion of how normative assumptions about ani-
mal minds cut across the fiction-nonfiction distinction, on the other hand. Before
concluding this chapter, however, it is worth considering how issues of genre and
medium intersect in some animal-autobiographical acts.
To this end, I use as my case study a fictional animal autobiography told in both
words and images: namely, Sue Coe’s Pit’s Letter (2000). This narrative provides a
dog’s-eye perspective on how one and the same animal may be forced to negoti-
ate multiple—and contradictory—ways of orienting to cross-species relationships
over the course of a life shared with humans. In particular, Coe uses the life story
of a one-time companion animal to explore the contradiction described by Fudge
(2002) and discussed previously in c hapter 1: “We live with animals, we recognize
them, we even name some of them, but at the same time we use them as if they were
inanimate, as if they were objects” (8). In speaking for Pit in the verbal track, Coe’s
text enacts a mode of alignment that reflects both humans’ desire to build solidarity
with other animals and their obligation to respect those animals’ autonomy. But she
also uses the visual track to suggest the lived realities into which other, more anthro-
pocentric alignments translate—for Pit and for nonhuman animals generally.
Like the accounts included in Dovey’s Only the Animals, Pit’s autobiography,
which takes the form of a letter addressed to his sister or littermate, is narrated post-
humously, after Pit has died as a result of animal experimentation. In his chronologi-
cal account, Pit tells how, after his and his sister’s mother died, he lived on the street
until the event that he describes as a miracle takes place: he is found and taken in by
a young boy named Pat Watson. As Pit puts it, “I went everywhere with my human.
I was a Velcro dog. We were never separated. I never wanted to be alone again” (1).
In this first life stage, Pit moves from the category of stray to pet. Further,
offering an etiology of human cruelty, perhaps in an attempt to provide backstory
for Pat’s later participation in experimentation on animals, Pit contrasts human
“packs” with dog packs, noting that whereas in canine packs even the weaker
dogs share in the protection of the pack, among humans strong ones bully those
who are less strong, with the bullied finding others with even less power to bully
in turn (5). This account is followed by images of Pat witnessing his father phys-
ically abusing his mother in a room that also includes animal heads mounted on
the wall and, on the floor, a copy of Popular Science with an experimented-on,
two-headed dog on the cover. Next come stories of Pat’s own cruelty toward a
homeless woman and then a woman with some form of intellectual disability
“who been thrown out of her pack” (6–7). On the same day that Pat takes home
the science prize at school because the student who usually got the highest marks
refused to dissect a frog, arguing that computer models of the frog’s anatomy
already exist, he receives rare praise from his father and makes Pit sleep on the
floor instead of at the foot of his bed.
With this rift between Pit and Pat already having been opened by Pat’s embrace
of the anthropocentric norms governing certain forms of scientific practice, the next
phase of Pit’s life begins when he is left behind on a hunt after trying to protect Pat
from his father’s abusive behavior.44 Passing from the category of pet back into that
of stray, Pit recounts how he is eventually taken to an animal shelter—his story reso-
nating with those included in the “Interview from an Animal Shelter” post on the
ALF website that I discussed previously. In Pit’s words:
Sister, I was captured, muzzled, and thrown into a steel cage in a steel room. There
were lines and lines of cages, stacked three deep, containing thousands of them. On
each cage was a justification for why we were there: owner allergic; owner had baby;
owner had to move . . .. The list was endless. My neighbor told me that her owner was
returning for her shortly, but I could read the code on her door: Destroy. My neighbor
on the other side had previously been adopted and was so happy that he urinated on
the carpet. He was returned to the pound. He too had the destroy code. (25)
Pit is then removed from “death row” at the shelter and sold to the scientists at
Eden Technologies Ltd., where Pat now works.45 Here Pit experiences the effects of
another category shift: from stray, or potential but unclaimed and unnamed com-
panion, to unnameable object of research, in which the individualized being gives
way to the amorphous mass of exploitable creatures (see figure 5.1 and also Fudge
2002: 27–34). Barely alive after the eight successive experiments that were per-
formed on him, Pit finally re-encounters Pat, who “held my face in his hands. He
knew me. I licked the tears from his eyes. I think my body died then, but it was hard
to be sure” (30). In a striking image of the reciprocity and mutual regard that enters
into companionship across as well as within the species boundary, Coe includes a
drawing in which Pat’s face is reflected in Pit’s eye as Pat himself looks into the dying
dog’s face (figure 5.2).
Later, with Pat himself dying from an infection he acquired at the lab, whose work
he has begun to question and which subjects him to experiments like those undergone
by Pit and the other animals (30), Pit tells how Pat thinks he recognizes his former dog
in a puppy that a volunteer brings to comfort Pat during his last days at the hospice,
where Pat “could feel my weight at the end of the bed, but he could not see me” (34).
In the visual track, Coe includes on the wall across from Pat’s bed what appears to be a
Figure 5.1 Eden Technologies, Ltd (Getting it Right the First Time). Also published in Pit’s
Letter, p. 21.
Credit line: Copyright © 1999 Sue Coe. Courtesy Galerie St. Etienne, New York.
mirror with Pit’s reflection in it (see figure 5.3); this page, humanimal in its structure,
aligns the reader-viewer with both Pit’s and Pat’s vantage points, providing not only an
over-the-shoulder perspective on the scene Pat sees but also an image confirming that
Pit is a witness to this scene even though he remains invisible to Pat.
Poignantly, when Pat is most in need of Pit’s companionship, he is deprived of
it—in part because of his own past participation in the forms of human domina-
tion enacted in the lab. Pit’s autobiography is in this sense also the biography of Pat,
who cycles through modes of cross-species alignment that range from solidarity and
respect, through disavowal, through objectification and exploitation, to a desire for
Figure 5.2 Found. Also published in Pit’s Letter, p. 29.
Figure 5.3 Therapy Animals Visit the Hospice. Also published in Pit’s Letter, p. 32.
mutuality that will never again be fulfilled—for Pat, and possibly for the human spe-
cies more generally, unless we come to recognize that, as Pit puts it in the closing
lines of his letter, “we are all brothers and sisters, in fur, fin, skin, and feather” (36).
Summing up some of the key points of my discussion of nonfictional as well as

fictional animal autobiographies, as well as directions for inquiry that I have not
had space to pursue in detail here, table 5.1 draws on ideas of framing and foot-
ing as well as concepts of epistemic modality to set out parameters for the two-
dimensional approach to acts of cross-species speaking-for that I have begun to
outline here.
n A N I M A L ( A U T O ) B I O G R A P H Y A N D
N A R R A T O L O G Y B E YO N D T H E H U M A N
In exploring how life narratives centering on nonhuman lives fit within the larger
project of a narratology beyond the human, this chapter has itself oscillated between
a narrow-focus and a wide-focus approach, beginning with an analysis of distinc-
tively modernist strategies for presenting animal biographies and then surveying a
range of narrational methods used in post-Darwinian animal autobiographies. As
will become increasingly evident in the chapters that follow, a fuller investigation of
the issues I have begun to sketch here, like the larger project that this book as a whole
seeks to further, requires the development of a new, transdisciplinary paradigm for
narrative inquiry.
As I argued in a previous study (Herman 2013) and as I continue to discuss in
my next chapter, the goal of transdisciplinary research, in general, is to promote
genuine dialogue and exchange among multiple fields of inquiry around a shared
focus of inquiry, rather than engaging in unidirectional borrowing from a particu-
lar field that thereby becomes dominant (see also Sternberg 2003; Tammi 2006).
Accordingly, my analyses of specific animal (auto)biographies aim to suggest how
accounts of nonhuman lives can contribute to an integrative, collaborative engage-
ment with storytelling practices vis-à-vis wider assumptions concerning the nature,
experiences, and ontological status of animals, as well as attitudes toward human-
animal relationships.
As Woolf ’s writing of a dog’s life indicates, the portrayal of nonhuman experi-
ences raises questions that cut across established boundaries between domains of
scholarly and creative practice. Nonhuman ways of being-in-the-world cannot be
exhaustively characterized by the arts and humanities, by the social sciences, or
by the natural sciences taken alone; hence genuine dialogue and exchange across
these fields of endeavor, rather than one-sided borrowing from any particular field
or methodology, will be required to address the issues of nonhuman phenome-
nology broached so compellingly in Flush. The same goes for the complex, shift-
ing alignments at work in autobiographies that extend beyond the human, and that
in doing so draw on and sometimes help reshape normative systems according to
which it is more or less appropriate to make assumptions or draw inferences about
TA B L E 5. 1 A two-dimensional approach to animal autobiography, drawing on ideas from the

framing and footing approach to discourse analysis inspired by Goffman (1981) and also on concepts
of epistemic modality
Human-animal co-authorship
In one sense, the human author or authors create(s) the overall design of the text in which the animal-
autobiographical act is performed, in whatever communicative setting or storytelling medium that
projected act of self-narration unfolds.
However, Goffman (1981) defines the author as “someone who has selected the sentiments that are being
expressed and the words in which they are encoded” (144, emphasis added). To the extent that more
or less extensive interactions with individual animals or with members of particular species allow for
modes of rapport across species lines—and for more or less far-reaching and detailed mental-state
attributions beyond the human (see chapter 7)—there is thus a sense in which animals can be viewed
as (hypothetical) co-authors of homo-or autodiegetic accounts designed to model their experiential
worlds, i.e., accounts situated toward the right end of the continuum in figures 4.5 and 4.6.
Human/nonhuman animators and figures
Figural relation 1 (entailing a species shift, or shift in ontological space): The human author who designs
or in some cases co-designs the autobiographical act projects himself or herself, as trans-species figure,
into the position of the nonhuman narrating I. These projections can be undertaken, in turn, in modes
positioned at various increments on the spectrum of epistemic modalities stretching between the realis
and the irrealis poles. By situating acts of speaking for nonhuman others on this spectrum, such acts can
be profiled as reflecting, and helping consolidate, a stance that marks animal experiences and interests
as ones about which it is appropriate to make assumptions, draw inferences, engage in hypotheses, or
bracket as elements of fictional worlds, as the case may be.
Figural relation 2 (entailing one or more spatiotemporal shifts, from the here and now of narration
to the there and then of prior storyworld events): The nonhuman narrating I, arrived at via the first
figural transposition across species lines, enters into a more or less proximate relation with that same
animal agent's earlier, experiencing self, as intraspecies figure. In turn, further temporal shifts become
possible through recursive embedding—as when Sewell's narrator in Black Beauty evokes the narrating
Beauty's earlier conversations with other horses, during which Ginger, Captain the army horse, and
other horses use stories to convey to Beauty experiences that they had still earlier in time (see, e.g.,
Sewell 1877/2007: 29–39, 169–74, 203–5).
Principal (or co-principal)
The principal for whose sake the animal-autobiographic act is performed takes on different (and
sometimes hybrid) profiles, depending on the purposes of the narrative as well as the scale of analysis. In
accounts situated toward the left end of the continuum in figures 4.5 and 4.6, a range of (co-)principals
situated in the domain of the human may be involved. Thus commentators such as Ferguson (1994)
and Dwyer (2015) map elements of Black Beauty and Beautiful Joe onto the institutions and legacies of
slavery as well as more general attitudes toward race (and vice versa).
For narratives located closer to the other end of the continuum, the principal can be profiled as an
individual animal, as a representative of a population or species (see Carrithers et al. 2011 and the
coda), as a representative of animal life more generally, or as a representative of the even broader biotic
communities of which animals as well as humans are a part. (Compare Schim Schimmel's Dear Children
of the Earth: A Letter from Home [1994], written as a letter from Mother Earth addressed to the world’s
children to enlist their help in protecting the environment.) When considered at this macroanalytic
scale, the human author of non-or anti-human-centric accounts is likewise a member of such
communities, so that he or she, in addition to other forms of creatural life (or creatural life as such), takes
on the status of co-principal.
animal subjects. The broader aim of a narratology beyond the human is to formu-
late ways of asking questions about narrative engagements with animals and human-
animal relationships—engagements that have unfolded in multiple genres, media,
and epochs—in a manner that promotes transdisciplinary convergence. The more
localized aim of the present chapter has been to argue, first, that modernist life writ-
ing like Woolf ’s helped create the conditions for such convergence, by using nar-
rative to model trans-species ecologies of mind; and second, that coming to terms
with the complexity and variety of narratives attributed to animal tellers will necessi-
tate a fuller elaboration of these convergent or integrative methods of inquiry.
My next two chapters outline other ways in which the study of animal narratives
both requires and gives rise to transdisciplinarity of this sort. Synthesizing narra-
tological work on thought presentation, concepts from phenomenology and the
philosophy of mind, and hermeneutic theory, the chapters zoom in on narrative
strategies used to project subjective experiences that cut across not only the spe-
cies boundary but also the fiction-nonfiction divide. In considering accounts of ani-
mal subjectivity across genres, chapter 6 discusses how cultural ontologies generate
(and are sustained by) constellations of more or less distinct “discourse domains.”
At issue are frameworks for understanding that embed norms for attributing mental
states and processes to others, human as well as nonhuman. Chapter 7 then explores
how specific narratives can comment reflexively on and potentially reset the norms
used to allocate possibilities for selfhood to animal agents in particular.
6 Animal Minds
across Discourse Domains
Like the seafarer, the peregrine lives in a pouring-away world of no
attachment, a world of wakes and tilting, of sinking planes of land and
water. We who are anchored and earthbound cannot envisage this
freedom of the eye.
—J. A. Baker, The Peregrine (1967/2015: 45–46)
In this chapter, I introduce the technical term discourse domain to describe the arenas
of conduct in which strategies for orienting to self-other relationships—including
human-animal relationships—take shape. Discourse domains are frameworks for
activity that, operative in the full range of cultural, subcultural, and interpersonal
settings, determine what kinds of subjective experiences it is appropriate and war-
ranted to attribute to others, nonhuman as well as human. Thus, I start from the
premise that the ascriptions of mental states and experiences to animals flow, in a
top-down manner, from domain-specific assumptions about how to understand
agents vis-à-vis their larger environments for acting and interacting. I then use a
variety of example narratives to consider how cultural ontologies translate into, and
depend for their support on, constellations of discourse domains taken in this sense.
Subsequently, in chapter 7, I focus in depth on a single case study—namely, Thalia
Field’s experimental work Bird Lovers, Backyard (2010)—to explore how individ-
ual narratives can in turn have a bottom-up impact on the norms for mental-state
attributions circulating within particular domains. Field’s text, I argue, uses multiple
genres and storytelling techniques to suggest how literary writing can at once draw
on and hold up for scrutiny available frameworks for conceptualizing animal experi-
ences as well as relationships that cross species lines.
In both chapters, I build on previous studies of the nexus of narrative and mind
(Herman 2011a, 2011b, 2013) in an effort to reframe debates organized around a
polarity between legible and illegible animal minds. In these debates, in parallel with
larger assumptions about fictional minds, readability or transparency has become
associated with fiction and unreadability or opacity with nonfiction (Cohn 1978,
1999; Hamburger 1957/1993; Nagel 1974). By contrast, in investigating how my
case studies profile the motivations, desires, intentions, and emotions of nonhu-
man characters, the chapter reveals more or less detailed and far-ranging attribu-
tions of subjective experiences to animal agents within the domain of nonfiction.
Such variation in ascriptive practice can be traced back to the way a given narrative,
whether fictional or nonfictional, bears on the norms for interpretation that struc-
ture discourse domains. Thus, integrating narratological work on thought presenta-
tion, research in phenomenology and the philosophy of mind, and human-animal
202
Animal Minds across Discourse Domains ■ 203
studies, I hypothesize that because the norms for ascription associated with such
discourse domains cut across the fiction-nonfiction divide, domain, not genre, is
the key determinant of how prolific and detailed the experiential worlds projected
by a given narrative will be—whether those worlds involve human or nonhuman
experiencers.
The next section suggests that research in narratology and stylistics has not inves-
tigated fully enough questions raised by the use of methods of thought presentation
to project the experiences of nonhuman animals. Here, continuing chapter 5’s focus
on how stories can be used to explore potential heterogeneities—but also potential
areas of commonality—in the structure of experience across the species boundary,
I examine the modeling of animal subjectivity in texts by writers ranging from Rachel
Carson and J. A. Baker to Daphne du Maurier and William Horwood, considering
questions that arise from the way those methods straddle the fiction-nonfiction
divide. Then, in the section that follows, I connect those questions to issues brought
to the fore in philosophical discussions concerned with other animals’ minds and
the degree to which they are opaque or accessible to humans—discussions that
have often unfolded in the context of broader debates, in phenomenology and the
philosophy of mind, about the nature of mental experience. Drawing on Dennett’s
(1991) debate with Nagel (1974, 1986) vis-à-vis some of the relevant issues, I work
to reframe this debate by putting ideas from narratology into dialogue with one of
Dennett’s key concepts in this connection—namely, the concept of “heterophe-
nomenology.” In contrast with what Dennett calls “autophenomenology,” hetero-
phenomenology involves “a third-person approach” to the study of consciousness,
by means of which one can investigate “the phenomenology of another not oneself ”
(Dennett 2003: 19; see also Dennett 1991: 72–79; Dennett 2007). For Dennett,
heterophenomological inquiry provides “a bridge—the bridge—between the sub-
jectivity of human consciousness and the natural sciences” (2007: 249), insofar as it
provides “a straightforward, conservative extension of objective science that hand-
somely covers the ground—all the ground—of human consciousness, doing justice
to all the data without ever having to abandon the rules and constraints of the exper-
imental method that have worked so well in the rest of science” (2003: 19).
But whereas Dennett puts heterophenomenology in the service of a reductive or
eliminativist approach to the domain of the mental, in the present chapter I adapt
the term to refer to the whole range of practices—and the norms organizing those
practices—whereby subjective experiences are ascribed to others, including nonhu-
man others. From this perspective, Dennett’s third-person approach to conscious-
ness constitutes only one strand of heterophenomenology. The strand in question
is marked by an extreme parsimony—or, rather, outright eliminativism—when
it comes to mental-state attributions, not only across but also within the species
boundary. Or, to use terms that will be elaborated further in what follows, Dennett’s
account can be viewed as affiliated with a particular discourse domain, in contra-
distinction to other domains marked by prolific rather than parsimonious alloca-
tions of subjectivity to animal others—animal others who feature, in those other
domains, as members of a wider, trans-species ecology of selves.1
Accordingly, focusing on interspecies rather than intraspecies ascriptive prac-

tices, that is, heterophenomenological engagements that cross species lines, I sug-
gest that debates organized around a polarity between legible and illegible animal
minds should give way to a new, cross-or rather transdisciplinary project: namely,
developing techniques for documenting and analyzing the attested range of mind-
ascribing practices in a given culture or subculture, as they manifest themselves in
nonfictional as well as fictional narratives anchored in a variety of discourse domains.
In other words, rather than assuming a priori that only fictional narratives afford
access to nonhuman minds, analysts can study how narratives concerned with ani-
mal agents at once reflect and help constitute a larger system of ascriptive practices,
governed by norms that cut across the human-nonhuman distinction as well as the
contrast between fictional and nonfictional genres.2
n P R E S E N T I N G E X P E R I E N T I A L WO R L D S
ACROSS SPECIES LINES
In one of her earliest published essays, “Undersea,” which appeared in the September
1937 issue of the Atlantic Monthly, Rachel Carson demonstrates her already highly
developed skill at evoking the diverse experiential worlds of different kinds of
animals—a skill that she would continue to perfect in her acclaimed book-length
contributions to the genre of nature writing, including Under the Sea-Wind (1941),
The Sea around Us (1951), and The Edge of the Sea (1955). The opening paragraph of
Carson’s essay reads as follows:
(1) Who has known the ocean? Neither you nor I, with our earth-bound senses,
know the foam and surge of the tide that beats over the crab hiding under the sea-
weed of his tidepool home; or the lilt of the long, slow swells of mid-ocean, where
shoals of wandering fish prey and are preyed upon, and the dolphin breaks the waves
to breathe the upper atmosphere. Nor can we know the vicissitudes of life on the
ocean floor, where the sunlight, filtering through a hundred feet of water, makes but
a fleeting, bluish twilight, in which dwell sponge and mollusk and starfish and coral,
where swarms of diminutive fish twinkle through the dusk like a silver rain of mete-
ors, and eels lie in wait among the rocks. Even less is it given to man to descend those
six incomprehensible miles into the recesses of the abyss, where reign utter silence
and unvarying cold and eternal night. (Carson 1937: 55)
This paragraph, which denies even as it enacts the possibility of imagining the expe-
riential worlds of animals living underwater, thereby brings into view what might be
called the paradox of narrative prosthesis—a paradox that obtains in at least some
narratives that cross the species boundary. In projecting so vividly what it might be
like for undersea creatures to inhabit the niches to which their organismic profile
makes them suited, and in driving home equally vividly how different these niches
are from the ones humans characteristically occupy, excerpt (1) by that very fact
affords means for modeling the experiences of other kinds of beings—with this
modeling activity itself undercutting the claims for cross-species incomprehensibil-

ity, for an unbridgeable divide between human and nonhuman worlds, that Carson
herself puts forward.3
Exploring how modeling resources built into narrative generate possibilities and
paradoxes of this kind, the present section considers how ideas developed under
the auspices of narratological and stylistic research on thought presentation take on
a new inflection when used to investigate stories centering on animal experiences.
Thought Presentation beyond the Human: Extending

Narratological and Stylistic Approaches
In narrative contexts, mental-state ascriptions entail forms of embedded world

building. Narrators ascribe subjective experiences to characters by portraying them
as perceiving, remembering, imagining, or explicitly recounting (as intradiegetic
narrators) further worlds within the storyworld. To account for the discourse envi-
ronments in which such nested worlds take shape, analysts have identified an array
of positions or increments along a continuum or scale; this scale stretches from
characters’ verbal or mental performances that are more overtly mediated by a nar-
rator to performances that are less overtly mediated in this sense. One version of
the scalar model is shown in table 6.1, where “discourse” serves as a cover term for
presentations of speech as well as thought. Significantly, research in narratology
and stylistics has not yet fully investigated the issues that arise when this model is
brought to bear on presentations of the experiences of nonhuman animals in stories.
Extending the model in this way, I suggest, highlights the need to rethink its concep-
tual underpinnings.
Such rethinking reveals the advantages of continuing to work with distinctions
of the sort captured in table 6.1 but without seeking to map them onto a Cartesian
geography of mind—onto increments of an external-internal scale stretching from
the world out there to the mind in here. Instead analysts can bring the previous
TA B L E 6. 1 A continuum of modes of speech and thought presentation (based on Leech

and Short 1981/2007; Toolan 1988/2001)
scholarship into relation with a different, non-or rather anti-Cartesian, metric

(see Herman 2011b). This metric is based on the relative degree of detail used to
project the interplay between agents and their environments, or the world-body-
mind interactions because of which a narrative agent’s experiences take on the
qualitative character that they have. At one end of the spectrum are narratives, or
segments within narratives, that provide a globalizing, summative account of agent-
environment interactions; at the other end are narratives that stage the moment-
by-moment construction of characters’ experiential worlds, detailing how a being’s
subjective experience arises from the way it is functionally coupled with the envi-
ronments it inhabits. From this perspective, the paradoxically prosthetic status of
excerpt (1) derives from the manner in which Carson’s discourse reaches out toward
both ends of the spectrum just described, stating the impossibility of presenting sea
creatures’ experiences with any degree of precision and yet providing specifics about
what the world might be like for beings of that sort. Carson’s text is striking because
of the rhetorical effect created when it sets an overt statement of the impossibility
of modeling underwater Umwelten alongside a cluster of sketched-in experiential
worlds that emerge from just that sort of modeling process.4
Several other points need to be registered here, by way of marking out directions
for further inquiry.
The Proteus Principle, Degrees of Granularity,

and the Narrative Modeling of Animal Experiences
For one thing, it is important to stress that although in some contexts increments
on the scale shown in table 6.1 may be aligned with degrees of granularity in Umwelt
modeling, in accordance with Sternberg’s (1982) Proteus Principle, or the plural,
fluctuating correspondences between linguistic form and representational function
previously mentioned in c hapter 2, there is no one-to-one correspondence between
a particular technique of mind presentation and a specific level of detail in captur-
ing experiential worlds (see also c hapter 4). Granted, compared with excerpt (1),
excerpt (2), which is taken from the account of a deer hunt by the American natu-
ralist Charles Dudley Warner (1878) previously mentioned in chapter 2, projects an
experiential world that is more dense with mental-state ascriptions than the worlds
inhabited by Carson’s crab, dolphin, and eel. In this passage, which recounts how a
doe runs toward the hounds that are pursuing her in order to lead them away from
her threatened fawn, Warner uses techniques positioned farther to the right on
the scale in table 6.1 than N and NRTA or NRPA—these being the modes used in
Carson’s account.
(2) After running at high speed perhaps half a mile farther, it occurred to [the doe]
that it would be safe now to turn to the west, and, by a wide circuit, seek her fawn.
But, at the moment, she heard a sound that chilled her heart. It was the cry of a hound
to the west of her. The crafty brute had made the circuit of the slash, and cut off her
retreat. There was nothing to do but to keep on; and on she went, still to the north,
with the noise of the pack behind her . . .. She bounded on; she stopped. What was
that? From the valley ahead came the cry of a searching hound. All the devils were
loose this morning. Every way was closed but one, and that led straight down the
mountain to the cluster of houses. Conspicuous among them was a slender white
wooden spire. The doe did not know that it was the spire of a Christian chapel. But
perhaps she thought that human pity dwelt there, and would be more merciful than
the teeth of the hounds. (Warner 1878: para. 20)5
The first sentence of this excerpt hovers somewhere between NRTA and IT. Likewise,
with its tag phrase, the final sentence has the surface structure of IT, although the
hedge provided by the adverb “perhaps,” together with the propositional content
of the sentence itself, detaches the suggestion of religious hypocrisy from the deer’s
own frame of reference. Other sentences in the excerpt, meanwhile, are situated still
farther to the right on the scale in table 6.1. Thus the sentences featuring expressions
such as “the crafty brute,” “there was nothing to do but to keep on,” “what was that?”
and “all the devils were loose this morning” can be interpreted as instances of FIT,
serving to model the subjectivity of the doe, to evoke the animal’s landscape of con-
sciousness (see Bruner 1990), even as they simultaneously project the landscape of
action in which the deer seeks to evade the hounds.
Yet excerpts (3) and (4), taken together with excerpt (1), confirm that any align-
ment between increments on the scale and degrees of granularity in Umwelt model-
ing is contingent rather than necessary, with variable degrees of detail being afforded
by a given increment. Like (1), both (3) and (4) limit themselves to the portion
of the continuum in table 6.1 that stretches between N and NRS/T/PA.6 Excerpt
(3) is taken from Esther Woolfson’s memoir about her and her family’s experiences
while living with several birds; it recounts what Woolfson observes when she first
releases doves that she and her daughters have been caring for. Excerpt (4) derives
from a text also discussed in chapter 2: namely, J. A. Baker’s account of the ten-year
period he spent pursuing and observing peregrine falcons, condensed into a diary
format covering one year.7 This passage suggests how the birds’ visual acuity enables
them to encounter, in ways strikingly different from humans, the terrestrial environ-
ments over which they fly.
(3) On the day of eventual release, I removed the door and, after considerable hesita-
tion and anxious hovering (mine, not theirs), [the doves] walked out on to the small
platform in front of the house, looked around them, seemed almost blinded by the
possibilities in front of them, and then flew . . .. I did, in that moment, assume that
this would be my final glimpse of them, but I was wrong. After some flight, a bit of
brisk circling in the air above us, a period of what I assume was orientation, they flew
back into their house, confirming remarkably, amazingly, the truth of the designation
“homing pigeon.” . . . As I watched my doves’ light, easy flight, I was delighted by
them, by their certitude and reliability, the way they flew off into the sky and returned
unfailingly each evening with the onset of dusk. (Woolfson 2008: 20–22)
(4) The peregrine’s view of the land is like the yachtsman’s view of the shore as he
sails into the long estuaries. A wake of water recedes behind him, the wake of the
pierced horizon glides back on either side. Like the seafarer, the peregrine lives in a
pouring-away world of no attachment, a world of wakes and tilting, of sinking planes
of land and water. We who are anchored and earthbound cannot envisage this free-
dom of the eye. The peregrine sees and remembers patterns we do not know exist: the
neat squares of orchards and woodland, the endlessly varying quadrilateral shapes of
fields. He finds his way across the land by a succession of remembered symmetries.
But what does he understand? Does he really “know” that an object that increases
in size is moving towards him? Or is it that he believes in the size he sees, so that a
distant man is too small to be frightening but a man near is a man huge and therefore
terrifying? He may live in a world of endless pulsations, of objects forever contracting
or dilating in size. (Baker 1967/2015: 45–46)
Excerpt (3) ascribes several perceptual or cognitive performances to the doves: expe-

riencing apparent bewilderment at the range of navigational possibilities open to
them as they first survey the skies around them; achieving spatial orientation by rap-
idly flying in circles above Woolfson’s own position as observer; and possessing cer-
titude (and demonstrating reliability) when they unfailingly make their way home
each evening after their aerial forays. It should also be noted that Woolfson hedges the
first two of these ascriptions (“seemed almost blinded by the possibilities,” “a period of
what I assume was”). The first part of excerpt (4), by contrast, with its paradoxically
prosthetic account of “a pouring-away world of no attachment” made accessible by a
“freedom of the eye” ostensibly unknown to humans, models the peregrine falcon’s
experience of flight in much greater detail. Similarly, in the second part of the passage,
the interrogatives set up a disjunction that exhausts the logical space of the bird’s per-
ceptual possibilities, with the hedging force of the modal auxiliary “may,” in the final
sentence, offset by the vividness with which Baker takes up the imagined perspective
of the falcon. Thus, although the excerpts from Carson, Woolfson, and Baker all use
techniques situated toward the left end of the scale from table 6.1, Baker’s text, as
excerpted in (4), shows greater particularization and prolificness when it comes to
presenting animal experiences, revealing the Proteus Principle in action.
Narratological and stylistic approaches to thought presentation raise other issues
relevant for inquiry into the narrative modeling of animals’ experiential worlds. One
set of issues grows out of questions about how previous research on the concept of
mind style might be extended to engage with narratives about nonhuman minds.
Other issues arise from work on the asymmetrical norms governing the use of meth-
ods to present characters’ thoughts in contrast to their verbalized utterances.
Mind Style and Nonhuman Minds
In Fowler’s (1977) original account of mind style the term refers to the proc-
ess whereby “cumulatively, consistent structural options [such as choices in
vocabulary and the use of transitive versus intransitive verbs], agreeing in cut-
ting the presented world to one pattern or another, give rise to an impression of a
world-v iew” associated with a character or narrator (Fowler 1977: 76). As such,
the idea of mind style seems to encompass narrative practices associated with rel-
atively fine-grained methods of modeling experiential worlds. Instead of project-
ing a globalizing outline of those worlds, in the manner of NRTA or NRPA, for
example, mind style refers to modes of textual patterning that encapsulate, or even
iconically reproduce, an intelligent agent’s moment-by-moment negotiation of its
lived environment.
Significantly, although the pioneering work on mind style by Fowler and by
Halliday (1971) as well as later research in this area has centered on differences
among the minds of human characters in fictional narratives, Fowler’s initial def-
inition is neutral with respect to species identity as well as genre. He wrote: “We
may coin the term ‘mind-style’ to refer to any distinctive linguistic presentation
of an individual mental self ” (Fowler 1977: 103).8 This definition accommo-
dates the study of how textual patterns might be used to project species-specific
modes of niche construction and also the niche-building activities of individ-
ual creatures—activities arising from the more or less idiosyncratic capacities,
dispositions, and life experiences of the individuals in question. Thus, excerpted
from Carson’s account of Silverbar the sanderling, one of the named seabirds
who acts as a species representative in Under the Sea-Wind (1941/2007), excerpt
(5) could in principle be glossed as an instance of N; yet the paratactic stack-
ing of clauses, combined with the repetition of “pad, pad” in the second clause,
can also be interpreted as iconically evoking the way Silverbar registers the accu-
mulating details of the fox’s appearance and behaviors as threats to her newly
hatched chicks, before the final clause morphs into NRTA:
(5) The gleaming eyes of the fox—the soft pad, pad of his feet on the shales—
the twitch of his nostrils testing the air for scent of her chicks—became for her
the symbols of a thousand dangers, formless and without name. (Carson 1941/
2007: 45)
For its part, excerpt (6), again taken from Baker’s The Peregrine, suggests how style
can be used to project nonhuman ways of encountering the world even when there
is no attempt to create an iconic matching of textual patterns with the unfolding of
an animal’s experience. In (6), the bird’s mind style emerges, not directly from the
verbal texture of statements that reflect its manner of processing events in the sto-
ryworld, but indirectly from Baker’s chosen format of a sequence of commands—
commands that the author issues to any human who seeks to enter the world of
a peregrine on its own terms. Here the imperatives invite readers to engage in a
two-stage modeling process: in a first stage, the prescriptive statements project a
set of behavioral protocols for humans who seek to gain recognition and acceptance
by peregrines, and then in a second stage those protocols can be mapped onto the
birds’ way of making sense of the world around them.
(6) Enter and leave the same fields at the same time each day, soothe the hawk from
its wildness by a ritual of behavior as invariable as its own. Hood the glare of the eyes,
hide the white tremor of the hands, shade the stark reflecting face, assume the still-
ness of a tree. A peregrine fears nothing he can see clearly and far off. Approach him
across open ground with a steady unfailing movement. Let your shape grow in size
but do not alter its outline. Never hide yourself unless concealment is complete. Be
alone. Shun the furtive oddity of man, cringe from the hostile eyes of farms. Learn to
fear. (Baker 1967/2015: 30)
As (6) demonstrates, and as suggested more generally by the brilliant diversity of

formats used by Baker over the course of his account, when the mind being mod-
eled in a narrative does not traffic in human language, the styles that can be used to
stage the workings of that mind arguably become not more but less constrained,
less bound to particular sorts of experiments with vocabulary, process types, and
syntax on which the early research in this area focused. In turn, because they may
use a variety of strategies to project nonhuman ways of experiencing the world, ani-
mal narratives can not only be informed by but also inform existing conceptions of
mind style.
Thought Presentation and Ecologies of Ascriptive Practice
But it is not just the range of textual phenomena falling under the scope of mind
style that needs to be reconsidered when it comes to animal narratives; these narra-
tives raise broader questions about how assumptions concerning what sorts of expe-
riential worlds are available to various kinds of beings bear, in a top-down manner,
on the strategies used to present (and interpret) different kinds of minds. At issue
here is the way the textual patterns associated with mind styles and with the presen-
tation of animal experiences more generally are interwoven with cultures’ ontolo-
gies; as noted earlier in this study, such ontologies specify, in the form of common
knowledge, what sorts of beings populate the world and how those beings’ attributes
relate to the attributes ascribed to humans. Grounded in such ontologies, norms that
guide the production and interpretation of narratives about animal experiences, like
the norms bearing on narratives about humans’ ways of encountering the world,
determine when, to what extent, and in what manner it is appropriate to ascribe
mental states and experiences to others. Reciprocally, as discussed below and in
chapter 7, the patterns of ascription used in particular narratives can impinge on,
and potentially recalibrate, normative assumptions about species of minds.
These issues can be approached initially via recent narratological and stylis-
tic research on differences in the norms governing the presentation of thought
versus speech in stories. As shown in figure 6.1, Leech and Short (1981/2007)
as well as Toolan (1988/2001) have built on the scalar model presented in table
6.1 to suggest a fundamental contrast between the norms in question. According
to this model, the norm for presenting speech is direct speech, such that “any
movement to the right of DS [Direct Speech] . . . will produce an effect of
Norm
Speech presentation N NRSA IS FIS DS FDS
Thought presentation N NRTA IT FIT DT FDT
Norm
Figure 6.1 Contrasting norms for speech and thought presentation (based on Leech and
Short 1981/2007: 276; Toolan 1988/2001: 139).
freeness, as if the author has vacated the stage and left it to the characters,”
“whereas any movement to the left of the norm will usually be interpreted as a
movement away from verbatim report and toward ‘interference’ ” by a narrator
(Leech and Short 1981/2007: 268). By contrast, “Thoughts, in general, are not
verbally formulated and so cannot be reported verbatim” (276). Hence shifts
from one increment to another mean different things in the context of speech
versus thought. Free indirect speech comes across as being subject to greater
narratorial mediation or intervention than direct speech, given that DS can be
considered the norm for reported speech. But in the case of reported thought, as
Leech and Short (1981/2007) suggest, indirect thought can be considered the
norm. Accordingly, free indirect thought comes across as a less mediated pres-
entation of characters’ mental activity than the normative mode.
This model, however, affords only a relatively low-resolution image of the larger
system(s) of ascriptive practices bound up with thought presentation in particular.
As Leech and Short (1981/2007) themselves note, in novels the default mode of
thought representation moved rightward along this scale, from indirect thought to
free indirect thought, as the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth (277).
Besides being subject to historical variability, norms for presenting characters’ men-
tal experiences are also subject to inter-and intracultural differences. Narratives fea-
turing animal subjects highlight such variability because they point to a plurality of
norms structuring engagements with experiential worlds, while also suggesting how
contrasts among the norms at issue cross-cut the distinction between fictional and
nonfictional accounts of animal life—to anticipate issues discussed in what follows.
Consider excerpt (7). Like excerpt (5), passage (7) concerns Silverbar’s response
to the marauding fox who threatens her chicks in Carson’s Under the Sea-Wind
(1941/2007). Yet passage (7) features more prolific and more fine-grained ascrip-
tions of perceptions, beliefs, intentions, and emotions to the animals involved than
does the earlier excerpt or, for that matter, other parts of Carson’s narrative.
(7) Now for the first time an abiding fear entered the heart of Silverbar. . . . After the
fourth chick had hatched, Silverbar began to carry the shells, piece by piece, away
from the nest. . . . A polar fox passed near her, making no sound as he trotted with sure
foot over the shales. His eye gleamed as he watched the mother bird, and he sniffed
the air, believing that she had young nearby. Silverbar flew to the willows further up
the ravine and watched the fox uncover the shells and nose them. As he started up
the slope of the ravine the sanderling fluttered toward him, tumbling to the ground
as though hurt, flapping her wings, creeping over the gravel. All the while she uttered
a high-pitched note like the cry of her own young. The fox rushed at her. Silverbar
rose rapidly into the air and flew over the crest of the ridge, only to reappear from
another quarter, tantalizing the fox into following her. So by degrees she led him over
the ridge and southward into a marshy bottom fed by the overflow of upland streams.
(Carson 1941/2007: 43–44)
Passage (7) thus reflects an upward adjustment of the threshold for permissible lev-
els of detail in Umwelt modeling. This adjustment arises, in turn, from the difficulty
of parsing Silverbar’s and the fox’s complex interaction without building a scenario
that makes sense of what’s going on in terms of the animals’ (interconnected) inten-
tional and volitional states.
My broader point here: that the co-presence of different norms for mental-state
attribution in the same narrative as well as across different kinds of accounts points
to a more complex ecology of minds than that indicated in figure 6.1. Rather, my
analysis suggests that multiple norms bear on mind-ascribing practices in narrative
contexts; rooted in different cultural or subcultural ontologies, these competing sets
of norms govern when and how experiential worlds are mapped onto forms of crea-
tural life. In an effort to account more fully for the variability and plurality of the rel-
evant norms, I turn now to debates about (un)readability of animal minds, and then
move into a discussion of how the concept of discourse domains provides means for
a narratology beyond the human to intervene productively in those debates.
n A N I M A L M I N D S B E T W E E N N A R R A T O L O G Y
AND HETEROPHENOMENOLOGY
A key goal of this section is to recontextualize—and suggest strategies for moving

beyond—a debate that has grown up around the question of animal minds in the
field of philosophy. Nagel (1974, 1986), in developing a broader account of the
nature of consciousness and its resistance to accepted modes of explanatory reduc-
tion in the context of the mind-body problem, has articulated claims that can be
aligned with one side of this debate. On this side are theorists who posit that animal
minds are radically inaccessible—but arguably without doing justice to observable
modes of relatedness and rapport between humans and other animals (compare
Kennedy 1992). Dennett (1991) can be aligned with the other side of the debate;
he posits that human and nonhuman minds are equally accessible—but arguably
without doing justice to potential heterogeneities in the structure of experience
across species lines. My aim here is to steer a course between the Scylla of the radical
inaccessibility of nonhuman minds and the Charybdis of experiential homogeni-
zation or flattening, by arguing that mind-ascribing acts, rather than occurring in
decontextualized, one-off acts of attribution, always unfold within particular arenas

of practice, or discourse domains. Such domains, as suggested previously, determine
when, to what extent, and in what manner it is appropriate and warranted to impute
subjective experiences to others, nonhuman as well as human. Accordingly, in lieu
of any top-down dichotomization of legible and illegible animal minds, I propose
working inductively toward an understanding of the spectrum of attested mind-
ascribing practices as they take shape in a given culture or subculture, with this
spectrum ranging from minimal to maximal projections of mind across the species
boundary.
Both to constrain my analysis and to open up possibilities for transdisciplinary
exchange, I focus on the way such ascriptive practices unfold in narratively organ-
ized discourse about animals, nonfictional as well as fictional. Here it should be
noted that Nagel’s thesis of radical opacity carries the corollary that only fictional
accounts of animals can support abundant, detailed ascriptions of mental experi-
ences to nonhuman agents (and for that matter to certain kinds of human agents).
Dennett’s antithesis carries the opposite corollary: namely, that the construction
of a nonfictional, or falsifiable, account is required to build up a profile of another
being that can reliably capture what it is like to be that being. To push past these
interlinked polarities in discourse on animal minds—polarities because of which a
division between legibility and illegibility leads in turn to a dichotomized approach
to narrative genres—it is necessary to rethink the core assumptions on which the
debate in question has been grounded.
Rethinking Heterophenomenology
To bolster his claims concerning the irreducibly subjective character of experience,

Nagel (1974) puts forward a series of examples meant to demonstrate the inac-
cessibility of other minds—and hence the impossibility of accounting for or even
eliminating consciousness via methods of “psychophysical reduction,” such as the
third-person approach later recommended by Dennett in Consciousness Explained.9
Nagel’s examples include, in the domain of intraspecies encounters, the subjective
experiences of a blind person vis-à-vis a sighted person and, in the domain of (hypo-
thetical) interspecies encounters, the subjective experiences of a human vis-à-vis
a Martian visitor to earth. Nagel’s central example, however, involves interspecies
encounters between humans and a particular kind of animal—namely, the micro-
bats who use echolocation or sonar to navigate their environments. Given that “bat
sonar, though clearly a form of perception, is not similar in its operation to any sense
that we possess,” and given that “there is no reason to suppose that it is subjectively
like anything we can experience or imagine,” it would seem that what it is like to
be a bat, or the subjective character of bats’ experiences as opposed to features of
the neurophysiology that scaffold those experiences, remain radically inaccessible
to humans (1974: 438). As Nagel puts it, “Even if I could by gradual degrees be
transformed into a bat, nothing in my present constitution enables me to imagine
what the experiences of such a future stage of myself thus metamorphosed would
be like. The best evidence would come from the experiences of bats, if we only knew
what they were like” (439).
Nagel concludes his influential article10 with speculations about the possibility
of establishing an “objective phenomenology,” or a theory of what it’s like to be a
particular kind of creature based on the creature’s physiological structure, percep-
tual capabilities, behavioral dispositions, and so forth. As Nagel puts it, “Though
presumably it would not capture everything, its [objective phenomenology’s] goal
would be to describe, at least in part, the subjective character of experiences in a form
comprehensible to beings incapable of having those experiences” (1974: 449).11 The
philosopher further develops these ideas in his 1986 book The View from Nowhere,
which aims to make space for ineliminably subjective experiences within a broadly
naturalistic and scientific worldview. Here again, however, Nagel assumption of a
basic incompatibility between subjective and objective perspectives on conscious-
ness leads him to emphasize the limitations of any objective phenomenology, or
what I am calling heterophenomenology in the present chapter. Thus Nagel’s book
contains the following memorable formulation: “We will not know exactly how
scrambled eggs taste to a cockroach even if we develop a detailed objective phenom-
enology of the cockroach’s sense of taste. When it comes to values, goals, and forms
of life, the gulf may be even more profound” (25).
By contrast, Dennett for his part suggests that there is no fundamental distinc-
tion between the way heterophenomenology plays out in human-human interac-
tions, on the one hand, and in human-nonhuman interactions, on the other. It is true
that experiments involving human subjects can build up heterophenomenological
worlds by means of transcribed texts; created on the basis of vocalized sounds made
by the participants, these texts can then be interpreted as a record of speech acts
such as questioning, answering, promising, objecting, and so on—thanks to the
interpreter’s adoption of the intentional stance, or the assumption that the human
subjects produced the transcribed sounds for particular communicative reasons
(Dennett 1991: 74–78). Yet as Dennett also notes, animals’ comportment itself
“provides a clear basis for describing their heterophenomenological world,” such
that “heterophenomenology without [such] a text is not impossible, just difficult”
(446).12 More fully, taking up Nagel’s central example, Dennett asserts that we can
“rank order heterophenomenological narratives for realism,” rejecting those that
assert or presuppose
discriminatory talents, or reactive dispositions, demonstrably not provided for in the
ecology and neurophysiology of the bat. . . . When we arrive at heterophenomeno-
logical narratives that no critic can find any positive grounds for rejecting, we should
accept them . . . as accurate accounts of what it is like to be the creature in question.
(Dennett 1991: 443–44)
Indeed, in stark opposition to Nagel, Dennett wishes to expurge ineliminably subjec-
tive aspects of experience; his project is to dispute the utility and even the coherence
of the concept of “qualia,” or raw sensory feels such as those putatively associated
with seeing the color red. The result is that for Dennett nonhuman experiences are
as accessible from a third-person perspective as human experiences, but potentially

at the cost of a flattening out of qualitative differences in how differently structured
beings might encounter the world—differences that Uexküll sought to capture with
his concept of Umwelt, or the phenomenal, subjectively experienced world to which
a creature’s organismic structure gives rise.13
Below I return to issues raised by Nagel’s emphasis on the unbridgeability of
the divide between humans and other animals; for the moment I focus on how
the premises of the debate can be undercut from another direction—namely, via
the particular approach to heterophenomenology proposed by Dennett. One line
of criticism against Dennett targets his mentalizing approach to ascriptions of
subjective states to others. Thus Gallagher and Hutto (2008) critique Dennett’s
notion of “the intentional stance,” or humans’ evolved tendency to construe oth-
ers’ behaviors in terms of interconnected intentional and volitional states, as an
overintellectualizing approach that is also misleadingly spectatorial in orientation.
For Gallagher and Hutto, what Dennett describes as the intentional stance should
be thought of not as the default orientation toward intersubjective encounters,
but rather as a specialized attitude or interpretive strategy that will be adopted
only when it becomes pragmatically expedient to do so. From this perspective,
when I interact with another person I will resort to the intentional stance only
when the default, embodied, pre-or nonconceptual modes of sense making that
are ontogenetically prior and cognitively more basic than deliberative reasoning
(Trevarthen 1993) do not suffice to make clear exactly what someone is doing or
why he or she may be doing that. If I see you standing near a broken window frame
with a hammer in your hand, I will not need to compute your intentions but will
be able to grasp them even as (or when) I grasp the situation at hand. The same
goes for a dog who barks and pushes eagerly against the front door: time to go out
for a walk!
Likewise Simon P. James (2009) and Kenneth J. Shapiro (1997) discuss how
nonmentalizing, embodied modes of interaction allow for coordinated interplay—
and mutual understanding—between humans and companion animals. For exam-
ple, in his account of the play behaviors in which he and his dog Lucy engage,
James writes that “talk of a meeting of minds is, to speak loosely, too ‘mentalistic’ to
capture my interactions with Lucy. My being-with Lucy, if it may be so described,
[involves] an intertwining of bodily intentions, a shared response of two lived bod-
ies to a common situation. It certainly cannot be understood on the basis of a model
that is merely cognitive” (39). Not only does this line of thinking further the argu-
ment that ascriptions of subjectivity (both within and across the species boundary)
should be viewed as embedded in and shaped by particular kinds of contexts rather
than as singular, one-off attributions; what is more, James’s and Shapiro’s work,
like Gallagher and Hutto’s, suggests that despite Dennett’s critique of what he calls
the “Cartesian Theater” model of consciousness,14 his approach reveals a residual
mind-body dualism, which involves a detached figuring out of rather than a cogni-
zant co-involvement with the postures and movements of bodies, nonhuman as well
as human.
As these considerations suggest, in any culture a variety of contexts—or what

I go on to describe in more detail as discourse domains—shape acts of mental-state
ascription across as well as within the species boundary. Heterophenomenology,
in this sense, is a cover term for the constellation of discourse domains in which
ascriptive practices take shape; the full range of relevant domains needs to be
taken into account in characterizing human-animal interactions and attribu-
tions of intentions, emotions, volitions, and other mental states and dispositions
across species lines. Thus, again using the example of companion animals such as
dogs, Noë (2009) notes that although it is possible to treat a dog in biophysical
terms as a merely mechanistic locus of conditioned response, “if one is to enter
into the kind of relationship of cooperation and companionship that character-
izes our actual relations with dogs, one must leave the standpoint of mechanism
behind and instead view the dog as . . . a thinking being” (37). Stating the point
in even starker terms, Noë writes, “There are two fundamentally different ways of
thinking about things . . .. From within one perspective, it is impossible to doubt
the mind of others. From within the other, it is impossible to acknowledge it”
(39; see also Arluke and Sanders 1996: 76–77, 80–81). Here, rather than opt-
ing for one or the other polarities of legible versus illegible animal minds, Noë
suggests that this dichotomy itself emerges from competing sets of protocols for
mental-state attributions, ranging from domains in which animal subjectivity is
blocked out as a nonfactor to those in which particularized, prolific ascriptions of
mind to nonhuman others are not only possible but mandated.
Crist (1999) reveals similar conflicts among divergent domains in her inves-
tigation of changing patterns in scientific discourse about animal behavior from
the nineteenth to the twentieth centuries. Crist focuses on the contrast between
the vernacular language of action used by analysts such as Darwin and the French
naturalist Jean-Henri Fabre, on the one hand, and the technical terms used by
ethologists such as Konrad Lorenz and Nikolaas Tinbergen, on the other hand.
As Crist puts it, “Grasped in the ordinary language of action [where animals are
the subject of verbs such as see, feel, pursue, etc.], knowledge of animal behavior is
oriented toward the behavior’s intrinsic meaning, including the subjective experi-
ence in (and of ) the world that behavior expresses and embodies” (4). However,
when animal behavior is mediated through technical terms, such as Lorenz’s
“specialized escape-and-defense reaction,” “innate releasing mechanism,” and
“stimulus-emitting object,” understanding of animal behavior becomes equiva-
lent to something like the physicist’s concept of gravity, which rather than consti-
tuting the behavior of a falling object belongs to a particular explanatory scheme
designed to account for that behavior (4). In parallel with Noë’s argument about
the two ways of orienting to dogs, Crist’s key point here is that whereas use of the
vernacular language of action casts animals as acting subjects, use of the technical
language of, for example, classical ethology casts animals as natural objects. Thus,
as in the behaviorist models from which they borrowed, the classical ethologists
sought to account for nonhuman behavior in terms of a “matrix of impinging
stimuli, intermediate mechanisms, and elicited responses” (Crist 1999: 94).
These two modes of discourse about animals, the one bringing “humans’ and
nonhumans’ phenomenal worlds into alignment” and the other “alien to any
possible experience or perspective of animals” (3), thus motivate very different
kinds of ascriptive practices (for further discussion, see c hapter 7).15
In the present subsection, I have drawn on the work of analysts in fields ranging
from the philosophy of mind and phenomenology to the sociology of science to ques-
tion the premises on which debates concerning animal subjectivity have been set up.
In turn, in disputing these premises, I have argued for the need to replace a binarized
model of animal minds—transparent accessibility versus radical otherness—with a
scalar or gradient model involving different degrees of projected relatedness, mutual-
ity, and rapport across species lines. From this perspective, heterophenomenology is
no monolithic affair; it encompasses, rather, a diverse environment of mind-ascribing
practices, of which Nagel’s and Dennett’s accounts, for example, capture only specific,
localized sectors or regions. Leveraging ideas from narratology, my next subsection
continues the process of mapping out the environment in question, even as it high-
lights the transdisciplinary nature of this mapping project.
From Heterophenomenology to Narratology

(and Back Again)
I return now to the association mentioned earlier—between fiction and the legibil-
ity or transparency of animal as well as human minds, and between nonfiction and
the illegibility or opacity of those minds. More specifically, I explore how my cri-
tique of binarized models of animal subjectivity bears on questions about the range
of techniques, from among those registered in table 6.1, that can be used to pres-
ent animal experiences within as well as across the fiction-nonfiction divide. The
previous subsection outlined the larger philosophical debates motivating my claim
that coming to terms with stories’ attributions of mental states to animals requires
situating a given narrative within a larger environment or ecology of ascriptive prac-
tices. But to locate a narrative in this manner, one must do more than ascertain a
text’s generic status, that is, its status as fictional or nonfictional. To put the same
point another way, the norms that govern how stories map (possibilities for) subjec-
tive experiences onto various forms of creatural life are matters of cultural ontology,
not—or not only—genre.
Compare passages (8) and (9); the first excerpt is taken from William Horwood’s
1982 novel The Stonor Eagles, and the second, once again, from Woolfson’s Corvus.
Despite their shared focus on birds, the two passages are marked by different modes and
degrees of mental-state attribution, in ways that might suggest the primacy of genre-
based differences in the norms governing ascriptive practices in narrative contexts.
(8) For days Cuillin [the last surviving white-tailed eagle in Britain] had remained at a
stance on the high cliffs at the easternmost part of the Shetland Islands, facing the dark
sea. She had groomed, she had stared, she had hunted; now another dawn had come,
and she knew there could be no further delay or excuse. . . . How vast and grey the sea
looked, how treacherous its swells and dark places, how fearful the day! . . . She flew
at 350 feet, and within an hour the coast-bound fulmar were behind her and she was
alone over the sea. It stretched ahead, frighteningly vast, and she could only close her
mind to what lay behind her, and commit herself to its care . . . when the first bout of
real tiredness hit her . . . she found her altitude sinking down to less than 200 feet . . ..
A spar of driftwood. A dead cormorant . . . too far out! (Horwood 1982: 45–46)
(9) As we began to look at all corvids with new interest, we saw Chicken [a rook
rescued by Woolfson’s daughter] do as the corvids around us did. In time, we could
recognise the complex series of movements of body, wings and feathers that told of
mood and inclination. . . . We began to discern her state of mind from her stance, her
walk, her feathers, to know that, when going about her day-to-day business, untrou-
bled and busy, the head feathers would be smoothed to her skull, her auricular feath-
ers (the panels of feathers by the sides of her head that cover the openings that are
her ears) flattened, with no “eyebrows” or “ears” visible—the raised head feathers
that indicate alternations of mood—no raised, irritated crown of Dennis the Menace
feathers around the top of her head, a posture that indicates surprise, alarm, anger.
Annoyance or some other stimulus, we saw, could bring this about instantly; when
teased, or crossed in any way, she’d fluff her feathers, lower her head, adopt an aggres-
sive stance, her leg feathers bagged out and full. (Woolfson 2008: 72–73)
Passage (8), participating in the genre of historical fiction, features a wide range of
ascriptive techniques, spread out across the continuum shown in table 6.1.16 The
first part of the passage morphs from scene-setting narration into narrative report of
thought act (“she knew there could be no further delay or excuse”), as Cuillin pre-
pares to make her long, difficult flight from Scotland to Norway. The exclamation
point that concludes the third sentence marks this material as free indirect thought.
Modeling the frightful aspect of the sea as it appears to the eagle, the succession
of “how” clauses (“How vast and grey,” etc.), like some of the expressions used by
Warner to call up the thought-world of the deer on the run in passage (2), evoke
the animal’s landscape of consciousness while also projecting the landscape of action
through which the bird must make its way (compare Bruner 1990). After a resump-
tion of scene-setting narration (“She flew at 350 feet . . .”), the use of the adverbial
phrase frighteningly vast reintroduces the eagle’s emotional state and frames the fol-
lowing further narrative reports of thought acts by the bird. Then, in the concluding
lines of the excerpt, Horwood uses the ascriptive method positioned rightmost on
the scale in table 6.1: the italicized phrase too far out with its attendant exclamation
point can be glossed as an instance of free direct discourse. Here the narrative creates
the sense that Cuillin’s surprise at the cormorant’s atypical location, instead of merely
coloring the narrator’s presentation of events as it would in free indirect thought,
manifests itself directly on the page, maximally free of narratorial mediation.
By contrast, passage (9), from Woolfson’s nonfictional account, limits itself
mainly to recounting the “complex series of movements of body, wings and feathers
that”—as Woolfson and her daughters learn to infer—“told of [Chicken’s] mood

and inclination.” Here the narrative focuses not so much on the rook’s subjectivity
per se as on the process by which her human observers construct inferential path-
ways leading from the bird’s bodily performances to hypotheses about her mental
states and dispositions. The passage recounts how Woolfson and her family initially
used a comparison set of corvids to identify salient behavioral patterns in Chicken’s
comportment and then derived, on the basis of repeated observations, translations
of those patterns into subjective states—and vice versa. Thus, rather than project-
ing Chicken as experiencing equanimity, surprise, anger, annoyance, and so on,
Woolfson’s account centers on the process of familiarization through which such
projections may become possible over time. Passage (9) therefore remains posi-
tioned at or near the leftmost end of the scale in table 6.1; it recounts how inferences
concerning avian thought acts or emotional states might be arrived at, rather than
directly ascribing those subjective states via techniques situated further to the right
on the scale.
Do passages (8) and (9) therefore support that argument that genre—the cate-
gorization of a text as fictional or nonfictional—is the main determinant of the rel-
ative richness and detail of mental-state ascriptions to animals in narratives? Here
again I seek to push back against what can be construed as a pervasive assumption
about animal narratives: namely, that only fictional accounts of animals support
prolific, particularized ascriptions of mental experiences to nonhuman agents. As
mentioned previously, this dichotomization of fictional and nonfictional animal
minds follows as a corollary from Nagelian assumptions about the radical opacity
of animal minds. Yet the variety of ascriptive practices at work within as well as
across the fiction-nonfiction divide belies any such dichotomy. Studying this vari-
ety, in turn, forms part of the project of redefining heterophenomenology in terms
of more or less localized, domain-specific methods for engaging in mental-state
attributions, rather than in terms of serial, decontextualized acts of ascription.
Along these lines, consider passages (10) and (11) against the backdrop afforded
by passages (8) and (9), respectively. Passage (10) is excerpted from Daphne du
Maurier’s 1952 novella The Birds (1952/2004), Alfred Hitchcock’s film adapta-
tion of which appeared in 1963. Passage (11) derives, once more, from Baker’s The
Peregrine.
(10) Nat [du Maurier’s protagonist] hurried on. . . . As he jumped the stile [leading
to his family’s cottage], he heard the whir of wings. A black-backed gull dived down
at him from the sky. It missed, swerved in flight, and rose to dive again. In a moment
it was joined by others, six, seven, a dozen, black-backed and herring mixed. . . .
Covering his head with his arms he ran towards the cottage. They kept coming at him
from the air, silent save for the beating wings, the terrible fluttering wings. He could
feel the blood on his hands, his wrists, his neck. Each stab of a swooping beak tore
his flesh. If only he could keep them from his eyes. . . . They had not learnt yet how to
cling to a shoulder, how to rip clothing, how to dive in mass upon the head, upon the
body. But with each dive, with each attack, they became bolder. (du Maurier 1952/
2004: 19–20)
(11) He [the male peregrine falcon] flew fast, banking narrow turns, winding in
steep spirals, wings lashing and quivering. Soon he was high above me. He could see
the hills sinking down into the shadowed valleys and the far woods rising all around,
the towns and villages still in sunlight, the broad estuary flowing into blue, the grey
dimness of the sea. All that was hidden from me was shining clear to his encircling
eye. . . . He was desperate with the rage of the hungry hawk. . . . Searing through
the sky, the hawk in torment saw the land beneath him work and seethe with birds
and come alive. Golden plover broke their wild cries along the green surface of the
lower air. The peregrine hissed among them like a burning brand. (Baker 1967/
2015: 136).
Here, relative to passages (8) and (9), the ascriptive patterning is reversed: the
excerpt from du Maurier’s fictional text limits itself to reportage-like narration of
the birds’ atypical swarming and attacking behavior, refraining from imputing to
the birds subjective states that might account for their actions, whereas the passage
from Baker’s nonfictional text engages in relatively prolific, wide-ranging ascriptions
of subjective experiences to the male falcon he has been observing—with Baker
exploiting techniques further to the right on the scale in table 6.1 than the ones used
by du Maurier. Indeed, part of the disturbing effect created by passage (10) (and
by du Maurier’s text as a whole) stems from the way it refrains from building any
coherent subjective profile for the massing, hyperaggressive birds. Thus, over the
course of the novella, restlessness caused by the change of seasons (2), unusually
cold weather originating from the Arctic Circle (8), intense hunger (12), poisoning
by the Russians (19), and a collective “urge for battle” (5) all feature as potential
explanations for the birds’ attacks. The heterogeneity of these accounts creates the
effect of a desperate attempt to identify reasons for the animals’ actions, which in
consequence take on, more and more, the character of brute events. In turn, the
indiscernibility of the birds’ motives helps anchor the narrative in the subgenre of
horror fiction.17
Reticence concerning animal subjectivity can also be found in parts of Baker’s The
Peregrine—for example, in material drawing on studies of falcon physiology, behav-
ioral routines, and geographical distribution (see Baker 1967/2015: 36–42, 45,
108–9). But passage (11) parallels the trajectory followed by Horwood in passage
(8): scene-setting narration gives way to ascriptions of perceptual and emotional
acts performed by the bird. Thus, based on the falcon’s elevated position in the sky,
Baker ascribes to the bird perceptions of particular features of the environment hid-
den from him. Extrapolating, Baker imputes to the falcon a general acuity of visual
perception that, embodied in the birds “encircling eye,” has been denied to humans
such as him. After attributing emotional states to the bird—desperation, rage, and
torment—the passage concludes with a projection of a nested structure of percep-
tual acts, with Baker perceiving the falcon perceiving the plovers perceiving the
predator bird. In this context, the allusion to the biblical figure of the burning brand
foregrounds the falcon as the point of triangulation linking human and nonhuman
subjectivities.
To underscore my larger claim here: Excerpts (8) to (11) reveal the co-presence
of different norms for mental-state attribution within as well as across the fiction-
nonfiction divide. Fictional accounts can be more or less prolific and far-reaching in
their ascriptions of mental experiences to animals, as can nonfictional accounts—
with the result that some nonfictional narratives about animals may make more
detailed and abundant attributions of mind than fictional accounts. In addition, as
suggested by the variable degrees of detail attaching to Baker’s projections of falcon
subjectivity over the course of his narrative, any given account may straddle or alter-
nate between different norms for mental-state attribution, occupying multiple posi-
tions within—and potentially expanding the frontiers of—what my case studies
have revealed to be a complex system, a diverse environment, of ascriptive practices.
These patterns of ascription hold significance both for narratological research on
thought presentation and for scholarship on animal subjectivity. Nagelian assump-
tions about the opacity of other minds relegate richly detailed construals of non-
human subjectivity to the domain of fiction. So too does Dennett’s eliminativist
approach, but for very different reasons: in what Dennett casts as a thoroughgoing
third-person perspective on consciousness, at least some of the mental states puta-
tively associated with conscious awareness are in fact nonexistent. Yet the examples
discussed thus far, revealing more or less detailed mental-state attributions in non-
fictional as well as fictional discourse, belie attempts to map patterns of ascription
onto generic classifications—attempts associated with the narratological work
I review in the next section. It is not the fictional versus nonfictional status of a nar-
rative that sets the upper (or lower) limit on how many mental-state attributions can
be made and the degree to which those attributions will be fine-grained and particu-
larized rather than coarse and general. Rather, the relative richness and granularity
of accounts of animal subjectivity reflect, and also help shape, how a given narrative
bears on the normative assumptions about species of minds.
My next section argues that the concept of discourse domains can shed further
light on methods of mental-state attribution in narrative contexts. At the same time,
the concept provides additional context for one of the key tasks for a narratology
beyond the human: namely, studying how storytelling practices are anchored in
more or less inclusive ecologies of selves.
n A N I M A L S M I N D S A C R O S S D I S C O U R S E D O M A I N S
In this section, I move from a discussion of differences in the treatment of subjectivity

in animal narratives to a sketch of the discourse domains in terms of which these differ-
ences can be explained. In a first characterization, discourse domains can be described
along the lines of what Wittgenstein (1953/2009) called language games and Levinson
(1979) labeled “activity types”: they are frameworks for conduct that organize partici-
pants’ verbal as well as nonverbal comportment around recognized kinds or modes of
activity, which are grounded in more or less fully shared sets of norms, purposes, and
goals. Relevant activities include engaging in paleontological research, debating the
status of animal minds, or going on a walk with a dog—in short, activities that involve
interacting with one or more human or nonhuman others in a particular setting and for
specific kinds of reasons. Clearly, different sorts of ascriptive practices will be deemed
appropriate and warranted across these different domains: there is a marked contrast
between attributing specific intentional and volitional states to a companion animal
in the context of a familiar play ritual, on the hand, and ascribing particular subjective
experiences to now-extinct animals based on the fossil record, on the other.
This last example allows me to home in on the concept of discourse domains
using other descriptive terms. Discourse domains codify or at least organize more or
less distinctive sets of assumptions concerning what sorts of experiential worlds are
available to the various kinds of beings taken to populate the world.18 Such domains
correspond, in other words, to sectors within a larger system of mind-ascribing
practices, with each sector being distinguished by its own constellation of ascriptive
norms. In turn, these norms bear, in a top-down manner, on the strategies used to
present—and interpret—species of mind in narrative contexts, whether fictional or
nonfictional. For example, in a discourse domain marked by an emphasis on the bio-
physical bases for human and nonhuman behavior, ascriptions of subjectivity will
remain severely curtailed, within as well as across the species boundary and in both
fictional and nonfictional accounts. Hence the ready traffic between behaviorist par-
adigms in psychology and foundational work in ethology in the mid-twentieth cen-
tury.19 Hence, too, the way both fictional and nonfictional narratives can make use of
the technique that Genette (1972/1980) originally termed external focalization. In
this mode, exemplified in texts ranging from Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies and Ernest
Hemingway’s “The Killers” to sailors’ logbooks and bedside shift reports by nurses,
the narrative discourse is largely stripped of explicit references to agents’ subjective
states and experiences.
To anticipate a distinction discussed in more detail in c hapter 7, vis-à-vis the exper-
imental animal stories assembled in Thalia Field’s Bird Lovers, Backyard: Domains of
the sort just mentioned profile human and nonhuman behavior as relatively event-
like, and thus as subject to language games centering on concepts such as “cause, law,
fact, explanation.” By contrast, other domains profile behavior in terms of actions more
than events, and hence as subject to language games centering on “projects, inten-
tions, motives, reasons for acting, agents, and so forth” (Ricoeur 1991b: 132–33).
Compared with discourse domains foregrounding what might be called the regis-
ter of events, domains foregrounding the register of actions—domains that range
from courtship practices to psychological profiling in forensic work concerned with
violent crime—are marked by more prolific, far-reaching, and detailed ascriptions
of mental states. As exemplified by accounts of human-dog interactions in police
canine units or search-and-rescue teams, these sorts of domains also cross species
lines, and they likewise encompass different narrative genres, nonfictional as well
as fictional. Hence the similarly abundant and particularized heterophenomenolo-
gies of texts otherwise miles apart, such as Jane Austen’s novels, contemporary
A culture’s ascriptive practices Narratives
All representational
modes in domain
Discourse domains organizing

these practices (size indicates
relative pervasiveness within the
culture)
Nonfictional
genres
Fictional
genres
Narratives featuring
nonhuman animals
Figure 6.2 Discourse domains and mind-ascribing practices.
romance fiction, textbooks on forensic psychology, and manuals on the training of

rescue dogs.
Figure 6.2 presents a visualization of the idea of discourse domains vis-à-vis
ascriptions of subjective experiences to others—with particular reference to ascrip-
tions that cross the species boundary. Each dot (or data point) in the background
grid constitutes a mind-ascribing act, with such acts being organized into domains
governed by more or less distinctive norms. The size of the circles corresponds to
the relative salience or pervasiveness of discourse domains in a given culture, allow-
ing for cross-cultural comparisons as well as tracking of the diachronic development
and transformation of domains within a particular culture. Further, the norms asso-
ciated with each domain bear in a top-down fashion on all the representational prac-
tices that fall within its purview, including nonnarrative as well as narrative modes,
narratives that feature animals as well as narratives that do not, and, for the narra-
tives featuring animals, nonfictional as well as fictional accounts.
In line with my previous remarks, figure 6.2 suggests that discourse domain
trumps genre when it comes to modeling animal minds in narrative contexts, mean-
ing that in a given instance a nonfictional account may feature more prolific and more
fine-grained ascriptions of subjective experiences to animals than would a fictional
account—depending on the domain in which the narrative is anchored. However,
as discussed in connection with Woolf ’s Flush in chapter 5, and in a manner that
resonates with assumptions about the opacity of animal minds, it is an established
position within narratology to associate far-reaching mental-state attributions with
fictional narratives—indeed, to make such attributions criterial for fictional dis-
course. Thus Cohn (1999) argues that fiction stands apart from nonfiction not only
because fictional texts create the worlds they refer to by referring to them (13), such
that it would be wrongheaded to try to falsify such narratives by appealing to alter-

native accounts of the “same” events, but also because of fiction’s “unique potential
for presenting characters” (16). More specifically, “In fiction cast in the third per-
son, this presentation involves a distinctive epistemology that allows a narrator to
know what cannot be known in the real world and in narratives that target the real
world: the inner life of his figures” (16). At issue, in other words, is “the intimate
subjective experiences of . . . characters, the here and now of their lives to which no
observer real observer could ever accede in real life” (24).
For Cohn, the “penetrative optic” by means of which fictional narratives provide
access to such experiences would be “epistemologically illegitimate” in the context
of nonfictional (e.g., historical) narratives (16); this optic goes hand in hand with
devices that analysts have treated as signposts of fictionality and that Jean-Marie
Schaeffer links with “syntactic” definitions of fictional discourse (paras. 18–22).
Relevant devices include, as David Gorman notes (167), the use of “frame-internal”
temporal and spatial deictics that refer to the world projected by a narrative rather
than the current scene of utterance in which the narrative is being produced (as in
“She was now leaving for a trip” or “Here was his best chance for happiness”), as well
as presentational modes such as free indirect discourse and interior monologue, pre-
viously discussed in connection with table 6.1.
Analysts have thus insisted on a strong association between fiction and wide-
scope attributions of mental states to characters, and a converse association
between nonfictional accounts and hedged, narrow-scope attributions, or what
Cohn describes as the use of “conjectural and inferential syntax” (27) concerning
what storyworld agents may have been perceiving, feeling, or thinking on a given
occasion. These associations at once rest on and reinforce assumptions about the
unknowability of animal as well as human minds—in all contexts except fictional
ones. Yet my example texts reveal that, even within the category of nonfiction, story-
tellers in fact rely on a wide range of strategies for presenting characters’ subjective
experiences. The variety of attested practices suggests the need for an approach to
fictional and nonfictional minds that refuses to dichotomize—that is, an approach
that acknowledges how narratively organized discourse opens up space for more or
less detailed and thoroughgoing engagements with both animal and human subjec-
tivity outside the realm of fiction.
Indeed, as noted in chapter 5 and discussed more fully in previous studies
(Herman 2011a, 2011b), what Cohn describes as the penetrative optics of fiction
versus the conjectural syntax of nonfiction can be linked to a Cartesian polarity
between the mind in here and the world out there—a polarity expressed as an inter-
nal-external scale separating the interior, immaterial domain of the mind from the
wider, sociomaterial world of action and interaction. In lieu of this scale, I suggest,
analysts should work to establish a post-Cartesian continuum stretching between,
not inner and outer worlds, but rather relatively fine-grained and relatively coarse-
grained representations of how intelligent agents negotiate opportunities for action
in their surrounding environments (see also the discussion of figures 4.5 and 4.6 in
chapter 4). In turn, without any Cartesian dichotomy between the interior and the
exterior, minds become not closed-off, inner spaces but rather processes lodged in
and partly constituted by the social and material structures that scaffold intelligent
agents’ encounters with one another and the world. It should be assumed, therefore,
that fictional minds are external and accessible while actual minds are internal and
hidden; instead, minds of all sorts can be more or less directly encountered or expe-
rienced, depending on the circumstances.
The concept of discourse domains provides means for refining this hypothesis in
two ways. First, regardless of a narrative’s generic status, depending on the domain
or domains in which that narrative is grounded, more or less detailed, wide-scope
ascriptions will be appropriate and warranted, whether those ascriptions reach
across or remain within the species boundary. Second, and relatedly, a given nar-
rative can in turn reshape one or more domains by engaging in mental-state attri-
butions in contexts where they tend not to be found—or found in a sparser, more
minimal form—such that the register of action becomes grafted onto domains in
which the register of events has been normative. I focus on the second part of this
research hypothesis in the concluding section of this chapter and in c hapter 7 (see
also Herman 2018a). In the remainder of the present section I discuss how the first
part of the hypothesis is borne out by several example texts centering on human-
canine interactions.
Compare, first, extracts (12) and (13); these passages are excerpted from two
texts discussed in Part I: respectively, Eric Knight’s 1940 novel Lassie Come-Home
(1940/1981), a fictional account of a dog’s experiences during her epic journey
back from Scotland to the Carraclough family in Yorkshire, and Carlos Montalván’s
2011 memoir Until Tuesday (Montalván and Witter 2011). A veteran of the Iraq
war with physical disabilities as well as PTSD, Montalván was paired with Tuesday,
a golden retriever, by the ECAD Service Dogs initiative—with ECAD standing for
East Coast Assistance Dogs. Passage (13) centers on the impressions about Tuesday
that Montalván formed, and vice versa, when they first meet. (I discuss below the
annotation system used to mark up these excerpts.)
(12) That first night Lassie travelled steadily. Never before in her five years of
life had she been out alone at night. So there was no training to help her, only instinct.
But the instinct within her was keen and alert. Steadily she followed a path
over the heather-clad land. The path filled her with a warm satisfaction, for it was
going south. She trotted along it confidently and surely.
At last she reached a rise and then, in a hollow below, she saw the dim shapes of
farm buildings. She halted, abruptly, with her ears thrown forward and her nose
trembling. Her magnificently acute senses read the story of the habitation below as
clearly as a human being might read a book . . .. She started down the slope war-
ily. The smell of food was pleasant, and she had gone a long time without eating.
(Knight 1940/1981: 96)
(13) When Tuesday [focused] on my face, I saw a sincerity in his dark brown eyes
I hadn’t suspected. This dog was handsome. He was intelligent. But he was also deep
and emotional and hurting at the core.
We stared at each other for a few seconds, and I could tell Tuesday was checking
me out, assessing the situation. He wasn’t timid. And he wasn’t selfish. Something
about the softness in his eyes told me Tuesday craved a relationship, but he was too
smart to fawn just because somebody handed me his leash. I didn’t know why he
was wary. I didn’t know he was sensitive. And needy. And that he had lost so much
confidence in himself, because of his multiple abandonments, that I would have to
slowly build back the intelligent, caring dog I glimpsed in those pleading eyes.
(Montalván and Witter 2011: 129–30)
Because of the intricate interinvolvement of humans’ and canids’ evolutionary

histories (Haraway 2003), in general the threshold for permissible ascriptions of
mental states to dogs, in fictional as well as nonfictional discourse, is higher than
it is for ascriptions in accounts of many other sorts of human-animal interactions.
But what is noteworthy here is that Montalván’s nonfictional narrative, grounded
in assumptions about the strong rapport and mutual regard of humans and dogs
also evident in Knight’s text, projects a richer experiential world than does the fic-
tional example. To facilitate a more precise comparison of the degree of detail asso-
ciated with the texts’ mind-ascribing practices, I have marked up excerpts (12) and
(13) using the annotation system for which table 6.2 provides a key. The system is
designed to measure degrees of what can be called “heterophenomenological den-
sity”—that is, the frequency and scope of ascriptions of subjective experiences to
animal others—across narrative genres as well as the discourse domains with which
those genres intersect. In essence, the more marked-up a text that engages with non-
human beings, the denser or more prolific the ascriptions of mental states and expe-
riences to the animal agents involved.
As presented, excerpts (12) and (13) are almost exactly the same length: 142
and 140 words, respectively. The passages thus allow for an indicative comparison
of the frequency and range of mental-state ascriptions across an equivalent span
of text in the two narratives. In turn, the annotations suggest that the raw num-
ber of mental-state ascriptions, especially direct ascriptions of subjective states,
is greater in Montalván’s nonfictional account of Tuesday than in Knight’s novel.
Excerpt (12) does feature several direct references to Lassie’s mental states, as well
as locutions that imply the dog’s perceptual activity and also intentional actions
TA B L E 6. 2 An annotation system for measuring heterophenomenological density in narratives

on Lassie’s part. Further, Knight uses the term south to suggest how Lassie orients
to this cardinal direction, again implying goal-driven behavior. Per line of text,
however, excerpt (13) is more marked up, with the overall number of direct ref-
erences to Tuesday’s mental attributes and dispositions, as well as his emotional
states, being particularly striking. Thus the passage ascribes to the dog, without
any hedging or qualification, dispositions and states that include sincerity, intel-
ligence, emotional hurt, timidity, lack of selfishness, craving (for a relationship),
wariness, neediness, lack of confidence, and caringness. Intermixed with these
ascriptions are locutions suggesting Tuesday’s perceptual activity, references to
arrangements and situations to which the dog orients intentionally (“relation-
ships,” “multiple abandonments”), and a translation of the dog’s manner of look-
ing at Montalván himself into a volitional state (“pleading”). The net result of the
greater density of mental-state ascriptions in (13) as compared with (12) is a text
that builds a richer profile of nonhuman subjectivity than the profile that emerges
from Knight’s novel.
Passages (14) and (15) reveal a similar pattern, with excerpt (14), taken from
Jack London’s 1903 novel The Call of the Wild, displaying a lower overall hetero-
phenomenological density than excerpt (15), taken from a recent nonfictional
account of animal heroes (Stevens et al. 1988). In (14), Buck, a sled dog, res-
cues John Thornton from the fast-moving river into which he has fallen. In (15),
a dog named Patches likewise acts as a rescuer, saving Marvin from drowning in
a frigid lake.
(14) His master’s voice acted on Buck like an electric shock. He sprang to his
feet and ran up the bank ahead of the men to the point of his previous
departure.
Again the rope was attached and he was launched, and again he struck out,
but this time straight into the stream. He had miscalculated once, but he would
not be guilty of it a second time. Hans paid out the rope, permitting no slack, while Pete
kept it clear of coils. Buck held on till he was on a line straight above
Thornton; then he turned, and with the speed of an express train headed
down upon him. Thornton saw him coming, and, as Buck struck him like a batter-
ing ram, with the whole force of the current behind him, he reached up and closed
with both arms around the shaggy neck. Hans snubbed the rope around the tree, and
Buck and Thornton were jerked under the water. Strangling, suffocating, sometimes
one uppermost and sometimes the other, dragging over the jagged bottom, smashing
against rocks and snags, they veered in to the bank (London 1903/2008: 54).
(15) Anxiously searching the churning waves for the spot where his friend had
disappeared, Patches gave one agonized bark, then leaped into the lake. He
dove through 15 feet of water, frantically searching about in the black-
ness. Ignoring the glacial shock, he suddenly glimpsed the thatch of Marvin’s hair
and clenched his teeth around it . . ..
At last, aching with cold and exhaustion, choking on swallowed water, Patches
brought Marvin within reach of the dock. Marvin clutched at the wood and
Patches released his hold on him. It was up to Marvin now—Patches couldn’t get out
of the water alone. He felt himself being pushed to safety by his friend, but once on
shore he turned to see Marvin, overcome by shock, slipping under once more. Marvin
had blacked out! . . .
Marvin was fading fast. If he slipped beneath the surface again he would surely die.
Patches paced frantically before the drowning man, licked at the
pale, near-frozen fingers and whined. Then, steeling himself against his
own exhaustion, he planted his four feet firmly on the rough planks,
gripped the collar of Marvin’s coat in his teeth, and pulled. (Stevens
et al. 1988: 20–21)
I have again marked up these two excerpts using the annotation system described
in table 6.2, with the comparable length of excerpts (14) and (15)—184 and 187
words, respectively—once more allowing for an indicative comparison of patterns
of mental-state attributions across an equivalent span of text. Excerpt (14) does fea-
ture free indirect discourse (“He had miscalculated once . . .”), and the passage also
includes a direct reference to Buck’s mental states, as well as references to his per-
ceptual activity and to intentional actions on Buck’s part. Per line of text, however,
excerpt (15) is considerably more marked up, and the passage also reveals more
variation in the techniques used to project Patches’s experiences. Reports that imply
the dog’s intentional activity are layered with multiple direct references to his men-
tal (specifically, emotional) states; hence, in the first paragraph alone, mental-state
descriptors include “anxiously,” “agonized,” “frantically,” and others. In addition,
over the course of the excerpt, the narration moves in and out of the different ascrip-
tive methods more rapidly than is the case in the passage from London. The sec-
ond paragraph exemplifies these dynamic shifts in technique, moving from direct
mental-state attribution, to implied intentionality on Patches’s part, to free indirect
discourse manifesting Patches’s subjectivity, to further direct ascription intermixed
with references to situations and relationships to which the dog orients intentionally
(“safety,” “his friend”), to expressions suggesting Patches’s perceptual activity, and
then back to more free indirect discourse. The net result of the greater frequency
and range of the ascriptions in (15) as compared with (14) is a text that builds a
richer profile of nonhuman subjectivity than the profile that emerges from London’s
text—in parallel with the greater heterophenomenological density of Montalván’s
memoir as compared with Knight’s novel.
More generally, to account for what might seem like counterintuitive pattern-
ing in excerpts (12) to (15), whereby the nonfictional narratives make more pro-
lific mental-state ascriptions than their fictional counterparts, the idea of discourse
domains can be brought to bear, with the annotation system being designed to
capture how contrasting norms organize the domains in which these examples
are anchored. The system confirms that the nonfictional texts are more dense with
mental language, or assume greater license in projecting animal subjectivity, than
the fictional narratives. In turn, this pattern can be traced back to the debate about
“nature fakery” (Burroughs 1903) in which both London’s and Knight’s novels are
caught up—with this debate being, in essence, an argument about what sorts of dis-
course domains are salient for narratives focusing on animals and human-animal
relationships. More precisely, the debate concerns how different domains, with their
contrasting protocols for ascriptions of mental states, bear on the fiction-nonfiction
distinction when it comes to accounts of animal subjects.
As mentioned previously, the nature fakers debate stemmed from accusations
by commentators such as John Burroughs (1903) and Theodore Roosevelt (1920)
that narratives about animals putatively based on naturalistic observation are in real-
ity fabricated—and largely human-centric—accounts of creatural life. Burroughs
asserts that “the line between fact and fiction is never crossed” in Charles Dudley
Warner’s “A-hunting of the Deer” (1878) and that likewise “the writer’s invention
is called into play without the reader’s credulity ever being overtaxed” in William
Davenport Hulbert’s 1902 text Forest Neighbors: Life Stories of Wild Animals
(Burroughs 1903: 300). By contrast, for Burroughs writers such as Ernest Seton-
Thompson and William J. Long, in Wild Animals I Have Known (1898) and School of
the Woods (1902), respectively, can be characterized as “romancers” (302). They not
only cross the line between fact and fiction in their narratives about animal lives, but
“induce the reader to cross, too, and . . . work such a spell upon him that he shall not
know that he has crossed and is in the land of make-believe” (300).20
Here it is worth pointing out that Burroughs’s and also Roosevelt’s charges of
fakery extend beyond what they take to be inaccurate reports of animals’ behav-
ioral patterns (Burroughs 1903: 301–2, 306–9; Roosevelt 1920: 262–65)—reports
subject to falsification via cross-comparison with other such reports. Burroughs
and Roosevelt target, as well, ascriptions to animals of the capacity for reason-
ing or problem-solving, and also processes of social learning within animal com-
munities. On the one hand, the processes of social learning that both Burroughs
(301–3) and Roosevelt (265) treat in dismissive terms are now studied by con-
temporary ecologists and analysts of animal behavior under the headings of niche
construction (Odling-Smee, Laland, and Feldman 2003) and, more broadly, ani-
mal traditions (Avital and Jablonka 2000). Indeed, as discussed in the coda to this
book, Eva Jablonka and Marion J. Lamb (2005/2014: 153–88) have character-
ized animal traditions as a distinct dimension of evolution, whereby traditions of
behavior—in effect, cultural versus genetic inheritances—can spread among animal
populations (see also Dukas 2007). On the other hand, researchers such as Bearzi
and Stanford (2008), Herzing and White (1998), Marino (2002), Marzluff and
Angell (2005: 196–252), and Wystrach and Beugnon (2009) have highlighted the
problem-solving abilities of animals ranging from cetaceans and primates to corvids
and invertebrates.
Within discourse domains recognized as undergirding the science of animal
behavior, then, research practices have resulted in a raising of the threshold for per-
missible attributions of complex mental states and capacities to nonhuman subjects.
Yet juxtaposing Knight’s and London’s texts with narratives such as Montalván’s
memoir and the story of Patches’s heroism foregrounds another key issue: namely,
how domains marked by a preference for the register of events, and hence relatively
parsimonious allocations of possibilities for subjectivity to animal others, take their

place in a larger system of ascriptive practices. This system or environment, organized
into a constellation of domains, includes accounts of nonhuman lives in which there
is greater tolerance of or even a preference for the register of actions vis-à-vis the reg-
ister of events, and thus more prolific allocations of possibilities for selfhood beyond
the species boundary. Further, this larger constellation of domains cuts across the
fiction-nonfiction divide, despite Burroughs’s and Roosevelt’s attempts to align fic-
tion with the projection of animal subjectivity. Thus, in his 1908 essay “The Other
Animals,” in which he seeks to rebut charges of nature fakery, London emphasizes
that, in “a protest against the ‘humanizing’ of animals of which it seemed to me sev-
eral ‘animal writers’ had been profoundly guilty,” he included hedges along the lines
of “ ‘He did not think these things; he merely did them,’ etc . . .. [despite] the clogging
of my narrative and in violation of my artistic canons” (London 1909: para. 2).21
Along the same lines, in Lassie Come-Home, possibly in an effort to broaden his
audience by avoiding human-animal parallels of a sort that some readers may have
associated with animal stories for children, Knight follows Burroughs in dichoto-
mizing instinct and reason along species lines. Hence Knight repeatedly indicates
that Lassie only has instinct, and lacks the ability to reason about the situations and
events in which she is involved.22
Given this overall setup, there is considerably less scope for any detailed model-
ing of animal experiences in The Call of the Wild or Lassie Come-Home than there is
in the nonfictional narratives about Patches’s heroism and about Montalván’s rela-
tionship with Tuesday—with domain thus trumping genre as the key determinant
of the fecundity and scope of mental-state attributions across the four example texts.
Adhering to a strikingly different system of ascriptive norms than the one held up
as ideal by Burroughs and Roosevelt, Montalván’s memoir foregrounds the trans-
species relationality in terms of which he and Tuesday develop ways of orienting
to one another within their shared world of encounter. For its part, the story about
Patches engages in prolific mental-state attributions not only to convey a sense of the
urgency and perilousness of the circumstances that had to be overcome for Marvin
to be rescued from the icy lake, but also to model what it might have been like for the
dog, in the co-produced niche he shares with his human companion, to perform and
live through that act of overcoming.
n C O N C L U D I N G R E M A R K S
In this chapter, I have aimed to synthesize ideas from narratology, stylistics, philoso-
phy, and other fields around questions concerning animal minds. By focusing on the
variability of mind-ascribing practices in nonfictional as well as fictional narratives,
and arguing that discourse domain is more salient than genre when it comes to the
prolificness and degree of detail attaching to projections of animal subjectivity in
narrative contexts, I have sought to reframe debates based on a polarity between
legible and illegible animal minds. In the account outlined here, maximal as well as
minimal projections of nonhuman subjectivity must be situated within the larger
system of ascriptive practices to which animal narratives afford access. Reciprocally,

debates about the scope and limits of heterophenomenology provide new contexts
for investigating methods of thought presentation used in narrative, particularly
when those methods are extended across the species boundary.
More broadly, my analysis highlights the need for further study of an under-
explored aspect of the mind-narrative nexus: namely, how textual patterns asso-
ciated with the presentation of animal experiences in narratives are interwoven
with cultures’ ontologies, in the sense of that term as it is used in contemporary
anthropological research.23 Discourse domains, as I have described them here, both
are grounded in and also help constitute these ontologies, which entail more or
less parsimonious or prolific allocations of possibilities for subjectivity beyond the
realm of the human. From this perspective, a cultural ontology can be described
as a constellation of discrete as well as overlapping discourse domains, in which
animal behaviors become normatively profiled (for example, via storytelling prac-
tices) as relatively action-like or event-like, and hence as more or less appropriately
targeted for mental-state attributions. Contrast a bare account of an animal’s trajec-
tory of movement in space with a narrative about the reasons for acting that moti-
vate the animal in question.
This way of putting the matter suggests why figure 6.1 tells only part of the story.
Previously I argued for the need to register the variability, and plurality, of the norms
organizing thought presentation in particular. I can now restate this argument by
connecting it more explicitly with the idea of discourse domains—and with the way
contrasting domains link up, in turn, with different ontological commitments, more
or less generous allocations of possibilities for selfhood beyond the human. As sug-
gested by figure 6.3, what Leech and Short (1981/2007) treated as singular norms
associated with the semantics of reporting can now be redescribed, in contexts of
thought presentation, as a range of “bands” of permissible ascriptive practices.
Thought presentation N NRTA IT FIT DT FDT
domains marked by parsimonious allocations of

subjectivity across the species boundary (e.g.,
classical behaviorist/ethological discourse)
domains marked by moderate allocations (e.g.,

naturalistic observations of animals)
domains marked by prolific allocations (e.g.,

exploratory modelling of animal experiences)
Figure 6.3 Norms for thought presentation across discourse domains.

The various bands, cutting across the fiction-nonfiction divide, will be more or less
inclusive of available methods for presenting minds. Hence the domains associated
with behaviorist discourse disallow all but narration and perhaps the bare sugges-
tion of NRTA or NRPA, whereas domains associated with the exploratory modeling
of nonhuman worlds license the full range of ascriptive techniques when it comes to
projecting animal experiences.
Furthermore, and to anticipate issues discussed in my next chapter, if discourse
domains shape patterns of mental-state attribution in narratives, the patterns of
ascription used in individual stories can reciprocally impinge on discourse domains,
and potentially recalibrate normative assumptions about species of minds—for
instance, by promoting a shift from the register of events to the register of actions to
account for humans’ relationships with particular (kinds of) animals. Thus, Gabriela
Cowperthwaite’s 2013 documentary film Blackfish, which links the deaths of several
animal trainers to the treatment of orcas kept in captivity at marine mammal parks
maintained by the SeaWorld corporation, has contributed to the call for legislation
to free the whales, on the grounds that current practices violate the US Constitution’s
prohibition of slavery.24 This example underscores the need to develop a multiscale,
and multidirectional, approach to the issues under discussion—one that not only
explores the top-down normative effects flowing from cultural ontologies to dis-
course domains to ascriptive acts found in particular texts, but also the way story-
telling practices can themselves reset default norms for understanding animals and
human-animal relationships, incrementally reshaping cultural ontologies in the
process.
7 Explanation and
Understanding
in Animal Narratives
Is textual action (what we’re willing to do with words) where
behavioral theory might begin?
—Thalia Field, Bird Lovers, Backyard (2010: 85)
Although my epigraph is taken from the case study in narrative experimentation to

be discussed in this chapter—namely, Thalia Field’s reflexive, polygeneric text Bird
Lovers, Backyard (2010)—it resonates with key contributions made by the philos-
opher Paul Ricoeur to the domain of hermeneutic theory. Specifically, Field’s for-
mulation can be compared with the program for research outlined by Ricoeur in
essays such as “Explanation and Understanding,” “The Hermeneutical Function
of Distanciation,” and “The Model of the Text: Meaningful Action Considered
as a Text.” In these studies Ricoeur argues that ways of engaging with texts pro-
vide a model for interpreting action, while also positing a dialectical relationship
between understanding (Verstehen) and explanation (Erklärung). Ricoeur follows
hermeneutic tradition in linking understanding to top-down, pre-or nondelibera-
tive use of available schemes for sense making, and explanation to the bottom-up,
deliberative modification of those schemes; such modification is required when
default assumptions about how the world works fail to find purchase. He further
argues that “rather than constituting mutually exclusive poles, explanation and
understanding [can] be considered as relative moments in a complex process that
could be called interpretation” (1991b: 126). Analogously, by intermixing fic-
tional and nonfictional characters, layering narratively organized sequences with
non-or antinarrative accretions of themes and motifs, and shifting between forms
of life writing and ecological-biogeographical discourse on how individual lives
unfold within larger biotic communities, Field’s text demonstrates how storytell-
ing practices at once reflect and help shape assumptions about the structure and
meaning of actions-in-context. In other words, by exploiting a striking variety of
textual formats, and thus making palpable its own status as a constructed artifact,
Bird Lovers, Backyard simultaneously projects a storyworld inhabited by acting
subjects and draws attention to the way textual designs can be used to project
worlds of that sort. Field’s text thereby stages the dialectical interplay between
truth and method—the movement between tacit reliance on and critical evalua-
tion of frameworks for sense making—that Ricoeur and other hermeneutic the-
orists locate at the heart of interpretive activity (see also Buck 1980; Gadamer
2004; Stueber 2012).1
233
It is important to underscore here, however, that the behavioral theory mentioned

in my epigraph centers on the behavior of nonhuman animals. Bird Lovers, Backyard
(hereafter, BLB) points up interconnections between forms of textual action and
ways of engaging with the nonhuman world in general, animal agents in particular;
a fundamental issue raised by the text is how telling animal stories differently might
translate into altered conceptions of human-animal relationships and hence of the
human itself. Field uses a variety of genres and techniques to explore assumptions
about animals’ qualities, abilities, and experiences; to interrogate the ontological as
well as biological status of species categories; to map out animal geographies2 and
show how they embody cultures’ tacit understandings of cross-species relationships;
and to model anthropogenic impacts on surrounding biotic communities, including
diminished biodiversity and indeed total species loss. In this manner, by suggesting
how literary writing can at once draw on and hold up for inspection available frame-
works for conceptualizing animal worlds as well as human-animal interactions, BLB
foregrounds the relevance of hermeneutic inquiry for discourse practices—and
modes of agency—that extend beyond the realm of the human. The text thereby
resituates what Ricoeur envisioned as philosophical anthropology within a wider
area of inquiry that might be called trans-species hermeneutics.3 This investigative
domain focuses on how textual practices at once reveal and help constitute cultures’
procedures for categorizing and interpreting stretches of behavior—increments of
activity—both within and across the species boundary.
The present chapter explores how Field’s storytelling methods in BLB broach
issues centrally relevant for a project somewhat more restricted in scope: namely,
that of developing a narratology beyond the human. Centering on fictional as well as
nonfictional narratives that include but also extend beyond the realm of the human,
this project, as adumbrated in the current study, seeks to open up new lines of com-
munication between frameworks for analyzing stories and research on cultural
(including scientific) understandings of animals and human-animal relationships.
To this end, I use Field’s text to explore ideas situated at the intersection of three
fields of inquiry: narratology, hermeneutics, and ethology.
Work by Liesbeth Korthals Altes (2014) and by Jens Brockmeier and Hanna
Meretoja (2014), for example, suggests possibilities for a rapprochement between
narratology and hermeneutic theory. Korthals Altes discusses how the early narra-
tologists, given their aim of formulating a science of narrative, sought to exclude
problems of interpretation from the domain of narrative analysis (2014: 37–50).
Thus, treating Saussurean linguistics as a pilot-science for narratological inquiry,
theorists such as Barthes, Genette, and Todorov focused not on the meaning of indi-
vidual narratives—narrative parole, or narratives-in-use—but rather on how narra-
tive viewed as a semiotic system—narrative langue—makes it possible for stories to
have meaning in the first place (Prince 1995b: 129–30).4 Korthals Altes, by contrast,
shares with Brockmeier and Meretoja an interest in re-establishing the relevance
of questions of interpretation for narrative inquiry. Korthals Altes investigates the
diverse interpretive procedures that enter into determinations of literary value and
of the ethos projected by a given author; Brockmeier and Meretoja (2014) consider
Explanation and Understanding in Animal Narratives ■ 235
how the interpretation of stories bears on more general questions raised by herme-
neutic theorists—and also how narrative constitutes a hermeneutic practice in its
own right. My study builds on this work by suggesting that animal narratives can
contribute to the process of what Ricoeur (1991c) calls distanciation, in which ini-
tially taken-for-granted frameworks for understanding are bracketed, reconstrued
as targets of explanation, and then reassimilated into (or repossessed as) new forms
of understanding.5 In the case of norm-challenging animal narratives like Field’s,
default assumptions about nonhuman agents and human-animal interactions are
what come into question—and in the process make possible new ways of orienting
to modes of creatural life that extend beyond the human.
In turn, this process or cycle6 of distanciation, recontextualization, and reas-
similation, set into motion by animal narratives such as Field’s, affords new insights
into the relationship between narratology and ethology. Susan McHugh (2011) has
set out elements of a “narrative ethology,” which concerns how fictional and non-
fictional narratives about animals shaped the foundational discourses of ethology,
and also how Jane Goodall’s, Frans de Waal’s, and other ethologists’ own narratives
about nonhuman primates, among other species, have come to serve “as a means
of negotiating alternatives to nature/culture, human/animal, and related hierarchic
dualisms” (214).7 Another way of connecting research on storytelling practices with
behavioral theory, sketched in my previous chapter, entails considering how assump-
tions about what sorts of experiential worlds are available to various kinds of beings
bear, in a top-down manner, on the strategies used to attribute mental states and
processes to animals in narratives. According to this approach, a variety of discourse
domains involving more or less distinctive interpretive paradigms and protocols for
behavior both emerge from and help support cultural ontologies that specify, in the
form of common knowledge, what sorts of beings populate the world and how those
beings’ qualities and abilities relate to the qualities and abilities ascribed to humans.
Such domains, in turn, both shape and are shaped by the production and process-
ing of narratives about animals and human-animal relationships. As with the sets of
norms bound up with narratives about humans’ ways of encountering the world,
discourse domains determine when, to what extent, and in what manner it is appro-
priate and warranted to ascribe mental states and experiences to animals on the basis
of their behavior. Conversely, the patterns of ascription used in particular narratives
can reciprocally impinge on, and potentially recalibrate, normative assumptions
about species of minds. The three-stage cycle of distanciation, recontextualization,
and reassimilation, brought into focus by a rapprochement between narratology and
hermeneutic theory, provides a way of describing the mechanism by which such
top-down and bottom-up interpretive processes interact when it comes to norm-
challenging animal narratives like Field’s.
My next section furnishes further details about the scope of Field’s formal experi-
mentation in BLB, linking her textual practices with concepts and methods growing
out of hermeneutic theory. I focus especially on Field’s interweaving of narration with
commentary about the nature and role of narrative as such, and also on the way her
text engages in a strategic oscillation between two nomenclatures that, as mentioned
in chapter 6, can be used to profile nonhuman as well as human behaviors. One

of these nomenclatures corresponds to the register of action, which profiles behav-
ior in terms of motivations, goals, and projects, while the other corresponds to the
register of events, which profiles behavior in terms of caused movements that have
duration in time and direction in space (see Taylor 1964: 54–62 and also Ricoeur
1991b: 132–43).8 By alternating between these registers, Field suggests that they
are dialectically interrelated. She also brings into view a strategy for addressing the
problem of ontological conservativism—the question of how holistic frameworks
for understanding undergo change—that has been implicitly raised by analysts like
Eileen Crist (1999) and Alva Noë (2009) and explicitly discussed by Elisa Aaltola
(2010). For example, how is it possible that, in accounts of nonhuman behavior cir-
culating in a given discourse domain, there can be a shift in the direction of a more
pervasive reliance on the register of action, and a concomitant backgrounding of the
register of events? As I go on to discuss, in juxtaposing or braiding together these
two registers, Field uses the distanciating effects afforded by narrative to explore
how discourse practices can be repatterned. As her text suggests, such repatterning
both reflects and enables broader paradigm shifts, in this case shifts in ways of under-
standing cross-species encounters and entanglements.
n F R O M A N E C O L O G Y O F Q U E S T I O N S
TO QUESTIONS OF ECOLOGY
Part of an oeuvre consisting of formally inventive, genre-blending work that hybrid-

izes elements of essay, narrative, film script, and lyric poetry (Parrish 2011: 157), BLB
furthers what Gillian Parrish (2011) describes as Field’s ongoing concern with “ecol-
ogy and environmental justice, the history of animal sciences, and interspecies com-
munication, [along with] notions of progress and what it means to be human” (157).
In turn, Field’s focus on an “interspecies mosaic” can be traced back to her commit-
ment to Buddhist practice, which questions any assumed duality between self and
world and embraces a conception of self-identity that is transhuman in scope (Parrish
2011: 161–70). As Field herself puts it in an interview with Miranda F. Mellis,
From where I stand, I think literary practice is due for a deep revision of our relation-
ship to the world and to “selves” in it . . .. We don’t spend a lot of time in the aware-
ness of our world without ourselves as tragic heroes of it. Larger timeframes or scales
rarely occur to us. Participation in the chorus of other creatures seems impossible,
and it’s scarcely imaginable to write ourselves out of the picture altogether. So if this
[i.e., the stance informing Field’s work] is an ethical stance in some sense, it becomes
an aesthetics as the narratives and imagery, the events and the dispersal of “selves”
across a wide climate of consciousness, all participate in a chaotic nonhierarchical
system of interdependence. (Field and Mellis n.d.: para. 2)9
BLB explores implications for narrative practice of this trans-species system of inter-
dependent selves, even as it suggests how stories can help take the measure of any
such system. Field multiplies narrative formats to “reconstruct or imagine acts of

animal observation, either from the point of view of the human observer or from
that of the observed animal” (Baetens and Trudel 2014: 602). At the same time,
in the process of using stories or story fragments to outline the relational networks
linking humans to birds, reptiles, dogs, ants, and other creatures, Field leverages Le
Corbusier’s architectural theory; the Icarus myth; ideas from evolutionary biology,
ecology, and ethology; the history of US nuclear testing on the Bikini Atoll in the
1940s and 1950s; research on the role of language in animal training and in human-
ape communication; and extinction narratives vis-à-vis concepts of species used in
the philosophy of biology as well as conservationist and jurisprudential discourse.10
By putting these and other discourses into dialogue with stories about more or less
localized human-animal encounters, BLB bears out Jan Baetens and Éric Trudel’s
reading of Field’s text as one that foregrounds the “web of linguistic, narrative, and
ideological forms and formats that structure and impose, often in very implicit
and apparently natural ways, our shaping of the notions of human and nonhuman”
(2014: 613).
Along similar lines, in an interview published in 2008 in the Seneca Review, Field
herself characterizes “Apparatus for the Inscription of a Falling Body,” later pub-
lished as the first section of BLB, as an attempt to ask “questions of how we nar-
rate ourselves in terms of biology, architecture, situation—how we invent story in
our relationship with history, species, place” (2). In other words, the text situates
storytelling practices in what Field goes on to describe as a larger “ecology . . . of
questions” (7), a phrase that in itself points up interconnections between modes
of textual action and forms of behavior emerging from—and helping constitute—
biotic communities.11 On the one hand, in articulating her ecology of questions,
Field uses narrative as means for developing an antifoundationalist epistemology,
in which knowledge claims reduce to particular kinds of stories about knowing, or
what it means to know something (Field et al. 2008: 7).12 As Field puts it, “For me,
on some emotionally structuring level, story is photo/stasis, a small history of an
order concocted. The more forthright narrative language comes, I think, when I’m
in need of small comfort, of the possibility that things are as you’ve been told they
are” (Field and Elshtain 2001: 103). On the other hand, once it is integrated into
a writing practice that exemplifies “a willingness not to know, to question without
expectation” (Field et al. 2008: 7), narrative itself needs to be recast in more capa-
cious terms, extending beyond what Field describes as “cinematic” modes limited to
human-centric temporal and spatial scales.
In Field’s formulation, “Cut open to expose the human-centered narrative for its
arrogance and ignorance, the complex impartiality of the world without cinematic
point of view makes for disorienting, broken, beautiful frames” (Field and Mellis
n.d.: para. 2). In contrast with narrative modes “where everything is tidy and psycho-
logically or symbolically closed” (para. 8)—modes associated with what Field calls
“consumer narrative” based on a sanctification of “syntaxes and predictable forms,
implying a predictable world of dulled attention” (Field and Elshtain 2001: 106)—
BLB embodies the commitment to experimentation that Field elsewhere opposes
to more traditional or convention-bound writing. Thus, in “Writing as Experimental

Practice,” Field argues that whereas the traditional writer “fills in the blank page as
though it were a pre-formatted space awaiting content” (2014: 326),
in what has been called an “organicist” or ecological encounter, the fullness of

the blank page becomes . . . a way of waking mindfully into an inseparable world.
Experimental practice and the project of deep ecology come together where writ-
ers relate not to landscapes but to “being worldbound.” This awareness of a different
definition of subject, object and action, results in work where the normative human-
hero-centered conventions of representation are replaced by more polycentric, pol-
yrhythmic, or stochastic processes. Whether these are mental or environmental, the
very notion of “event” and “character” may reflect the collapse of distinctions such as
those between nature/culture and media/message. (327)
BLB reveals this dual commitment to expanding the boundaries of storytelling and
to using narrative to help build a polygeneric discourse environment in which to
consider how stories, in general, take their place within a larger ecology of questions,
which are also questions of ecology. Thus Field includes diary-like formats featur-
ing autodiegetic “we” narration by only partially identified collectives; animal auto-
biography; story-based definitions of what appear to be lexical entries associated
with descriptions of coastal environments (“/Primary dunes/”; “/Shallow-probing
and surface-searching shorebirds/”; “/Slipper limpets/” [43–51]); an extended
heterodiegetic account of how Konrad Lorenz’s narratives about animal behavior
echo doctrines espoused by the National Socialist Party, with which Lorenz actively
sought to ingratiate himself during World War II; further autodiegetic narration by a
stand-in for Field who recounts her own attempts to put into practice Vicki Hearne’s
ideas about the role of language in human-canine interactions; and microstories cir-
culated in an online discussion group whose members exchange more or less vio-
lent, environmentally destructive strategies for limiting ant populations—strategies
that, in tandem with those proposed to address the “pigeon problem” in the text’s
opening section, bookend Bird Lovers with human-centric animal geographies. Like
the graphic adaptations of The Metamorphosis discussed in c hapter 4, Field’s ironiz-
ing account holds these geographies up for closer inspection and critique.
But in addition to multiplying narrational formats, Field juxtaposes those for-
mats with metanarrative commentary thematizing the possibilities and limits of sto-
ries as such. For example, the first section, “Apparatus for the Inscription of a Falling
Body,” consists of short, timestamped, diary-like entries composed, minutes apart,
by the representative of an amorphous collective (“we”) who have apparently come
to a shopping-mall food court to compete in a contest to solve the “pigeon prob-
lem” at the mall. From the beginning of this section, storytelling and reflection on
the nature and purpose of stories alternate with one another. Hence the entry for
8:35 reads, “We arrived at the food court ready to think. Some polished buildings
all night, sandblasted metal, washed the billboards—we hear they’re using prison-
ers for the labor” (1), whereas the next entry, timestamped at 8:37, asks readers
to reset default assumptions about available or likely plot trajectories, dissociating

the unfolding story of human-pigeon interactions at the mall from a myth in which
overreaching pride precedes disastrous failure, with this plot arc in turn taking its
shape from avian flight patterns: “Instead of narrative build-up, what if we have
Icarus crawling right into the water—wings on, indifferent to flight—skipping past
the story-part to lie down in the ending” (1).
Similarly, in the section devoted to Lorenz’s personal and intellectual biogra-
phy, “Exposition: He Told Animal Stories,” an account of how Lorenz schemed
to take the posts of colleagues and mentors removed by the Nazi regime alter-
nates with reflections on the way Lorenz used stories to elaborate his claims about
innate releasing mechanisms, action-specific potential, and related ethological con-
structs.13 Those constructs are in turn caught up in a higher-order dialectic: in trac-
ing Lorenz’s ethological ideas back to his reliance on analogy, with Lorenz updating
Descartes’s mechanomorphic view of animals such that species of all sorts became
“hydraulic machines, motored with inborn behaviors, fueled by pressure” (63),
Field herself draws analogies between Lorenz and Richard Nixon to imply a life nar-
rative built on chicanery, betrayal, anti-Semitism, and worse (see also Baetens and
Trudel 2014: 610). At the same time, Field foregrounds the storytelling tropes on
which she herself relies to expose Lorenz’s problematic strategies for theory build-
ing. These strategies are evident in Lorenz’s racially tinged hypothesis concerning
north-south canine origins, based on a now-discredited distinction between north-
ern Canis lupus (wolf) versus southern Canis aureus (jackal) canine varieties (73),
as well as his unsubstantiated claim that interspecies hybridization leads to dete-
riorating fitness among animal populations. In Field’s formulation: “Fiction to biol-
ogy to birds, back to people, back to poetry—authority lies in how you thread the
sequence, solicit association” (78). This sequence of tropes, which Lorenz uses to
import stories of racial purity into the animal interactions from which he claimed
to derive lessons about the dangers of hybridization as well as domestication, also
enables Field to tell a wider-scope narrative about the ulterior motives bound up
with Lorenz’s work in ethology.
More generally, by interweaving acts of narration and metanarrative commen-
tary on the presuppositions and implications of those acts, Field’s text stages the
dialectical relationship between understanding and explanation previously men-
tioned in connection with Ricoeur’s approach to hermeneutic theory. This interplay
between reliance on tacit, preexistent frames for interpretation and interrogation
of those same frames is a key theme of Ricoeur’s “Explanation and Understanding”
(1991b). Here Ricoeur describes the dialectic in question as a movement between
exteriorization and appropriation, or what I have termed reassimilation. Processes
of understanding are, in this model, necessarily mediated by an exteriorization of
discourse that begins with “the gap between saying and the said, continues through
inscription in letters, and is completed in the complex codifications of works of dis-
course, the narrative among others” (130). Reciprocally, explanatory engagements
with narrative “stripped of its actuality as an event of discourse and reduced to the
state of a variable in a system having no existence other than that of a coherent set of
prohibitions and permissions” require the interpreter to “take the reverse path from
the virtual to the actual, from the system to the event . . .. The activity of analysis then
appears as one segment on an interpretive arc extending from naive understanding
to informed understanding through explanation” (130; see also Bell 2011; Herman
2013: 42–55). From this perspective, “Distanciation is the condition of understand-
ing” (Ricoeur 1991c: 88), providing unforeseen points of access to “the world of the
text—namely, in the case of the narrative text, the world of the possible paths open
to real action. If the subject is called upon to understand himself in light of the text,
[then] . . . the text is not closed in upon itself but open onto the world, which it rede-
scribes and remakes” (Ricoeur 1991b: 132; see also Bell 2011: 543–45).
Likewise, insofar as experimentation with multiple narrative formats, metanar-
rative commentary, and the bracketing or ironization of BLB’s own storytelling
tropes “hold open”14 the world of Field’s text, this textual openness in turn creates
new possibilities for re-encountering, as guests rather than hosts (Field and Elshtain
2001: 105), the larger world in which the text and its storyworld are situated. BLB,
in other words, affords new opportunities for becoming mindful of the world-
bound nature of human being (Field 2014: 327), the co-constitutive relationality
linking humans with other animals, in wider biotic communities, that I discussed
in chapter 1.
n T E X T U A L A C T I O N, A C T I O N T H E O R Y,
AND ANIMAL AGENCY
Ricoeur’s emphasis on the homology between text theory and action theory pro-
vides another point of entry into the cycle of distanciation, recontextualization, and
reassimilation set into play by Field’s narrative experiments vis-à-vis frameworks for
understanding animal agency and human-animal relationships. More precisely, BLB
highlights the trans-species relevance of the contrast between the register of action
and the register of events that for Ricoeur bridges postwar analytic philosophy and
work in hermeneutics, and that in turn affords foundations for a narratology beyond
the human.
Ricoeur (1991e) argues that because texts are configured in a manner that is
paradigmatic “with respect to the structuring of the practical field in which indi-
viduals figure as agents and patients” (xiv), the dialectic between explanation and
understanding mediates the theory of action as well as the theory of the text (1991b:
132).15 Thus work by Elizabeth Anscombe, J. L. Austin, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and
others can be viewed as reproducing, in the postwar analytic philosophical tradi-
tion, the same discussion that had played out around the understanding-explanation
dichotomy in the German-language hermeneutic tradition some fifty years earlier.
These later theorists draw a contrast between the register of events, or the “language
game involving cause, law, fact, explanation,” and the register of action, or the lan-
guage game involving “projects, intentions, motives, reasons for acting, agents, and
so forth” (Ricoeur 1991b: 132–33), that mirrors the explanation-understanding
contrast in classical hermeneutic theory.16 The sheer unremarkableness of shifts
and blends between these two registers in everyday discourse suggests that they, in
parallel with the bottom-up and top-down interpretive processes associated with
explanation and understanding, are dialectically related rather than dichotomously
opposed. Actions invariably unfold in response to and are constrained by events,
as when I take shelter (or implore someone else to take shelter) to avoid lightning
from a thunderstorm. Conversely, events not only condition but also grow out of
increments of behavior in which purposive conduct features importantly, as when
unanticipated consequences emerge from decisions made, or not made, about how
to address a legal or familial dispute.
These considerations indicate that any stretch of behavior can be profiled as
action-like or event-like, depending on the register brought to bear on the behavior
in question. Further, what I referred to in chapter 6 as discourse domains provide a
way of describing how these registers become normatively coupled with particular
contexts of activity. Domain-based norms regulate use of the two registers, with only
the register of action licensing mental-state attributions—ascriptions of motives,
goals, projects, reasons for acting, and the like—across as well as within the spe-
cies boundary. And here Field’s text not only resonates with but extends Ricoeur’s
insights into the role of distanciation in action theory. Ricoeur suggests that dis-
tanciation arises in the realm of action interpretation when motives or reasons for
acting become arguable or contestable, and thereby subject to “social inscription”
(1991d: 161). As he puts it, “The process of arguing linked to the explanation of
action by its motives unfolds a kind of plurivocity that makes action similar to a
text” (161); hence procedures for validating interpretations—of actions as well as
texts—have an essentially polemical character, such that “in front of the court, the
plurivocity common to texts and to actions is exhibited in the form of a conflict of
interpretations” (162).17 But BLB demonstrates how, in addition to using the reg-
ister of action to argue about motives and reasons, toggling between discourse on
action and discourse on events can likewise give rise to distanciating effects, and
hence set into play the cycle of distanciation, recontextualization, and reassimilation
that allows for new ways of understanding behavior.
By oscillating between event-like and action-like profiles for (sequences of)
behaviors, nonhuman as well as human, Field’s text shows how narratives can model
and potentially help bring about the repatterning of discourse practices bound
up with paradigm shifts in cultural ontologies. At issue here is a repatterning that
inhibits or disrupts default assumptions about what sorts of behavior count as goal-
directed actions versus mere movement, and also about what kinds of beings can
be considered agents (see also Herman 2018a).18 In turn, leaving space for such
shifts—allowing for a dialectical interplay between assumption and evidence that
leads to changes in the normative structure of discourse domains—circumvents
the problem of ontological conservativism identified by Aaltola (2010). Because
of such conservativism, behaviorist models remain “conceptually immune” to evi-
dence suggesting animal minds (Aaltola 2010: 76), with “the background beliefs
and conceptual frameworks used to describe animal minds [taking priority] over
the animal herself ” (77). Conservativism of the same kind, though tending in the
opposite direction, can forestall corrective processes when it comes to extending the
register of action across species lines.19 By contrast, BLB engages in (meta)narrative
play to model strategies for resisting any such fossilization of paradigms for under-
standing, whether those paradigms foreground caused movements or motivated
actions when it comes to profiling segments of behavior.
Indeed, a key part of Field’s aesthetic in BLB is her use of narrative to create
a textual environment for experimenting with shifts between the two registers
in question, yielding sometimes startling juxtapositions of divergent discourse
domains—and their attendant norms for understanding animal behavior.20 This
technique enables Field to recontextualize overreliance on the register of events
as, in some instances, a kind of ethological or folk-ethological dodge, used to avoid
coming to terms with the implications of a fuller engagement with the register
of action for animal behavior and for human-animal relationships. As noted in
chapter 6, Crist (1999) has discussed how behaviorist approaches, such as those
associated with classical ethology, equate science itself with an exclusion of all dis-
course outside the register of events, that is, discourse where animals take on the
profile of acting subjects rather than natural objects, while Noë (2009) similarly
points to the incompatibility of discourse domains in which the register of events
takes pride of place versus domains in which the register of action is normative.
Noë underscores the need to move beyond a biophysical or mechanistic under-
standing of companion animals such as dogs “if one is to enter into the kind of
relationship of cooperation and companionship that characterizes our actual rela-
tions with dogs ” (37). In a manner that complements Crist’s and Noe’s accounts,
Field’s ecology of questions calls for an antireductive multiplication of vocabular-
ies, a refusal to privilege one analytic register over another across all contexts, and,
consequently, a reassimilation of the language of action into the range of discourse
environments in which animal behavior features.
For example, as its title suggests, “Apparatus for the Inscription of a Falling Body”
juxtaposes discourse about the movements of bodies in space, and in particular
nomenclature based on the physics of falling bodies, with the register of action—
inscription being a social process of recording and communication that translates
the trajectory of a body into the unfolding of a being’s history. With the falling
bodies at issue being birds either actually or hypothetically killed to control pigeon
populations, leading to extinction in the case of the passenger pigeon (12–13),
throughout the section Field intermixes the register of action with the register
of events in ways that highlight the historically and culturally variable bound-
ary between them. She also suggests how such variability at once shapes and is
shaped by the larger context of human-animal relationships. Thus, some of the
diary or journal entries record transformations in animal geographies that moti-
vate shifts between the two registers in the history of human-animal interactions,
and underscore the contingent, arbitrary nature of those shifts.21 Whereas dur-
ing the French Revolution “All the pampered pigeons [were] massacred alongside
their noble protectors,” being no longer “birds then, but symbols of oppression”
(9), “Pigeons were essential in the 1871 siege of Paris—the only way information
travelled between the city and the outside” (17). Conversely, whereas monu-
ments to pigeons’ “service” in World War I and World War II can be found both in
Europe and in the United States, where “pigeon heroes are on display at the Army
Signal Corps museum and the Smithsonian” (18), in the here and now of the sto-
ryworld pigeons have again lost their status as fellow subjects, co-participants in
human affairs, instead becoming more or less object-like, biogeographical prob-
lems to be solved—although the residue of past history makes this transformation
incomplete:
What if someone could shoot them, scare them, taser them, gel them, poke them,
pluck them, infect them, humiliate them, glue them, bomb them, heat them, tar
them? Poison, guns, nets, huge rakes, it would be possible. But it isn’t yet possible.
These birds were cared about once. Then minds changed. Dirty pests. But we’re not
absolutely sure. So a few “crazy” people carry and redistribute crumbs. (9)
Other entries suggest that the different nomenclatures available in the present
moment, the multiple, sometimes contradictory discourse domains structur-
ing contemporary cultural ontologies, are what destabilize the boundary between
accounts of animals as objects and as subjects. Hence the unnamed representative
of the food-court collective uses the register of events to formulate locutions that,
as they unfold, bleed over into, or are absorbed by, the register of action: “But what
equation governs the potential energy of the bird at rest? Can this potential be con-
veyed to other birds? It is likely that one potential of rest could become free move-
ment in another body. Is this how resistance spreads?” (11). A similar drift occurs in
this more extended passage:
We’re weighing out a variety of ramifications of the falling body problem . . .. A freely
falling body is a repository of force, a pent-up release of velocity in time, the product
of the weight of the body and the height to which it would rise from the earth if it
were rising from the earth—or raised. But potential energy is more about the “hav-
ing fallen” which was never a free falling. And in some respects this problem is about
potential which has dropped, been dropped, or about the way that the past has a grav-
ity which menaces and pollutes the best intentions of architects. (2, 4)
In still other contexts, the text highlights qualities and abilities in the pigeon that
exceed the register of events, and that provide warrant for reorienting to the birds
not as objects to be controlled but as subjects whose capacity for taking perspectives
on the world must be situated within a wider ecology of selves, in which humans
figure as only one species of self among many others. One entry emphasizes the
incongruity between pigeons’ complex behaviors and humans’ objectifying atti-
tudes toward the birds, with the substitution of stones for eggs again evoking the
possibility of extinction: “Pigeons know us, whatever we call them. They can pry
their way by memory. Then they live thirty years. In stable pairs. What if someone
replaced the eggs in their nests with stones?” (8). Later in the section, the attested
capabilities of pigeons reveal limitations in humans’ own efforts to know and control
nonhuman nature—limitations that call for a rethinking of frameworks for under-

standing premised on hierarchical classifications of species difference:
But no one knows how they find their way. Sun? Magnetic fields? Basic ability to
ask directions? They have been shown to fly along human roads. The military tested
pigeons’ accuracy to within 1000 miles in two days, often in the dark of night and
from mobile lofts. Without much thinking, it seems these pigeons solve seemingly
impossible problems. (18)
Pigeons retain a learned behavior even if rewarded only 1 in 10,000 times. They engage
in unnumbered counting as part of their unnamed thinking, the unnamed names
they insist on, the unnamed name of their home, the unnamed name of their mate,
the unnamed number of their flock, the unnamed thought of their thinking. (19)
The section “On the Increase of the Habitable Earth,” whose title is taken from
a 1781 study by Linnaeus, again intermixes the two registers in question, this time
destabilizing the boundary between action-like and event-like ways of profiling
biomedical experiments involving animals.22 Using instrumentalizing discourse in
her introductory comments to the audience in the museum theater, the lab assis-
tant introduces a rat named Wicki who has been genetically engineered to replicate
the effects of neurofibrillary tangles on human memory and learning. She remarks,
“Multi-million dollar facilities mass-produce these rats, the daylight-loving white
kind, helping us conquer disease, rather than spreading it. They are basic tools”
(124). In the sequence that follows, the text again oscillates between objectifying
and subjectivizing registers in providing an account of Wicki’s performances in an
experiment conducted in a setting for theatrical displays; here the assistant uses food
in an attempt to reinforce learned behaviors as Wicki navigates an unfamiliar maze.
On the one hand, as reported by the representative of the one-time food-court
collective that has now migrated to the museum, “Wicki’s no longer just a little ani-
mal, or even really a member of the genus, Rattus”; instead, using a graph to indicate
Wicki’s movements through the maze, the assistant characterizes him as “a totem, in
the best sense of the word. A data point. Without these animals, who would stand
in our place?” (125). But on the other hand, the narrator includes details that evoke
Wicki’s subjective states, his lived experiences, over the course of the experiment.
Thus, when the assistant opens the first swing door in the maze, “Wicki sniffs and
scrambles through, nails clicking” (124), later stopping to scratch his side with a
back leg (125). The narrative of Wicki’s last moments likewise reveals this tension
between the tendency to instrumentalize the rat as an experimental object and the
tendency to engage with Wicki as an experiencing subject:
The assistant takes Wicki by the tail and hangs him over the floor, stabbing at his
stomach with a hypodermic needle. Wicki curls, biting back at her. “We’re trained
to be as kind as possible, so he’s habituated,” she begins. A flash of frustration; she
swings Wicki around her head by his tail several times and tries the stomach needle
again, this time succeeding. Holding Wicki with one hand, she runs a scalpel along
his skin, confirming (we’re not sure how) that the narcotic is working, before she
opens him wide . . .. Wicki who just moments before . . . is now dead. We guess he
already kind of was, but before we can look away, she takes a pair of garden shears and
snaps Wicki’s head off, flops the body back into the box, and lowers the head in a jar
numbered “14.” “The rat’s body is useless, but this brain contains vital information; a
new life just beginning.” (125–26; second ellipsis in the original)
Elsewhere in BLB, Field takes up animal perspectives in even more detail, rei-
magining human impacts on the environment by exploring their consequences for
nonhuman projects and ways of living. In “This Crime Has No Name,” for instance,
she uses the register of action to recontextualize the cascade of events that led to the
extinction of the dusky seaside sparrow, when the St. Johns River was flooded during
the construction of the Kennedy Space Center near Merritt Island in Florida. The
narrator of the first section had already asked, “Can we think about a whole species
like a character?” (16; see also Carrithers, Bracken, and Emery 2011, along with the
coda), and in “This Crime Has No Name” Field draws on the tradition of animal auto-
biography to develop a male sparrow’s (posthumous) account of the experience of
being the last of his kind, thereby unpacking the lived consequences of the event of
species loss.23 It is not just that Field’s narrating sparrow thematizes the boundaries
of scale that must be crossed when an individual animal serves (for example, for the
human scientific community) as the representative for a species; what is more, the
text shows how stories can be used to interleave the experiences of a last-remaining
species member with those of precursor animals, distributed through time and space.
The bird asks, “Am I a special case? A memory-bird that died and kept right on
living, exploding from one to many in mid-flight” (31), and later on he notes that
“on March 31, 1986, ‘I’ was the one male dusky alive. . . . My single body was a tiny
spindle falling apart, yet holding this huge thing” (40). Further, the sparrow pro-
vides an account of how in opening up new frontiers for exploration, and creating a
new sense of humans’ interconnectedness with the wider universe (41), the archi-
tects of the US space program destroyed the habitat of another species with which
humans are also interlinked, in webs of trans-species interdependencies, infraterres-
trial spaces, that deserve further exploration in their own right:
The whole space program started with the Bumper 8, sent up ten miles from an out-
house and a ladder. Then . . . more “empty scrubland” got cleared and filled for the
inauguration of the (newly-named) NASA program . . .. In hindsight they called us
“Indicator Species.” I can’t find food without my mud pools, mud flats. I don’t like
pesticide sauce on my mosquitoes. (36)
In this way, the distanciation effects created by the dead sparrow’s story allow for an
indictment of human institutions and practices that fail to take into account their
impact on larger ecologies of selves. As the bird puts it, “If I were designing the
world, forgetting would be harder than remembering, and freedom would simply
mean keeping your home” (33).
Field therefore engages in strategic projections of animal perspectives, using
those projections as a means for distanciating human-centric frames of reference
that tend to profile patterns of nonhuman behavior in event-like rather than action-
like ways. She thus recontextualizes and reassimilates the register of action vis-à-vis
accounts of animals and human-animal relationships. At the same time, however,
BLB critiques inappropriate extensions of the register of action into animal worlds,
such as those put forward by Lorenz. Hence, in “Exposition: He Told Animal
Stories,” Field examines how narratives about nonhuman experiences, modes of
animal agency, can go wrong. In parallel with the text’s global pattern of alternating
between narration and metanarrative commentary, this section both tells the story
of Lorenz’s contributions to ethological theory and raises questions about the way
those contributions emerged from narratives—including narratives based on one-
off encounters with individual animals. For example, in connection with Lorenz’s
report about a starling’s attempt to catch a fly that was not present—an incident that
formed the kernel of Lorenz’s hypotheses concerning action-specific potential—the
narrator recounts that “a skeptical colleague once asked Lorenz, ‘Is that something
that actually happened or just something you saw?’ In other words, is storytelling
your scientific method?” (64). Later, raising doubts about the veracity of the “official
story” that Lorenz worked as a doctor for the German army before being held as a
POW by the Russians for four years, the narrator poses the same question in a differ-
ent way: “How is a story not the story? What if there was a fly?” (70).
To put the point in more general terms: even as it speculates about the insepa-
rability of behavioral theory and storytelling practice, the link between biological
research and modes of cultural expression, the section on Lorenz uses his work to
suggest that there are more and less critical and responsible ways of extending the
register of action beyond the human. On the one hand, the narrator acknowledges
entanglements between these areas of inquiry and their associated representational
norms, remarking that “biology seems suddenly condemned, through its use of fig-
uration, to be literary, and somehow the reverse seems equally true. Writing reveals
individuals, worlds, how ontology relates to stories, their biological basis, their evo-
lution” (71). The narrator goes on:
Reading science as biography or poetry feels both rich and problematic. Biologists
mostly work and write quantitatively, to loosen language’s messy involvement. Also,
writing from the perspective of species rather than individuals avoids psychoanalysis,
or the overlapping of language and fantasy. But some biologists now consider living
beings merely diverse processes of semiosis. To the mind, the inexhaustible displays
of the earth will model anything. (71)
On the other hand, however, the narrator questions the assumptions behind
Lorenz’s statement that “the comparative ethologist who makes it his business to
know animals more thoroughly than anybody else” should therefore be entitled to
“tell stories about their private lives” (quoted by Field 67).
Discussing Lorenz’s King Solomon’s Ring, which contains biographical chapters
about animals Lorenz had known and observed, the narrator calls into question
the authority that Lorenz claims for himself in telling such animal stories: “Can we
imagine analogy, or even the feeling of sympathy between creatures, providing the
source for knowledge—some uncontaminated epistemology—allowing people to

share an animal’s world? Definitely. But, one by one, analogies also reveal the mir-
ror’s opaque side, the confusion within this perceived agreement” (87). Along these
same lines, the narrator articulates issues raised by the method of storytelling used
by Field herself in having a sparrow recount the experience of extinction in “This
Crime Has a Name”: “Anthropomorphism involves projecting one’s self into the
body of something which is so completely different that its interiority cannot be
known, yet assuming that one can tell stories in its voice; a species ventriloquism”
(78). But the very inclusion of this metanarrative strand of discourse works to unset-
tle the frame for understanding that underpins the sparrow’s posthumous narration
in the earlier section. Lorenz’s globalizing and overconfident extensions of the regis-
ter of action beyond the species boundary can be glossed as, in fact, hyperextensions
of human-centric frames for understanding behavior. By contrast, by virtue of their
metanarrative reflexivity, BLB’s cross-species mappings remain deliberately and
overtly partial and provisional, as confirmed by the narrator’s genealogical explana-
tion of the popularity of animal fables:
In the joy of recognizing sentience in other creatures, we feel the rush of kinship, and
perhaps because we don’t know how to act around lost or abandoned or ultimate kin-
ship, we try to own other creatures’ actions, translate them into our language, extend
them our fantasies. We are industrious ants or hermaphrodite barnacles. We are fierce
lions or clever foxes. We are monogamous penguins or self-sacrificing helpmates at
the nest. We like these stories because it’s hard to get a grip on exactly where we
stand. No matter how many airplanes we build or satellites guide us, we feel like we’re
everywhere and nowhere, lost in our family without a poster or map. We are all the
animals and none of them. (81)
In short, whereas the action models in Lorenz’s animal stories exemplify ontological
conservativism, Field’s are designed to accommodate, or rather promote, the possi-
bility of understanding creatures’ motivations, goals, and projects otherwise, even as
BLB insists on the relevance of the discourse of action for making sense of behavior
beyond the human.
n I M A G I N A R I E S O F A C T I O N
IN EXPERIMENTAL WRITING
It is important to acknowledge that the cycle of distanciation, recontextualiza-

tion, and reassimilation of frames for understanding animals and human-animal
relationships—a cycle that becomes visible when ideas from hermeneutics are
brought into dialogue with concepts from ethology and narratology—can oper-
ate in a range of narrative environments, nonfictional as well as fictional, autobio-
graphical as well as biogeographical. Thus, in “Prey to a Crocodile,” the philosopher
Val Plumwood uses a narrative about her near-death experience of being attacked
by a crocodile to re-envision “from the outside” the framework for subjectiv-
ity that had previously organized her thought and conduct (2002b: para. 3).
This outside or distanciated view of her frame for self-understanding becomes

available when Plumwood uses the resources of story to look through the eye
of the crocodile—that is, to reconceptualize herself as prey. Insofar as “The idea
of human prey threatens the dualistic vision of human mastery in which we
humans manipulate nature from outside, as predators but never prey” (para. 15),
by telling the story of how she became prey Plumwood can call into question
the “concept of human identity [that] positions humans outside and above the
food chain” and enables us to “act as if we live in a separate realm of culture in
which we are never food, while other animals inhabit a different world of nature
in which they are no more than food” (para. 15). Recontextualized in transhu-
man terms, as part of rather than opposed to the wider world of creatural life,
Plumwood’s framework for subjectivity becomes reassimilated in an altered nar-
rative of the self that foregrounds humans’ “own animality and ecological vulner-
ability” (para. 18).
As Plumwood’s account suggests, and as she elsewhere explicitly argues, imag-
inative writing of all sorts plays a distinctive role in “making visible new pos-
sibilities for radically open and nonreductive ways to experience the world”
(2007: 17)—that is, in initiating “whole new interspecies dialogues, dramas and
projects previously unimaginable” that work to disrupt “the post-enlightenment
illusion of [a]‌human monopoly of the mindful, cultural, intentional elements of
the world” (19). Whether it involves using life narratives to reveal entanglements
between human and nonhuman ways of living, or engaging in (meta)narrative
play to explore possibilities for storytelling beyond the human, experimen-
tal writing across genres draws attention to, or rather potentiates, the mutually
enabling relationship between textual practices and cross-species interactions.
Experimental texts not only activate a cycle of distanciation, recontextualization,
and reassimilation when they are being interpreted, but themselves emerge from
previous iterations of that same cycle, which gives rise to, as well as being trig-
gered by, norm-challenging modes of narration.
Likewise, narration of this sort reinforces and extends Ricoeur’s claims about the
symbiotic relationship between narrative and action—about the way interpreting
actions undertaken in storyworlds opens “possible paths . . . to real action” (Ricoeur
1991b: 132). BLB in particular suggests that experiments with narrative form can
expand the repertoire of behaviors that it is possible to imagine humans performing
in cross-species encounters. Hence Field’s insistence on making the interconnec-
tion between human and nonhuman worlds part of the texture as well as the topic
of her writing, by orchestrating an interplay between discourse registers, imbricat-
ing human and nonhuman perspectives, and engaging in shifts of scale that move
from localized human-animal encounters to species-level transformations across a
range of biotic communities. Bird Lovers, Backyard is, in this sense, its own best evi-
dence for the core claim emerging from Field’s text: that new ways of telling animal
stories, by foregrounding humans’ co-constitutive relationality with other forms of
creatural life, afford new possibilities for conduct, new imaginaries of action, in a
more-than-human world.
Coda: Toward a Bionarratology;
or, Storytelling at Species Scale
The steady decline in mammalian fertility, and the growing ascendancy
of amphibian and reptile forms best adapted to aquatic life in
the lagoons and swamps, inverted the ecological balances . . . the
genealogical tree of mankind was systematically pruning itself,
apparently moving backwards in time.
—J. G. Ballard, The Drowned World (1962/2014: 35)
In Book V of Metamorphoses, Ovid recounts the story of how the daughters of a king
from Macedonia are transformed into birds. Having challenged the Muses to a sing-
ing contest and been defeated, and then mocked the Muses when threatened with
punishment for their insulting remarks, the king’s daughters
laughed and ridiculed these threatening words, but as they tried to speak, and attack
[the Muses] with insolent hands, making a great clamour, they saw feathers spring
from under their nails, and plumage cover their arms. Each one saw the next one’s
mouth harden to a solid beak, and a new bird enter the trees. When they wanted to
beat their breasts in sorrow, they hung in the air, lifted by the movement of their arms,
magpies now, the slanderers of the woods. Even now, as birds, their former eloquence
remains, their raucous garrulity, and their monstrous capacity for chatter.1
Figure C.1 reproduces the engraving that Jean Matheus (also known as Jean Mathieu)
created for this episode in Nicolas Renouard’s French translation of Ovid’s text
(Ovid ca. 8 c.e./1637: 137). In this image the leftmost magpies are facing away from
the Muses, at the far end of a human-bird continuum in which the king’s daughters’
variable distance from their pretransformed condition is marked by their size, spatial
position, bodily orientation, and gaze direction. Here multiple metamorphosizing
creatures are used to figure forth the trajectory of change followed, one can infer,
by any particular individual involved, as she moves through the phases of human,
human-bird blend, and bird with the vestigial human trait of garrulity.
Flash forward two thousand years. The abstract of a feature titled “Lions and
Tigers and Bears, Oh My!,” authored by science writer Moises Velasquez-Manoff
and published in the August 17, 2014, issue of the New York Times Magazine, reads
as follows: “As climate change alters habitats, once-disparate animals are shacking
up, creating hybrids that challenge our notion of what it means to be a species” (33).
Velasquez-Manoff, suggesting that post-Darwinian biologists’ view of species may
have been shaped by early and mid-twentieth-century fears about miscegenation and
the loss of racial purity, points to evidence flying in the face of conventional wisdom
concerning hybrids as nonreproducing failures, biological nonstarters. Examples
249
Figure C.1 Jean Matheus’s illustration of the Muses’ transformation of the nine daughters
of King Peiros of Emathia (Macedonia) into magpies, titled Les Muses et les filles de Piere.
Credit line: From the 2nd, 1637 edition of Nicholas Renouard’s French translation
of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Ovid ca. 8 CE/1637). Reproduced courtesy Bibliothèque
nationale de France.
include the coywolf or Eastern coyote in the northeast region of the United States
(one-quarter wolf, two-thirds coyote, and the rest dog) that emerged in response to
population pressures caused by European colonization; the so-called grolar bears,
or pizzly bears, that resulted from the intermittent interbreeding of polar bears and
grizzlies during periodic changes in the climate; and two spadefoot toad species that
interbreed during periods of drought. As Velasquez-Manoff puts it,
The emergence of [these blends] . . . shows how human activity can break down the
barriers that separate species . . .. [Such] evidence of intermixing has spurred a reas-
sessment of the notion that hybrids are born failures. In its place a more nuanced
view has taken hold: While hybridization can certainly be destructive, it may also
expedite adaptation. New creatures may emerge seemingly overnight from cross-
species mating. (2014: 34–35)2
But Velasquez-Manoff, whose account raises questions about species concepts to
which I return below, brings things even closer to home. He writes:
Coda ■ 251
Everyone except sub-Saharan Africans carries a small quantity of Neanderthal DNA

that includes traits possibly important for survival in Eurasian environments—
immune-system and skin-pigmentation genes, among others. And our current
genome warehouses DNA from archaic humans that have otherwise disappeared.
A recent study estimated that, in the same way that coywolves can be said to store
wolf DNA that might have otherwise vanished from the Northeast, one fifth of the
Neanderthal genome endures, dispersed throughout humanity. (2014: 36; see also
Mooallem 2017)
To be sure, very different ontologies, causal mechanisms, and timescales are

involved in this instance of modern-day science journalism as compared with Ovid’s
first-century discourse on human-into-animal transformations. On the one hand,
divine retribution drives the king’s daughters to a lower position on Aristotle’s scale
of nature, which I discussed in c hapters 2 and 3; their insolent conduct moves them
downward within the ontological hierarchy in which they sought to leap up several
levels, to a position lower than their starting point. This crossing of species boundar-
ies, from human to bird, is staged sequentially in the time span covered by the text,
in a way that anticipates the morphing technologies made possible by computer-
generated imagery in cinema: mouths hardening to beaks, arms and hands trans-
mogrified into wings, bird by bird they enter the trees, their sole remaining tie to
their pretransformation identities being their continued garrulity as chattering
magpies.
On the other hand, Velasquez-Manoff, in his discussion of biological intermix-
tures that call into question prior conceptions of species, strategically narrows and
distends the timescales for transformation. At some points in his account the relevant
time frame extends across epochs of glaciation, whereas at others it encompasses
only the centuries that have elapsed since Europeans colonized North America or
shrinks to episodes within a single generation, as in the case of the Central American
tungara frog that tends to mate with members of a different species when it hears
the croaks of a predator frog (Velasquez-Manoff 2014: 37). Furthermore, no scale
of nature or Great Chain of Being structures Velasquez-Manoff ’s discussion; in this
biocentric versus anthropocentric account, humans as well as coyotes, dogs, and
wolves, bears as well as sharks, and finches as well as toads are all subject to the same,
environmentally embedded processes of intermixture and mutation. As for the
causal mechanisms at work, some of these do involve anthropogenic impacts such
as climate change, deforestation, and destruction of habitat, one implication being
that by compromising the larger biotic communities of which we are a part, and
thus harming our own chances for survival, the position of us present-day humans
is not altogether dissimilar from that of Ovid’s hubristic characters. But here the
agential network is distributed across time and space, with human-caused changes
to the environment leading to the emergence of new forms of animal life in some
domains even as it causes diminished biodiversity in others. As an emergent prod-
uct of human and nonhuman migratory patterns, changes in agricultural practices,
and the co-evolution of humans and canids, the rise of the coywolf, for example,
could not have been predicted from the array of factors whose causal interrelations
Velasquez-Manoff ’s narrative traces out, partly through juxtaposition with other,
more or less similar constellations found elsewhere in the world.
Much more can be said about the commonalities and contrasts between these
two accounts of species transformations—and what they suggest, in turn, about
transformations to the very concept of species. For example, Velasquez-Manoff ’s
discussion raises issues also broached by Bynum (2001) in her study of metamor-
phosis and hybridity as competing strategies for accommodating change taken
as an ontological problem during the medieval period. As noted previously in
chapter 2, Bynum suggests that for medieval thinkers, “the hybrid [as represented
by werewolves and other mixed-species creatures that figured in the culture of
the time] expresses a world of natures, essences, or substances (often diverse or
contradictory to each other), encountered through paradox; [hybridity] resists
change” (2001: 29–30). By contrast, “Metamorphosis expresses a labile world
of flux and transformation, encountered through story” (30). Remarking that by
the fourteenth century allegorical readings had replaced readings based on ideas
of transformation as the normative interpretive mode, with Ovidian concepts of
metamorphosis having been labeled heretical (100–101), Bynum characterizes the
poets, theologians, and natural philosophers of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries
in terms that parallel those Velasquez-Manoff uses for the species theorists of the
early to middle twentieth century. Both groups struggled to contain what can now
be described as unpredictably emergent biological structures in “categories of unal-
terable, or not-easily-alterable, species” (83), even though the biological structures
in question are, as it turns out, defined rather than interrupted by metamorphic
transformations.
But with my discussion having begun in medias res, to borrow a phrase from
Ovid’s near contemporary Horace, it is time to backtrack to the larger questions that
constitute my chief focus here. At issue is the extent to which, and the specific ways
in which, narrative affords means for modeling phenomena situated at the level or
scale of species, however elusive an operational definition of that concept ultimately
proves to be. I have already hinted at some of these larger questions in suggesting
that Velasquez-Manoff uses a method of narrative clustering, assembling a constella-
tion of individual case histories in creatural intermixture, to trace out a wider, trans-
species trajectory of metamorphic emergence. Ovid likewise brings together, in a
different register of discourse, multiple instances of biological blending to adum-
brate a larger world-in-flux. In what follows, I work to formulate in more explicit
terms some ways of investigating these and other methods of multiscale narration,
as I call such attempts to interlink local circumstances and global environments,
individuals and the supraindividual contexts of change in which they are caught up.
As my initial examples indicate, questions raised by these multiscale methods cut
across the distinction between imaginative and factual discourse, fiction and non-
fiction, science and myth.
My guiding hypothesis is that narrative, even though it is grounded in and opti-
mally calibrated for human-scale phenomena, furnishes routes of access to emergent
Coda ■ 253
structures and processes extending beyond the size limits of the lifeworld. To test
this hypothesis, I begin by fleshing out in more detail the concept of multiscale nar-
ration, in which storytellers cross the boundaries of scale separating the mesophys-
ics of everyday life from subpersonal domains situated at the level of microphysics as
well as suprapersonal domains situated at the level of macrophysics. I then draw on
recent research on the idea of emergence to re-evaluate arguments suggesting that
narrative and emergent phenomena are irreconcilable. Arguing, by contrast, that
stories provide resources for modeling at least some modes of emergence, I focus on
the heuristic potentials of multiscale narration when it comes to species transforma-
tions in the domain of animal life. Reviewing debates between species monism and
species pluralism, and surveying a range of fictional as well as nonfictional discourses
engaging with questions of species, I articulate my central research hypothesis more
fully. According to this hypothesis, narrative provides structural affordances that can
be used to trace out pathways between, on the one hand, localized environments
in which temporally and spatially bounded events involving particular animals or
groups of animals take place, and, on the other hand, more or less massively distrib-
uted transformations at species scale.
n N A R R A T I V E , S C A L E , A N D M U L T I S C A L E
NARRATION
As a point of entry into the concept of multiscale narration, I draw on a previous

study in which I discuss J. J. Gibson’s attempt to establish the field of ecological psy-
chology via a focus on person-level accounts of humans’ experiences of the world
(see Gibson 1979; Herman 2013: 80–85). In contrast with micro-and macrophysi-
calist models, ecological accounts are geared toward human-scale circumstances
and events—that is, circumstances and events as they are encountered by humans
(among other animals) considered as whole organisms, embedded in the environ-
ment in species-and even organism-specific ways. As Gibson puts it,
The size-levels of the world emphasized by modern physics, the atomic and the cos-
mic, are inappropriate for the psychologist. We are concerned here with things at
the ecological level, with the habitat of animals and men, because we all behave with
respect to things we can look at and feel, or smell and taste, and events we can lis-
ten to. The sense organs of animals, the perceptual systems . . . , are not capable of
detecting atoms or galaxies. Within their limits, however, these perceptual systems
are capable of detecting a certain range of things and events. (1979: 9–10)
For Gibson, because human mental dispositions and capacities are optimally suited
for navigating situations and events that are encountered at a particular spatiotem-
poral scale or degree of resolution, those mental abilities need to be investigated
with reference to the appropriate ecological benchmarks—namely, the affordances
or opportunities for action that human-scale environments present to embod-
ied human minds. In Heft’s (2001) formulation, in contrast with subatomic and
cosmic levels of description for which physicalistic frameworks can be used, the
“psychological level operates at an intermediate range of size, at a scale comparable

to an organism considered holistically and purposively” (111), or as an integrated
functional system (112). Crucially, “The functional properties of [such] organisms
considered at a molar level of analysis are not reducible to more molecular levels”
(112; compare Noë 2009: 40–41). Person-level experiences arising from engage-
ments with the world are therefore not reducible to subpersonal neurophysical
processes that, at a molecular level, make them possible, nor for that matter to the
larger, macrophysical processes (e.g., levels of carbon production, macroeconomic
behaviors, or epidemiological characteristics of populations) to which they may in
turn contribute. Thus, for Gibson, when one tries to reduce what he calls terrestrial
events to “elementary physical events, they become impossibly complex, and physi-
cal complexity then blinds us to ecological simplicity” (1979: 100).
From this perspective, to revert to a primary argument of my previous study,
stories can be seen as instruments for sense making that are optimally calibrated
for person-level, that is, human-scale, events. Figure C.2 visualizes this hypothesis
concerning the relationships between narrative and scale, while linking the relation-
ships in question back to the idea of discourse domains discussed in c hapter 6. As
described there, discourse domains are frameworks for activity that determine what
kinds of subjective experiences it is appropriate and warranted to attribute to others,
nonhuman as well as human. Selecting out discourse domains involving animals in
particular, figure C.2 suggests that narratives about animal agents and their interac-
tions are optimally supported by, and will in turn have the greatest reciprocal impact
on, domains situated at the level of mesophysics—that is, the medium-sized level
of everyday experience—rather than at the microphysical or macrophysical levels.
But what about narratives that seek to span the gap between meso-and microlevel
phenomena, or between meso-and macrolevel situations and events? A first way of
Narrative-favoring and -disfavoring domains
domains situated at the level of

microphysics (e.g., cell biology,
research on brain physiology, studies of
animal locomotion)

mesophysics (nature writing, naturalistic
observation of animals, accounts of
interactions with companion, service, or
therapy animals, animal geographies)
= narratively
organized discourse domains situated at the level of
macrophysics (evolutionary biology,
= all representational behavioral ecology, population genetics,
modes in domain epidemiology)
Figure C.2 Narrative-favoring and narrative-disfavoring discourse domains.

Coda ■ 255

animal locomotion)
multi-scale
narratives type A:
meso-micro blends
mesophysics (nature writing, naturalistic
= narratively
Figure C.3 Multiscale narration type A: projecting the meso-level source domain onto
micro-level target domains.
explaining such scale-bridging or scale-blending accounts would be to suggest that

narrative has proved to be so serviceable for the world of everyday experience that
extensions across these boundaries of scale became inevitable, with stories provid-
ing a home base for exploratory probes into micro-and macrophysical domains.
To be sure, this rough explanation will require refinement and recontextualization
in what follows; but for now figures C.3 and C.4 can be used as aids for visualiz-
ing how such boundary-crossing narratives map elements of the source domain of
mesophysics (characters motivated by particular goals, understandings of canonical
action sequences associated with human-scale projects, and so forth) onto the target
domains of microphysics or macrophysics, as the case may be.
It is no accident that initial examples of such multiscale narration, of both types
A and B, can be drawn from the genre of science fiction, given the way sci-fi narra-
tives are rooted in processes of world modeling and world innovation (see chapter 2
and also my discussion of H. G. Wells’s work below; see also Weik von Mossner
2014, 2016a). An example of type A multiscale narration would be the 1966 film
Fantastic Voyage, subsequently novelized by Isaac Asimov, in which miniaturization
technology developed during the Cold War enables a small submarine named the
Proteus, staffed with a team of medical experts, to be reduced to one micrometer
(= one-thousandth of a millimeter) and injected into the body of the Soviet inven-
tor of the technology, so that the team can use a laser to remove a life-threatening
blood clot from his brain. The narrative thus maps human-scale projects involving
espionage, an attempted rescue, treason, and sabotage onto vascular structures and
physiological processes that—though entering into the composition of such meso-
level phenomena—require narrative projections of this sort to be situated within
the frames of reference afforded by the medium-sized world of everyday experience.

animal locomotion)
multi-scale
narratives type B: domains situated at the level of
meso-macro blends mesophysics (nature writing, naturalistic
= narratively
Figure C.4 Multiscale narration type B: projecting the meso-level source domain onto
macro-level target domains.
Conversely, another sci-fi movie from the same period, Quatermass and the Pit
(1967), released in the United States in 1968 under the title Five Million Years to
Earth, projects meso-level domains onto vast timescales and interplanetary dis-
tances, providing an instance of type B multiscale narration. More specifically, the
film uses an encounter with a buried remnant of alien technology and associated
stories of ghosts and hauntings to map out million-year timescales, thereby engaging
narratively with the process of human evolution. More specifically still, the movie
suggests that Martian-human interbreeding some five million years ago shaped the
course of human evolution while also accounting for the presence of the devil or
devil-like figures in the species’ collective unconscious, or narrative traditions.3
The remainder of this chapter focuses in more detail on issues raised by just one
subtype of multiscale narration. My discussion concerns type B narratives, with
their projections of the source domain of everyday, meso-level experience onto the
target domain of macro-level phenomena. But I further restrict my focus to type B
narratives that involve species-level changes in animal life, using such narratives to
explore the problems and potentials of storytelling at species scale.
n B E Y O N D T H E S I Z E L I M I T S O F T H E L I F E WO R L D
Timothy Morton (2013) uses the term hyperobjects to refer to “things that are mas-
sively distributed in time and space relative to humans” (1), suggesting that his account
overlaps with (but is not reducible to) theories of emergent phenomena developed in
the philosophy of science and other areas of inquiry (119–20, 156–57).4 Instancing
climate change, the biosphere, the Florida Everglades, and all the nuclear materials on
earth as examples of hyperobjects, Morton goes on to write:
Coda ■ 257
Hyperobjects have numerous properties in common. They are viscous, which means
that they “stick” to beings that are involved with them. They are nonlocal; in other
words, any “local manifestation” of a hyperobject is not directly the hyperobject.
They involve profoundly different temporalities than the human-scale ones we are
used to. . . . Hyperobjects occupy a high-dimensional phase space that results in their
being invisible to humans for stretches of time. The hyperobject is not a function of
our knowledge: it’s hyper relative to worms, lemons, and ultraviolet rays, as well as
humans. (2013: 1–2)
For Morton hyperobjects, so described, give rise to two major philosophical chal-
lenges: coming to terms with the impossibility of developing “a metalanguage
that could account for things while remaining uncontaminated by them” (2; see
also 153–54, 179) and establishing “what phenomenological ‘experience’ is in the
absence of anything meaningfully like a ‘world’ at all”—given the way the concept
of hyperobjects unsettles previous conceptions of the world (3; see also 99–104).
As formulated, Morton’s claims warrant further scrutiny. For one thing, when it
comes to the idea of viscosity, or what Karen Barad (2007, 2012) alternatively refers
to as entanglement (see chapter 3), this concept arguably applies across all scales,
and fails to differentiate the macrophysics of hyperobjects from the mesophysics of
objects. As work by Daston (1992) and Nagel (1986) suggests, the quixotic search
for an explanatory scheme that floats free of the world it is designed to explain—
at whatever scale—is itself a historically conditioned privileging of “the view from
nowhere” over frameworks for inquiry that by their nature remain situated, context-
bound, and partly determinative of what can be observed and known with their
help. Further, Morton can be charged with inconsistency. He sometimes writes as
though hyperobjects themselves, and not just the awareness of hyperobjects, can be
dated to the onset of “the Anthropocene,” “a geological time marked by the decisive
human ‘terraforming’ of Earth as such” (4) that begins to come into existence with
the invention of the steam engine as the first human technology capable of alter-
ing the global ecosystem.5 Hence his use of nuclear radiation and climate change as
key exemplars of hyperobjectivity. But at other times Morton’s analysis licenses the
assumption that hyperobjects, defined in general terms as phenomena more or less
massively distributed in space and time, predate the moment when anthropogenic
impacts began to make themselves felt at a global scale, as when he refers to cities,
complex ecologies such as the Florida Everglades, and—crucially for my purposes
here—evolution as examples of hyperobjects (118, 120).
In turn, Morton’s account falls between the horns of a dilemma. On the one
hand, his dating of the moment of recognition of hyperobjectivity is disputable,
as suggested by the debates about the sublime that go back to Longinus’s writ-
ings from the third century. These debates likewise center on environments that
exceed humans’ capacity to experience or synthesize them as coherent wholes,
or worlds (compare Morton 2013: 60, 103). But on the other hand, if Morton’s
hyperobjects—or, to revert to a more widely discussed and debated descriptive par-
lance, emergent phenomena—have always been with us, then the central question
raised by Morton’s discussion has likewise always been with us. This question can
be recast in the following terms: What strategies have humans developed to accom-
modate, in the domain of lived experience, structures and processes that exceed the
size limits of the lifeworld as we know it—size limits that have both temporal and
spatial dimensions?
The research hypothesis that I am exploring here is that, although narratives are
grounded in and adapted to a human-scale lifeworld, storytelling practices furnish
means for negotiating the differences of scale introduced by phenomena beyond the
scope of the human. In particular, through the specific subtype of multiscale narra-
tion that I am investigating, stories provide structural affordances that can be used to
map animal experiences and localized environments for animal life—environments
in which singular events involving particular animals or groups of animals take
place—onto spatially and temporally distributed transformations at species scale.
In furnishing such affordances, type B techniques for multiscale storytelling open
up additional pathways to a narratology beyond the human—in this case, through
a cross-fertilization of work in narrative studies and scholarship on the concepts of
emergence and emergent phenomena, as those concepts bear in turn on ideas of
species.6
Narrative and Emergent Phenomena
Terrence Deacon (2011) describes emergence in terms of the supervenience of

higher-order structures or properties on sets of elements that do not exhibit such
structures or properties prior to the elements’ interaction with one another—as
in the case of mob behavior emerging from a collocation of individual persons
(165–69). Along similar lines, Mark A. Bedau and Paul Humphreys (2008) define
emergent phenomena as ones that “arise from and depend on some more basic phe-
nomena yet are simultaneously autonomous from that base” (1). They cite “evolu-
tionary processes shaping biological lineages” (2) as a case in point. As Bedau and
Humphreys put it, “A complex, highly differentiated biosphere has emerged over
billions of years from what was originally a vastly simpler and more uniform array of
early life forms” (2).
Taken together, Deacon’s and Bedau and Humphrey’s descriptions of emergent
phenomena point to two different concepts of emergence between which Andy
Clark (1997) differentiates. On the one hand, “there is emergence whenever inter-
esting, non-centrally-controlled behavior ensues as a result of the interactions of
multiple simple components within a system” (108). For the sake of convenience,
this kind of emergence can be called autonomous emergence—though Clark him-
self does not use this term. On the other hand, a different concept of emergence
“foregrounds the notion of interactions between behavior systems and local envi-
ronment structure” (Clark 1997: 109) and can be called environmental emergence.
Cross-cutting the distinction between autonomous and environmental emergence,
however, is another, gradient distinction between strong and weak emergence, or
robustly and weakly emergent phenomena (Bedau 2008). The continuum shown in
Coda ■ 259
table C.1, based on the model proposed by Andrew Assad and Norman H. Packard
(1992/2008), aims to capture such differences of degree, stretching from nonemer-
gence through weaker and stronger forms of emergence.
Combining the contrast between autonomous and environmental emergence
with the scalar model presented in table C.1 yields an eight-way distinction between
modes of emergence, shown in table C.2. As table C.2 indicates, in exploring how
narrative might afford routes of access to emergent structures and processes extend-
ing beyond the size limits of the lifeworld, including those bound up with animal
species, it is necessary to consider both the kind and degree of emergence involved.
Much of the commentary in this area, however, has focused on the maximal modes
of (autonomous and environmental) emergence, without addressing how narra-
tives might engage with the full range of possible modes. Thus, whereas H. Porter
Abbott (2003, 2008b) has argued for the irreconcilability of narrative and emer-
gent phenomena, of both the autonomous and the environmental kinds, his argu-
ments appear to be targeted at maximal modes of emergence in both categories.
Discussing phenomena associated with autonomous emergence, Abbott (2008b)
writes that such phenomena involve “a massive distribution of cause among agents,
all of which interact to some degree by chance, and each of which lacks any pre-
eminent role in the emergent behavior of which it is a part . . .. As such, emergent
behavior is by definition unnarratable” (233). Elsewhere, addressing questions
about forms of emergence that arise from agent-environment interactions, Abbott
(2003) argues for the difficulty of reconciling narrative with the mechanisms of
natural selection via selective adaptation. This challenge arises, Abbott proposes,
“because neither natural selection nor species, as they were conceptualized by
Darwin, are entities with agency” (2003: 148), with the result that commentators
distort the Darwinian model when they try to narrativize it. For his part, focusing
again on what can be characterized as the maximal mode of (autonomous) emer-
gence, Walsh (2011) suggests that narrative itself can take on emergent forms;
he defines emergent narrative as “a form of systemic representation that becomes
interpretable at a higher level; it is understood as an invitation to make sense of
narrative” (79–80).
But questions about the pertinence of narrative practices for less-than-maximal
modes of emergence, as well as questions about where forms of emergence associated
TABLE C.1 A continuum of degrees of emergence, based on Assad and Packard (1992/2008: 232)
TABLE C.2 Eight modes of emergence
degree/kind autonomous environmental
non
weak
strong
maximal
with species-level phenomena should be placed in the grid shown in table C.2, deserve
fuller consideration. As I have already begun to suggest, and as post-Darwinian research
on epigenetics and on the evolutionary influence of animal cultures also indicates, talk
of individual as well as collective agency is not necessarily incompatible with the dis-
course of species, opening up possibilities for storytelling at species scale.7 Do spe-
cies transformations stand as an example of maximal, narrative-refusing emergence,
or rather an instance of strong but only narrative-resisting emergence? For example,
Velasquez-Manoff’s (2014) case histories in species intermixture, when brought into
an assemblage made possible by an overarching narrative frame, arguably go some dis-
tance toward closing the gap between the mesodomain of observable experience and
what can be glossed as a strongly emergent macrodomain of biological (or biogeo-
graphical) change on a transcontinental, planetary scale.8
To extrapolate: When it comes to the modes of environmental emergence that
warrant being placed in the categories of weak or even strong emergence, or that can
be given these relative weightings, narrative affords means for explaining emergent
interactions between the behavior systems and local environment structures at issue.
Accordingly, whereas for Abbott (2008b) “Narrative is . . . not only our first response to
the representation of events in time, but also a kind of mental lust” (230) that can lead
the mind astray when it seeks to make sense of phenomena that exceed the human scale,
by contrast I focus here on how stories can be used deliberately and strategically as heu-
ristic devices or modeling tools for macro-level, emergent phenomena. More precisely,
I focus on the heuristic potentials of multiscale storytelling for species-level characteris-
tics and transformations viewed as instances of strong environmental emergence.9
Storytelling at Species Scale
As a first step toward investigating how narrative might operate at species scale, it
is important to factor in the variety of species concepts—and the tension between
species monism and species pluralism—at work in fields that include evolutionary
and organismic biology, ecology, and conservation science.
Coda ■ 261
Philosophers of biology such as Marc Ereshevsky (2010) and James Mallett

(2001/2007) have identified multiple species concepts used in the biological litera-
ture (see also Godfrey-Smith 2014: 100–19; Heise 2010: 54–55; Lockwood 2012;
Wilkins 2009). Ereshevsky offers a partial catalog:
The Biological Species Concept defines a species as a group of organisms that can
successfully interbreed and produce fertile offspring. The Phylogenetic Species
Concept (which itself has multiple versions) defines a species as a group of organ-
isms bound by a unique ancestry. The Ecological Species Concept defines a species
as a group of organisms that share a distinct ecological niche. These species concepts
are just three among over a dozen prominent species concepts in the biological liter-
ature. (2010: sec. 3, para. 1)10
As Mallet (2001/2007: 8–10) discusses, debates about the status and validity of
these concepts, and also about what the proliferation of concepts of species might
imply about the biological phenomena they are designed to describe and explain,
have led theorists to deny that species denote real objects, or categories of objects, in
the world and in some instances to propose that populations rather than species are
the most pertinent evolutionary units (compare Heise 2010: 55–56). Mallet himself
holds that judgments about species membership have local objectivity but cannot
necessarily be extended across wider geographic spaces and larger spans of geological
time (3).
Such arguments have generated, in turn, metatheoretical debates. Whereas the
position known as species monism assumes that only one of the currently availa-
ble concepts of species is valid and that the correct understanding of species will
eventually be reached through further empirical research, species pluralism accepts
multiple ways of conceiving of species. Thus, in line with work cited by Mallet,
some pluralists argue that the species concept must be redescribed as a heuristic
construct rather than a real category in nature—this position being the one that
Darwin himself embraced in The Origin of Species (Ereshevsky 2010: secs. 4 and
5; see also Blitz 1992: 15). Similarly, even as he emphasizes the pragmatic impor-
tance of species concepts when it comes to issues of biodiversity and conservation,
noting that “conservation still depends on lists of endangered species at both local
and global levels,” Mallet holds that “species counts over large expanses of space
and time represent only a sketchy measure of biodiversity, a measure which owes
more to taxonomic and metaphysical fashion than to science” (2001/2007: 14). If
the very idea of species fractures into a cluster of only partially overlapping species
concepts, and if what counts as a species varies with one’s taxonomic principles and
pragmatic needs, then the case for categorizing species traits and transformations
as maximally emergent phenomena becomes harder to make. Instead, these phe-
nomena start to look like supraindividual structures and processes that may none-
theless be mapped out through modeling strategies afforded by narrative—indeed,
whose purchase on the world is bound up with, and in part constituted by, the same
conceptual resources that undergird multiscale storytelling practices.
A study by Carrithers, Bracken, and Emery (2011) offers a preliminary glimpse

at some of the key issues that come into play here; this study, focusing on rhe-
torical tropes that figure species as persons, provides a segue to my next section,
where I discuss in more detail how narrative structures afford a basis for modeling
emergent, supraindividual structures and processes associated with animal species.
Carrithers and his co-authors explore a mode of discourse that is especially rele-
vant in contexts where issues of conservation and biodiversity are foregrounded. In
this mode, a species or a significant subspecies unit, such as a population, features
as a person or character. As Carrithers et al. note, whereas “Many ethnographers
have written of a wide range of societies for whom animals fall within the magic
circle of personhood, and so within the morally imagined world of mutual gaze and
mutual responsiveness, of reciprocity and/or relatedness, . . . there are some spe-
cies whose character seems, at least from the viewpoint of Our Society, resistant
to such extension” (2011: 663). The co-authors use “the freshwater pearl mussel
(Margaritifera margaritifera L.), which is one among many candidates for conser-
vation” in the northeast of England (663), as an example of an animal it may prove
difficult to situate in the “magic circle of personhood,” suggesting that the trope of
personification provides rhetorical means needed to argue for the protection of such
species. In a way that resonates with Ceridwen Dovey’s (2014) act of cross-species
speaking-for in Only the Animals—more specifically, her use of fictional discourse to
“chip in” for the roving, beatnik-like mussel whose autobiography Dovey includes in
her collection (see chapter 5)—Carrithers and his co-authors argue that the trope
of personification, or what they term the “species ≈ person trope,” evokes “the super-
charged moral value of personhood without a direct equation of individual animal
to individual human person” (663). In turn, by means of discourse that leverages
this trope, “Our Society’s” native imaginative capacities and predispositions can
achieve “a caring, attentive regard . . . even for an apparently unpromising animal in
an apparently constraining technocratic environment” (663).
Narratives in which a species or a population features as a person-like being
thus recruit from a modeling resource I term allegorical projection in my next sec-
tion. Through such projections individual animals, or the traces left by their activ-
ity, can be used to figure forth species-level phenomena. In other words, structural
affordances built into narrative provide resources for imagining and engaging with
species-level processes, including those involving the loss or extinction of whole
species. My larger hypothesis: that by modeling species-or population-level phe-
nomena via a representational technology geared to the medium-sized objects and
events of the lifeworld, storytelling practices have the potential to open up new ways
of connecting the meso-level world of everyday experience with macro-level dis-
tributions of traits and trajectories of change, including trajectories introduced or
accelerated by anthropogenic impacts. In turn, these narrative-enabled or narrative-
supported techniques for modeling the lives of species participate in the dialectic of
understanding and explanation discussed in c hapter 7. The techniques in question
at once recruit from and impinge on broader assumptions about the nature of the
human-animal relationships at stake.
Coda ■ 263
n N A R R A T I V E A F F O R D A N C E S
F O R M A C R O -L E V E L M O D E L I N G
In my study Storytelling and the Sciences of Mind (Herman 2013: 293–310), I argued

that stories embed a whole technology for action-modeling, perfected over millen-
nia and distributed across the world’s cultural (including literary) traditions. This
technology makes narrative a powerful means for designing and testing explanatory
models bearing on the behavior of storyworld agents; such models provide a resource
for understanding actions via story-enabled attributions—and reattributions—of
reasons for acting. Storytellers and story recipients can assess the motivations, struc-
ture, and consequences of actions by varying perspectival and attitudinal stances
toward those actions and the situations in which they occur. Narrative can also be
used to manipulate timescales so as to compress or elongate event-chains, and to
reorder events in ways that allow for targeted assessments of particularly salient
links within those chains; to cluster together—or “emplot”—discrete behaviors into
goal-directed patterns of action, which both shape and are shaped by the material
and sociocultural environments in which they unfold; and to generate and cross-
compare counterfactual scenarios that allow the domain of the actual to be profiled
against a larger universe of possibilities, such that what might have been can be used
to take the measure of what has come to be.
In targeting the actions-in-context of the agents that feature in storyworlds, my
earlier study centered on meso-level situations and events. The present section
builds on this approach by outlining four ways in which narrative can be used to
scaffold engagements with macro-level phenomena: namely, through extensions of
the modes of temporal structuring, or strategies for arranging events in time, that
storytelling provides; through related strategies for projecting hypothetical or imag-
ined situations and events in storyworlds, or what I here term counterfactual scene
building; through allegorical projections of the sort discussed preliminarily in the
previous section, via Carrithers et al.’s (2011) account of the personification of an
endangered species, as well as through a complex, multilayered variant of allegorical
projection that I describe as “allegorical laddering”; and through the cross-mapping
of trait codes associated with storyworld agents, a story-enabled process that I began
to explore in chapter 3 vis-à-vis the intertwining of traits associated with autism and
animality in Gardner’s A Friend like Henry and Isaacson’s The Horse Boy.
Temporal Structuring
Genette’s (1972/1980) foundational work on time in narrative, along with subse-

quent refinements to his account proposed by later analysts, provides support for
Abbott’s (2008a: 3) characterization of storytelling as a primary cultural technology
for making sense of how things unfold in time.11 In the narratological tradition that
Genette’s work helped establish, narratives can be analyzed into the dimensions or
levels of story (i.e., the basic sequence of states, actions, and events recounted); the
designs situated at the level of the text or discourse by means of which interpreters
reconstruct that story; and the act of narration that produces the textual designs.
In this heuristic scheme, features of narrative time can be discussed in terms of all
three dimensions; I focus here on the categories and distinctions that Genette used
to capture the temporal relationships that obtain between the story and text levels.
Specifically, Genette used the categories of duration, order, and frequency to
describe the relationships in question. Duration, or narrative speed, can be com-
puted as a ratio between how long events take to unfold in the world of the story and
how much text is devoted to their narration, with speeds ranging from descriptive
pause to scene to summary to ellipsis. In turn, shifts from rapidly surveyed backstory
or expositional material to a slower, scenic mode of presentation can signal aspects
of the storyworld valued (or at any rate noticed) by a narrator (Sternberg 1978).
Order concerns how the sequence in which events are narrated matches up with the
sequence in which they can be assumed to have occurred; options include chrono-
logical narration, analepses or flashbacks, and prolepses or flashforwards, together
with various subcategories of these nonchronological modes. Finally, frequency can
be calculated by measuring how many times an event is narrated against how many
times it can be assumed to have occurred in the storyworld. Again, more than just
a range of formal possibilities, frequency affords ways of allocating attention to and
evaluating actions and events—with repetitive narration foregrounding some action
or set of actions, iterative narration providing a summative gloss on multiple story-
world incidents, and singulative narration being the baseline metric in this context.
All of these modes of temporal structuring are potentially relevant for storytell-
ing at species level—that is, for the narrative modeling of environmentally emergent
phenomena. Here, however, I zoom in on aspects of order and speed. More specif-
ically, I focus on the use of external analepsis as well as accelerated narrative speeds
for purposes of multiscale narration.
Reaching toward the Phylogenetic Past

in Nonfiction as well as Fiction
Narratologists have used the concept of “reach” to capture the difference between
internal and external analepsis and prolepsis (Prince 1987/2003: 81). Reach is a
measure of the amount of time covered by flashback or flashforward. In internal
analepsis, the time shift reaches back to a point that falls within the period covered
by the main action of the narrative. In external analepsis, by contrast, the time shift
reaches back to a point that comes before the period covered by the main action of
the narrative. External analepses, thus defined, can provide conceptual scaffolding
for movements back into the phylogenetic history of animal species, even though
that history, again, exceeds the size limits of human-scale lifeworlds.
In the domain of nonfiction, Neil Shubin’s Your Inner Fish (2008) explores how
the fossil record reveals evolutionary trajectories by virtue of which some animal
species adapted to life on land—and because of which humans remain linked, phy-
logenetically speaking, to fish. In suggesting that “ancient fish bones can be a path
to knowledge about who we are and how we got that way,” allowing researchers to
Coda ■ 265
“visualize events that happened millions and, in many cases, billions of years ago”
(3), Shubin brings into view the technique of “allegorical laddering” that I discuss
below in the context of research in paleontology and paleoecology. In such research
analysts use trace fossils, for example, to support accounts of ancient animal life that
stretch out a ladder-like series of projections leading from tracks and trails in sedi-
ment to the creatures that (are hypothesized to have) left those tracks, and thence
to the larger environments in relation to which the creatures in question evolved.
For the moment, though, it is worth emphasizing how Shubin relies on what can be
described as macro-level reach to move back analeptically to the period before any-
thing like a human-scale lifeworld came into being.
Much of Shubin’s discussion centers on the fossilized Tiktaalik roseae, an extinct
type of lobe-finned fish, co-discovered in 2004 by Shubin and his colleagues, that
had features like those of tetrapods (i.e., four-limbed vertebrate animals), including
arm-like skeletal structures and a neck that can move independently of the rest of its
body.12 Shubin profiles this animal as the member of a species associated with the
evolutionary transition from fish to amphibians, from animal life in the sea to ani-
mal life on land. In doing so, he projects a backstory for the lifeworlds made possible
by anatomical structures and physiological capabilities that ultimately prove to be
more-than-human, given the way human ontogeny is embedded in a longer phylo-
genetic lineage:
We can trace many of the structures of our own limbs to the fins of . . . fish. Bend
your wrist back and forth. Open and close your hand. When you do this, you
are using joints that first appeared in the fins of fish like Tiktaalik. Earlier, these
joints did not exist. Later, we find them in limbs . . .. the earliest creature to have
the bones of our upper arm, our forearm, even our wrist and palm, also had scales
and fin webbing [and] . . . was a fish . . .. The basic skeleton of our hands and feet
emerged over hundreds of millions of years, first in fish and later in amphibians
and reptiles. (41–42)
Thus, as Shubin goes on to write, “All of our extraordinary capabilities [e.g., bipedal
walking] arose from basic components that evolved in ancient fish and other crea-
tures. From common parts came a very unique construction” (43). For instance,
the structure of the human inner ear can be traced back to a jaw support bone that
became an ear bone when fish had to adapt to life on land, and more specifically
to the need to hear things through vibrations in the air rather than through move-
ments of water (164). By the same token, however, human health problems such as
back and joint pain emerged from this same evolutionary trajectory: “Take the body
plan of a fish, dress it up to be a mammal, then tweak and twist that mammal until
it walks on two legs, talks, thinks, and has superfine control of its fingers—and you
have a recipe for problems. We can dress up a fish only so much without paying a
price” (185).
A fictional example of macro-level reach can be found in Jack London’s The
Call of the Wild (1903/2008). In this novel, discussed previously in chapters 4
and 6, London’s canine protagonist is named Buck, a former California house pet
kidnapped by dog poachers and conscripted into service as a sled dog during the
gold rush in the Yukon territories. Buck runs alongside a wolf in the Alaskan wild late
in the novel, reconnecting with the longer phylogenetic history of which he is part.
He knew he was at last answering the call, running by the side of his wood brother
toward the place from which the call surely came. Old memories were coming upon
him fast, and he was stirring to them as of old he stirred to the realities of which they
were the shadows. He had done this thing before, somewhere in that other and dimly
remembered world, and he was doing it again, now, running free in the open, the
unpacked earth underfoot, the wide sky overhead. (62)
A similarly analeptic passage, again focalized through Buck, uses macro-level reach
to suggest the interinvolved evolutionary histories of humans and canids. Thus, as
the dog dozes by the fire,
blinking dreamily at the flames, it seemed that the flames were of another fire, and
that as he crouched by this other fire he saw another and different man from the
half-breed cook before him. This other man was shorter of leg and longer of arm,
with muscles that were stringy and knotty rather than rounded and swelling. The
hair of this man was long and matted, and his head slanted back under it from the
eyes . . .. He did not stand erect, but with trunk inclined forward from the hips, on legs
that bent at the knees. About his body there was a peculiar springiness, or resiliency,
almost catlike, and a quick alertness as of one who lived in perpetual fear of things
seen and unseen. (33)
Whereas in the novel as a whole Buck’s becoming-wolf figures forth the advantages,
for humans, of rejecting the stultifying influence of civilization, London here inverts
the direction of his animal allegory. More specifically, he uses a strange, oneiric
temporality—a flashback to primordial time made possible by the dog’s dream of
human atavism—to prefigure Buck’s own eventual reversion to the wildness of the
wolfpack, in lieu of other possible future evolutionary trajectories.13
From Order to Duration: Narrative

Speed as a Modeling Resource
For Genette, narrative speed has to do with how much text space is devoted to a
given increment of time in the world of the narrative. Time-lapse videos about evo-
lutionary processes recruit from this narrative resource to condense into a few min-
utes timescales that extend beyond the limits of the lifeworld. Examples include the
“Human Evolution Timelapse” and “Timeline of Human Evolution” videos available
on YouTube. The first of these videos, a three-minute animated sequence excerpted
from the television production of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos (Sagan 1980), traces the
emergence of Homo sapiens from the first, single-celled organisms on earth. The sec-
ond features a “counter” that records the passing of 530,000,000 years in a video
that, like the Sagan animation, lasts less than three and a half minutes.14
Coda ■ 267
But another kind of duration is worth mentioning in this context: what might be

called storyworld speed. At issue are not changes in narrational speed, or variations
in the amount of text space devoted to a given span of time in the world projected
by a narrative, but rather fluctuating rates of time vis-à-vis the unfolding of events in
the narrated world itself. Narratives of time travel typically involve such shifts in sto-
ryworld speed, as when the protagonist of H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine recounts
the experience of having lived through the speeding up and slowing down of time’s
progression while operating his time-travel machine: “Mrs. Watchett came in and
walked, apparently without seeing me, towards the garden door. I suppose it took
her a minute or so to traverse the place, but to me she seemed to shoot across the
room like a rocket” (Wells 1898/2004: 20). More salient for the present analysis,
Wells uses the novum of time travel—and the different rates of temporal progres-
sion that it affords—to project macro-level situations and events that lie beyond
the human experience of time, extrapolating forward into the (hypothetical) evo-
lutionary future of several species of animal life. Significantly, as he accelerates into
the future, Wells’s traveler can only provide vague indications of what it is like to
experience such transhuman timescales, remarking that though he “felt a nightmare
sensation of falling” as “an eddying murmur filled my ears, and a strange, dumb con-
fusedness descended on my mind,” “I am afraid I cannot convey the peculiar sen-
sations of time travelling” via “the helpless headlong motion” he sets into play by
manipulating the levers on his machine (20). Thus the bulk of the narrative consists
of episodes in which time does in fact unfold at a human scale, including the opening
dinner scene when the traveler first describes time as a fourth dimension, the scene
one week later when the traveler gives an account of how he came to encounter the
Eloi and the Morlocks in the year 802,701, and, embedded within that account, the
scene on the desolate beach many thousands of years further in the future that is
populated by crabs the size of tables—as well as the scene more than thirty million
years after the present moment of telling, in which only “livid green liverworts and
lichens,” plus some sort of creature about the size of a soccer ball with black tentacles
“hopping fitfully about,” appear to have survived massive changes to the biosphere
(167–73).
I return to Wells’s text in the next section, since his use of the science-fiction trope
of time travel also falls under the rubric of counterfactual scene building—another
narrative-based affordance for storytelling at species scale. But is important to note
that authors working outside the domain of narratives of time travel have likewise
experimented with uneven storyworld speeds to explore macro-level evolutionary
processes. For example, Kafka’s “Report for an Academy,” discussed previously in
chapters 2 and 5, condenses into five years of Red Peter’s life the much longer span
of time that was required for humans to evolve from the nonhuman primates who
were their forbears. In this way, Kafka uses an individual ape’s biomutation to adum-
brate changes and continuities across a still-emergent species boundary—and to
suggest how those changes and continuities bear on more or less entrenched modes
of human self-understanding vis-à-vis other forms of animal life.
Counterfactual Scene Building
Margolin (1999) notes that prospective or future-tense narration “is a narrative of

that which has not yet occurred at speech time: a prediction, prognosis, scenario,
projection, conjecture, wish, plan, and the like” (154). But a narrative need not be
told in the future tense for it to engage, in a hypothetical mode, with macro-level
phenomena of the sort associated with what I am calling storytelling at species
scale—or, for that matter, with the meso-level phenomena on which Margolin
focuses in the study just quoted (see also Margolin 1996).
In Dannenberg’s (2008) formulation, “A counterfactual is a hypothetical alter-
ation in a past sequence of events that changes the events in a factual sequence in
order to create a different, counterfactual outcome. The term antecedent refers to the
event in the past where the alteration is made. The consequent (or outcome) refers to
the result of the alteration” (119). Analysts such as Dannenberg, Harding (2007),
Karttunen (2015), and Margolin (1996, 1999) detail how both literary and every-
day discourse can recruit from a variety of linguistic resources (including, in English,
conditional if . . . then constructions, modal auxiliary verbs such as should and would,
and also specific verbs like hope and regret) to cue interpreters to build counterfactual
scenarios, encompassing what might have happened but did not actually transpire.
In turn, in describing these scenarios, psychologists sometimes distinguish between
downward and upward counterfactuals (see Dannenberg 2008: 112–13; Harding
2007: 266–68; McMullen, Markman, and Gavanski 1995). Downward counterfac-
tuals revise in a “downward” or negative direction what actually took place and thus
produce emotions such as relief (as in Although it might have rained yesterday, ruining
our camping trip, thankfully it did not). Upward counterfactuals trend in the opposite
direction, revising in an upward or positive direction what actually transpired and
thereby evoking emotions such as regret (as in If only it had not rained yesterday, we
would have enjoyed our camping trip more).
As this brief characterization already suggests, the construction of counter-
factual scenarios bears importantly on storytelling practices, not to mention the
analytic frameworks developed by narrative theorists. As Dannenberg puts it,
“Counterfactual thinking is therefore not simply a field for philosophical specula-
tion, . . . but a fundamental thought pattern in human consciousness and a key part
of the way we narrativize what happens in our lives” (2008: 110). Hence Labov’s
(1972: 381–87) emphasis on what he calls “comparators,” or locutions that com-
pare the events that did occur to those that did not occur, for purposes of narrative
evaluation, or signaling the point of a narrative (as in both of the examples included
in my previous paragraph, involving rain, or the lack of rain, and the camping trip).
Hence, too, Prince’s (1988) taxonomy of functions served by the disnarrated, or
“all the events that do not happen but, nonetheless, are referred to (in a negative or
hypothetical mode) by the narrative text” (2). The disnarrated, as Prince defines
it, can be used as a rhythmic device to slow down narrative speed (in its guise as a
narrator’s commentary), as a characterization device (in suggesting what a story-
world agent never would have done or at least did not do on a given occasion), as a
Coda ■ 269
means for emphasizing the noteworthiness or tellability of events (in parallel with
Labov’s category of comparators), and, most significantly for my purposes here, as a
resource that can be used to insist on narrative’s “ability to conceive and manipulate
hypothetical worlds or states of affairs and the freedom to reject various models of
intelligibility, of coherence and significance, various norms, conventions or codes
for world-and fiction-making” (Prince 1988: 6).15 These last remarks indicate how
counterfactual scene building can, beyond opening up hypothetical situations and
events in a larger storyworld in which they are bracketed off as momentary irrup-
tions of the inactual, instead generate entire narrative worlds whose basic ontologi-
cal structure suggests an alternative developmental or evolutionary course, another
way things, in general, might have unfolded (compare Dannenberg 2008: 126;
Herman 2013: 151–52).16
It is in this sense that the use of stories to construct counterfactual scenarios
provides a second narrative-based affordance for the modeling of macro-level
phenomena—that is, for storytelling at species scale. In what follows, I consider
how this affordance comes into play in counterfactual species histories in fictional
and nonfictional narratives, and also in the subdomain of alternate history some-
times called speculative biology.
Counterfactual Species Histories in Fictional

and Nonfictional Narratives
In his 1895 novel The Time Machine, already discussed in connection with tempo-
ral structuring, H. G. Wells uses his narrator-protagonist to chart a double tem-
poral movement that involves counterfactual scene building as well. Wells routes
the narrator’s prospective narration of species history through a prior external
analepsis that reaches back into the phylogenetic past, on the way to extrapolating
counterfactually into the future. Thus, to account for the divergent behaviors of the
Morlocks and the Eloi, the two (sub)species of humans that have emerged by the
year 802,701, the narrator draws on what he takes to be parallel cases from com-
parative evolutionary biology to model processes of speciation that have not yet
occurred in the time frame of his act of narration. Noting that “this second species
of Man,” that is, the humanoid group known as the Morlocks, was subterranean,
the narrator recounts how
there were three circumstances in particular which made me think that its rare emer-
gence above ground was the outcome of a long-continued underground habit. In the
first place, there was the bleached look common in most animals that live largely in
the dark—the white fish of the Kentucky caves, for instance. Then, those large eyes,
with that capacity for reflecting light, are common features of nocturnal things—
witness the owl and the cat. And last of all, that evident confusion in the sunshine,
that hasty yet fumbling awkward flight towards dark shadow, and that peculiar car-
riage of the head while in the light—all reinforced the theory of an extreme sensitive-
ness of the retina. (Wells 1895/2004: 98)
Similar strategies for scene building manifest themselves when the narrator, hav-
ing narrowly escaped from the clutches of the Morlocks, makes his way thousands
and then millions of years into the future. Again Wells situates his narrator’s account
in extended, macro-level evolutionary processes to build a model of creatural life on
the earth of far-distant futures. Or rather, he combines what was known about those
processes in 1895 with the novum of time travel to hypothesize a symmetrical, dev-
olutionary course of development that mirrors the proliferation of species in ocean
environments but unfolds in reverse. In this contrary-to-fact storyworld, the evolu-
tionary trajectory followed by sea creatures such as Shubin’s Tiktaalik—creatures
that underwent morphological changes enabling them to adapt to life on land—
has already reached its apogee and begun to trend in the opposite direction. In the
scene encountered by the narrator during his first stop after escaping the Morlocks,
this devolutionary process appears to have eventuated in mass extinctions in which
only large arthropods, which originally date back to the Cambrian period more
than 500 million years ago (Zhuravlev and Riding 2001), appear to have survived.
During his second stop, the narrator is barely able to recognize as animals the crea-
tures that, still more devolved, are less readily identified and presumably even far-
ther away from humans on the phylogenetic tree.
J. G. Ballard’s The Drowned World (1962/2014), for which Wells’s novel consti-
tutes a key intertext, likewise suggests how counterfactual scene building affords
means for engaging with macro-level phenomena unfolding on suprahuman times-
cales. Ballard’s storyworld is focalized through his protagonist, Dr. Robert Kerans, a
biologist assigned to one of the testing stations that has been set up to map changes
in plant and animal life after cataclysmic solar storms, having diminished “the Earth’s
gravitational hold upon the outer layers of the ionosphere” and thereby “deplet[ed]
the Earth’s barrier against the full impact of solar radiation” (32–33), lead to a large
increase in the earth’s surface temperature and the subsequent melting of the polar
ice-caps. Temperatures at the equator have now reached 180 degrees Fahrenheit
(23), and even the Arctic Circle has become a subtropical zone with an annual mean
temperature of 85 degrees (32). At the same time, higher levels of radioactivity have
caused mutations of whole species—not only freak botanical forms “recalling the
giant tree-ferns of the Carboniferous period,” but also a “drastic upsurge of all lower
plant and animal forms” (33).
As indicated in the quotation used as the epigraph for this coda, whereas fertil-
ity rates among mammals have declined, with the total human population reduced
to less than five million, by contrast, outsized amphibians, reptiles, and insects,
their mutated forms optimally adapted to an environment of lagoons and swamps
brought about by the rising water levels, have “inverted the ecological balances”
(35) and gained the ascendancy over other forms of creatural life. Indeed, these
creatures have begun “to assume once again,” as Kerans puts it, “the forms they dis-
played the last time such conditions were present—roughly speaking, the Triassic
period” that ended over 200 million years ago (60). Reptiles, by the time the novel
begins, are more or less literally taking up residence in one-time boardrooms in
flooded high-rise buildings (29); and as he looks up at the “ancient impassive faces”
Coda ■ 271
of giant iguanas, “Kerans [can] understand the curious fear they roused, re-kindling
archaic memories of the terrifying jungles of the Paleocene, when the reptiles had
gone down before the emergent mammals, and sense the implacable hatred one
zoological class feels towards another that usurps it” (29). Ballard thus dramatizes
the devolutionary trajectory, and the resulting reconfiguration of species relation-
ships and hierarchies, of which Wells provides only brief snapshots via time travel.
In this way, Ballard builds on Wellsian precedents to conduct a fully fledged sci-fi
thought-experiment concerning climate change. He uses his narrative to flesh out a
contrary-to-fact conditional whose antecedent involves massive alterations to the
earth’s geophysical profile and whose consequent plays out in the form of species-
scale changes in both plant and animal ecologies. But what is more, Ballard, in con-
trast with Wells, is writing in the wake of Freudian psychoanalysis. The Drowned
World not only leverages narrative-based affordances in conjunction with ideas from
evolutionary biology to project a hypothetical future environment marked by trans-
species atavism; in addition, it combines those same affordances with Freud’s ideas
to suggest the disorienting effects, for humans, of a sudden reversion to prehistoric
modes of human-animal relationality.
Significantly, Bodkin, Kerans’s assistant, explicitly invokes both Freud’s work and
Wells’s novel in hypothesizing that “just as psychoanalysis reconstructs the orig-
inal traumatic situation in order to release the repressed material, so we are now
being plunged back into the archaeopsychic past” (62), such that “as we move back
through geophysical time so we re-enter the amnionic corridor and move back
through . . . archaeopsychic time, recollecting in our unconscious minds the land-
scapes of each epoch . . . , as recognisable to anyone else as they would be to a travel-
ler in a Wellsian time machine” (64). Kerans’s subsequent experiences, including his
dreams, bear out what the novel itself thematizes (and enacts) as a convergence of
macro-and meso-level processes and phenomena, a crossing or blending of the geo-
physical with the psychological. In one of his dreams, the baying of “Triassic lizards,”
the “volcanic pounding of the solar flares,” and Kerans’s own heartbeat all seem to
merge, “the barriers which divided his own cells from the surrounding medium dis-
solving” (100–101; see also 104).17 Later, another character refers to “time-sickness”
or “the chronoclasmic bends” (131) induced by the quasi-Triassic environment.
And before embarking on his own final journey to the even hotter, more inundated
south, Kerans wonders: “Was the drowned world itself, and the mysterious quest for
the south which had possessed Hardman [the helicopter pilot who makes his escape
from the mapping team into the jungle], no more than an unconscious acceptance
of the logic of his own devolutionary descent, the ultimate neuronic synthesis of the
archaeopsychic zero?” (158).18
As Velasquez-Manoff ’s (2014) account of the coywolf and other hybrids already
confirms, however, counterfactual scene building is not limited to the domain of fic-
tion; this narrative-based resource also supports storytelling at species scale in non-
fictional contexts. Contrary-to-fact conditionals bear directly on the modeling of
(changes to) animal populations across time and space, for example, with Velasquez-
Manoff reporting a zoologist’s estimate that the hybrid ancestry of the coywolf “has
allowed it to expand its range five times as fast as nonhybrid coyotes could have”
(34). Developing a much more extended counterfactual scenario, Alan Weisman’s
The World without Us (2007) projects future consequences from an originating bio-
spheric event that constitutes Weisman’s antecedent: our own species is suddenly
and completely gone from the earth.19 Asking readers to imagine what might happen
if, say, “a Homo sapiens-specific virus—naturally or diabolically nano-engineered—
picks us off but leaves everything else intact” (4), Weisman then follows Ballard and
Wells in moving back into the more or less distant past as a strategy for extrapo-
lating counterfactually into a human-less future—even as he acknowledges differ-
ences between (science-)fictional and nonfictional uses of this strategy. Granting
that “we’re not time travelers, and the fossil record is only a fragmentary sampling”;
granting, too, that “even if that record were complete, the future won’t perfectly mir-
ror the past”; still, as Weisman puts it, “for a sense of how the world would go on
without us, among other places we must look to the world before us” (4).20
Even when this backward movement stops at the prehistoric (instead of the pre-
human) past, both negative and positive impacts from our species’ absence can be
imagined via contrary-to-fact world creation of the kind narrative supports—with
Weisman in effect developing story-based upward and downward counterfactuals to
suggest how the world may have been better, but also worse, without humans. On
the one hand, he cites the work of the paleoecologist Paul Martin, whose research
suggested that seventy genera of large mammals in the New World all vanished in
about one thousand years—caused by humans’ migration to North America from
Africa and Asia (58). More precisely, Martin (2005) argues that, starting about
thirteen thousand years ago, humans perpetrated extinctions that killed off “three-
fourths of America’s late Pleistocene megafauna, a menagerie far richer than Africa’s
today” (Weisman 2007: 58–59). As Martin says in conversation with Weisman,
configuring humans’ hypothetical absence as an upward counterfactual: “If Homo
sapiens had never evolved, . . . North America would have three times as many ani-
mals over one ton as Africa today” (59).
On the other hand, the subtraction of humans from the species mix also functions
as a downward counterfactual in Weisman’s account. When it comes to megafauna
on the African continent, in contrast with “the unsuspecting American, Australian,
Polynesian, and Caribbean herbivores who had no inkling of how dangerous we
were when we unexpectedly arrived” (69), humans’ co-evolution with large mam-
mals led to adaptive behaviors. Thus “The genus Homo’s burgeoning brain spawned
inventions that [led to changes in] herbivore defense strategies: tight flocks, for
example, increased the odds that a thrown hand-axe would actually connect with
a target” (70). Weisman can therefore ask: “If Africa’s animals evolved learning to
avoid human predators, how would the balance swing with humans gone? Are any
of its megafauna so adapted to us that some subtle dependence or even symbiosis
would be lost along with the human race, in a world without us?” (71). Elsewhere
Weisman develops even more straightforwardly downward counterfactual scenar-
ios, along the lines of “There are grounds for relief (from the vantage point of at
least some of the parties involved) when we consider that consequences X, Y, and Z,
Coda ■ 273
which would follow from antecedent A, have not in fact occurred.” Thus he notes
that species such as head and body lice, follicle mites, and the approximately “200
bacteria species [that] also call us home, especially those dwelling in our large intes-
tines and nostrils, inside our mouths, and on our teeth” (235) would be profoundly
negatively impacted by a human-less world.
Other science writers likewise employ what amount to upward and downward
counterfactuals to bring within view of meso-level frameworks for understand-
ing the macro-level phenomena associated with evolution, including the massive
timescales at work in species transformations. Jon Mooallem (2017), for example,
engages in counterfactual scene building in his account of changing understandings
of Neanderthals, a hominid group that died out approximately forty thousand years
ago, vis-à-vis modern-day humans. In reporting a conversation with paleoanthro-
pologist Chris Stringer, Mooallem notes the hypothesis that by the time Homo sapi-
ens migrated from Africa to Europe unstable climatic patterns had greatly reduced
the Neanderthal population; he quotes Stringer’s suggestion that a single cultural
or technological innovation by Homo sapiens might therefore have hastened the
Neanderthal decline. In this context a counterfactual scenario that operates in a
downward direction for humans (without such an innovation we might not have
survived) also operates in an upward direction for Neanderthals (without such an
innovation that group may not have died out): “With the demographics so skewed,
Stringer went on, even the slightest modern human advantage would be amplified
tremendously: a single innovation, something like sewing needles, might protect just
enough babies from the elements to lower the infant mortality rate and allow mod-
ern humans to conclusively overtake the Neanderthals” (Mooallem 2017: para. 52).
Whether it is tracked in an upward or downward direction, the counterfactual inven-
tion or innovation here serves as a conceptual bridge between macro-and meso-
level processes.
Similarly, in Your Inner Fish, Shubin uses a downward counterfactual to concre-
tize how our species’ phylogenetic development—and indeed the very texture of
human being-in-the-world—hinges on an evolutionary trajectory that has taken
millions of years to unfold. Interrupt or deflect that trajectory, which can be recon-
structed from the fossil record, and which leads from fish to rodents to Homo sapi-
ens, and we humans would not have been able to do something as basic as eat fruits
and vegetables:
By about 150 million years ago, in rocks from around the world, we find small rodent-
sized mammals with a new kind of tooth row, one that paved the way for our own
existence. What made these creatures special was the complexity of their mouths:
the jaw had different kinds of teeth set in it. . . . These little mammals, which resemble
mice, have a fundamental piece of our history inside them. If you doubt this, imagine
eating an apple lacking your incisor teeth or, better yet, a large carrot with no molars.
Our diverse diet . . . is possible only because our distant mammalian ancestors devel-
oped a mouth with different kinds of teeth that can occlude precisely. (Shubin 2008:
73–74)
Below, in my analysis of allegorical projection and “allegorical laddering,” I return

to a discussion of the way species-level story-lines can be interpreted as encoded
in—figured forth by—the fossil record. But first I consider the role of counterfac-
tual scene building in the interdiscipline of speculative biology, and more specifically
the subdomain of this interdiscipline known as speculative (or alternative) zoology.
The Hypothetical Bestiaries of Speculative Biology
Practitioners in the area of speculative biology combine work in evolutionary theory

and ideas from paleontological and paleogeographical research to explore alternate
histories of the earth’s biosphere. Some of these practitioners also draw on visualiza-
tion techniques, digital as well as nondigital, to develop morphological and behav-
ioral profiles for the members of imagined species.21 The subdomain of speculative
biology concerned with alternate forms of animal life, speculative or alternative zool-
ogy, suggests how narrative-based affordances for counterfactual scene building can
be used to chart evolutionary trajectories that animals may have followed had the
history of the planet unfolded differently, and also to map out phylogenetic pathways
that the creatures of the future may yet follow—depending on what climatological
or more broadly geophysical processes manifest themselves in the terrestrial epochs
to come.22 These hypothetical bestiaries should be distinguished from localized, pro-
visional hypotheses concerning gaps in the attested fossil record—that is, attempts
to reconstruct the histories of known species that, on the basis of paleontological or
paleoecological evidence, have been assigned to particular genera within established
zoological classifications (for examples see Domning 1982; Naish 2014; and, in the
area of science journalism, Kennedy 2017 and Yong 2016). Whereas hypothesis for-
mation of this sort constitutes a basic part of disciplines such as paleontology and
paleogeography, speculative or alternative zoology instead seeks to imagine wholly
new animal lineages and their associated, contrary-to-fact species histories.23
Dougal Dixon’s strikingly illustrated The New Dinosaurs: An Alternative Evolution
(1988), for example, sets up a counterfactual conditional whose antecedent is that
what has become known as the fifth mass extinction event, which occurred at the
end of the Cretaceous period about 65 million years ago, and which led to the
extinction of 76 percent of all biological species (Tennesen 2015: 6, 16–17), did
not in fact occur: “For the purposes of this book none of that happened . . .. In our
alternative zoology the Great Extinction did not happen . . .. The dinosaurs have
evolved and adapted to the Earth’s changing conditions” (Dixon 1988: 9; 11). The
consequent is a “new tree of life” resulting from “the continuation of the dinosaur
lineage over the last 65 million years” and a correspondingly diminished role for
mammals: “They began in the Triassic period as small insectivorous creatures . . ..
They have had no opportunity to expand and diversify, and are small insectivorous
creatures to this day” (12).
Dixon’s counterfactual dinosaur species range from tree-living species that are
members of a genus he designates arbrosaurs (32–33), to the balaclav that has
Coda ■ 275
adapted to arctic conditions by evolving “insulating layers of fat and fur, an ability to
eat the alpine plants and mosses, and a compact shape to preserve body heat” (61),
to the long-tailed, bipedal, punningly named numbskull, “one of the pachycephalo-
saurs, or bone-headed dinosaurs,” that have, as it turns out, changed very little since
evolving during the Cretaceous period (83). Dixon concludes his text by addressing
the question of whether intelligence, “as we know it, [is] an inevitable result of evolu-
tion” (112). Again the author uses the two-part, antecedent-consequent structure of
a counterfactual conditional to project, in outline form, a storyworld that reimagines
the earth’s evolutionary history; on this other earth, the dominant form of intelli-
gence is likewise other-than-human. In lieu of “the kind of intuitive reasoning intel-
ligence” that, as discussed previously in c hapter 3, humans have used as a criterion
for setting themselves apart from other animals, the continuance of the dinosaurs
would have led to the emergence “more of an animal cunning, with increasingly more
sophisticated and efficient hunting techniques and cooperative abilities” (112).
Dixon himself had already established a precedent for a non-or anti-
anthropocentric speculative zoology of this sort in After Man: A Zoology of the Future
(1981). Instead of imagining alternative phylogenetic trajectories that branch off
from the known evolutionary timeline for life on earth, this text, in the manner of
Wells’s The Time Machine but using even longer timescales, projects a storyworld
whose animal inhabitants correspond to those that might evolve on earth 50 million
years after we humans have become extinct. As Dixon puts it, whereas the climate
and vegetation of the earth at this stage would still be recognizable to us, the animals,
“although still falling into the familiar classes of fish, mammals, reptiles and so on are
remarkably different even though there are, in most cases, underlying similarities
between them and the species that man would have known” (Dixon 1981: 33). Here
Dixon makes good on the plan for the volume that he announces in his introduction,
in which he describes his zoology of the future as a means “to expound some of the
basic principles of evolution and ecology,” the result being “speculation built on fact”
where the author offers “not a firm prediction—more an exploration of possibili-
ties” (10).24 What follows, as in his later study of The New Dinosaurs, is a series of
narratively elaborated profiles of counterfactual animal species—in this case, spe-
cies that emerge via the stimulus of human extinction, the “vacuum created by the
demise of man” that opens new possibilities and pathways for evolutionary adapta-
tion (33). Thus Dixon once again engages in storytelling at species scale, suggesting
how narrative can scaffold an extended zoological thought-experiment. In parallel
with the gradualist model of evolutionary development he fleshes out through his
alternative dinosaur lineages, in After Man a hypothetical bestiary brought to life
by the contrary-to-fact antecedent of a 50-million-year leap forward into the future
(rather than the nonoccurrence of the asteroid strike that concluded the Cretaceous
period) enables Dixon to test a basic Darwinian assumption: “If a creature has a par-
ticular feature that, in the short term, can be modified to suit a certain role, then that
feature will develop over the course of evolution to suit the purpose in preference
to one that is hypothetically better but which would have to evolve from scratch”
(Dixon 1981: 33; compare Blitz 1992: 5–23).
Dixon’s text provides, through a series of illustrated narratives-before-the-fact,

species histories that range across a variety of evolutionary epochs, biogeographical
regions, and zoological taxa, including those of the parashrew (Pennatacaudus voli-
tarius) and the desert shark (Psammonarus spp.), from the mountainous and desert
regions of the future, respectively (see figures C.5 and C.6). Of the parashrew Dixon
writes:
The adults are unremarkable small shrew-like creatures, but the juveniles possess one
of the strangest devices found in the animal kingdom. At the end of their tails, they
have a fantastic parachute structure formed of interwoven hair, which they normally
use only once before discarding. When the time comes to leave the parental nest,
they launch themselves into the air, relying on the thermal currents . . . to carry them
to a fresh habitat, in some cases several kilometres away. . . . The evolution of the
parashrew’s parachute tail is primarily due to the creature’s insectivorous ancestry. It
is thought that these early creatures used their tails as balancing organs when leaping
to catch insects in mid-air. (1981: 68)
Of the desert shark, also “descended from insectivore stock,” he writes:

It is sausage-shaped with a blunt, strong head and powerful shovel-like feet. It swims
through the sand rather than burrowing, bursting into the rodents’ nesting cham-
bers, which it locates using the sensory pits at the end of its nose. It is almost com-
pletely hairless and avoids the extremes of temperature [in the arid desert regions] by
remaining underground most of the time. (72)
Likewise, in narrating “the rise of the predator rat,” Dixon resort to his charac-
teristic hypothetical-historical mode to detail how “the spread of man to all parts
of the world encouraged [rodents’ and especially rats’] proliferation and after man’s
demise they continued to flourish in the refuse created by the disruption and decay
of human civilization” (40). He constructs the not-yet-existent species’ contrary-to-
fact profile as follows:
As the rats expanded to occupy the niches left by the dwindling carnivores their
teeth evolved to fulfil their new role. The gnawing incisors developed long, stab-
bing points and were equipped with blades that could cut into and grip their
prey. . . . To make the dentition effective the jaw articulation changed from a
rotary grinding motion into a more powerful up and down action. This dentition
was crucial in the development of the predator rats and allowed them to radiate
into the numerous forms and varieties seen throughout the world today. . . . In
temperate latitudes the larger herbivores, the grazers and browsers of the plains
and forests that were one time prey to the wolf, have now become the prey of
the falanx, Amphimorphodus cynomorphus, a very large dog-like rat which hunts
in packs. The evolution of this form involved the modification of the limbs from
the fairly generalized scampering legs of the rat to the very sophisticated running
organs with small, thickly padded feet, and long shanks powered by strong mus-
cles and tendons. (40)
Figure C.5 The parashrew (Pennatacaudus volitarius).
Credit line: From Dougal Dixon’s After Man, illustrated by Diz Wallis, p. 68.
Copyright Dougal Dixon.
Figure C.6 The desert shark (Psammonarus spp.).

Credit line: from Dougal Dixon’s After Man, illustrated by Diz Wallis, p. 73. Copyright
Dougal Dixon.
Figure C.7 Possible scenario for the evolution of the rat, from Peter Ward’s Future
Evolution, illustrated by Alexis Rockman, p. 122.
Credit line: Alexis Rockman, Rat Evolution (1999), oil and acrylic on wood, 15 × 50 inches.
Dixon’s focus on the expansion of rodent populations and on the emergence

of larger species of rats resonates with the Peter Ward’s account of rats in Future
Evolution: The Illuminated History of Life to Come (2001). Ward’s text, illustrated by
Alexis Rockman, likewise envisions an enlarged role for rats in the world to come,
as suggested by figure C.7.25 Even as he acknowledges that “picking the evolution-
ary winners of the future—those that will evolve to take the place of the ‘losers’
(those going extinct)—is something like trying to pick winners in the stock mar-
ket” (121), Ward draws on macroevolutionary modeling methods (Stanley 1979/
1998, 1987) in identifying rats and mice along with snakes as champion “evolvers,”
Coda ■ 279
or supertaxa. These are classes of animals that produce many long-lasting species
and that are therefore “prime candidates for refilling the world with new species fol-
lowing any mass extinction” (124)—with Ward, like Myers (1996) and Tennesen
(2015), suggesting we are currently in the midst of a sixth, anthropogenic extinction
event that will be followed by the emergence of new forms of plant as well as animal
life.26
The perspective structure of figure C.7, however, needs to be taken into account.
Granted, the illustration does suggest that rats will evolve to be larger than they are
at present; but even at the terminal point of the hypothesized evolutionary series the
rat reaches a size that is at most two to three times the size of today’s species. In con-
trast with Dixon’s post-“Age of Man” megafauna (Dixon 1981: 48, 61, 66, 83, 93),
then, Ward produces a hypothetical bestiary that is in line with studies of evolu-
tionary processes suggesting a trend not only toward diminished biodiversity on
earth but also toward “the dwarfing of large species and the enlarging of small ones,
with extinction occurring among the largest and smallest” (135; see also Myers
1996: 41–43). With Rockman’s assistance in figure C.7, Ward uses counterfactual
scene building to chart constrained phylogenetic pathways for the future species
that, in a world hypothesized to feature “no evolutionary novelty” (134), continue
to share the earth with humans.
Significantly, although Ward himself invokes Wells’s time machine for the purpose
of taking a “fanciful, if dyspeptic flight” 10 million years into the future (135–37),
which is inhabited by an untold number of flies and other cockroach-sized insects,
tiny mammals, “a few as large as cats but most rat-, mouse-, or even shrew-sized,”
larger snakes, and human-attacking crows with eagle-like beaks and knifelike tal-
ons, Ward characterizes Dixon’s “semi-whimsical” (133) alternative zoology as “a
completely untestable vision residing in the realm of fantasy” and compares the ani-
mals of After Man to those portrayed, in less detail, in Wells’s fictional account (6).
Ward’s critique reflects a broader ambivalence about the methods and purpose of
alternative zoology itself, even among practitioners. Thus, in a post about specula-
tive zoology on the Tetrapod Zoology blog hosted by Scientific American, paleozoolo-
gist Darren Naish (2015) confesses to “confused feelings” about the project. As he
puts it, whereas from one perspective the endeavor can be seen as “fun” yet “frivo-
lous and childish, divorced from actual science” (para. 1), from another perspec-
tive speculative zoology can be viewed as providing “educational examples of how
actual evolutionary processes are thought to occur” and supporting “the develop-
ment of genuine hypotheses about the future” (para. 2). The ambivalence that both
Ward and Naish express about speculative zoology can be traced back, arguably, to a
more general concern about the limitations of attempts to extend narrative modes of
sense making from meso-to macro-level spatiotemporal scales. When exactly does
the use of counterfactual scene building, given its status as a narrative-based affor-
dance for compressing more or less massively distributed phenomena into a human-
scale frames for understanding, stop being a resource for the exploratory modeling
of macroevolutionary processes and instead enter the domain of pseudoscience?
Going forward, this question will be centrally important for any investigation of
bionarratological issues—issues of storytelling at species scale—under the wider

rubric of a narratology beyond the human.
I return to ideas from speculative zoology below, in my discussion of another way
in which narrative provides means for engaging with suprahuman evolutionary and
ecological processes—namely, through the cross-mapping of trait codes associated
with different kinds of animal life. But first, I consider how stories can facilitate the
modeling of macro-level phenomena by means of allegorical projection, whereby
the event-sequence in a source narrative functions as a template for interpreting the
events of one or more target narrative(s).
Allegorical Projection and Allegorical Laddering
In Northrop Frye’s (1974) classic account, allegory obtains “when the events of
a narrative obviously and continuously refer to another simultaneous structure
of events or ideas, whether historical events, moral or philosophical ideas, or nat-
ural phenomena” (12). Figure C.8 presents a visualization of the basic structure
involved. This structure is exemplified by texts such as John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s
Progress (1678), where the Pilgrim’s journey from the City of Destruction to the
Celestial City in the primary storyworld refers simultaneously to a spiritual journey
that, taking place in a parallel storyworld, leads from sinfulness and despair to sal-
vation and faith. Other examples include animal allegories of the sort described in
chapter 4, such as George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945) and Art Spiegelman’s Maus,
where nonhuman characters and their relationships and conflicts figure forth rela-
tionships and conflicts among humans.
In turn, basic or first-order allegories of this sort provide a bridge to emergent,
macro-level phenomena through a process for which I propose the term “allegori-
cal laddering.” Figures C.9 and C.10, representing three-rung and four-rung ladders,
suggest how such laddering involves a stacking of allegorical projections one on top
of another. The more rungs a text encompasses, the greater the semantic complex-
ity of the macro-level modeling at stake—there being an interpretative, but not a
structural, limit on the number of rungs that can be added. Thus, in comparison
with an account featuring a three-rung allegorical ladder, an account that uses a four-
rung ladder recruits more heavily from narrative-based affordances to shrink the gap
between the mesodomain of observable experience and the strongly or even max-
imally emergent phenomena that supervene—whether in the autonomous or the
environmental mode—on the lifeworld.
Allegorical level
Level of literal events
Figure C.8 The basic structure of allegory (adapted from Frye 1974).

Coda ■ 281
Figure C.9 Allegorical laddering: a three-rung ladder.
Figure C.10 Allegorical laddering: a four-rung ladder.
Compare, in this connection, London’s The Call of the Wild. As suggested in

c hapter 4, London uses Buck’s experiences—more specifically, his (re)integration
into the wolfpack at the end of the text—to allegorize the need for humans to throw
off the shackles of civilization and embrace the more primordial ways of living that
London associates with the Alaskan wild. The narrative thereby exemplifies a three-
rung allegorical ladder (figure C.9). London’s novel, in other words, engages in a
double mapping: from the life history of Buck as an individual dog to the larger spe-
cies history of canids in general, and then from the species history of canids to the
species history of humans.
Research on the fossil record, as suggested earlier, also involves what can be
described as allegorical projection, and in some contexts a three-r ung allegor-
ical ladder whose structure mirrors that of the ladder used by London in the
domain of fiction. Granted, the mechanism or vehicle of projection differs when
one shifts from a literary allegory like London’s to fossil-based research in areas
such as paleontology and evolutionary biology. In Peircean terms, fossils, by pre-
serving evidence of flora and fauna associated with past ecological niches and
the broader biospheric conditions that made them possible, function as indexi-
cal signs, in the manner of smoke signifying fire, or a noise in a forest signifying
a falling branch or perhaps the movements of a predator (see Peirce 2011; see
also Kohn 2013: 27–70). In the case of an index like a fossil, an effect signifies
the causal factors that helped bring it about—though with fossils considerable
expertise is required to identify and contextualize the precise causal factors at
issue (see Dodd and Stanton 1990: 10–13; 223–76; Donoghue and Smith 2004;
Switek 2010). By contrast, London’s animal-to-human allegory operates along
what Peirce would characterize as symbolic lines. Symbols, for Peirce, carry con-
ventional meanings, in the manner of linguistic expressions, musical scores, or
the insignia on military uniforms. In both paleontological inquiry and London’s
primitivist allegory, however, the same fundamental projective structure can be
identified. This structure bridges, with greater or fewer intermediary layers or
“rungs,” the meso and macro levels of creatural life on earth.
As the field is characterized by Henry Woods in his classic 1950 text, Paleontology
Invertebrate, paleontology seeks to reconstruct “the race-history or phylogeny of
animals and plants” from the physical evidence afforded by “the stratigraphical suc-
cession of fossil forms” (11–12). Woods’s account of how research is conducted
in the field is predominantly inspired by Darwin’s gradualist model of evolution as
opposed to saltationist models that allow for sudden discontinuities in the evolu-
tionary record, abrupt—that is, large-scale--shifts in the course of phylogenetic his-
tories.27 Thus Woods writes that fossil
specimens found at the top and bottom of [a geological] formation, and also at
certain intervening levels, [sometimes] differ so much from one another that they
appear to belong to distinct species. When, however, examples are collected from all
the beds of the formation, the apparently distinct species are seen to be connected by
intermediate forms, and a series, showing a graduate passage from the species found
in the lowest bed to that in the highest, can be obtained. (12)28
Thus characterized, paleontological study can be parsed into the basic structure
of allegory diagrammed in figure C.8, with the fossil record as it exists in the cur-
rent moment of investigation indexing (once the proper interpretive protocols
are developed) the evolutionary history of the flora and fauna preserved in that
record.
As writers like Shubin (2008) and Tennesen (2015) note, however, the fossil
record suggests how multiple stratigraphical successions may in fact be layered upon
one another in a given location, because of dramatic geophysical changes to the earth
over more or less extended timescales. In such contexts, what I have described as a
three-rung allegorical ladder manifests itself. Shubin, suggesting that “every rock sit-
ting on the ground has a story to tell: the story of what the world looked like as that
particular rock formed,” also underscores that the fossil record as a whole requires
fossil analysts to “come to grips with the vastness of time and the extraordinary ways
our planet has changed” (2008: 11):
Inside the rock is evidence of past climates and surroundings often vastly different
from those of today . . .. The presence of warm-adapted species at what today are
extreme altitudes and latitudes [as indicated by, for example, fossilized seashells
Coda ■ 283
discovered on Mt. Everest, as well as the remnants of an ancient tropical delta in the
Arctic] attests to how much our planet can change: mountains rise and fall, climates
warm and cool, and continents move about. (11)
Here Shubin moves from the level of the recovered fossils themselves, to the spe-
cies histories of which they provide a record, to the way patterns in the convergence
of such evolutionary histories in space as well as time reveal, in turn, a sometimes
startling history of biogeographical changes at planetary or macroevolutionary scales.
Tennesen (2015: 11ff.) likewise engages in a double projection—or sets up a three-
rung allegory—in his account of the fossils on the trail that leads through the Capitan
Reef at Guadalupe Mountains National Park in Texas, where “a quarter of a billion
years ago,” prior to the Permian mass extinction event and the appearance of the
dinosaurs, this one-time reef “was still glowing with a halo of life formed by millions
of juvenile fish and other marine creatures” (13). Following the projective pattern
also used by Shubin, Tennesen moves from the fossils to the species histories pre-
served in or rather projectible from these “calcified remains of ancient reef animals
that had once been bound together in a mass of life” (13) to the still wider-scope
story of the biogeographical changes that the Permian mass extinction event, now
attributed to volcanic activity, created some 252 million years ago not only in North
America but across the world’s continents (see Erwin 2006; Tennesen 2015: 16–21).
Other fossil-based research, some of it also reported by Tennesen (2015), can
involve even more complex, or layered, kinds of allegorical projection. Take, for
example, work on trace fossils in ichnology, characterized by J. Robert Dodd and
Robert J. Stanton (1990) as “the study of the effects of biological agents on sedi-
ments” (191). Working within the broader field of paleoecology, which studies
“the interactions of organisms with one another and with their environment in
the geologic past” (1), ichnologists investigating trace fossils concern themselves
with “features formed by the activity of organisms during their life, but [not] the
remains of the organisms themselves [i.e., body fossils] . . .. The most thoroughly
studied category of trace fossils . . . are tracks, trails, and burrows in soft sediment,
and borings and other evidence of bioerosion” (191).29 In this connection, Dodd
and Stanton make use of the concept of bioturbation, writing that “bioturbation is
a general term applied to the disruptive effect of organisms on primary sedimen-
tary features, but is most commonly used when the resulting biogenic structures
are pervasive and/or impart a generally stirred appearance to the sediment” (191).
Ichnological research on bioturbative effects thus entails, in effect, projection or
laddering across four levels. The analyst moves from the trace fossil (level 1), to
the hypothesized bioturbative behaviors of the animal inferred to have caused the
fossil in question (level 2), thence to the paleoecological environments in the con-
text of which those behaviors can be inferred to have been adaptive (level 3), and
thence—at least in some instances—to the overarching history of animal-environ-
ment interactions that are assumed to have played a shaping role in a species’ evo-
lutionary history, precisely by requiring adaptations of the sort studied on the third
level (level 4).
A four-rung ladder of this sort emerges from Tennesen’s (2015: 203–4) account

of research by Smith et al. (2010) on the fossilized remains of ancient pack rat mid-
dens, or bundles of refuse left over from the rats’ nests. In this case, the fecal pellets
(of varying sizes) contained in the middens constitute trace fossils. Attributed to
pack rats in a first inferential step, or projection, the pellets also indicate, in a second
projection, the size and diet of the rats. The researchers then “characterize body and
genetic responses to climate [= third projection] in populations of pack rats spread
out over thousands of years [= fourth projection]” (Tennesen 2015: 204). Indeed,
demonstrating the iterability of this laddering procedure, what can be described as
a five-rung ladder takes shape in Dodd and Stanton’s (1990) account of how the
burrowing behavior of the trapdoor spider—a species belonging to the Ctenizidae
family of spiders—can be used as a basis for ichnological study of ancient burrowers
(see figure C.11).
Here, centering not on “excremental fossils” such as fecal pellets but rather
on fossilized evidence belonging to the category of “tracks, trails, and burrows
in soft sediment, and borings and other evidence of bioerosion” (191), Dodd
and Stanton’s account again suggests how, by facilitating translations of event-
sequences across multiple temporal levels or contexts, the projective mechan-
ism of allegory scaffolds storytelling at species scale. More precisely, Dodd and
Stanton (1990) explore how the current-day traces left by animals such as the
burrow-dwelling trapdoor spider can be used as a means for interpreting the bur-
rowing behavior of ancient animals (206), in effect supplementing with a fifth
rung (or projective level) the four-r ung model that Tennesen (2015) sketches
in his review of Smith et al.’s (2010) research. This fifth rung emerges through
what Dodd and Stanton refer to as “a strict substantive application of the prin-
ciple of uniformitarianism—that the ecology of present organisms is the key
to that of past organisms” (13). According to this principle of paleoecological
research, “The most basic method of interpreting environments from fossils is by
assuming that the environmental requirements of the fossils were the same as the
most closely related living representatives and transferring this environmental
information from the modern to the fossil” (13).
Hence, insofar as burrows left by extant animals such as the trapdoor spider con-
stitute an “essential survival strategy,” namely, that of using resources at and above
the substrate into which the animal has burrowed, while living “in the more equat-
able habitat below the substrate” (198–99), it can be inferred that, for prehistoric
creatures as well, “a dwelling burrow provides protection for the inhabitant from
both predators and physical conditions above the substrate” (199), including clima-
tological changes over extended timescales. Dodd’s and Stanton’s five-rung ladder
thus spans the following projections, or translations across levels of scale: modern-
day traces (left by creatures like the trapdoor spider) > trace fossils > the ancient ani-
mals inferred to have left those traces > the paleoecological environments in which
those behaviors emerged as adaptations > the longer history of animal-environment
interactions that, in promoting or necessitating such adaptations, in turn impinged
on the evolutionary history of a given species.
Coda ■ 285
Figure C.11 Trapdoor spider, as portrayed in B. J. Kaston’s How to Know the Spiders, 3rd
edition (1978: 69). In reproducing this illustration, Dodd and Stanton (1990: 198)
provide the following caption: “Trapdoor spider lurking at door of its web-lined dwelling.
Upper right, burrow with door open; upper left, burrow with door closed. Burrow is
inconspicuous because outer side of door is covered with dirt.”
Credit line: Used with permission from McGraw-Hill Global Education Holdings, LLC.
Emergent Individuals; or, The Cross-Mapping

of Trait Codes
Although a more exhaustive analysis would require exploring the full range of ways
in which stories can be used to model macro-level phenomena, the fourth and final
narrative-based resource to be discussed here is the cross-mapping of trait codes
associated with different kinds of characters, or storyworld individuals. In turning
to this last narrative affordance, I shift from the syntagmatic or sequential axis of
stories to their paradigmatic axis; my focus moves from considering how narratives
arrange events in time to considering how they draw upon a repertoire of elements
that can be grouped into categories, and how (interrelations among) those catego-
ries bear on understandings of the qualities and abilities of the agents who feature
in nonfictional as well as fictional storyworlds. More specifically, I explore how by
intermixing classes or categories of attributes associated with different kinds of char-
acters, narratives can figure forth “emergent individuals,” bioagents-in-flux whose
emergence within macro-level phylogenetic histories constitutes a core concern of
storytelling at species scale.
The present discussion of emergent individuals is informed by my previous study
of characters in narratives vis-à-vis research on categorization processes (Herman
2013: 193–215). As in that earlier study, key precedents for my approach include
Barthes’s (1970/1974) account of the “semic code” that structures engagements with
storyworld agents, Chatman’s (1978) and Culler’s (1975) related work on culturally
and historically variable trait-codes, and more recent research on the nature and func-
tions of characters in fictional worlds.30 For his part, Barthes suggested in S/Z that, in
conjunction with four other “codes for reading,” a semic code governs the process by
which story recipients identify and interpret characters and their attributes, enabling
semantic features of the text (e.g., lists of character attributes or descriptions of the places
they inhabit) to be categorized as information relevant for understanding persons, fic-
tional and otherwise. Taking inspiration from Barthes, Chatman and Culler described
characters as paradigms of traits. In Chatman’s scheme, a character is a “vertical assem-
blage of [a set of traits, or more or less enduring qualities or dispositions] intersect-
ing the syntagmatic chain of events that comprise the plot” (1978: 127; see also Culler
1975: 236–37). Chatman thus explores how interpreters rely on their knowledge of
cultural and historically variable trait-codes to use textual cues as a means for projecting,
or constituting, individuals in stories. These trait codes, or repertoires of trait-names,
derive from a variety of sources, including specialized domains such as psychoanalysis
(he has a clothes fetish) and literary history (they compared themselves to Romeo and Juliet)
as well as the broader domain of folk psychology (he was apt to exaggerate others’ faults
and underestimate his own) (see also Schneider 2001: 617–27). Trait codes can also
originate from cultural understandings of animal life and of biological structures and
processes more generally, not to mention more technical discourse on these subjects.
Compare locutions such as Despite claiming to be injured, he moved like a cat out on the
tennis court; I’m blind as a bat without my eyeglasses; You’ve been a busy beaver; and Recent
estimates suggest that dogs’ olfactory sense is a thousand times keener than humans’.
In turn, individuals in storyworlds can be more or less readily subsumed under
available trait-codes—whatever their ultimate source. Hence the division between
the two strategies for engaging with characters that have been labeled categoriza-
tion versus personalization (figure C.12; see also Eder, Jannidis, and Schneider
2010; Jannidis 2004, 2009). The term categorization can be used for cases where
textual details about characters are amenable to the top-down application of pre-
existing repertoires of trait names; in such contexts, the character can be said to be
Coda ■ 287
categorization personalization
code code
character character
Figure C.12 Characters and categorization processes.
acting true to type, as when the protagonist in a revenge plot, such as Paul Kersey in
Michael Winner’s 1974 movie Death Wish, becomes a vigilante in response to vio-
lence inflicted upon his family. Conversely, personalization obtains when a charac-
ter, instead of inviting assimilation to available categories or codes, requires a more
bottom-up mode of engagement, resulting in more or less complete individuation of
the character. In such instances, where a character’s membership in a given category
is de-emphasized, becoming one attribute among others (Schneider 2001: 625–
26), individuals in narratives push against the boundaries of available conceptual
models. A case in point is the sui generis combination of traits in the titular hero of
Shakespeare’s Hamlet, who fails to instantiate features (single-mindedness of pur-
pose, readiness to capitalize on the first opportunity for revenge, and so on) that
typify protagonists in revenge plots.
To extrapolate: Insofar as they constitute an exploratory workspace for the (re)
combination or rather cross-mapping of trait codes bound up with personalization,
which can be recast in more species-neutral terms as individualization, nonfic-
tional as well as fictional narratives provide means for grasping emergent phenom-
ena, including those associated with species transformations. At the same time,
accounts of emergent individuals reveal how narratives can work to recalibrate the
trait-codes used to make sense of storyworld agents—as figure C.13 illustrates.
Cross-mapping of the sort involved in individualization, where code x involves
attributes belonging to one category (compare Hamlet’s revenge-mindedness) and
code y involves attributes belonging to another category (compare Hamlet’s con-
templativeness and tendency to hesitate), creates a dialectical interplay between
codex codex+y codey
character
Figure C.13 Emergent individuals and the convergence of trait codes.

bottom-up and top-down modes of interpretation. Hence the process of situating

an agent at the intersection of trait codes previously kept distinct can give rise to
new, integrative codes marked by a convergence of traits—namely, the traits instan-
tiated, in a novel way, in the emergent individual. The same dialectic comes into
play in narratives that characterize bioagents at species scale.
Convergent Codes and Emergent Individuals: Nonfiction
My initial comparison of Ovid’s Metamorphoses with Velasquez-Manoff ’s account

of newly hybridized animals already suggests how, across genres, narrative provides
means for tracing out trajectories of change that involve an intermixture of biologi-
cal categories, a cross-mapping of species traits. Ovid, in positing divine retribution
as a mechanism for species transformation, projects a storyworld marked by what
Pavel (1986) would characterize as a salient ontology, divided into realms occu-
pied by mortal and immortal beings. Within that ontological setup, Ovid evokes
emergent individuals by situating them at the intersection of traits associated with
humans and magpies. Velasquez-Manoff, by contrast, sets up a flat ontology; in his
account species-level transformations arise from large-scale environmental changes,
including those brought about by anthropogenic impacts such as habitat loss and
climate change. Yet here too new kinds of bioagents emerge from a cross-mapping
of trait-codes, whether the intermixture in question be the convergence, in modern-
day humans, of attributes associated with our sub-Saharan ancestors and with our
Neanderthal forebears; the rise of grolar or pizzly bears that, because of a warming
arctic, blend features of hitherto distinct species; or the emergence of the coywolf
that, originating from the “canis soup” of coyotes, wolves, and dogs, “is a study in the
balancing act required to survive as a medium-sized predator in a landscape full of
people”—a predator that, “40 percent larger than the Western coyote, with powerful
wolflike jaws,” has combined the coyote’s ability to thrive where humans live with
“the wolf ’s more social nature, which allows for pack hunting” (2014: 34). In parallel
with the other emergent individuals featured in his account, Velasquez-Manoff pro-
files the coywolf as “a predator whose exceptional adaptability has derived, in large
part, from the hodgepodge nature of its genome,” such that “in an exceedingly brief
period, coyote, wolf and dog genes have been remixed into something new” (34).
Further, as might be surmised from my previous discussion of alternative zool-
ogy, the hypothetical bestiaries developed by speculative biologists consist wholly
of what I am calling emergent individuals. The counterfactual lines of dinosaur
development imagined in The New Dinosaurs (Dixon 1988), like the evolution-
ary trajectories predicted in After Man (Dixon 1981) and Future Evolution (Ward
2001), entail a convergence of species characteristics that are currently divided
up among creatures that belong to more or less widely separated biological taxa,
like Dixon’s desert sharks, or that do not presently exist in nature at all, like
Ward’s outsized rats (figure C.7) or Dixon’s contrary-to-fact dinosaur lineages
(1988). Indeed, in the case of Dixon’s “parashrew” (figure C.5), individualization
occurs through a cross-mapping of (1) traits associated with shrews—traits that
Coda ■ 289
(in Dixon’s hypothesized future) shrews will acquire via adaptation to living at
altitude—and (2) traits associated with a particular class of inanimate objects,
namely, parachutes. In effect, then, Dixon’s prospective narrative of the parashrew
inverts accounts of how artifacts have been or might be designed according to
principles of biomimicry (Benyus 1997; Xia 2016). In modeling this emergent
individual, rather than considering how forms taken from nature might inspire
technical innovation, Dixon instead uses current-day technology as a source
domain and maps it onto a target domain comprising one of the bioagents of a
hypothesized, far-distant future.
Convergent Codes and Emergent Individuals: Fiction
Fictional narratives, too, can adumbrate a convergence of categories of attributes—

in this case, a cross-mapping of biological characteristics—by portraying deliberate
attempts at species hybridization, as well as inadvertent intermixtures. Once again
science fiction, with its capacity to challenge dominant ontologies (along the lines
discussed in c hapter 2), provides environments that are particularly favorable to
imagining emergent individuals, and thereby engaging with the project of storytell-
ing at species scale.
Inadvertent hybridization features prominently in George Langelaan’s 1957 sci-fi
short story “The Fly,” for example, as well as in the 1958 and 1986 film adaptations
of the story by Kurt Neumann and David Cronenberg, respectively. In Langelaan’s
original text, André Delambre (renamed Seth Brundle in the Cronenberg remake)
invents a technology capable of transmitting solid objects through space by disinte-
grating and then reintegrating them—via matter-transmitting and matter-receiving
stations. When a fly accidentally gets into the matter-transmitting station along with
Delambre as the inventor tests the technology on himself, Delambre is reintegrated
as a human with a fly’s head and arm, while the fly acquires, reciprocally, a white
head and arm. Retrying the disintegration-reintegration process in an attempt to
undo this intermixture of species traits, Delambre only complicates matters, over-
laying his insectoid-human form with the characteristics of a cat that had been lost
in transmission in a previous experiment.
Although Neumann’s 1958 adaptation omits the incident involving the cat, it
interpolates a scene near the end of the film in which the fly now bearing Delambre’s
head and arm gets caught in a spider’s web and cries out for help as the spider comes
in for the kill. If anything, then, the 1958 adaptation accentuates the ontological
anxieties concerning the porousness of species boundaries—anxieties about the
reconfigurability of the material world and hence of the bioagents who inhabit that
world—that the original story’s plot brings into view. At the same time, Langelaan’s
text and its adaptations suggest how different narrative affordances for macro-level
modeling can complement one another. Thus “The Fly” creates a convergence of
codes—codes used to assign attributes to various nonhuman species and also to
human versus nonhuman animals—by staging an instantaneous swapping of spe-
cies characteristics. This cross-mapping or convergence complements temporal
structuring of the sort used in Kafka’s “Report for an Academy,” where a sped-up
version of the evolutionary process produces a similar end-result.
Other sci-fi narratives center on more deliberate attempts to bring about emer-
gent individuals; some of these texts engage with the sorts of issues that have been
raised by modern-day work in biotechnology, including the creation of “chimeras”
by researchers who, in an effort to develop treatments for particular kinds of diseases
or injuries, implant human stem cells into the embryos of other animals.31 H. G.
Wells’s 1896 sci-fi thriller The Island of Dr. Moreau, discussed previously in chapter 2,
provides an early precedent for fictional accounts of emergent individuals created
through biotechnological research. Granted, the research methods in question
involve vivisection rather than the implantation of stem cells, but the metamorphs
Moreau creates—that is, the animals he alters mentally as well as physically while
using humans as his benchmark species—anticipate the chimeras or hybridized
humanimals that now feature in modern-day biomedicine (Danta 2012: 690–94).
At the same time, Wells uses Prendick’s encounter with these metamorphs, engi-
neered through bioscience, to explore how evolutionary theory opens up non-or
anti-human-centric understandings of the mutability of species—and thus of trans-
species relationships. Moreau’s violent attempt to map human traits onto nonhuman
animals reveals possibilities for the converse mapping relationship; hence Prendick’s
concluding remarks about how, because of his experiences on Moreau’s island, the
humans he sees when he returns to London have revealed themselves to be emer-
gent individuals in their own right: “I could not persuade myself that the men and
women I met were not also another, still passably human, Beast People, animals
half-wrought into the outward image of human souls; and that they would presently
begin to revert, to show first this bestial mark and then that” (138).
Two other texts discussed in chapter 2, though engaging with more recent
developments in biotechnological research, use fictional humanimals along simi-
lar lines—to create thought-experiments focusing on the mutability, and porous-
ness, of species categories. Peter Dickinson’s young adult novel Eva (1988) and
Laurence Gonzales’s Lucy (2010), in projecting storyworlds organized around
human-primate relationships in particular, again suggest how narrative can be used
to stage the convergence of trait-codes, thereby affording resources for storytell-
ing at species scale. The novum of Gonzales’s text is the technical possibility of
cross-breeding humans and nonhuman primates; the novel’s protagonist is thus an
“interspecific hybrid” (45) who combines characteristics of humans and bonobos.
For its part, Dickinson’s novel imagines a future world in which scientific research
on “neurone memory” allows human identities to be resituated within nonhuman
bodies. Both texts thus foreground macro-level issues to which emergent individu-
als give rise.
For one thing, both Gonzales and Dickinson use internal focalization to drama-
tize how a convergence of human and nonhuman attributes (and species histories)
might play out in the domains of perception and memory, for any given individual.
Not only does Lucy enjoy a fuller sensory attunement to her environment than her
human counterparts; what is more, when a school psychiatrist asks her whether she
Coda ■ 291
remembers anything about her deceased mother, Gonzales in portraying Lucy’s act
of remembering gives to that act a dual or hybrid profile. The act blends (1) an aware-
ness of the protocols associated with her current, human-dominated surroundings
and (2) a reliving of the experiential particulars of being an infant who was born
to another kind of being: “But what could Lucy tell [the psychiatrist]? . . . Should
she describe how she had clung to the hair on her mother’s back as she went fly-
ing through the forest? . . . She recalled how Leda [the bonobo from whose DNA
Lucy was in part bred] would make Lucy the nicest nests in the highest branches”
(Gonzales 2010: 82–83). Analogously, but in a way that reverses the polarity of the
humanimal blending at work in Lucy, when the severely injured Eva awakens from
a coma to discover that her consciousness has been transplanted into the body of
Kelly, a young female chimp, she too takes on the role of an emergent individual—
one featuring, as McCallum (1999/2013) puts it, “both a present chimpanzee body
and an absent past human body, which is present as an aspect of [the protagonist’s]
human memory” (85). Here Dickinson’s text resonates with current debates about
research involving pluripotent human stem cells injected into other animals’ bod-
ies, the aim being to grow organs that might be transplanted back into humans for
therapeutic purposes. Given that the migratory paths taken by these cells cannot
be fully predicted, and that in some cases the implanted cells do move to the brain
(Kaplan 2017: paras. 6, 25; Stein 2016a), the research at issue has the potential to
create emergent individuals like Eva—that is, nonhuman animals with (partly)
human minds.
But Eva, like Lucy, raises even broader questions concerning the impact such
emergent individuals may have on evolutionary trajectories over longer timescales.
Eva has the capability, through her offspring, of impinging on the evolution of non-
human primates, and by extension enabling a re-emergence of the human with an
altered, more adaptive species identity—one more attuned to larger, transhuman
ecosystems and thus less prone to self-destruction (compare Plumwood 2002a: 97–
122). The same theme manifests itself in Gonzales’s novel, through the child that,
fathered by Lucy’s human partner, is about to be born when the narrative ends. This
concluding development highlights the salience of a claim made by Lucy’s own
father in one of his research notebooks: namely, that “humans can be moved into
a more favorable spot in the evolutionary matrix, a position in which we may enjoy
some of the superior qualities of our bonobo cousins” (48). Whatever its bearing
on current-day developments in bioscience and biotechnology, the articulation of
this claim in itself demonstrates the power of fictional narratives like Gonzales’s and
Dickinson’s to explore far-ranging questions about trait-blending bioagents who
emerge through processes of species convergence or hybridization.
n B U I L D I N G A B I O N A R R A T O L O G Y: T H E S C O P E
AND LIMITS OF MULTISCALE NARRATION
In the previous section, I sketched out just some of the structural resources that
narrative affords when it comes to engaging with species-level transformations and
other phenomena that exceed the size limits of the lifeworld. I conclude by high-
lighting two risks associated with multiscale narratives of the sort that I have been
discussing; these two risks, which I touched on in a different context in chapter 7,
are the obverse of one another. The first risk is hyperextending—or overestimating
the explanatory power of—narrative models of emergent, macro-level phenomena.
The second risk is underestimating narrative’s potential as a resource for modeling
emergent processes of this kind. The project of building a bionarratology, as it is
described here, requires taking both risks into account.
In chapter 7, I discussed how Thalia Field, in Bird Lovers, Backyard, critiques
Konrad Lorenz for telling animal stories that hyperextend human-centric frames
for understanding behavior. The result: undertheorized and overconfident acts of
“species ventriloquism” (Field 2010: 78). Such hyperextensions of the human are
doubly ironic, given that from the start classical ethology defined (and policed) itself
against what early practitioners such as Lorenz and Tinbergen construed as anthro-
pomorphic explanations. To this end, ethologists employed the vocabulary of the
mental only to “revoke, translate, or problematize it in some way” (Crist 1999: 118).
Thus Crist (1999) comments on the use of hedges, reformulations, and scare quotes
around terms like “afraid” in mid-twentieth-century ethological descriptions of ani-
mal behavior; in this way analysts expressed skepticism about and deauthorized
talk of animal minds (118). Even earlier, as noted in chapter 6, in an effort to guard
against what he took to be illicit extensions of human frames of reference beyond
the species boundary, C. Lloyd Morgan formulated in his 1894 Introduction to
Comparative Psychology what became known as “Morgan’s Canon.” This principle
of parsimonious mental-state ascription holds that “in no case may we interpret an
action as the outcome of the exercise of a higher psychical faculty, if it can be inter-
preted as the outcome of the exercise of one which stands lower in the psychological
scale” (qtd. in Greenwood 2009/2015: 223).
In response, analysts working in a variety of fields have set out reasons for
rethinking the scope and validity of Morgan’s Canon and its later variants.32 Granted,
with the exception of Bekoff ’s (2013) proposal for a “biocentric anthropomor-
phism,” the accounts of animal behavior around which these debates have arisen
do not turn on questions of multiscale narration of the sort being discussed here;
rather, the accounts at issue operate at the meso level, and involve differences of
species (human vs. nonhuman animals) rather than differences of scale (meso-vs.
macro-level phenomena).33 Yet the push-pull dynamic at stake in such debates about
mental-state ascriptions across the species boundary applies mutatis mutandis to
questions raised by the use of stories to model species-level phenomena.
On the one hand, the unreflexive imposition of narrative templates—plot mod-
els, character types, perspective structures—onto situations and events massively
distributed in time and space can only be a quixotic effort to capture emergent pro-
cesses that exceed the boundaries of the lifeworld. Any approach that overestimates
narrative’s heuristic potential in this way is indeed vulnerable to Abbott’s (2003,
2008b) critique of storytelling beyond the human. On the other hand, however,
more critical and reflexive uses of narrative-based affordances to engage with a more
Coda ■ 293
sharply differentiated array of emergent phenomena remain resistant if not immune

to such critiques. In short, in building a bionarratology—a narratology beyond the
human—analysts must be attuned not just to the limits but also to the possibilities
of narrative when it comes to grappling with macro-level processes, like those that
shape animal species and their interactions with one another and their surrounding
terrestrial environments.
As this last formulation suggests, underestimating possibilities for storytelling at
species scale is just as problematic as overestimating those possibilities. Consider
in this connection recent efforts to supplement Darwin’s original account of evolu-
tion with models that factor in inheritance systems operating in tandem with those
anchored in the domain of genetics. As noted previously, Jablonka and Lamb, in
Evolution in Four Dimensions (2005/2014), argue for the existence of several suprage-
netic information-transmission systems—including epigenetic, behavioral, and sym-
bolic systems—and argue that these inheritance systems can influence evolutionary
change, thereby supplementing Darwin’s and neo-Darwinians’ focus on the genetic
inheritance system as the driver of evolution.34 This multidimensional model not
only suggests that some of the factors bearing on speciation and species change lend
themselves to being profiled in narrative terms; it also suggests how, in the case of
humans at least, storytelling practices may have themselves contributed to as well as
emerged from the evolutionary matrix (see Scalise Sugiyama 2001; Easterlin 2012).
To sum up: even as narrative helps sustain the traditions that give shape to human
communities, across a range of timescales, stories can also be used to characterize the
species-shaping inheritance of traditions in communities beyond the human.
At issue are the behavioral and symbolic inheritance systems whose mechanisms
for transmission—traditions, processes of social learning, symbolic encoding—
resonate with narrative structures and processes. In the behavioral domain, Jablonka
and Lamb discuss how traditions of behavior—in effect, cultural versus genetic
inheritances—can spread among animal populations through socially mediated
learning.35 Modes of niche construction, for example, propagate themselves as tra-
ditions within what must be viewed as animal cultures (Odling-Smee, Laland, and
Feldman 2003; see also Avital and Jablonka 2000; Laland and Galef 2009). These
traditions can involve, for example, food preferences inculcated by the members
of nonhuman communities within specific microecologies; hence the well-known
example of the British blue tits who, in the first part of the twentieth century, began
learning (and teaching their conspecifics) how to open milk bottles delivered to
doorsteps ( Jablonka and Lamb 2005/2014: 166–67). Also relevant are regional
and even situational differences among song types produced by populations of ceta-
ceans as well as birds (170–72). For its part, the symbolic inheritance system affords
means for acquiring and transmitting information that have shaped human cultural
evolution in particular (189–227). Hence Donald’s (1991) emphasis on the role
of linguistic and more broadly symbolic systems in the evolution of humans’ cog-
nitive abilities from the starting point he terms episodic culture (149) to the fully
fledged theoretic culture that marks Homo sapiens’ current stage of development
(308–35).36
But once behavioral and symbolic domains are factored into the evolutionary
process viewed from this wider-scope perspective, it becomes necessary to rethink
assumptions about the differences of scale between storytelling practices and the
lives of species. It is not just that narrative practices are in fact continuous with the
behavioral traditions and symbolic structures that Jablonka and Lamb recast as
supragenetic inheritance systems; what is more, in a manner that parallels multi-
dimensional models of the evolutionary process, multiscale narratives, in breach-
ing the familiar boundaries of the lifeworld, may alter understandings of where that
lifeworld begins and ends in space and time. Multiscale storytelling thus has the
potential to foster keener recognition of our inextricable interconnectedness with
the larger biotic communities, the transhuman traditions, on whose survival on
our own survival depends. Maximizing that potential is the overarching goal of the
larger project to which this coda and the present book as a whole seek to contrib-
ute: the project of developing a narratology beyond the human.
n N O T E S
n Preface
1. It is important to clarify, at the outset, how I use the terms “human,” “nonhuman,” and
“animal” in this book. A key working assumption of the present study is that humans are ani-
mals too—that humans, as members of larger biotic communities, occupy one niche within
the broader domain of creatural life. For the sake of simplicity, however, I sometimes use
the terms “human” and “animal” as shorthand for “human animal” and “nonhuman animal.”
Likewise, even though the term “nonhuman” encompasses inanimate objects and artifacts as
well as living creatures, I sometimes use terms such as “nonhumans” and “nonhuman others”
as an abbreviation for “nonhuman animals.” For a wide-ranging discussion of the history,
motivations, and stakes of philosophical treatments of the human-animal distinction itself,
see Calarco’s Zoographies (2008).
2. As discussed in Herman (2013) and in c hapter 6, the goal of transdisciplinary research
is to promote genuine dialogue and exchange among multiple fields of inquiry around a
shared focus of inquiry, rather than engaging in unidirectional borrowing from a particular
field that thereby becomes dominant.
3. In a more recent formulation, Ingold (2013) argues that we humans need “to think of
ourselves not as beings but as becomings” (8), with “every trajectory of becoming [issuing]
forth within a field that is intrinsically social and biological, or in short, biosocial. That is why
we speak of humans . . . not as species beings but as biosocial becomings” (9; compare Willett
2014). Hence “We can no longer think of the organism, human or otherwise, as a discrete,
bounded entity, set over against an environment. It is rather a locus of growth within a field of
relations traced out in flows of materials” (10). Hence, too, the importance of acknowledging
“that cultural forms arise within the weave of life, in conjoint activity” (8).
4. Relatedly, noting that in a previous elaboration of his approach he used the locu-
tion “anthropology of life,” Kohn asserts that “the current iteration is closely related to that
approach except that here I am less interested in the anthropological treatment of a subject
matter (an anthropology of x) and more in an analytic that can take us beyond our subject
matter (‘the human’) without abandoning it” (2013: 229 n. 6; see also Kohn 2007). Several
decades earlier, Illies (1973) argued that zoology, in its use of the methods of natural science
to study animals, is always caught up in broader frameworks for understanding human-animal
relationships—frameworks that zoological research assumes or implies but that remain tacit
in the absence of what Kohn went on to call anthropology beyond the human. As Illies puts
it, “Hinter jeder Zoologie wird daher eine Anthropologie des Tieres stehen müssen, wenn
es gilt, den ganzen Umkreis zu erhellen, in dem Tier und Mensch miteinander existieren”
(Behind every zoology, therefore, an anthropology of animals must be posited, if one hopes
to illuminate the entire domain of human-animal interrelations) (29, my translation).
n I ntroduction
1. Critics have suggested that Kuhn’s contrast between normal or paradigmatic versus
revolutionary science is overly dichotomized, arguing that revolutionary scientific develop-
ments (e.g., the discovery of DNA) can occur in the practice of what would have to be classed
295
296 ■ Notes
as normal science on Kuhn’s own terms (see Bird 2013 for further discussion). Nonetheless,
the contrast provides a means for drawing a heuristic distinction between work that seeks to
consolidate, extend, or supplement existing paradigms for narratological inquiry, on the one
hand, and work that reconsiders those paradigms’ conceptual and institutional status, range
of applicability, and interconnections with other fields, on the other hand.
2. For discussions of plant life and plant worlds in this context, see Hartigan (2015),
Ogden et al. (2013), Power (2005), and Tsing (2015). The approach to narratology beyond
the human developed in the present study should also be distinguished from more general
projects in posthumanism—projects that interrogate assumptions of humans’ centrality and
priority vis-à-vis the nonhuman world taken as a whole, including inanimate objects and
built technologies as well as living creatures or biological agents (compare Bernaerts et al.
2014, Braidotti 2013, Grusin 2015, and Latour 1991/1993). As discussed in c hapter 1 and
elsewhere, I follow Eduardo Kohn in arguing that these generalizing projects, which in effect
lump together all that is nonhuman, deny themselves important analytic resources by failing
“to recognize that some nonhumans are selves” (2007: 5; see also Kohn 2013: 7, 91–92).
3. In chapter 2, however, I do address historical aspects of human-into-animal (and
animal-into-human) “biomutations,” drawing on Bynum’s (2001) work on medieval liter-
ature and its Ovidian precedents as well as research by other scholars who have adopted a
historical approach to the study of stories about species transformations.
4. As Dennett puts it, “Darwin’s idea had been born as an answer to questions in biology,
but it threatened to leak out . . .. If redesign [of living things in the biosphere] could be a mind-
less, algorithmic process of evolution, why couldn’t that whole process itself be the product
of evolution, and so forth, all the way down. And if mindless evolution could account for the
breathtakingly clever artifacts of the biosphere, how could the products of our own . . . minds
be exempt from evolutionary explanation? Darwin’s idea thus also threatened to spread all
the way up, dissolving the illusion of our own authorship, our own divine spark of creativity
and understanding” (63). See also Abbott (2003) and the coda to this book.
5. As one of the reviewers of an earlier version of this study succinctly put it, “If the objec-
tifying view of animals persists, . . . isn’t this at least in part due to narratives that build on
and reinforce dichotomies between human and animal life?” Along similar lines, see Herman
(2018a) for a discussion of the imagery—or rather the lack of imagery—that allows the
experiences of farm animals to be bracketed off from those regularly attributed to humans’
animal companions.
6. As Plumwood writes, “The question of anthropomorphism can often be raised with
some greater validity in the context of the denial of difference which is a key part of structures
of subordination and colonisation to which animals are subject. The charge of anthropomor-
phism may then legitimately draw our attention to a loss of sensitivity to and respect for ani-
mal difference in humanising representation” (2002a: 59).
7. Plumwood sums up as follows her critique of how the concept of anthropomorphism
is used as a counter in arguments about the limits of human-animal interactions and relation-
ships: “It is well past time we abandoned the sado-dispassionate scepticism about animal
minds and the anthropocentric Cartesian double standards that insist that the mindfulness
we can airily assume for humans must be rigorously ‘proved’ for non-humans (a task that can
easily be made impossible to succeed in by a variety of strategems [sic] of exclusion). There
is no reason to identify this kind of scepticism with rationality . . .. Should we, in the context
where we have the possibility of developing a more generous narrative and dialogical form of
rationality that allows more sensitivity to the other, bend and strain our reasoning faculties to
keep our options confined to the old reductive models?” (2002a: 61).
Notes ■ 297
8. That said, a 2017 special issue of the journal Humanities is devoted to the topic of
“Animal Narratology.”
9. For Plumwood (2002a), the environmental or ecological humanities must engage with
two fundamental tasks arising from what the philosopher describes as a “rationalist hyper-
separation of human identity from nature” (8). These tasks can be summed up as (1) “(re)
situating humans in ecological terms,” and (2) (re)situating “non-humans in ethical terms”
(8–9; see also Bird Rose et al. 2012 and, for an overview of recent developments in the field,
Heise, Christensen, and Niemann 2017). Plumwood continues: “To the extent that we
hyper-separate ourselves from nature and reduce it conceptually in order to justify domi-
nation, we not only lose the ability to empathise and to see the non-human sphere in ethical
terms, but also get a false sense of our own character and location that includes an illusory
sense of autonomy. The failure to see the non-human domain in the richer terms appropriate
to ethics licences supposedly ‘purely instrumental’ relationships that distort our perceptions
and enframings, impoverish our relations and make us insensitive to dependencies and inter-
connections—which are thus in turn a prudential hazard” (9).
10. On multispecies ethnography, see Kirksey and Helmreich (2010), Kirksey (2014,
2015), and Ogden et al. (2013); on trans-species anthropology, see Kohn (2007, 2013); on
cultural ecology, see Zapf (2016).
11. Arguing that traditional ethical approaches ranging from Aristotelian virtue ethics
to Levinasian alterity ethics do not answer fundamental questions such as “How can we
enhance our ethical rapport with nonhuman creatures with whom we enjoy, suffer, and find
meaning in evolving modes of earthly cobelonging and worldly cocreating? What basis is
there for trans-species communitarianism and cosmopolitanism?” (9), Willett turns to
Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological work as a basis for a “biosocial eros ethics” grounded
in trans-species forms of affect attunement. For Willett, such attunement, modeled after
accounts of “the preverbal social bond between infant and adult based on a predominantly
nonconscious immersion in the rhythms and tones of ordinary life,” suggests how “affect-
laden protoconversations weave substantial threads of a communicative ethics across regions
of the biosphere” (82; see also Trevarthen 1993).
12. For an updating and recontextualization of ecofeminist ideas, see Alaimo (2010,
2016), Gaard (2011), and Grusin (2017). On interspecies ethics see, in addition to Willett
(2014), Allen and McLean (2008), Bolton (2014), Calarco (2008), and Derrida (2008).
On animal geography, see, in addition to Urbanik (2012), Lorimer and Srinivasan (2013),
Philo and Wilbert (2000), and Wolch and Emel (1998). On disability and animality, see
Goodey (2011) and other sources discussed in c hapter 3. On animals and science fiction,
see Vint (2010). On historical and conceptual interlinkages among ideas of race, ethnicity,
nation, sexuality, and species, see Ahuja (2016), Chaney (2011b), Giffney and Hird (2008/
2016), Link (2018), and Walther (2014). On companion species, in addition to the analy-
ses of McHugh (2011: 65–112), Serpell (1998), and Tsing (2015), see Haraway’s (2008)
account of how humans “become with” companion animals in the more or less localized
domains that Haraway calls “naturecultures,” where dichotomies between nature and cul-
ture break down (see also Haraway 2003; Ratelle 2014: 12; and chapters 2 and 3 of this
book). For examples of the somewhat disparate strands of research mentioned here as
contributing to a questioning of the centrality or exceptionality of the human, see, among
other sources discussed in the coda, Avital and Jablonka (2000), Braidotti (2013), Calarco
(2008), Odling-Smee et al. (2003), Plumwood (2002a: 168–95), Tyler (2003, 2012), and
Wolfe (2010). On issues of extinction see Heise (2010, 2016), Turner (2007), and van
Dooren (2014).
298 ■ Notes
13. For general discussions of medium-specific affordances and constraints in cinematic

narratives about animals, in documentary contexts as well as fiction film, see Burt (2002);
the collection assembled by Lawrence and McMahon (2015), which works toward a cross-
pollination of film studies and critical animal studies; and the volume edited by Pick and Narr
(2013), which adumbrates an ecocentric approach to cinema by triangulating film studies,
human-animal studies, and ecocriticism. For a comparison of the two versions of The Hunter
that focuses on the endings of Leigh’s novel versus Nettheim’s film, see Freeman (2013). For
other studies that focus on the novel, the film adaptation, or both, see, in addition to the sources
noted in the analysis that follows, Borrell (2012), D’Aeth (2002), Himmer (2009), and Salter
(2015).
14. For more on narratological approaches to methods of thought presentation, see
table 6.1 and the surrounding discussion in chapter 6, the relevant nomenclature included
in the glossary, and my further comments below on Leigh’s narrational strategies in the
novel. See also Bartosch’s (2016) and Crane’s (2010) analyses of the role of interior mon-
ologue in the text; in Bartosch’s account, this technique, which in Crane’s interpretation
fosters in readers a paradoxical sense of distance from M (qtd. by Bartosch 2016: 265),
contributes to a literary representation of the thylacine that stages M’s genuine uncertainty
regarding the animal. In turn, argues Bartosch, engaging with sophisticated literary nar-
ratives like Leigh’s creates a mode of hermeneutic encounter that gives scope to the true
“diversity of relations, encounters, and connections between humans and other animals”
(Bartosch 2016: 261).
15. As Freeman (2013: 201) points out, although both Leigh’s novel and Nettheim’s film
use the loss of a specific human family to accentuate the enormity of the loss of the thylacine,
in reality the Tasmanian tiger was the last remaining species of an entire taxonomic category.
In this sense, the extinction of the thylacine, rather than being like the loss of a particular spe-
cies of dog, is like the loss of the whole canid family, which includes not just dogs but wolves,
coyotes, foxes, jackals, and other species.
16. For another text that presents a moving account of the last animal of its kind, in this
case told by the animal in question, see the self-narrative presented by the now-extinct dusky
seaside sparrow in the experimental text that constitutes my primary case study in c hapter 7,
Thalia Field’s Bird Lovers, Backyard (2010: 31–41). See below and the coda for more on
extinction narratives.
17. This historical interlinkage comes into play from the first page of the novel, when, just
after landing in Tasmania, M sees “a fat man with a crew cut wearing a White Power T-shirt”
along with a road sign that reads “Welcome to Tiger Town.” Crane (2010), for her part, notes
that Truganini, the last-surviving Tasmanian Aborigine, died at about the same time as the last-
surviving thylacine (114). Crane concludes her analysis with a discussion of what are most
likely myths about the tiger’s continued survival (see below as well as Kennedy and Dwyer 2017
and Weisberger 2017). She argues that these myths, or sightings, like the myths surrounding
aboriginal culture, create the false hope that extinction is not final (Crane 2010: 115–18).
18. Although it does not engage with the logging industry specifically, Leigh’s text does
thematize environmentalism as one strand in the weave of discourses making up Tasmanian
culture. Thus, during M’s confrontation with the drunken locals in the pub, one of the
regulars, using a locution that invites ecofeminist analysis, says: “Just one thing, mate. We
don’t take greenie cunts round here. So unless you want to join your mate Jarrah Fucking
Armstrong, fuck off ” (63).
Notes ■ 299
19. Compare the moment in the novel when Martin finds a set of human bones he takes
to be Jarrah Armstrong’s: “This was Jarrah Armstrong, he thinks, this is a dead man. He meas-
ures a rib against the side of his own chest” (Leigh 1999: 114).
20. In one scene (11:00), Martin David plays Handel’s “Ombra Mai Fu” while checking
the vials in which he is supposed to collect the thylacine’s DNA.
21. Again, see the glossary as well as c hapter 6 for definitions and discussions of narra-
tological terms used to describe methods for presenting characters’ mental and verbal acts,
including indirect, free indirect, and free direct discourse, as well as mind style.
22. The novel and film thus broach issues falling under the heading of cryptozoology,
or the study of animals commonly held to be extinct (such as the thylacine) or otherwise
nonexistent (such as the yeti or Sasquatch) (see Heuvelmans 1955/2014 and, for a skeptical
account, Simpson 1984). As discussed in the coda to this book, practitioners in fields such as
paleozoology categorize cryptozoological research as pseudoscientific at best—in a way that
foregrounds questions about the boundary between fictional and nonfictional accounts of
animals that I take up in more detail in chapters 6 and 7.
n C
hapter 1
1. As noted in the preface, a remark by Tim Ingold (1990) anticipates the emergence of
the fields of inquiry that have been termed trans-species anthropology (Kohn 2007) and mul-
tispecies ethnography (Kirksey and Helmreich 2010): “The most urgent task for contempo-
rary anthropology is to . . . re-embed the human subject within the continuum of organic life”
(224). On the concept of the biotic community, see Leopold (1966), for whom humankind’s
status as only one member of a larger “biotic team is shown by an ecological interpretation
of history. Many historical events, hitherto explained solely in terms of human enterprise,
were actually biotic interactions between people and land” (220; see also Hinchman 1995).
2. To reiterate, the glossary contains definitions of heterodiegetic, autodiegetic, and other
narratological terms used over the course of the present study.
3. The importance of naming in Reklaw’s memoir should be noted at the outset. Groff 's
text includes only generalized references to animals, including those involving the protago-
nist’s unnamed cat, discussed below. By contrast, the family cats’ names in Reklaw’s account
serve an important individualizing function and, relatedly, provide a basis for telling stories
about particular animals and their interactions with one another and with members of the
Reklaw family. See Fudge (2002: 31) for more on the way individuating animals through
naming can foster possibilities for empathy and promote nonhuman agency, in a manner that
calls into question established species hierarchies. See Ferguson (2014: 91–94) for a broader
discussion of naming practices vis-à-vis pets.
4. See Pick (2011) for a discussion of how concepts of the creaturely, whose defining fea-
ture is bodily vulnerability, point to deep commonalities between humans and other animals.
Herman (2016a: 3–6) provides additional perspectives, as does Smith’s (2015) discussion
of how contemporary literary engagements with animals reflect a longing to “escape painful,
claustrophobic self-consciousness” and a desire to build up “a sense of self realized through
the rich experiences of the body that we share with nonhuman animals” (245).
5. For further discussion of questions about consciousness, metacognition, self-aware-
ness, and other issues relevant to the study of nonhuman selfhood—questions that also
afford context for my analysis of animal minds in chapter 6—see, among other sources, Allen
and Bekoff (1997), Allen and Trestman (2016), Andrews (2015, 2016), Bekoff (2013),
300 ■ Notes
de Waal (2001), Griffin (2001), Jamieson (1998), Ristau (1999), and N. Taylor (2016:
chaps. 2 and 3).
6. As my discussion already suggests, and Andrews (2015) notes in her overview of
possible objections to Carruthers’s analysis (60–62), arguments like those advanced by
Carruthers (1989), Edelman (2003), and Lloyd (1992) are potentially vitiated by the ambi-
guity of the term consciousness itself—and by its use in multiple senses in these and other
accounts of animal minds.
7. As discussed by Andrews (2015, 2016), Gallup (1991, 1998), Griffin (2001), Plotnick
et al. (2006), and Reiss and Marino (2001), the capacity for mirror self-recognition has been
attributed to some nonhuman primates (chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans), bottlenose
dolphins, Asian elephants, magpies, and rhesus monkeys (see Andrews 2016: sec. 4.3). But
see Andrews (2015: 70–73) and Heyes (1994, 2008) for criticisms of some of the assump-
tions informing this research.
8. Thus, even when the comparison set consists of animals whom researchers in this tra-
dition view as at least approximating a concept of self, such as nonhuman primates, it is not
uncommon for analysts to impute to users of human languages a more fully realized self-concept
(compare Edelman 2003: 5523; for additional context, see Bishop 2009; Griffin 2001: chaps.
8–10; and Suddendorf 2013: 63–88). For a very different perspective on questions of nonhu-
man selfhood—a perspective more consonant with the one outlined in this book—see the
emerging discussions of animal selves in the field of environmental sociology, anticipated by
Arluke and Sanders (1996). Relevant studies include Brewster and Puddephatt (2017), Irvine
(2004), and Young and Thompson (2013). For complementary work in anthropology, see, in
addition to the research discussed in my next section, Kockelman (2011).
9. Gergen and Gergen (1997) situate these strategies for self-narration within a broader
taxonomy of storytelling modes circulating in the culture, consisting of what they term sta-
bility narratives, progressive narratives, and regressive narratives. The authors characterize
stability, progression, and regression in what might be described as meso-analytic terms;
their account therefore needs to be dovetailed with finer-grained methods of analysis that
narratologists have used to map trajectories of change in storyworlds (see, e.g., Dannenberg
2005, 2008) and also with macroanalytic frameworks for studying how narratives at once
reflect and help constitute broader norms concerning what sorts of event-sequences count as
improvement or degeneration (Abbott 2008a: 46–49). Thus, as suggested by my discussion
of Groff ’s text, an event-sequence that might be interpreted as regressive, in the sense that the
protagonist becomes homeless and exposed to the dangers of life in the open, can instead (or
also) be read as progressive, in the sense that the protagonist, by entering a new, expanded
constellation of self-other relationships, leverages the experience of homelessness to work
toward an empowering self-narrative (see also Irvine 2013a, 2013b).
10. As Candea (2010) puts it, “The late 19th-century shift from singular capitalized
Culture to the multiplicity of cultures, and the shift from the single Ontology of philosophy
to an anthropology of ontologies can therefore be seen as analogous moves—they both serve
to inscribe difference at the heart of the anthropological project. Not, of course, an exclu-
sive, oppressive difference but a relational, productive difference” (175). Similarly, Descola
(2013) argues that “for anthropology, no ontology is better or more truthful in itself than
another . . .. [At issue are] schemes of coding and parceling out phenomenal reality by means
of which [members of human cultures] have learned to couch and transmit their experience
of things, schemes issuing from historical choices that privileged, at a given time and place,
certain sets of relations to humans and non-humans, in such a way as to allow for the com-
bination of these relationships into sui generis ensembles—already constituted before the
birth of the individuals that actualize them to be experienced as naturally coherent” (66–67).
Notes ■ 301
11. See chapter 6 for a discussion of how “discourse domains,” or arenas of practice that
are governed by more or less distinctive interpretive paradigms and protocols for behavior,
serve to bridge such cultural ontologies with more or less localized mental-state attributions
in narratives about animals and human-animal relationships and interactions.
12. In Kohn’s (2007) formulation, “The distinction Latour makes between humans and
nonhumans . . . fails to recognize that some nonhumans are selves” (5; see also Kohn 2013: 7,
91–92).
13. By way of negotiating some of the issues discussed in my previous excursus on the
scope and limits of selfhood, Kohn (2013) offers the following transhuman, biocentric def-
inition of self: “A self . . . is the outcome of a process, unique to life, of maintaining and per-
petuating an individual form, a form that, as it is iterated over the generations, grows to fit the
world around it at the same time that it comes to exhibit a certain circular closure that allows
it to maintain its selfsame identity, which is forged with respect to that which it is not” (76).
14. Fudge (2002) likewise identifies multiple, conflicting ontologies in the cultures asso-
ciated with modernity in the West, describing as follows the contradiction arising from this
internal clash of perspectives: “We live with animals, we recognize them, we even name some
of them, but at the same time we use them as if they were inanimate, as if they were objects.
The illogic of this relationship is one that, on a day-to-day basis, we choose to evade, even
refuse to acknowledge as present” (8).
15. Arguably, Groff uses the protagonist’s entrance into a socioeconomic underclass, the
community of the marginalized poor, to suggest how an altered conception of self-other rela-
tions across species lines connects up with a rethinking of structures of power, wealth, and
privilege within the domain of the human. In a phrase, prolific allocations of possibilities for
selfhood beyond the human pair naturally with recognition of the claims of disenfranchised
members of the human community (see Lorimer and Srinivasan 2013: 333).
16. In this connection, see Bateman’s (2014) analysis of Henry James’s 1903 novella “The
Beast in the Jungle.”
17. An example of narrated perception occurs early in the story, as the narrator prepares
to leave the apartment from which she has been evicted: “The apartment was a shell, scoured
to enamel” (Groff 2011: 106).
18. On the concept of disavowal, that is, humans’ tendency to disavow their own status as
one animal species among others, see Rohman (2009).
19. Lydia Millet explores a similar dynamic in her novel How the Dead Dream, whose
protagonist, at one time a profit-driven real-estate developer, embraces a new understand-
ing of self-other relationships—and hence an altered self-narrative—after he becomes
aware of the impact of one of his developments on an endangered species of rat: “He had
left the settlements now, all the old geographies. . . . He had been drawn to cities, had con-
sidered no alternatives—cities and buildings, buildings and institutions. The lights across
the continent. But what if, from his childhood on, he had imagined not the lights but the
spaces between them? He would do so now, to make up for all the years behind him” (Millet
2008: 234).
20. My discussion of Reklaw’s text lays groundwork for the more detailed discussion of
animal comics in chapter 4, where I examine medium-specific constraints and affordances
in graphic narratives in which nonhuman characters feature as focal participants. Here, how-
ever, I focus on the particularity of the comics medium only insofar as Reklaw’s use of word-
image combinations bear on strategies of self-narration in the text.
21. For purposes of exposition, I refer to the older narrating I as “Reklaw” and the younger
experiencing I as “Jesse.” For a discussion of the larger tradition of alternative or underground
comics—or comix—in which Reklaw’s autobiographical graphic narrative can be situated,
302 ■ Notes
and which took rise in the United States in response to the censorship laws associated with
the establishment of the Comics Code Authority in 1954, see, for example, Baetens and Frey
(2015: 30–40), Gardner 2012 (102–4, 107–12), and Hatfield (2005: 6–31). For more on
the formal, thematic, and more broadly cultural dimensions of the methods of self-narration
used in post–Comics Code autobiographical comics, see Gardner (2012: 107–48) as well as
Hatfield (2005: 108–51).
22. Significantly, and in direct contrast with Reklaw’s account of his interactions with at
least some of the family’s cats, Groff highlights her protagonist’s failure to maintain a rela-
tionship with a specific companion animal—namely, the cat with whom she shares the apart-
ment that she has been evicted from when the story opens. One way of interpreting this
aspect of the story: the attenuation of the protagonist’s bond with the cat goes hand in hand
with her relinquishment of a self-narrative that blocked or inhibited recognition of her place
within a larger ecology of selves. That earlier self-narrative allocated possibilities for selfhood
only to the select few animals adopted by humans as their companions.
23. Fudge (2002) notes that in the West pets emerged as a category in the sixteenth
century, at a time when domestic livestock were no longer being kept in the home (28).
For an analysis of how power asymmetries create the very concept of pet, see Tuan (1984).
In Tuan’s account, whereas dominance produces victims when it is exercised with cru-
elty and exploitation, when it is combined with affection, which is “dominance’s anodyne”
or “dominance with a human face,” it produces the pet (1984: 4). James Serpell (1998),
for his part, distinguishes between pets and companion animals, arguing that whereas
companion animals are kept mainly for purposes of companionship, the rubric of pets
“includes animals kept for decorative purposes (for example, ornamental fish or birds),
those kept for competitive or sporting activities (dog shows, obedience trials, racing), and
those kept to satisfy the interests of hobbyists (specialist animal collecting and breeding).
In practice, of course, any particular pet may overlap two or more of these subcategories”
(111; see also Serpell and Paul 2011). See also Veevers (1985), Wolfe (1998), and, for a
discussion of pets vis-à-v is therapy and service animals as well as the role of pets in family
therapy, chapter 3.
24. See the coda to this book for discussion of how narratives about animals and human-
animal relationships can be interpreted at the other scales of analysis identified by Haraway.
For more on companion animals and co-constitutive relationality at the scale of face-to-
face human-animal interaction specifically, see Ferguson (2014), who argues not only
that humans constitute companion animals as selves via acts of recognition that include
naming (91–94) but also that, reciprocally, “animals in general, and pets in particular, pro-
vide [humans] a means for articulating [their own] sense of self in the world” (82; see also
Frost 1991). As Ferguson’s comments suggest, storytelling acts that foreground such co-
constitutive relationality are not limited to published pet memoirs. Thus, in the stories elic-
ited in interviews conducted by Irvine (2013a, 2013b), homeless and formerly homeless
persons tell about the companion animals whom they view as having redeemed or even
saved their lives. The stories portray animal companions not only as benefiting from but
also making possible the tellers’ avoidance of substance abuse and other self-destructive
behaviors (compare Bowen 2012).
25. See Skloot (2009) on legal debates about service animals, therapy animals, and com-
panion animals. As Montalván puts it, Tuesday and the other dogs trained by East Coast
Assistance Dogs “were not our pets; they were our life support systems” (Montalván and
Witter 177). For further discussion of Montalván’s text, see chapter 6.
Notes ■ 303
26. As I go on to discuss in subsequent chapters, the German-Estonian philosopher-biologist

Jakob von Uexküll (1934/1957) coined the term Umwelt to refer to an animal’s phenomenally
experienced world, or, in Evan Thompson’s (2007) characterization, the world as it presents
itself to an animal given its specific organismic structure and corresponding sensorimotor capa-
bilities (59; see also Clark 1997: 24–25; Portmann 1961: 91–92, 120–35; Portmann 1990a: 87;
and c hapters 4 and 5). As Uexküll puts it in his Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans,
originally published in 1934, “the animal’s environment [or Umwelt] . . . is only a piece cut out
of its surroundings, which we see stretching out on all sides around the animal—and these sur-
roundings are nothing else but our own human environment. The first task of research on such
environments consists in seeking out the animal’s perception signs and, with them, to construct
the animal’s environment” (13). Uexküll goes on to write: “With the number of actions availa-
ble to an animal, the number of objects in its environment also increases. It increases as well in
the individual life of any animal capable of accumulating experiences, for each new experience
conditions a new attitude toward new impressions” (48).
27. In this respect, compare Jesse’s and his sister’s narratives about the cats with what
ethologists refer to as ethograms. An ethogram can be defined as “a behavioral catalog that
presents information about an action’s morphology and gives the action a name” (Allen and
Bekoff 1997: 40), or alternatively as “a time budget of the various activities” in which an indi-
vidual animal or a species engages (Ristau 1999: 132). A future task for narratology beyond
the human is to investigate more fully the relationship between narratives and ethograms—
for example, how storytelling practices bear on the construction and comparison of etho-
grams, and conversely how normative understandings of animal behavior shape narratives
about animals and human-animal interactions (see McHugh 2011: 211–19; Mitchell 1997;
Morris, Fidler, and Costall 2000; Rollin 1997; and chapter 7 below).
28. More generally, as my comments about Thirteen Cats suggest, the role of metalepsis in
more-than-human storyworlds (across media) deserves further study. Like Reklaw, a num-
ber of writers have conflated or at least superimposed events from different narrative levels as
a strategy for revisiting basic assumptions about our species’ relationships and interactions
with other animals. For example, in The Lives of Animals, J. M. Coetzee used a fictional nov-
elist, Elizabeth Costello, as his stand-in for the Tanner Lectures he delivered at Princeton
University in 1997–98, and Costello in turn compares her position with that of Red Peter,
the speaking ape, in Kafka’s “Report for an Academy.” By layering but also conflating these
narrative levels or frames, Coetzee suggests the pertinence of Kafka’s anti-anthropocentric
narratives when it comes to interpreting Costello’s claims, as well as the place of those
claims within Coetzee’s own textual designs. Metalepsis plays a different role in Paul Auster’s
Timbuktu. Early on in the novel, William Gurevitch, the initial human companion of the dog
he names Mr. Bones, adopts the moniker of Willy G. Christmas after hearing himself being
directly hailed by an actor dressed up as Santa Claus in a television commercial and preach-
ing what William/Willy takes to be an ethic of “goodness, generosity, and self-sacrifice” (21).
Here, rather than merging author and character, Auster uses metaleptic boundary crossing
to suggest the far-reaching consequences of listening to voices that might otherwise remain
unheard, bracketed as unreal or relegated to the domain of the imaginary. Over the course of
Timbuktu, the reader is made privy to just such a voice, that is, the nonhuman voice of Mr.
Bones, through a blend of reports about events in which the dog participates more or less
centrally, accounts of Mr. Bones’s perceptions, memories, and emotions, and free indirect
discourse, in which the heterodiegetic narrator's statements take on the subjective coloration
of the dog’s own experiences, as modeled by Auster.
304 ■ Notes
n C
hapter 2
1. There is some overlap between alignment and identification, as when Reklaw projects,
in the manner discussed in my previous chapter, the imagined reunion between Gene and
Frosty after his father’s banishment of Gene to the construction site.
2. In later comments on the interconnectedness of metamorphosis and narrative, Bynum
notes that “there is no story if there is only change. If something does not continue, we have
only discrete vignettes” (2001: 177). Similarly Lassén-Seger (2006) remarks that “a met-
amorphic change from human shape into something Other is not simply a replacement-
change, but a continuum-change where the original and newly acquired shapes oppose and
define each other” (26–27; see also Mikkonen 1996: 310).
3. Given that there is already an extensive body of work centering on lycanthropes or
werewolves (see, e.g., Arnds 2015; Benkov 1986; McMahon-Coleman and Weaver 2012),
I focus mainly on other sorts of metamorphs—with a view to broadening the investigative
focus of studies of species transformations. That said, I do discuss Ursula K. Le Guin’s por-
trayal of a wolf-into-human transformation in “The Wife’s Story” (1979/1994) later in this
chapter.
4. As Bynum discusses, in the domain of interpretive practice, by the early fourteenth cen-
tury allegory replaced any emphasis on mutation as the focus of commentary, and Ovidian
ideas of metamorphosis were labeled as heretical (Bynum 2001: 101–2, 178–79). I return
to some of the issues raised by Bynum, from a different perspective, in the coda to this book.
5. Johnston (2013) cites the definition of otherkin included in the 2007 Field Guide to
Otherkin authored by Lupa: “a person who believes that, through either a nonphysical or
(much more rarely) physical means, s/he is not entirely human. This means . . . anyone who
relates internally to a nonhuman species either through soul, mind, body, or energetic res-
onance, or who believes s/he hosts a being in hir [a non-gender specific pronoun] body/
mind” (qtd. in Johnston 2013: 294). Robertson (2015) observes that, with otherkin most
commonly identifying as “supernatural or fantastical creatures found in contemporary
Western popular culture such as aliens, vampires, elves, dragons, angels, and demons,” their
kintypes may originate both from particular texts and cultures (e.g., J. R. R. Tolkien’s elvish
beings) and from more generic sources (e.g., legendary and popular references to “nature
spirits”) (265).
6. As with Warner’s “A-hunting of the Deer,” I discuss Baker’s The Peregrine vis-à-vis ques-
tions of animal minds in chapter 6.
7. Although Foster (2016) takes pains to distinguish his approach from Baker’s, which
he describes as a kind of “quasi-shamanism,” Foster’s account of his experiences of living in
an underground sett and eating worms in the manner of badgers, mimicking the swimming
and hunting routines of otters, attempting to emulate how deer evade predators, surveilling
the city streets of East London after the fashion of urban foxes, and so on, combined with
his use of vivid landscape descriptions and facts about animal neurology and physiology to
“peer over” the species boundary (19), reads like an updated version of Baker’s own narrative
about (possibilities for) metamorphic convergence between human selves and animal oth-
ers. See also Rothman (2016).
8. Compare this sentence from the entry for February 22: “To rest my hand in the place
where the peregrine had stood so recently was to experience a strong sense of proximity, of
identification” (Baker 1967/2015: 126).
9. Grivell, Clegg, and Roxburgh (2014) remark that “in the Western world, research
investigating therianthropy has tended to be divided into two perspectives: that of psychiatry
Notes ■ 305
which positions therians as mentally ill and that of anthropology and archeology which
explains therian beliefs and experiences as spiritual phenomena” (114).
10. Key terms associated with the therian belief-system include theriotypes (also known
as theriosides), or the specific animals or animal species as whom practitioners identity; poly-
weres, or therians who have multiple but separate animal types (Robertson 2013: 19); and
polymorphs, who are composite creatures (2013: 19; Johnston 2013: 295). Another key con-
cept is that of “shifting.” As discussed in more detail below, shifting designates a range of
processes by which a therian’s human self enters into dialogue with its theriotypes, thus co-
constituting a larger, hybrid identity.
11. As Robertson points out “The first community of modern Therianthropes was formed
in 1992 on the message boards of alt.horror.werewolves, or AHWW, which was founded as a
werewolf fiction fan site” (2013: 15).
12. For similar accounts of the psychological and narrative correlates of therianism, see
Grivell, Clegg, and Foxburgh (2014: 122–23, 130–31) and Johnston (2013: 295). In the
domain of fiction, DeKoven (2016) describes Kafka’s “humanimals,” “oscillating characters
who are neither/both human and animal” (20), in analogous terms. See below, however, for a
reading of Kafka’s “A Report for an Academy” (1917/2015) as a narrative about biomutation
rather than (or in addition to) hybridity.
13. The concept of m-shifts (and also that of the sensory shifts described below) resonates
with identificatory practices used in both nonfictional and fictional narratives featuring non-
human characters. Compare, respectively, Baker’s identifications with falcon minds and bod-
ies in The Peregrine (discussed further in chapter 6) as well as the analogous practices used
by the thylacine-pursuing protagonist in Leigh’s The Hunter, discussed in the introduction.
Thus, to elaborate on a point noted previously in my account of Leigh's novel, M uses shifts as
a strategy for tracking the tiger: “Lying there on the hard ground inside his tent . . . he changes
shape, swallows the beast. The eyes in his head are no longer his own, short thick fur runs
along the back of his neck, out into a long stiff tail. He hangs his body off this strong spine,
hollows out his belly, shrinks his gangling limbs. His arm is bent at the elbow, and a paw, not
a hand, rests against his bony convex chest” (Leigh 1999: 91; see also 93).
14. Grivell, Clegg, and Roxburgh (2014) link therian testimony about such ph-shifts to
work by Melzack (1992) and others on amputee patients’ experiences of phantom limbs.
Drawing on Melzack’s hypothesis that humans operate with a “neurosignature” that is partly
genetically determined but also subject to modification via experience, Grivell, Clegg, and
Roxburgh suggest that this research points to “a scientific explanation of phantom limbs that
moves away from a pathologization of such experiences” (128).
15. This same web page differentiates among other kinds of shifts besides those men-
tioned by Robertson (2013), including dream shifting (“when the inner animal stimulates
the brain while a person is sleeping and allows them to become their inner animal in their
dreams”), sensory shifting (“when your senses shift to match those of your inner animal”),
and, with significant hedging, bilocation shifting (“when the body supposedly makes a car-
bon copy of the animal inside the body and travels the lands; sometimes, others may believe,
as a somewhat physical image of their inner animal”). The web page labels this last kind of
shifting “Not Likely.”
16. Contrast Johnston’s (2013) claim that otherkin subjectivity can be interpreted as a
destabilization of the real-fiction binary as it pertains to concepts of self (294).
17. Norris (1985) argues that, in St. Mawr, “originality, getting life straight from the
source, is . . . only possible in the wild state in which the mediation of the social, the cultural,
306 ■ Notes
the intersubjective, the rational, and the communicative are abolished . . .. The recuperative
power of the wilderness is precisely its ability to extract and reclaim wild, natural life from
socialized, acculturated human beings” (190–91). See John Bruni (2007) for a discussion of
similar reactionary political (or antipolitical) impulses at work in Jack London’s prioritiza-
tion of wildness over domestication in The Call of the Wild (1903/2009), in which “London’s
reading of the theory of atavism, which supported a return to past hereditary traits, addresses
popular anxieties about the loss of the frontier and the resulting depletion of American mas-
culine vitality” (25).
18. The ranch’s name links it with the god of nature, Pan, who emerges as a topic of discus-
sion vis-à-vis issues of hyperdomestication earlier in the novel (84–87). Describing the ranch
to Mrs. Witt, Lou remarks that what draws her to the place is “a spirit. And it’s here, on this
ranch. It’s here, in this landscape . . .. It’s something wild, that will hurt me sometimes and will
wear me down sometimes. I know it. But it’s something bigger than men, bigger than people,
bigger than religion. It’s something to do with the wild America” (175).
19. Coetzee recounts how Lurie is “sensible of a generous affection streaming out toward
him from the dog,” and aware that when he works on his opera “the dog is fascinated by the
sound of the banjo . . .. When he hums Teresa’s line . . . the dog smacks its lips and seems
on the point of singing too, or howling” (215). See Rohman (2014) for arguments that
Lurie’s engagement with the dog during the process of musical composition marks a shift,
on Coetzee’s if not Lurie’s part, from an anthropocentric to a biocentric or trans-species con-
ception of art, according to which aesthetic impulses form part of the evolutionary history of
humans and nonhuman animals alike (see also Davies 2013).
20. See Matthew Calarco (2014) for an interpretation of this scene as exemplifying the
concept of indistinction that Calarco contrasts with attempts to impose a “clean separation
between human and animal” (627). If the logic of indistinction opens up “a realm of funda-
mentally unknowable and unanticipatable relations” between humans and other animals, for
Calarco it needs to be complemented by a logic of radical alterity, which works against “the
possibility [that] alternative modes of subjectivation” and the different lifeways to which they
give rise “might be overlooked and allowed to collapse into a simple homogeneity” based
upon human ways of engaging with the world (627). In what follows I argue that Rosemary’s
self-narrative reveals a split between the experiencing I and the narrating I, caused by her
belated appreciation of the logic of radical alterity.
21. Rosemary’s use of free indirect discourse to convey her younger self ’s assessment
of Fern’s motives—“Oh, she has played this perfectly, that baby who still wears a diaper!”
(94)—brings to mind the hyperbolic tone of the governess’s ascriptions of wickedness to
Miles and Flora, the children in her charge, in Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw ( James
1898/2000).
22. Late in the novel Rosemary uses a counterfactual construction to revise the account
of Fern’s behavior that resulted in Fern’s being sent away—this revision having been made
possible by, in part, the process of telling the larger story of the divergences and convergen-
ces between Rosemary’s and Fern’s intertwined lives: “This is what I should have said to
Mom; this is what I meant to say—That there was something inside Fern I didn’t know. That
I didn’t know her in the way I always thought I did. That Fern had secrets and not the good
kind” (270).
23. In her 2015 novel Spill Simmer Falter Wither, Sara Baume also uses a delayed revela-
tion by her own narrator-protagonist—in this case, to suggest the far-reaching, life-changing
effects of his adoption of a shelter dog. Only after recounting his ever-increasing sense of
Notes ■ 307
attachment to One Eye and detailing the vicissitudes of their weeks-long car journey, trig-
gered by the possibility of the dog’s being impounded and destroyed for biting another dog,
does the narrator reveal that he originally adopted the dog merely to scare off the rats that
have consumed the corpse of his abusive father, whom he allowed to choke to death on a
piece of sausage (233–38).
24. See Vanderbeke (2003/2004) for further discussion of how Byatt at once evokes and
challenges human-insect analogies of the sort used by E. O. Wilson (1978) and other socio-
biologists. For Vanderbeke, Byatt’s text reveals how such claims about human-animal analo-
gies are rooted in the particular, historically specific (human) culture that serves tacitly as a
frame of reference (295).
25. Compare Gymnich and Costa (2006): “Involving what is presumably the most inti-
mate connection between human beings and animals imaginable, the depiction of a human-
animal transformation is virtually bound to challenge culturally dominant assumptions
about animals as the ‘other’ of humankind” (69).
26. See the coda to this book for further discussion of the conclusion of Gonzales’s novel.
As mentioned in c hapter 1, Varsava (2013) argues that Gonzales’s text falls back on the
human-animal opposition that the novel might prima facie seem to disrupt. This argument
provides independent support for the view that, despite gestures toward a metamorphic
model of self-other relations across the species boundary, hybridity remains the narrative’s
dominant model for engaging with cross-species relationality.
27. Thus, for Gaston Bachelard, as Mikkonen (1996) notes, metamorphosis is a metat-
rope: “a trope that stands for troping and imagination” (312; see also Clarke 2008: 46–47).
28. For the notice, see http://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/NOT-OD-15–158.
html; for details about the workshop, see http://osp.od.nih.gov/office-biotechnology-activities/
event/2015-11-06-133000-2015-11-06-220000/workshop-research-animals-containing-
human-cells. A news report about the workshop published on the website maintained by
National Public Radio quotes the philosopher Françoise Baylis as asserting that “the engineer-
ing of creatures that are partly human and partly nonhuman animal is objectionable because
the existence of such beings ‘would introduce inexorable moral confusion in our existing rela-
tionships with nonhuman animals, and in our future relationships with part-human hybrids
and chimeras’ ” (Stein 2015). In a follow-up story (Stein 2016a), the same reporter describes
research in which scientists inject human stem cells into pig embryos in an effort to grow trans-
plantable human organs in animals’ bodies. Here Stein notes that uncertainty about those
cells’ migratory paths in the host bodies raises key ethical questions, since it is possible that the
cells might move to the brain and thereby create animals with (partly) human minds (com-
pare Kaplan 2017: paras. 6, 25). Stein (2016b) makes a further contribution to this thread,
reporting on a proposal by the NIH to allow certain forms of chimera-based research, and
Kaplan (2017) reviews non-federally funded research in the United States that has produced
a chimeric, part-human, part-pig embryo. In a general comment about genetic research of this
sort, Bartowski (2008) argues that “we are misguided to . . . engage discourses of purity in an
age of chimeric realities. We live in a time of donation, surrogacy, adoption, genetic transfer,
splicing, and design. Practices emerge and become conventionalized while ethical debates and
disturbances and regulatory statutes and strictures follow behind” (8).
29. Computer-generated imagery and other, earlier technologies have been used to pres-
ent metamorphoses in television and film—for example, in Manimal, the 1983 US television
series, canceled after eight episodes, about a human protagonist with the ability to take on
animal form, or for that matter the television adaptation of Applegate’s Animorphs series
308 ■ Notes
that ran from 1998 to 2000. The ideas about fictional biomutation discussed in this section
therefore need to be put to the test in a transmedial investigation of narratives about species
change. For a clip of the scene in the pilot episode of Manimal in which Jonathan Chase,
the titular metamorph, transforms into a black panther, see https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=6iQ-mzYRl3s.
30. Lassén-Seger (2007) reviews work suggesting both that adult-authored texts for
younger readers “assign otherness to children in order to be able to control the field of repre-
sentation” and also that such texts have the potential to subvert understandings of self-other
relationships, not only cross-generationally but also more broadly (160–61). As I go on to
discuss, this dual profile of fiction targeted at younger readers manifests itself concretely in a
simultaneous reliance on and overturning of ideas of species difference.
31. See chapter 3 for a discussion of appeals to the biophilia hypothesis (Kellert and
Wilson 1993) to explain the pervasiveness of animals in children’s literature. Lassén-Seger
(2006), for her part, argues that the construction of the child as Other to the adult order
(10–14) becomes intertwined with strands of discourse about animals that project “ani-
mality as instinctual and non-rational, and which then [associate] the realm of childhood
with pejorative images of animality” (33; see also Le Guin 1987/1994: 9–14). Similarly,
Ratelle (2014) observes that “the configuration of childhood as separate from and sub-
ordinate to adulthood is, much like the distinctions between the human and the animal,
predicated on maintaining the illusion of a clear boundary between two constructed states
of being” (4).
32. Focusing on a corpus of texts whose mutating characters and intended readers are
children or teenagers, Lassén-Seger (2006) divides the relevant biomutations into those that
are empowering and those that are disempowering for the pre-adult protagonists involved.
She asks: does the metamorphic change “silence or repress child characters in a manner that
undercuts their individual agency and forces them into submission or regression? Or does the
experience of otherness increase their agency and self-awareness in a manner that enhances
the equality of children with adults, or subverts adult authority?” (3). See also Lassén-Seger
(2007) and Kokkola (2010).
33. In one sense, the scope of my discussion of biomutation is narrower than Lassén-
Seger’s (2006) account of metamorphs, insofar as she includes child protagonists who trans-
form into plants, minerals, objects, and monsters, as well as those who mutate into animals.
But in another sense, my approach is broader: whereas Lassén-Seger excludes reverse species
transformations, as exemplified by the rat-to-human mutation in Pullman’s text, I consider
such species mutations to be further evidence of the porousness of the category boundaries
on which dichotomized understandings of human-animal relationships are premised.
34. In Genette’s model, however, the ontological insulation of embedded narratives does
not preclude embedded narratives from influencing the main diegesis in an “actional” way
(see Rimmon-Kenan 2002: 95). Thus Scheherazade, in A Thousand and One Nights, tells sto-
ries that keep the king in suspense, preventing him from murdering her.
35. Joosen (2009) identifies as another potentially relevant real-world context the 1993
murder of two-year-old James Bulger near Liverpool, England, by two ten-year-old boys.
Joosen, building on Natov’s (2003) account of pre-Rousseauian conceptions of children,
argues that constructions of the child as innocent or as evil enable adults to position chil
dren as constitutive others ( Joosen 2009: 202). In the case of Pullman’s biomutated rat-
boy, Roger, these processes of child-construction intersect with projections of animality as
other-than-human.
Notes ■ 309
36. As King (2009) notes, tabloid journalism can itself be characterized as a discourse
that intermixes an acceptance of the marvelous with falsifiable references to real-world situ-
ations and events.
37. Pullman’s text dramatizes how once the Chief Scientist situates Roger in the cate-
gory of the nonhuman, he is incapable of interpreting his behavior as anything but other-
than-human. See chapters 6 and 7 for a discussion of how norms associated with “discourse
domains” bear in a top-down way on the qualities and abilities ascribed to both human and
nonhuman agents in storyworlds.
38. See Csicsery-Ronay (2003) and Jameson (2005) for further details about Bloch’s con-
ception of the novum vis-à-vis his understanding of the utopian function of art. Jameson
(2005) distinguishes his own project from Bloch’s, which sought to find “traces of the
Utopian impulse everywhere” and thereby naturalize that impulse, by grounding it in human
nature (10). Jameson instead foregrounds the psycho-sociohistorical conditions in which
utopian projects have emerged, focusing on how those projects (and the conditions that have
given rise to them) intersect with the structures and modalities of science fiction.
39. Le Guin (2015), however, confers on fantasy the potential for world reconfiguration
that Suvin and Csicsery-Ronay reserve for science fiction.
40. H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds (1898/2005: 34) offers a variant of this trope vis-
à-vis the Martians’ conquest of human civilization.
41. Lassén-Seger (2007: 165), quoting Warner (1994: 72); see also Herman (2013: 252–
62). For a different sort of resemanticization, see Han Kang’s 2007 novel The Vegetarian (Kang
2007/2015). Troubled by her own past participation in human-on-animal violence, Kang’s
protagonist, Yeong-hye, aligns herself with the realm of photosynthesizing plants, especially
flowers and trees. Yeong-hye thereby takes up a position on the scale of nature that Aristotle
had ranked lower than those occupied by nonhuman as well as human animals, explaining to
her sister, who voices her concern about Yeong-hye’s refusal to eat: “I’m not an animal any-
more, sister . . .. I don’t need to eat, not now. I can live without it. All I need is sunlight” (159).
42. In support of Lassen-Séger’s (2006, 2007) and Warner’s (1994) observations, con-
sider this passage from The Invasion, in which the narrator-protagonist, Jake, morphs into a
tiger while attacking the Yeerks: “I felt the morph begin. The hair grew from my face. The tail
squirted out behind me. My arms bulged and rippled. They were massive! My shirt ripped . . ..
The power! . . . I could feel the power of the tiger growing inside me . . . I was afraid of noth-
ing! (166–67).
43. Lassén-Seger (2006) argues that the series can be read as presenting an image of
the human characters, and not only the animals whose DNA they acquire, as disempow-
ered. From this perspective, the series suggests that the ideal identity is other-than-human
(109)—even if, ironically, the animal agents whose identities the human characters assume
are co-opted into this role rather than being willing partners.
44. See the similar mirror-recognition scene, involving a teenaged male protagonist who
wakes up as a dog, in T. Ernesto Bethancourt’s The Dog Days of Arthur Cane (1976: 14–15).
45. For other fictional treatments of the figure of the feral child, see Angela Carter’s “Wolf-
Alice” (1979: 140–49) and Hornung’s Dog Boy (2010).
46. Compare Prendick’s comments about Moreau’s experiments: “He was so irrespon-
sible, so utterly careless. His curiosity, his mad, aimless investigations, drove him on, and
the things were thrown out to live a year or so, to struggle and blunder and suffer; at last to
die painfully . . .. I must confess I lost faith in the sanity of the world when I saw it suffering
the painful disorder of this island. A blind fate, a vast pitiless mechanism, seemed to cut and
310 ■ Notes
shape the fabric of existence” (99–100). See Glendening (2002: 577–84) for further discus-
sion of Wells’s text as an allegory of evolution.
47. See Grier (2006) for a discussion of the special place of songbirds in Victorian
discourse about domesticity, which constructed birds as models of mutual devotion
and conscientious childrearing (164–66), and with which Butler’s story stands in ironic
relation.
48. Butler also suggests that because of his embodied experience as a parrot, the narrator
has acquired the ability to reframe what went wrong with his relationship with his former
wife—in terms that, if he had used them in the past, might have allowed to him avoid the
attitudes and actions that proved so self-destructive: “I was not part of all those other men
who were part of her. I didn’t want to connect to all that. It was only her that I would fluff for,
but these others were there too, and I couldn’t put them aside. I sensed them inside her, and
so they were inside me” (81).
49. But see Kafka’s The Metamorphosis (1915/2006), discussed in chapter 4, for an
account of a one-off change that poses equally radical challenges to established species cat-
egories. Kafka’s works thus reconfirm the pertinence of Sternberg’s (1982) Proteus Principle,
or the many-many relationships between textual forms and representational functions, when
it comes to narrative engagements with human-animal relationships and the broader cultural
ontologies in which they are embedded.
50. For discussions of Carter’s critical and creative engagements with human-animal rela-
tionships, and her resistance to any dichotomization between human and nonhuman worlds,
see Desblache (2011: 82–84; 2005: 384–88) and Pollock (2000). Desblache (2005) links
Carter’s fiction to the way early women writers worked at cross-purposes to the taxonomic
impulses that informed the bestiaries created by medieval male authors: “Women were not
writers of bestiaries. They excelled at telling, and then writing, tales in which the notion of
metamorphosis is central, and used animals in a more fluid way” (381). For more on inter-
sections between gender and animality in Carter’s engagement with fairy-tale traditions, see
Moss (2001); on gender, more particularly, see Bacchilega’s (1999) and Lau’s (2008) studies
of Carter’s tales.
51. Thus, when the narrator looks in the mirror, “I saw within it not my own face but that
of my father, as if I had put on his face when I arrived at the Beast’s palace at the discharge of
his debt” (60). Later, again seeing her father’s face in the looking glass, the narrator “thought
he smiled at me. Then I saw he was smiling with pure gratification,” as he counts out the pile
of banknotes he has received from the Beast (65).
52. See again my discussion of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis in c hapter 4.
n C
hapter 3
1. For more on the medical humanities, see e.g., Cole, Carlin, and Carson (2014). On the
critical medical humanities, see Whitehead et al. (2016). On narrative medicine, see Charon
(2006), Hurwitz (2011), and Jones and Tansey (2015). Likewise, Herman (2016b), in par-
allel with the present chapter, focuses on how work in narrative studies and ideas from the
critical medical humanities can be mutually illuminating.
2. This definition harmonizes with the one included on the website maintained by the
University of Glasgow’s Medical Humanities Research Centre (http://www.gla.ac.uk/
schools/critical/research/researchcentresandnetworks/mhrc/): “The Medical Humanities
complement, contextualize and critique purely biomedical, technological or other reductive
accounts of what it means to experience illness, encounter disease or transact a therapeutic
Notes ■ 311
relationship. In addressing how we comprehend health, sickness, disease and ‘the embodied
life,’ such concerns are examined from a range of professional and patient perspectives.”
3. For Barad (2012) the dynamics of entanglement explain how discourses become “dif-
fractively threaded through and enfolded in” one another (207). Elsewhere Barad (2007)
outlines what she describes as an “agential realist account,” according to which phenomena
“are neither individual entities nor mental impressions but entangled material agencies” (56).
4. The practice of aligning animals and persons caught up in the “cultural dynamics
surrounding embodied and cognitive difference,” in Rapp and Ginsburg’s (2011) phrase,
extends beyond nonfictional accounts such as Isaacson’s and Gardner’s; it is also a common
fictional trope, as exemplified by two novels published a century apart: Joseph Conrad’s The
Secret Agent (1907/2000) and Neil Abramson’s The Unsaid (2011), mentioned in my previ-
ous chapter. Thus, commenting on Winnie Verloc’s brother Stevie, who manifests symptoms
of intellectual disability, Conrad’s narrator remarks: “But as errand-boy [Stevie] did not turn
out to be a great success. He forgot his messages; he was easily diverted from the straight path
of duty by the attractions of stray cats and dogs, which he followed down narrow alleys into
unsavoury courts . . . or by the dramas of fallen horses, whose pathos and violence induced
him sometimes to shriek piercingly in a crowd” (49). Similarly, in Abramson’s novel, one of
the characters has a son who is on the autism spectrum, and referring to the many animals
with whom her employer lives, she remarks, “He’s going to love your animals, feels comfort-
able about them. I wonder sometimes if he just sees the world the same way they do” (122).
5. Compare this passage from Isaacson’s The Horse Boy: “Within seconds of entering the
trees, [Rowan’s] screams would lessen, fade and finally disappear when he found a patch of
sand to run his fingers through, a piece of variegated bark to look at, or when he sat down on
the trail to become lost in the intricate lace patterns of a dead yellow leaf ” (2009: 18).
6. See, for example, Griffin et al. (2011), Katcher and Wilkins (1993: 180), Melson
(2001: 123), and Walsh (2009a: 474–75). In their meta-analysis of relevant studies, Nimer
and Lundahl (2007) sound a more cautious note, suggesting that overall AAI “was associ-
ated with moderate effect sizes in improving outcomes in four areas: Autism-spectrum symp-
toms, medical difficulties, behavioral problems, and emotional well-being” (225).
7. For a discussion of the importance of accommodating this fourth level in scholarly
work in general, see Viney (2013).
8. That said, Isaacson does dispute critiques of shamanism as irrationalism (217–18).
9. In an appendix that includes Dale’s own retrospective account of the events his mother
has written about in her memoir, Dale indicates that from the start he oriented to Henry as
another locus of experience, a nonhuman self: “Henry was just really gentle, friendly and
sociable. I liked that he had a wise look on his face and I always trusted him, which made me
feel very comfortable with him. You could see all this from his eyes, as they were lovely and
I could understand his feelings from looking at his eyes and face” (Gardner 2007: 355). On
transhuman families, see my next section.
10. In Philo and Wilbert’s (2000) formulation, the field of animal geography is concerned
with the relationships between (actual as well imaginary) places reserved for humans and
those assigned to nonhumans, and also how “animals destabilise, transgress or even resist
our human orderings, including spatial ones” (5; see also c hapter 4). On feminist approaches
to human-animal relationships, see, in addition to the sources listed in the introduction to
this book, Dunayer (1995), Haraway (1991), and Scholtmeijer (1995). Scholars in this area
have also examined links between ideas of animality and concepts of sexuality, whether the
focus is on Freud’s model of the unconscious as the site of humanity’s archaic or phylogenetic
312 ■ Notes
heritage (Rohman 2009: 5–9, 23–24) or on “the queer history of people’s life writing about
intercorporeal relations as they arise in cross-species companionship” (McHugh 2011: 119;
Kiang 2016).
11. Effective March 15, 2011, two years after the publication of Skloot’s article, the word-
ing of the ADA provision for service animals was changed. As noted on the website of the US
Department of Justice, only dogs now qualify as bona fide service animals in the ADA’s nar-
row definition of the term—as opposed to broader definitions found in some state and local
laws. See http://www.ada.gov/service_animals_2010.htm.
12. In this connection, see Shir-Vertesh’s (2012) ethnographic study of the concept of
“flexible personhood” vis-à-vis companion animals in Israeli families. Shir-Vertesh discusses
how, depending on circumstances, pet-keeping Israelis can shift from treating companion
animals as dependent children to excluding them from the domain of personhood, recat-
egorizing them as “non-children” who are “there for personal convenience and comfort”
(428). Thus, companion animals “gain and lose value through constructed relations within
the family” (428).
13. Goodley (2011) builds on the social model of disability proposed by Michael Oliver
(1990) to argue that the aim of disability studies is to dislodge “disability from its medi-
calised and moral origins . . .. ‘Dis/ability’ is not natural. Dis/ability is socially constructed”
(8). Goodley notes that in the UK, UPIAS (the Union of the Physically Impaired Against
Segregation) drew the distinction between impairment and disability adapted in the defini-
tions proposed by the DPI (Disabled People’s International). Whereas impairment is defined
(somewhat circularly) as “the functional limitation within the individual caused by the phys-
ical, mental or sensory impairment,” disability is “the loss or limitation of opportunities to
take part in the normal life of the community on an equal level with others due to physical
and social barriers” (quoted in Goodley 2011: 8). For further discussion of the social con-
struction of disability, see Roulstone, Thomas, and Watson (2012).
14. Goodey notes that this emphasis on abstract logical reasoning as the defining charac-
teristic of the human species can be traced forward to the rise of psychometric testing in the
early twentieth century. See also Jones and Thissen (2006).
15. See Rapp and Ginsburg (2011) for an ethnographic analysis of the “new kinship
imaginaries” emerging from families that include children who have been diagnosed with
a learning disability. Arguing that “kinship is a key hermeneutic in understanding the cul-
tural dynamics surrounding embodied and cognitive difference” (384), Rapp and Ginsburg
discuss how, for families with children on the autism spectrum, “kin relations are inevitably
transformed around issues of caretaking, specialized curriculum, and developmental expec-
tations” (382). But whereas Rapp and Ginsburg’s focus is on the way efforts to accommodate
the children in their study affect concepts of family viewed from an intraspecies perspective
(see 385), my focus here is on how ideas of family can also be more or less inclusive when it
comes to interspecies relationships.
16. As Serpell and Paul (2011) note, “According to various opinion polls and surveys,
between 86% and 97% of pet-owning Americans consider their pets to be members of the
family” (297).
17. For more on fictive families, see Ball (1972), Carsten (2010), Mac Rae (1992), and
Wilson et al. (2013).
18. See also Walsh (2009a: 467, 470, 473). Relatedly, Albert and Bulcroft (1988), through
statistical analysis of information obtained in telephone interviews, found that “never-
married, divorced, and widowed people, as well as people who are involved in a second or
subsequent marriage [and hence in a “critical life course transition” (551)] score higher on
Notes ■ 313
pet attachment than do cohabitating couples and people who are in first marriages. People
who do not have children and those who do not have children present in the home also feel
closer to their pets” (548). Serpell and Paul (2011) discuss other possibly adaptive functions
of pet keeping that involve a similar crossing of species boundaries—namely, the way keeping
pets may facilitate the acquisition of parenting skills via “practice” parenting (304), and also
the way such animals serve to advertise their human companions’ ability to engage in altru-
istic or prosocial behavior, thus making the humans more attractive to their conspecifics as
potential mates or allies (304–5).
19. Regarding the inclusion of animals in family photographs, the practice is now so well
established that it is the subject of ironic commentary, as in the “Pets” section of the web-
site devoted to “Awkward Family Photos” (http://awkwardfamilyphotos.com/category/
photos/pets-2/). Regarding ventriloquized speech productions by companion animals, see
Tannen’s (2010) discussion of how, in the tape-recorded conversations of the two families
whose discourse she studied, “family members use pet dogs as resources in their interactions.
Specifically, the pets become resources by which speakers buffer criticism, effect frame shifts,
deliver praise, teach values, mediate or avoid conflict, and both reflect and constitute the
participants’ family identities” (401; see also Arluke and Sanders 1996 as well as chapter 5).
Regarding pet testimonials, see the collection of memorials posted on the critters.com web-
site for examples of online testimonial practices.
20. See Hodgson and Dowling (2011) on the use of animal-including genograms. On the
history and use of genograms more generally, see Huss and Cwikel (2008) and McGoldrick,
Gerson, and Petry (2008).
n C
hapter 4
1. See, for example, Chaney (2011b), De Angelis (2005), and, for broader discussion of
animal representations across a variety of media, chapters included in Almiron, Cole, and
Freeman (2016) as well as Molloy (2011).
2. See Herman (2018b) for further discussion of these keywords.
3. Ryan and Thon (2014) suggest that, taken together, these two strands of inquiry—
one focusing on the constraints and affordances of different storytelling media, the other on
the processes of transmission and transformation that come into play when narrative worlds
originally projected in one medium are then taken up in stories presented in other media—
define the scope of transmedial narratology. For more on the first of these strands, see
Herman (2004), Ryan (2004), and, vis-à-vis graphic narratives in particular, Ewert (2000),
Mikkonen (2008, 2011, 2013), and Stein and Thon (2013). For more on the second strand,
see Herman (2013: 8–15), Jenkins (2006), and Klastrup and Tosca (2004, 2014). Although
I focus mainly on questions concerning the expressive capacities of comics vis-à-vis other
storytelling media in the present chapter, I do explore issues associated with transmedial
worlds in my discussion of the graphic adaptations of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis.
4. I subsume these paradigms or indigenous theories of animal minds under the gen-
eral heading of “folk ethology,” a term I use in parallel with “folk psychology,” or everyday
understandings of how (human) thinking works, the rough-and-ready heuristics to which
people resort in thinking about thinking itself. Dennett (1987) characterizes such folk-psy-
chological rules of thumb in the following way: “Very roughly, folk psychology has it that
beliefs are information-bearing states of people that arise from perceptions and that, together
with appropriately related desires, lead to intelligent action” (46). For further discussion of
research in this area, see Herman (2013: 293–98).
314 ■ Notes
5. See Herman (2013: 283–85, 291–92) for a discussion of how storytelling practices,

in general, saturate with lived experience what would otherwise remain an abstract spatial
network of objects, sites, domains, and regions (see also Duncan 2000; Johnstone 1990;
Tuan 1977). For a narratology beyond the human, a particularly salient question is: How do
animal narratives work to emplace species, whether in conformity with or in opposition to
broader cultural ontologies and their associated divisions and hierarchies vis-à-vis forms of
creatural life (see also chapter 7).
6. For more on animal geography, see Buller (2014), Johnston (2008), Lorimer and
Srinivasan (2013), Philo and Wilbert (2000), Saha (2015), and Wolch and Emel (1998).
7. See Portmann (1961) for a different approach to animal geography, which Portmann
integrates with Umwelt research or inquiry into animals’ experiential worlds: “If a dragonfly’s
wing-structure is a source of astonishment and delight for our gaze, and a fact full of unsolved
problems for research, an equally astonishing fact is the dragonfly’s possession of a daily terri-
tory, an integration of the surrounding space into the individual insect’s experience, a space of
which that insect is the centre, which in a clearly understandable way belongs to it and greatly
extends its effective ‘presence’ beyond the bounds of the body” (232). See along the same
lines Portmann’s later account of the migratory abilities of the warbler, a bird he characterizes
as “an animal with an inborn picture of the sky” (1990a: 9).
8. As Hughes put it in an interview with Nicholas Wroe (2009), “And this notion of a little
chap being pursued by a large predatory female bird with a sharp beak does seem to unnerve
people. Particularly men.”
9. Another aspect of the text to explore in this connection is the relationship between
Hughes’s narrative and the 1960 stage musical and 1963 film adaptation also titled Bye Bye
Birdie, which feature a character based on Elvis Presley and a small-town young woman from
the American Midwest.
10. It should be recalled that this nursery rhyme itself registers anxiety about the human-
nonhuman boundary, as well as issues of containment and control associated with that
boundary. The four and twenty blackbirds are initially inside the pie, but by the end of the
nursery rhyme a blackbird has come to occupy and indeed dominate the space that contains
the pie as well as human pie-makers, pecking off the nose of a maid hanging out some clothes.
Hughes’s text perhaps visually alludes to the maid and her clothesline via the telephone wires
that appear late in the narrative (see Hughes 2009: 19–21, 25).
11. On the distinction between anthropocentric and biocentric understandings of human-
nonhuman relationships, also discussed in chapter 1, see Margot Norris (1985). Tracing the
biocentric tradition back to Darwin’s denial of any distinction in kind between humans and
other animals—to the way Darwin “places biological man within Nature, giving him an ani-
mal genealogy and a mutable mammalian form” while situating “reason, morality, culture, art,
and language within Nature as well” (46)—Norris explores strands of biocentrism not only
in Kafka’s work but also in Nietzsche, D. H. Lawrence, and other late nineteenth-and early
twentieth-century writers and artists.
12. The fuzziness of the category of vermin may be behind Kafka’s creation of a composite mor-
phology for Gregor, notably described by Hartmut Binder as “a mélange of bug and beetle and—
possibly—cockroach” (qtd. in Corngold 2004: 61). Likewise, the cultural and historical variability
of the animals considered to be vermin surfaces in the charwoman’s references to Gregor as a dung
beetle, or scarab, a creature sacred to the ancient Egyptians (see Swinford 2010: 216).
13. In this respect, the idea of vermin plays, in the domain of animal life, a role analogous
to that of the weed in the domain of plant life.
Notes ■ 315
14. This correlation between animal geographies and membership criteria for the category
of vermin underscores once again why a narratology beyond the human can dovetail with
emergent work in the critical medical humanities (Whitehead et al. 2016)—as previously
discussed in chapter 3. As Alex Nading (2013) has argued, when it comes to public health
initiatives involving vector-borne and other zoonotic diseases, including emerging infectious
diseases, or EIDs, cross-cultural differences in attitudes toward animals must be taken into
account; only then can different understandings of and ways of orienting to the animals that
bioscience has identified as disease vectors, for example, be properly factored into the dis-
course and methodology of public health research. In turn, if a culture’s narrative practices
at once emanate from and help scaffold its animal geographies, analysis of those storytelling
practices will have an important bearing on protocols for the prevention and treatment of
relevant diseases. Conversely, research on EIDs and other diseases can inform studies of the
intersections between narratives and animal geographies across (and also within) cultures.
For historical perspectives on some of the key issues at stake, see, in addition to Fissell (1999)
and Jerolmack (2008), Wilkinson (1992).
15. Here it is worth noting that the anthropologist Mary Douglas defined dirt as “matter
out of place,” threatening a “set of ordered relations” (qtd. in Jerolmack 2008: 73). Douglas’s
account resonates with the way, in the third section of Kafka’s text, Gregor’s bedroom
becomes a kind of junk room, and Gregor himself becomes “covered with dust; fluff and hair
and remnants of food trailed with him” (Kafka 1915/2006: 412).
16. For a different, schizoanalytic approach to Kafka’s animal narratives, see Deleuze and
Guattari’s (1975/1986) account of The Metamorphosis and other texts by Kafka featuring
nonhuman characters, including “Investigations of a Dog” (“Forschungen eines Hundes”)
(1922) and “Report for an Academy” (“Ein Bericht für eine Akademie”) (1917). For
Deleuze and Guattari (12–15), Kafka uses Gregor, the canine narrator of “Investigations,”
the former ape featured in “Report,” and other nonhuman or hybrid beings to stage a process
of becoming-animal, interpreted as a strategy for evading or undermining the repressive psy-
chosocial territorialization of flows of desire.
17. See Herman (2013: 213–14) for a discussion of how ideological factors bear on the
migration of characters across species boundaries in fictional narratives.
18. Mairowitz and Crumb do not include this second scene in their condensed adapta-
tion/explication of Kafka’s text.
19. Drawing on de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life (1980/1984), which
describes how ordering systems configure places so as to exclude the possibility of two
distinct kinds of things being in the same location at the same time, Philo and Wilbert
(2000) discuss a range of human classificatory schemes by means of which nonhuman
animals are assigned their “proper place” vis-à-v is humans as well as other nonhuman
species (6–7).
20. Among the sources that Abadzis drew on for historical information are Dubbs (2003)
and Siddiqi (2003).
21. For further details about the flight, some of which were not revealed until 2002, see
Whitehouse (2002). Also, as Rohman (2018) discusses, Abadzis invented the character of
Yelena Dubrovsky in the service of his overall narrative design, raising important questions
about how understandings of gender identities intersect with attitudes toward other animals
in stories about human-animal interactions and relationships.
22. Here one might also mention another experiential frame: on a subsequent page, faint
television images of Laika appear on monitors in the control room. Those monitors, however,
316 ■ Notes
do not seem to be operational during the sequence presented in fi gure 4.4, which occurs just
after the rocket reaches orbit.
23. In general terms, this resituated continuum can be aligned with work in the philoso-
phy of mind, psychology, robotics, and other fields that seeks to move away from Cartesian
geographies of the mental as an interior, immaterial domain, and instead characterizes the
mind as distributed across brain, body, and world (Clark 1997 and 2008; Gallagher 2005;
Hurley 1998; Noë 2004 and 2009; Thompson 2007; Torrance 2005; Varela, Thompson, and
Rosch 1991). Particularly relevant, in this context, are the “enactivist” models of mind that
have emerged as part of the broader critique of Cartesian dualism (for a foundational study,
see Varela, Thompson, and Rosch 1991). In sharp contrast with Descartes’s portrayal of an
immaterial mind “in here” that is separate from—indeed, dichotomously opposed to—the
world “out there,” enactivist models emphasize how a mind acquires the profile it has by vir-
tue of an organism’s ongoing interactions with its larger environment.
24. Varela, Thompson, and Rosch (1991) suggest that “affordances consist in opportu-
nities for interaction that things in the environment possess relative to the sensorimotor
capacities of the animal. For example, relative to certain animals, some things, such as trees,
are climbable or afford climbing. Thus affordances are distinctly ecological features of the
world” (203).
25. As noted by Bernaerts et al. (2014: 75), Ziolkowski (1983), in an analysis of texts
with canine narrators, sets up a comparable scale between anthropocentric and cynocentric
narratives. See also Nelles (2001).
26. See the coda to this book for a fuller discussion of counterfactual conditionals.
27. See http://www.jayhosler.com/clanapis.html.
28. In an earlier version of the model presented in figure 4.5 (see Herman 2011d), I used
the label “anthropomorphic projection” for this second increment on the scale. Because of
conceptual, methodological, and other issues discussed in the introduction, however, in the
present study I seek to avoid the term anthropomorphism and its cognates wherever possible.
Here I have opted to replace the previous label with a new rubric that foregrounds and I hope
clarifies the inverted analogical mappings performed by narratives, or segments of narratives,
situated near the second and third increments on the scale.
29. In the comment quoted in my previous paragraph, the reviewer in effect subsumes all
the potential types (or functions) of models distinguished by Black under the single heading
of theoretical models.
30. Likewise, London portrays White Fang as being undermined or diminished by domes-
tication: “His bondage had softened him. Irresponsibility had weakened him” (London
1906: 114).
31. As Cosslett (2006: 74) notes, the publication of Black Beauty helped bring about a ban
on the use of the bearing rein.
32. Earlier in the narrative, the animal terrorist Pompeii cries out after shooting Robert
Paige, the human whose car Pompeii commandeers at gunpoint in order to escape from
police, “You take everything! You take and you take and you take!!! You take everything
and you give nothing back” (Hines 2010: 195).
33. In an interview quoted by Jeanne Ewert (2000: 92), Spiegelman and Mouly (1981)
suggested that Spiegelman deployed animal allegory to tell his father’s story in a (paradoxi-
cal) effort to ward off inauthenticity—namely, the inauthenticity that might have attached to
Spiegelman’s account had he tried to represent in a less oblique manner situations and events
in which he himself did not directly participate.
Notes ■ 317
34. For example, Keen notes that Safa’s memory of being gang-raped by several male lions
imposes a human-oriented narrative—about violence against women—on the attested mat-
ing behavior of adult lions, which differs from that of humans (Keen 2011: 148).
35. See, however, Bekoff ’s (2013) and Burghardt’s (2010) arguments for the advantages
of critical or heuristic projections from the source domain of the human to the target domain
of the nonhuman, as discussed in chapter 3. See also Morris, Fidler, and Costall (2000) for
empirical work suggesting that HSAT projections—that is, imputing to nonhuman agents
psychological states that are more or less closely modeled after those pertaining to human
minds—may constitute a default cognitive preference when it comes to interpreting the
behavior of nonhumans. Finally, consider the arguments made by Plumwood (2002a) that
I discussed in my introduction to this book—in particular, her distinction between weaker
and stronger forms of “humanization” in accounts of animals, and her suggestion that “weak
forms are unavoidable but not necessarily harmful, while strong forms may be damaging but
are by no means inevitable” (58).
36. For more information about the comic and its history, see http://en.wikipedia.org/
wiki/Animal_Man as well as the Animal Man discussion forum: http://amanbuddybaker.
proboards.com.
37. See “Animal-Man and the Mod Gorilla Boss,” in Strange Adventures 201 ( June
1967): 10.
38. Keen (2011) characterizes a sequence involving human-into-animal transformation
in J. P. Strassen’s Deogratias as an instance of “dehumanization.” In the terms afforded by
figures 4.5 and 4.6, this sequence can instead be described as a special type of ASHT projec-
tion. Whereas in this context the term dehumanization suggests that, in being aligned with
nonhuman animals, humans undergo some sort of loss or degradation, with the term thus
connoting a value hierarchy that maps species differences onto different degrees of ontolog-
ical status or moral worth, talk of a projection from an animal source onto a human target is
a more value-neutral description—suggesting merely the mapping of nonhuman attributes
onto human agents.
39. On storytelling techniques vis-à-vis the history of species, see the coda to this book;
on companion animals and the idea of being with, see Serpell (1998) and Haraway (2008),
respectively; on the forms of domination bound up with pet keeping, see Tuan (1984) and
chapter 1.
40. As Bird Rose et al. (2012) put it, “The Australian philosopher Val Plumwood . . . iden-
tified two central tasks for the ‘ecological humanities.’ These tasks are to resituate the human
within the environment, and to resituate nonhumans within cultural and ethical domains.
Both tasks aim to overcome the nature/culture binary that positions humans outside of
nature and thus implicitly posits that we are free to control our own destiny within a broader
‘natural’ world that is devoid of meaning, values, and ethics” (3).
41. As noted in the introductory section of this chapter, future work will need to consider
routes for investigating the constitution of narrativity, in more-than-human terms, across
a range of storytelling media—and not just in graphic narratives. My introduction to this
book, in parallel with Burt’s (2002) monograph as well as the studies assembled in Pick and
Narraway (2013) and Lawrence and McMahon (2015), poses questions about how narra-
tivity, medium-specificity, and animal worlds intersect in cinematic environments. But the
same questions need to be asked about animal narratives in digital environments, among
other storytelling media (see, e.g., Almiron et al. 2016; Cronin 2014; Huff and Haefner 2012;
Molloy 2011).
318 ■ Notes
42. In the same study, Fludernik (1996) goes on to define narrativity as “mediated human
experientiality” (26), suggesting that “human experientiality is the topic of narrative” (37)
and that “the representation of human experience is the central aim of narrative” (37).
Other theorists who make a focus on human or human-like characters criterial for narra-
tivity include Cohn (1999), Kafalenos (2006), and Ricoeur (1983–85/1984–88). By con-
trast, Richardson (1997) lifts this restriction, arguing that a representation need not center
on human or human-like characters for it to qualify as a narrative.
n C
hapter 5
1. In an extended endnote concerning Lily Wilson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s house-
maid, Woolf suggests the need to widen the scope of biography to include subjects from a
range of socioeconomic backgrounds (1933/1983: 168–74). See also Woolf ’s remark in her
1939 essay “The Art of Biography”: “Is not any one who has lived a life, and left a record of
that life, worthy of biography—the failures as well as the successes, the humble as well as the
illustrious?” (qtd. in Marcus 1994: 97).
2. With the book selling thirty thousand copies in the United Kingdom and the United
States in the first six months after publication, Woolf herself had mixed feelings about Flush’s
success (see Briggs 2005: 300; Lewis 1983: 308).
3. As Craig Smith (2002) notes, until recently critics have tended to read Flush as second-
ary to or even an embarrassing departure from “Woolf ’s ‘serious’ fiction” (359).
4. Texts by literary authors who have acquired specialist knowledge of particular life forms
would need to be placed in a different category. Relevant here are Nabokov’s contributions
to lepidoptery, as well as the research on nineteenth-century theories of social insects that
informs A. S. Byatt’s 1992 novella Morpho Eugenia, as discussed in chapter 2.
5. Another relevant development is what Louis van den Hengel (2012), drawing on the
ideas of Giorgio Agamben (2004), Bruno Latour (1991/1993), and others, terms zoegraphy,
or “a mode of writing life that is not indexed on the traditional notion of bios—the discursive,
social, and political life appropriate to human beings—but [rather] centers on the generative
vitality of zoe, an inhuman, impersonal, and inorganic force which . . . is not specific to human
lifeworlds, but cuts across humans, animals, technologies, and things” (2).
6. See Goldman (2006: 76–77), Lewis (1983: 304–5, 311–12), Marcus (1994: 93–97),
and Snaith (2002: 618).
7. For a different interpretation of Strachey’s life- writing practices, see Abbott
(2008a: 149–150). For a discussion of ascriptions of mental states in fictional versus nonfic-
tional contexts, see Cohn (1999: 117–23) and chapter 6. For his part, Monk (2007) argues
that though Strachey emphasized “brevity, style, irreverence and an interest in character” in
his life-writing practices, he did not equate fiction with biography. On the contrary, in seek-
ing to “strip away the pieties of the Victorian age in order to reveal the reality that lay under-
neath,” Strachey aimed “to sharpen, not blur, the distinction between truth and illusion, fact
and fiction” (3–4).
8. The converse proposition does not hold: the inclusion of historical characters in fic-
tional discourse does not undercut a narrative’s overall status as fiction. Thus, when Abraham
Lincoln appears in a 1969 episode of the television series Star Trek, titled “The Savage
Curtain,” his presence does not compromise or diminish the fictionality of the episode. For
further discussion of these and related issues, see Abbott (2008a: 151–52, 158–59).
9. At the beginning of her review, however, Woolf suggests that this fault line between fact
and fiction, rather than being a defect specific to Nicolson’s book, is endemic to the project of
Notes ■ 319
modern biography, which fails to unite the “granite-like solidity” of truth with the “rainbow-
like intangibility” of personality (1927/2008: 95). For further details about Nicolson’s work
and Woolf ’s responses to it, see Marcus (1994: 104–110).
10. The following statement from Woolf ’s essay “The New Biography” seems to lend sup-
port to Monk’s claim: “Too many biographers have relied upon external facts as a substitute
for knowledge of the inner life. The external skeleton cannot stand in place of life” (1927/
2008: 298).
11. In The Inward Turn (1973), Kahler argues that the evolution of literary discourse has
been marked by a progressive internalization of events, a movement away from environments
for acting and interacting toward the domain of the mental or psychological, characterized
as an interior space separated from external material reality. Although the historical trajec-
tory traced in Kahler’s study ends before the modernist period, his discussion resonates with
(and may have been influenced by) accounts of early twentieth-century fiction by modernist
writers themselves (for example, Woolf ’s “Modern Fiction” [1919/1984]) and by commen-
tators such as Edel (1955) and Lukács (1936/1971). By contrast, Herman (2011b) argues
that modernist writers staged how conscious experiences arise from a functional coupling
between intelligent agents and their surrounding environments, in parallel with recent post-
or rather anti-Cartesian accounts of embodied, situated minds in fields ranging from phenom-
enology and the philosophy of mind to cognitive linguistics and social psychology. Further,
in connection with issues that will come to the fore in chapter 6, see Herman (2011a: 7–18)
for a critique of Käte Hamburger’s claim that only “epic fiction,” or heterodiegetic fictional
narration, provides access to the I-originarity of another, such that “third-person figures can
be spoken of not, or not only[,]‌as objects, but also as subjects” (1957/1993: 122)—a claim
further elaborated by Cohn (1978: 7–8).
12. In Mrs. Dalloway, as discussed below, Woolf uses many different focalizing agents or
reflectors, yielding the techniques that Genette described as variable and multiple focaliza-
tion (see Genette 1972/1980: 161–211; Jahn 2007; and the glossary). In Flush, by contrast,
the focalization is largely fixed: Flush is the main focalizer.
13. My remarks concerning free indirect discourse reflect the “dual-voice hypothesis”
about this mode—as discussed by Pascal (1977) and, in somewhat different parlance, Cohn
(1978). According to this hypothesis, free indirect discourse represents a fusion of a narra-
tor’s and a character’s discourse, in a broad sense of “discourse” that includes not just patterns
of expression but also ways of evaluating and understanding the world. See Banfield (1982)
for a very different account of the structure and functions of free indirect discourse.
14. Ferguson (2000) develops a comprehensive account of the structure and functions of
counterfactual histories.
15. Bear, Connors, and Paradiso (2007) note that the size of the olfactory epithelium
(which is a “thin sheet of cells high up in the nasal cavity”) provides one indicator of acuity
of smell, and that whereas the surface area of this structure is about 10 cm2 in humans it is
about 170 cm2 in some dogs (265). Further, “Dogs have over 100 times more receptors in
each square centimeter than humans. By sniffing the aromatic air above the ground, dogs can
detect the few molecules left by someone walking there hours before. Humans may only be
able to smell the dog when he licks their face” (265).
16. Compare Quentin Bell’s remark that “Flush is not so much a book by a dog lover as a
book by someone who would love to be a dog” (qtd. in Smith 2002: 352–53).
17. As Agamben discusses (2004: 49–56), Heidegger held that nonhuman animals are
“poor in world” (weltarm), in contrast with “worldless” (weltlos) inanimate objects such as
320 ■ Notes
stones, at one end of the spectrum, and “world-forming” (weltbildend) humans, at the other
end (see Heidegger 1929–30/1995: 176–77; see also Buchanan 2008: 65–114). Calarco
(2008), for his part, suggests that Heidegger, although striving to avoid traditional or com-
mon-sense hierarchies that rank humans above animals, nonetheless insisted on a dichoto-
mizing approach that separates humans out from all other forms of animal life (40–56). In
turn, Calarco traces this approach back to a reaction by Heidegger against developments in
the life sciences that the philosopher interpreted as symptomatic of biological reductionism
(37–39), including Darwin’s account of evolutionary processes as trans-species in scope, and
hence as bearing on human as well as nonhuman animals.
18. In a later passage recounting Flush’s explorations of Florence, however, Woolf suggests
how Flush’s powerful senses of smell and touch in effect allow him to read the world itself as
a text—a text that is orthogonal to, but in no way less information-rich than, the texts gener-
ated by human languages. Thus, through “the rapture of smell” and by taking “the clear stamp
of Latin inscriptions . . . upon the infinitely sensitive pads of his feet,” he “knew Florence in its
marmoreal smoothness and in its gritty and cobbled roughness” (131–32).
19. As indicated in chapters 2 and 3, A. O. Lovejoy (1936/1964) provides a foundational
account of the metaphysical assumptions, cultural imagery, and value schemes associated
with the Great Chain of Being.
20. For general discussions of the fiction-nonfiction distinction, see, in addition to the
analyses developed in the present chapter as well as chapter 6, Cohn (1999), Gorman
(2005), and Lejeune (1989).
21. For further context, see Bateson (1954/1972), Goffman (1974), Gordon (2015);
Pagliai (2012), Tannen (1993a, 1993b), and Tannen and Wallat (1993). See also my discus-
sion of the analogous concept of discourse domains in c hapter 6.
22. See, for example, Buchbinder (2008), Gordon (2015), Herman (2002: 198–205),
Johnstone (2007: 139–43), Schiffrin (1993, 1994: 106–36), Simmons-Mackie, Kingston,
and Schultz (2004), Tannen (1993a, 1993b), and Tannen and Wallat (1993).
23. Goffman goes on to write that, in connection with the principal, “one deals in this case
not so much with a body or mind as with a person active in some particular social identity or
role, some special capacity as a member of a group, office, category, relationship, association,
or whatever, some socially based source of self-identification. Often this will mean that the
individual speaks, explicitly or implicitly, in the name of ‘we,’ not ‘I.’ . . . And, of course, the
same individual can rapidly alter the social role in which he is active, even though his capacity
as animator remains constant—what in committee meetings is called ‘changing hats’ ” (145).
See below for further discussion of these issues; see also table 5.1.
24. On negative versus positive face wants, see Brown and Levinson (1978/1987: 91–
228), Goffman (1967), and Schiffrin (1993: 234, 238). On Critical Discourse Analysis, see
Fairclough (2010) and Wodak and Meyer (2012).
25. For his part, Portner (2011) situates epistemic modality among a range of other types
of sentential modality, “in which some expression combines with a nonmodal sentence,
making it modal” (508). Whereas epistemic modality has to do with knowledge, other types
include deontic modality, which has to with rules, and dynamic modality, which has to do
with ability or the laws of nature (508–509). Also relevant in this context are evidentials,
which Portner characterizes as a discourse-level form of modality, but which Crystal (1997)
defines as “a type of epistemic modality where propositions are asserted that are open to
challenge by the hearer, and thus require justification” (141). As Crystal puts it, “Evidential
constructions express a speaker’s strength of commitment to a proposition in terms of the
available evidence (rather than in terms of possibility or necessity)” (141).
Notes ■ 321
26. In Crystal’s (1997) formulation, realis is “a term used in the study of epistemic modal-
ity: in a realis (‘real’) assertion, a proposition is strongly asserted to be true, the speaker
being ready to back up the assertion with evidence or argument. It is opposed to an irrealis
(‘unreal’) assertion, where the proposition is weakly asserted to be true, but the speaker is not
ready to support the assertion” (321).
27. In Marcus’s formulation, part of the anxiety about autobiography’s instability and
hybridity arises from a concern over whether autobiography is “a way of ordering and objec-
tifying the self, and thus importing alterity into the self that engenders it, or [a form] mirror-
ing its vacillations and alterations” (1994: 16).
28. The website may be found at http://www.meddybemps.com/Riddles/index.html.
29. The pervasiveness of animals telling riddles in educational and other material targeted
at children speaks to issues raised by Degnen (2011) and discussed previously in c hapter 2.
As Degnen notes, at a time when they themselves are still in the process of acquiring the
status of persons, “Young children are actively encouraged to invert Western naturalist ontol-
ogy (whereby human beings and all other living beings are segregated into radically different
domains) and invest their imagination in a cosmos where human and nonhuman animals are
commensurate” (2011: 677).
30. The classroom website is available at http://lorihyland.weebly.com and the
PowerPoint file can be accessed at http://tinyurl.com/hesnrm2.
31. Thus in the appendix titled “Curious Critters: Natural History” included at the end of
the volume, and featuring paragraph-long recaps of the animals’ physical traits and attested
behaviors, the paragraph for “Ohio Crawfish” recapitulates (and elaborates on) statements
attributed to the animal itself in the profile quoted previously: “Crayfish—known regionally
as crawdads, drawfish, or mudbugs—have many pairs of appendages, including a pair of che-
lipeds (with large claws, or chelae) in the front, medium-sized walking legs in the middle, and
small swimmerets under the tail. Any of these can be regenerated if injured” (Fitzsimmons
2011: 25).
32. Compare the similar shifts of footing at work in the profile for the black swallowtail
butterfly, who is portrayed both as reporting, “I take flight, showing off my beautiful colors”
and as anticipating the questions of the child addressee: “Now, I know what you are think-
ing: Predators can catch me quite easily. True, but they don’t. Do you know why? Because
they think that I am poisonous. Let me tell you a secret: I’m not, but my colors are similar to
a butterfly that is poisonous” (Fitzsimmons 2011: 18).
33. Bykofsky’s (undated) text can be found on the Animal Liberation Front’s website at
http://www.animalliberationfront.com/Practical/Entertainment/ImanElephant.htm, while
“Interview from an Animal Shelter,” dated August 2009 (author unknown), can be found at
http://www.animalliberationfront.com/Practical/Pets/Stories/InterviewAnimalShelter.
htm. With Bykofsky’s text, compare the fictional elephant autobiography included in William
Kotzwinkle’s Doctor Rat (1976/2014), in which the Old River Elephant reminisces (and
recounts to the long-legged white bird who perches on his back) how he and the other ele-
phants in his nation of herds “ate the magnificent herb of the savannah, the one that raised us to
the skies” and that created, in addition to visions, “the incomparable feeling . . . that we were all
one elephant. One heart, one knowledge. They had a name for this wonderful feeling, a special
name, but I’ve lost the sound of it now. But imagine, little bird, imagine one elephant with the
strength of seven hundred” (113–14).
34. Thus, rather than being an instance of fiction, this animal autobiography cautions
against using fictional narratives as templates for understanding animal lives, or human-
animal relationships.
322 ■ Notes
35. Another, more recent fictional equine autobiography for which Black Beauty consti-
tutes a key precursor text, Michael Morpugo’s War Horse (1982/2007), likewise carries over
the balance of compositional techniques found in Sewell’s novel. Thus War Horse relies on a
preponderance of HSAT projections, including those bound up with Joey’s framing of his
wartime experiences by way of concepts and practices such as No Man’s Land and trench
warfare, coupled with intermittent instances of Umwelt modeling, as when Joey reports that
Trooper Warren is an exacting caretaker but a heavy and clumsy rider (84, 88), or recounts
his nearly fatal struggle with tetanus (214–27).
36. As Norris (2012) notes, because of illness Sewell was unable to walk and depended on
horse-drawn transportation for most of her life.
37. Although her discussion foregrounds the aspects of speaking for nonhuman others
that concern questions of negative face wants or the desire not to be intruded upon, without
sufficient consideration of the aspects that concern positive face wants or the desire to show
solidarity, Ittner (2006) identifies in Paul Auster’s 1999 novel Timbuktu some of the issues
that are at stake in ironized or self-reflexive acts of butting in across species lines. Thus, for
Ittner Auster uses Willy G. Christmas’s relationship with his dog, Mr. Bones, to suggest how
“by thinking of an animal, we construct it within our own consciousness and therefore what
is reflected back to us is our own existence, irrespective of the point of view we choose to
adopt . . .. [Auster’s] approach acknowledges this impasse and integrates it into its inquiry on
animal alterity” (Ittner 2006: 182).
38. O’Brien’s text won the 1972 Newberry Medal, awarded annually to books that con-
tribute to American literature for children.
39. Other echoes include Doctor Rat’s references to tattoos on rats’ bodies, as well as
his accounts of scientific papers published on the basis of sadistic experiments involving
castration, decapitation, exposure to radiation, the grafting of body parts removed from
one rat onto the bodies of other rats, the retraining of rats’ teeth such that they grow
up through the roof of the mouth and pierce the brain, the implantation of cancerous
tumors, the sewing together of rats’ bodies, and other abhorrent practices, including
placing kittens, fully awake, in a microwave oven, with their paws taped down to the tray.
As Doctor Rat puts it: “This is the sort of gratifying sight the taxpayers don’t usually
have a chance to see—t wo young scientists in front of the oven, baking a trayful of cats.
This is where your taxes are going, fellow Americans, contributing to a better and lasting
etcetera” (38).
40. Dovey extends the metafictional profile of the story by intermixing fictional characters
and real-world individuals, including not only Kafka but also Kafka’s friend and collaborator
Hans Blei, as well as Carl Hagenbeck, founder of the zoo in Hamburg, Germany, that came to
be known as Tierpark Hagenbeck. Along similar lines, in an online list of the sources that she
used while composing stories in the collection, Dovey lists Kafka’s diaries, journals, letters,
and fictional works as sources for “Red Peter’s Little Lady” (see http://www.ceridwendovey.
com/assets/Uploads/Only-the-Animals-sources.pdf).
41. Thus, in one of her letters to Red Peter in which she reports on Hazel’s progress as
a trainee, Evelyn remarks that “the frustration with her body that she expresses [when she
tries to put on a bodice] should be seen as a positive step, I believe, as it can only motivate
her to give up her chimpanzee habits and fully embrace human ways—as you have, to such
astounding effects” (loc. 585–92).
42. For more on the US Navy’s Marine Mammal Program, which has engaged in the docu-
mented use of bottlenose dolphins, Beluga whales, and sea lions for purposes of surveillance,
Notes ■ 323
and which is reported to have used dolphins for “swimmer nullification” missions, see Casey
(2015: loc. 733–36).
43. For more on dolphins’ sophisticated echolocation skills, see Casey (2015: loc. 729–
34) and Moore (1991).
44. The way Coe ventriloquizes this moment of abandonment typifies the anti-
anthropocentric mode of alignment, that is, the proclivity for chipping in rather than butting
in, that both informs and is promoted by her acts of cross-species speaking-for: “I ran and ran
[after the pickup truck containing Pat, his father, and his uncle], the truck growing smaller
and smaller. The dead deer tied to the roof bounced up and down, her sad eyes watching me.
The last thing I saw was the sobbing face of my only friend as he watched me disappear into a
speck, and then no more” (17).
45. Pit recounts this incident as follows: “A human trader in animal lives appeared. Certain
dogs on death row caught his eye. He chose me. I was taken past all that remained of the aban-
doned: their collars. What was our crime? We were guilty of being animals and our sentence
was life in a laboratory until death” (28–29).
n C
hapter 6
1. A reviewer of an earlier draft of this book suggested that my approach conflates heterophe-
nomenology, in the narrow, technical sense in which Dennett uses the term, and the broader
notion of intersubjectivity. I return to Dennett’s work in more detail below; but it is worth not-
ing here that I purposely adapt Dennett’s term, in the enriched or expanded sense discussed in
the paragraph to which this note is appended, to avoid the connotation of shared or reciprocal
understanding associated with at least some concepts of intersubjectivity. My emphasis, in this
chapter, is on humans’ mind-ascribing practices and the way norms associated with different
discourse domains impinge on the nature and scope of mental-state attributions that cross the
species boundary. I thus treat only indirectly the other half of the dialectic that falls under the
remit of intersubjectivity: in this case, nonhuman recognition of and response to the ascriptive
practices at issue (but see c hapters 2 and 5 as well as Hearne 1986/2007). I wish to take this
opportunity, in any case, to express my gratitude to this reviewer for the time and care that he
or she devoted to his or her outstanding report, which has (I hope) allowed me to avoid many
errors and sharpen the arguments made over the course of this study.
2. In an earlier study (Herman 2013), I pursued transdisciplinarity of the sort described
in the concluding section of c hapter 5 by emphasizing how mind-oriented frameworks for
narrative scholarship can not only be informed by but also inform research on human intel-
ligence. In the present chapter I shift the focus to fictional and nonfictional accounts of the
experiences of nonhuman animals, and consider strategies for fostering fuller, more open
dialogue between narratological approaches to stories that engage with animal subjectivity,
on the one hand, and phenomenological, ethological, anthropological, and other studies of
animals and human-animal relationships, on the other hand. Indeed, as is also the case with
questions about storytelling vis-à-vis human minds, because of their complexity and many-
sidedness, questions about the narrative projection of animal experiences can arguably only
be addressed by a cross-or transdisciplinary approach that brings together insights from the
natural sciences, the social sciences, and the arts and humanities. Reciprocally, inquiry into
narratively organized discourse about animal worlds and human-animal interactions across
a variety of contexts provides new opportunities to connect the aforementioned areas of
inquiry or, as Kagan (2009) calls them in his update of C. P. Snow (1998), cultures.
324 ■ Notes
3. Compare here Carson’s response to the author’s questionnaire she was asked to fill out
for Under the Sea-Wind, which grew out of her “Undersea” essay: “I wanted my readers to feel
that they were, for a time, actually living the lives of sea creatures” (quoted in Lear 1998: 56).
Similarly, in a paper given in 1953 for a symposium for the American Association for the
Advancement of Science, Carson remarked that it is time to move beyond initial ecologi-
cal findings about species’ geographical distributions to address questions such as “ ‘Why
does an animal live where it does?’ ‘What is the nature of the ties that bind it to its world?’ ”
(quoted in Lear 1998: 135).
4. As noted previously, Uexküll’s idea of the Umwelt has been glossed by Evan Thompson
(2007) as “an animal’s environment in the sense of its lived, phenomenal world, the world as
it presents itself to that animal thanks to its sensorimotor repertoire” (59).
5. In an essay titled “Real and Sham Natural History” in which the American naturalist
John Burroughs critiques accounts of animals that he takes to be human-centric as instances
of “nature fakery,” Burroughs characterizes Warner’s narrative as “the most beautiful and
effective animal story yet written in this country. It is true in the real sense of the world. The
line between fact and fiction is never crossed” (1903: 300). To anticipate issues I discuss later
in this chapter, it is significant that Burroughs here aligns with nonfiction a text that makes
prolific, detailed ascriptions of mental states and experiences to a nonhuman character, par-
ticularly given Burroughs’s aim of policing the border between real and sham accounts of
animal worlds.
6. As discussed in what follows, NRS/T/PA serves as something of a boundary condi-
tion, or upper limit for mental-state attributions, for accounts of animal experience designed
to deflect charges of anthropomorphism—or, to use a less question-begging term, Human-
Source-Animal-Target projections. See figures 4.5 and 4.6 and the surrounding discussion in
chapter 4, as well as c hapter 7.
7. It should be stressed here that although it is written in the form of a diary recording a
year’s worth of encounters with peregrines, Baker’s text is in fact based on a decade of obser-
vations of the birds, their habitats, and their behaviors.
8. For work postdating (and updating) Fowler’s original account of mind style, see
Bockting (1994), Semino and Swindhurst (1996), Semino (2007), and McIntyre and Archer
(2010). For elaborations of the concept that maintain the species neutrality of Fowler’s
account, see Bockting (1994), for whom “Mind style is concerned with the construction and
expression in language of the conceptualisation of reality in a particular mind” (159), and
Semino and Swindlehurst (1996), for whom “The study of mind style involves the identifi-
cation of linguistic patterns that account for the perception of a distinct world view during
the reading of a text” (143). It should also be noted here that ever since Halliday’s (1971)
groundbreaking analysis of the text, commentators have sought to use William Golding’s
1955 novel The Inheritors to map out different mind styles for characters who represent dif-
ferent stages of humans’ evolutionary history.
9. In the account that Nagel outlines, the basic problem with attempts to engage in psy-
chophysical reduction, whether they involve physicalism (the claim that mental states and
processes can be reduced to or are supervenient on underlying physical properties of brains
[Stoljar 2016]) or eliminativism (the claim that at least some aspects of conscious experi-
ence are merely folk-psychological posits, rather than being facts about the domain of the
mental [Churchland 1986; Dennett 1991, 2003, 2007]), stems from the sui generis nature
of consciousness itself: “In other areas [of inquiry] the process of reduction is a move in the
direction of greater objectivity, toward a more accurate view of the real nature of things. This
is accomplished by reducing our dependence on individual or species-specific points of view
Notes ■ 325
toward the object of investigation . . .. Experience itself, however, does not seem to fit the
pattern. The idea of moving from appearance to reality seems to make no sense here” (Nagel
1974: 444; see also Nagel 1986).
10. Elizabeth Costello, Coetzee’s fictional novelist in The Lives of Animals and Elizabeth
Costello, cites Nagel’s article but disputes his conclusions by arguing that humans can in fact
transport themselves into nonhuman subjectivities via acts of “sympathetic imagination”
(see Coetzee 1999: 31–35). Caracciolo (2014b: 489–92) suggests grounds for interpreting
Coetzee’s presentation of Costello’s claims as critical and ironic. Her claims do resonate, how-
ever, with other aspects of the texts in which she appears (Coetzee 1999, 2004) and also with
the experiences of David Lurie in Disgrace (Coetzee 1999/2010; see chapter 2).
11. Statements of this sort explain why I disagree with the previously mentioned review-
er’s suggestion that Nagel’s “interest [in his 1974 article] is in first-person experience, and that
cannot be reduced to an ascription.” As the project is described by Nagel, an objective phe-
nomenology depends at least in part on mental-state ascriptions that square with the attested
neurophysiological characteristics and behavioral dispositions of other subjects, whether
across or within the species boundary (see also Dennett 2007: 252).
12. Although Dennett himself does not make this point, the conduct of animal agents
can itself be construed as a kind of text—to anticipate the link between actions and texts
discussed in chapter 7 (see also Hinchman 1995; Ricoeur 1991d).
13. However, see Dennett (2003, 2007) for counterarguments against this line of critique
vis-à-vis intraspecies differences among human experiencers.
14. For Dennett (1991) the Cartesian theater model assumes that specific subsystems of
the mind/brain (e.g., those bound up with perception, long-term memory, and planning)
converge in some “central thinking area, “a Cartesian Theater, a place where ‘it all comes
together’ and consciousness happens” (39).
15. Boardman (2011) discusses how these two modes of discourse about animals remain
in tension with one another when anthropologist and science writer Loren Eiseley provides
reports about his encounters with animals in his autobiographical writings.
16. Horwood’s text can be categorized as historical fiction because it draws on the
resources of fiction to explore the significance, for the last remaining member of the species,
of the historically documented extinction in 1918 of the white-tailed eagle in Britain, prior to
its reintroduction in 1975 (see “White-Tailed Eagle: Population Trends”).
17. By contrast, although J. G. Ballard’s 1961 short story, “Storm-Bird, Storm-Dreamer,”
likewise features birds attacking humans, the novum on which Ballard’s science-fictional sto-
ryworld is premised helps clarify the birds’ motivations, distinguishing this environmental
dystopia from du Maurier’s tale of horror (see Suvin 1972, 1979; and c hapter 2). In Ballard’s
story the use of new fertilizing sprays brings about a “biological accident” that causes a mas-
sive, almost Brobdingnagian increase in the size of birdlife, creating “sparrows as fierce as
eagles, gannets and gulls with the wing spans of condors . . .. Driven by hunger, they began
to attack the human beings who were their only source of food” (Ballard 1961/1967: 15).
18. I write “more or less distinctive sets of assumptions” here to leave room for possi-
bilities for overlapping, interacting, and emergent domains, and also for domains governed
by competing, sometimes contradictory norms for mental-state attribution. As previously
indicated, texts such as Baker’s The Peregrine and Woolfson’s Corvus straddle or alternate
between domains that license relatively rich ascriptions of subjectivity to nonhuman oth-
ers and domains in which the primary focus is, rather, on the biophysical features and pro-
cesses that make animal experiences possible (see also Woolfson 2013). The texts thereby
allow for or even promote a cross-mapping of these domains, and of the action-oriented and
326 ■ Notes
event-oriented registers that circulate within them. See chapter 7 for a fuller discussion of
these issues in connection with Thalia Field’s Bird Lovers, Backyard (2010).
19. Even earlier, in response to what he viewed as the anthropomorphizing tendencies of
work by George Romanes, an early adopter of Darwin’s ideas and author of an 1882 text on
Animal Intelligence, the psychologist C. Lloyd Morgan formulated a principle that became
known as “Morgan’s Canon”; this principle was also sometimes given the name “Law of
Parsimony,” which had been coined for a similar principle by Wilhelm Wundt (1863/1896;
see Greenwood 2009/2015: 223). According to the principle in question, stated in Morgan’s
1894 Introduction to Comparative Psychology, “In no case may we interpret an action as the
outcome of the exercise of a higher psychical faculty, if it can be interpreted as the outcome
of the exercise of one which stands lower in the psychological scale” (qtd. in Greenwood
2009/2015: 223). As its alternate name suggests, Morgan’s Canon at once emerged from and
scaffolded discourse domains in which ascriptions of subjectivity to nonhuman agents are
severely curtailed.
20. Technically, then, insofar as Burroughs here accuses Seton-Thompson and Long of
producing discourse about animals that is not only intendedly but also deceptively untrue, he
is calling these authors liars, not just writers who cross the line from fact into fiction. By con-
trast, as Gorman (2005) suggests, fiction can be defined as “one kind of intendedly but non-
deceptively untrue discourse” (163), other kinds of which include metaphor and irony. In
discussing Field’s portrayal of Konrad Lorenz in her experimental text Bird Lovers, Backyard
in my next chapter, I return to the complex issues at stake in the question that Burroughs
poses in a bald-faced way: “Why should anyone palm off such stuff [as is found in Long’s
account of a family of partridges in School of the Woods] to the unsuspecting public as verita-
ble natural history?” (308).
21. However, in terms that resonate with the discussion of trans-species kinship networks
in chapter 3, London draws on Darwin’s work to argue that naturalists such as Burroughs, in
attributing instinct to animals while allocating the capacity for reason to humans alone, seek
to “deny [their] relatives, the other animals” (London 1909: para. 34).
22. Thus in recounting one of Lassie’s escapes, the narrative reads: “Dogs can know these
things [i.e., how to burrow under or scale over obstacles] not by logical thought processes, or
because someone has told them it must be so. Even the very smartest dogs know them only
slowly and by hazy instinct and by training they have had in their own short lives” (Knight
1940/1981: 47).
23. On cultural ontologies, see, along with the other relevant sources discussed in
chapter 1, Candea (2010), Descola (2013), Kohn (2013), and Viveiros de Castro (1998).
24. As reported by Allen (2016), in part because of the negative media attention to which
Blackfish helped give rise, SeaWorld decided in March 2016 to end its captive breeding of
orcas and also to phase out, over a three-year period, its staging of theatrical orca shows at its
San Diego facility.
n C
hapter 7
1. In a way that amplifies the resonances between Field’s text and Ricoeur’s model of
explanation and understanding, Ricoeur viewed narrative as a privileged site for hermeneu-
tic theory—not only in his influential account of the three “levels of mimesis” (prefigura-
tion, configuration, refiguration) outlined in Time and Narrative (1983–85/1984–88) but in
earlier studies as well. Thus, in “Explanation and Understanding” (1991b) Ricoeur contrasts
his account with Dilthey’s model of understanding as empathy, arguing that a narrative-based
Notes ■ 327
approach to understanding highlights, instead, its dialectical relationship with explana-

tion: “Whereas explanation appeared to do violence to understanding taken as an immediate
grasp of the intention of others, it naturally serves to extend understanding taken as the com-
petence to follow a narrative” (141–42). In other words, stories have “a lacunary structure,
such that the why proceeds spontaneously from the what. But in return explanation has no
autonomy. Its advantage and its effect are to allow us to follow the story better and further
when the first-order, spontaneous understanding fails” (142).
2. As discussed in c hapters 3 and 4, Philo and Wilbert (2000) characterize animal geog-
raphies as human classificatory schemes by means of which nonhuman animals are assigned
their “proper place” vis-à-vis humans as well as other nonhuman species (6–7).
3. Taylor (1964) defines philosophical anthropology as “the study of the basic categories
in which man and his behaviour [are] to be described and explained” (4). Ricoeur’s approach
to this area of study, as Dauenhauer and Pellauer (2014) describe it, “aims to give an account
of the fundamental capabilities and vulnerabilities that human beings display in the activities
that make up their lives” (para. 2).
4. As Korthals Altes (2014) puts it, “Since structuralist times, scientificity has often been
considered to come proportionally to one’s distancing from interpretation, and from herme-
neutics more generally” (19). By contrast, see Lorraine Daston (1992) for arguments that
the emphasis on objectivity in science is a specifically nineteenth-century development. See
also Lewis P. Hinchman (1995: 237–47) for a discussion of how Aldo Leopold’s (1966)
account of humans as members of larger biotic communities calls into question any dichoto-
mous separation between having authoritative knowledge of and being an interested partici-
pant in such transhuman environments.
5. In making a case for the relevance of hermeneutic theory for discourse analysis,
Allan Bell (2011) recasts Ricoeur’s hermeneutical arc as an “interpretive arc” spanning six
stages: estrangement (Bell’s term for distanciation), pre-view, proto-understanding, analysis
(Bell’s term for explanation), understanding, and ownership (Bell’s term for what Ricoeur
calls appropriation and what I have termed reassimilation). However, the three-phrase cycle
described in the present study has, I believe, sufficient granularity to capture how Field’s
animal narratives both recruit from and comment on available schemes for understanding
behavior beyond the human.
6. This cycle could also be described as an instance or subtype of the hermeneutic circle.
In the Gadamerian version of the circle, as characterized by Bernstein (2011), the process
of bringing background assumptions and prejudgments to bear on particular phenomena
allows for the assumptions and prejudgments that facilitate understanding to be distin-
guished from those that impede it (138–39).
7. In McHugh’s (2011) account, narrative ethology not only studies “animal narrative
form as an indicator of the changing historical conditions of species and agency” (215), but
also examines how “forms of representation matter to the development of theories of species
life” (218). Hence “Story forms [can be seen] as spawning grounds for forms of species and
social agency” (19).
8. My discussion of how human as well as nonhuman conduct can be profiled via these
contrasting nomenclatures or vocabularies—what I term the language of action versus the
language of events—resonates with Crist’s (1999) account of the opposition between action
and behavior elaborated in some strands of work in social and behavioral science (210–22).
9. In another interview, Field (Field and Elshtain 2001) characterizes this nonhierarchical
system of interdependence as “a world we inhabit as guests, not hosts” (105).
328 ■ Notes
10. In “This Crime Has a Name,” discussed in more detail in my next section, the last-
remaining dusky seaside sparrow posthumously addresses concepts of species in the follow-
ing terms: “Talking about species is harder than talking about yourself. Some people propose
that species are natural kinds, with essential qualities. Others say that species are simply DNA
and decoded ancestry. Some think species are just flux, or individuals, or a matter of context,
or mere convenience. Species have even been called market investors, maximizing profits
in speculation of self-production . . .. Let me put it as a philosopher might: If all gold atoms
were to suddenly disappear, the class of gold would exist until more gold showed up. But if all
individuals of a species die away, the species is extinct, and even if creatures identical to me
evolve, they will be counted as new. The same species cannot re-evolve, any more than the
same person can be born twice” (31–32). On concepts of species circulating in the biolog-
ical literature, see Wilkins (2009) and the coda. On issues raised by narratives focusing on
extinction and the loss of biodiversity, see Heise (2010, 2016), van Dooren (2014), and my
discussion in the introduction of Leigh’s and Nettheim’s versions of The Hunter.
11. Field elaborates on the phrase later in the same interview: “I think you’re right that
questions are for me the basis of ecology, the interplay of seeking and ‘reading’ which makes
meaning and life possible. Aren’t all creatures engaged in the paradoxes and parameters of their
worlds? An ecology can’t be summed up in economic terms. It can’t be reduced to costs, or
compared numerically. An ecology escapes the risk of hierarchy, of being easily explained”
(2008: 9).
12. In her interview with Miranda F. Mellis, Field suggests that different fields of inquiry,
with their distinctive nomenclatures, constitute heuristics for generating stories: “The end-
less variety of descriptions of reality reveals a gorgeous, mournful cacophony. Esoteric vocab-
ulary is a total turn-on, as little corners of experience are illuminated and every ‘branch’ of
knowledge shakes loose new stories to their advantage, layering world upon world” (para. 6).
13. For further discussion of these constructs, see below as well as c hapter 6. For a detailed
historical discussion, see Burkhardt’s (2005) account of Lorenz’s and Tinbergen’s contribu-
tions to the study of animal behavior. In addition to tracing the emergence of ethology in the
early twentieth century and charting its postwar “reconstruction,” Burkhardt’s account also
includes a chapter titled “Lorenz and National Socialism” (231–80).
14. In “Writing as Experimental Practice,” Field hypothesizes that “perhaps what makes a
writing practice ‘experimental’ is the intention of the writer to continually re-open their ways
of proceeding, their habits, as they encounter the world. A text held open may go beyond the
parameters of both familiar forms and habitual creative process. The results do not necessar-
ily have to be complex or difficult, but they are surprising” (2014: 326).
15. In “Explanation and Understanding,” Ricoeur elaborates on the homology between
text and action by describing action as “in many respects a quasi text. It is externalized in a
manner comparable to the fixation characteristic of writing. In separating itself from its agent,
action acquires an autonomy similar to the semantic autonomy of a text; it leaves a trace, a
mark; it is inscribed in the course of things and becomes an archive, a document. Like a text,
whose meaning is detached from the initial conditions of its production, human action has
a weight that is not reduced to its importance in the initial situation in which it appears but
allows the reinscription of its sense in new contexts. Finally, an action, like a text, is an open
work, addressed to an indefinite series of possible ‘readers.’ The judges are not its contempo-
raries but subsequent history” (1991b: 138; see also Ricoeur 1991d: 153).
16. In Hoy’s (1980) account (653), whereas Richard Rorty (1979) in effect denies
the distinction between these two registers, suggesting that talk of events is a more or less
Notes ■ 329
oblique or disguised way of talking about actions, Taylor maintains the distinction but cri-
tiques behaviorist or quasi-behaviorist attempts to subsume the register of actions under that
of events (see Taylor 1964: 72–97; 1979: 31–38).
17. In elaborating this claim, Ricoeur draws on the work of H. L. A. Hart (1948–49), who
develops what Hart calls an ascriptive rather than descriptive account of action. Hart argues
that “the philosophical analysis of the concept of a human action has been inadequate and
confusing, at least in part because sentences of the form ‘He did it’ have been traditionally
regarded as primarily descriptive sentences whereas their principal function is what I venture
to call ascriptive, being quite literally to ascribe responsibility for actions much as the prin-
cipal function of sentences of the form ‘This is his’ is to ascribe rights in property” (171).
18. It is no accident, arguably, that Field uses experiments with storytelling to explore
possibilities for repatterning of this sort. As I discuss in an earlier study (Herman 2013: 73–
99), narrative constitutes a primary resource for configuring circumstances and events into
sequences of actions bound up with agents’ beliefs, desires, and intentions. It is not just that
interpreting narratives requires framing inferences about tellers’ intentions, then; what is
more, stories themselves afford a basis for making sense of the world in terms of the inten-
tions, goals, emotions, and actions of intelligent agents. See also chapter 3.
19. As noted previously (see the introduction), I resist using the term anthropomorphism
in such contexts for a range of reasons, including those outlined by Plumwood (2007).
Plumwood suggests that terms like anthropomorphism and sentimentality have been
employed “to delegitimate boundary breakdown between human and non-human” worlds”
(17)—that is, “to enforce segregated and polarised vocabularies that rob the non-human
world of agency and the possibility of speech, with departures from reductionist standards
declared irrational or superstitious” (20).
20. Margot Norris (2010) has identified a related technique in Franz Kafka’s own experi-
mental animal stories; this technique involves transposing the two registers across the human-
nonhuman boundary. By creating “a form of human ethology” and “imagining for [animals]
a rich, complex, emotional, and affect-filled inner life” (30), Kafka in effect crisscrosses the
event-based and action-based registers of Pavlovian and Freudian models, respectively. His
animal stories thereby subvert early twentieth-century resistance to Darwin’s argument that
humans’ mental abilities differ in degree, not kind, from those of other animals, insofar as this
resistance took the form of an attempt to keep human and nonhuman psychologies segre-
gated into separate domains (29–30).
21. See Colin Jerolmack (2008) and also c hapter 4 for a discussion of how changes
in animal geographies, and in particular the rise of the ideal of the sanitized, orderly
metropolis, can cause once-admired species to take on the status of problem animals,
or “vermin.”
22. In this respect, BLB brings to the fore the contradictory status of the norms structur-
ing discourse about animal use in biomedical research. As Benston (2009) notes, the term
animal studies designates “a wide range of investigative operations employing nonhuman ani-
mal bodies, [operations that posit] material resemblance and metaphysical incompatibility
between researcher and object of research” (548). By using the register of action to ironize
the lab assistant’s objectifying references to the rat as a data point, a model organism that can
“stand in our place” (125), Field’s text undercuts claims for an ontological difference between
human and nonhuman subjects.
23. See chapter 5 for a discussion of historical and critical perspectives on the practice of
animal autobiography more generally.
330 ■ Notes
n C
oda
1. This translation is taken from A. S. Kline’s (2000) cross-referenced online English
translation of the poem; quoted here are lines from the last paragraph of Kline’s translation of
the final section of Book V (lines 642–78). For links to these translations as well as a wealth
of other editions, illustrations, and other details concerning the reception of Ovid’s text, see
the Ovid Illustrated site maintained by James D. Kinney at http://ovid.lib.virginia.edu/ovi-
dillust.html.
2. Along similar lines, see Heise’s (2010) discussion of how, in addition to causing other
species to become extinct, humans have (sometimes inadvertently) increased biodiversity,
or played what she terms a “biologically creative role” (59). Thus, the “harvesting of certain
fish provides an evolutionary advantage for other fish with more undesirable characteristics,
and our struggles against weeds by means of herbicides, and against bacteria by means of
antibiotics, lead to the emergence of resistant varieties, while the original ones sometimes
disappear” (59).
3. Further background on Fantastic Voyage as well as Quatermass and the Pit can be found
on the web pages for these films maintained by the International Movie Database. See Asimov
(1966) for the writer’s novelization of Fantastic Voyage, and also Brodesco (2011), Cassou-
Noguès (2011), and van Dijck (2005) for relevant philosophical, scientific, and biographical
contexts for this narrative. Cassou-Noguès also discusses Asimov’s recycling of type A meth-
ods of multiscale narration in his 1987 sequel, Fantastic Voyage II: Destination Brain.
4. As Morton puts it, “Nature is a reification . . .. That’s why we need ecology without Nature.
Maybe if we turn Nature into something more fluid, it would work. Emergence is also a sen-
sual object. And thus it’s in danger of doing the work of reifying—strangely enough, given its
reputation as an unreified, flowy thing, despite its popularity as a replacement for terms such
as nature. Emergence is always emergence-for” (119).
5. See Morton (2013: 4–5, 194–95). Carrithers et al. (2011) describe the Anthropocene,
first named as such by Crutzen and Stoermer (2000), as “the dark new geological era . . . in
which human activity catastrophically affects the destinies of all—plant, animal, and
human—through global warming and mass extinction” (663). In Heise’s (2010) gloss, the
term “refers to a time period in which humans are no longer just the biological agents that
they have always been, but have become geological agents transforming the most basic struc-
tures of the planet. Climate change is the most obvious manifestation of the Anthropocene,
since it reshapes even parts of the planet where humans have not yet set foot” (50). For her
part, Crist (2013) critiques the term as being itself anthropocentric: leaving assumptions
about human dominion unchallenged, the term, for Crist, resonates with arguments for tech-
nological and managerial solutions to environmental crises that instead require a rethinking
of humans’ place within a more-than-human world.
6. For a discussion of how “environmental narratives” or stories about human-environ-
ment interactions can promote affective and more specifically empathetic engagement with
macro-level geophysical processes, such as anthropogenic climate change, see Weik von
Messner (2016a, 2016b).
7. In Jablonka and Lamb’s (2005/2014) characterization, epigenetic inheritance systems
(or EISs) constitute a dimension of heredity and evolution that, along with the behavioral
and symbolic dimensions, supplement Darwin’s and neo-Darwinians’ focus on the genetic
inheritance system as the driver of evolution. Jablonka and Lamb suggest that EISs, which
bear on phenotypic rather than genotypic variation, allow cells to transmit to their progeny
information acquired through an organism’s interactions with its environment, despite the
Notes ■ 331
cells’ DNA sequences remaining unchanged over the course of their development (2005/
2014: 111). See Jablonka and Lamb (2005/2014: 111–52), Moore (2015), and, for an
account of EISs as a “bridge between ecological and evolutionary timescales” that is partic-
ularly salient for the present discussion of bionarratology, Duckworth (2013). See below for
further discussion of Jablonka and Lamb’s multidimensional model.
8. Returning to one of Morton’s “hyperobjects,” compare Grunwald’s The Swamp (2006)
for a comparable use of the method of narrative clustering. In this instance, Grunwald assem-
bles a constellation of stories about localized encounters with the flora, fauna, and overall
ecology of the Florida Everglades over the past five centuries to bridge the mesodomain of
(recent) human history and the much longer timescales that have shaped the region’s bioge-
ographical profile.
9. Another significant question to which my approach gives rise: whether a feedback loop
is possible here, whereby study of the narrative modeling of emergent, species-level phenom-
ena might have an impact on understandings of the phenomena at issue, with those under-
standings in turn potentially (re)shaping narrative practices themselves.
10. Mallet (2001/2007) includes an overview of species concepts not listed by Ereshefsky,
including, for example, the recognition concept. This concept turns on “specific mate recog-
nition systems,” defining species as “that most inclusive population of individual biparental
organisms which share a common fertilization system” (Paterson 1985, quoted by Mallet
2001: 6).
11. For similar arguments, see Ricoeur (1983–85/1984–88). For further context for the
discussion of narrative temporality that follows, see Herman (2013: 301–8).
12. Shubin (2008) goes on to describe Tiktaalik as follows: “Like a fish, it has scales on
its back and fins with fin webbing. But, like early land-living animals, it has a flat head and a
neck. And, when we look inside the fin, we see bones that correspond to the upper arm, the
forearm, even parts of the wrist. The joints are there, too: this is a fish with shoulder, elbow,
and wrist joints. All inside a fin with webbing” (23).
13. Published three years later than The Call of the Wild, London’s 1906 novel White Fang
traces the titular character’s opposite trajectory—from life in the Canadian wild to a domes-
ticated existence in California. Here too, however, London uses macro-level reach to suggest
how the central character’s instinctual responses derive from an extended phylogenetic herit-
age, “a remote ancestry [of] a thousand thousand lives” (London 1906: 63; see also 86, 109).
14. The two videos can be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qbjKZbm-9Rs
and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSSzn4bIwZg, respectively. More details about
the Sagan production, titled Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, can be found via the Internet Movie
Database at http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0081846/.
15. On the structure and functions of counterfactuals more generally, see Fauconnier and
Turner (2002: 217–47).
16. Dannenberg writes: “The genre of alternate history and the related science-fiction nar-
ratives of history alteration use a counterfactual-historical premise to construct a detailed
narrative world with a significantly altered historical framework. In ontological terms these
are fully autonomous counterfactual worlds: counterfactual events are articulated as fact by
the narrator and not as hypothesis” (Dannenberg 2008: 126–27).
17. Bodkin draws on the nomenclature of mid-twentieth-century ethology in a way
that resonates with the assimilation of humans into the larger domain of creatural life being
enacted at the level of plot. He suggests that Kerans’s dream “wasn’t a true dream, . . . but an
ancient organic memory millions of years old” (105): “The innate releasing mechanisms laid
332 ■ Notes
down in your cytoplasm millions of years ago have been awakened, the expanding sun and
rising temperature are driving you back down . . . into the drowned seas submerged beneath
the lowest layers of your unconscious . . . This is the lumbar transfer, total biopsychic recall.
We really remember these swamps and lagoons” (105).
18. The phrase “neuronic synthesis” harkens back to Bodkin’s earlier disquisition con-
cerning the calibration of inner time with outer geophysical environments—in terms that
suggest a convergence of meso-level phenomena not just with macro-level geological and
evolutionary changes but also with micro-level structures and processes. As he puts it: “The
uterine odyssey of the growing foetus recapitulates the entire evolutionary past, and its cen-
tral nervous system is a coded time scale, each nexus of neurones and each spinal level mark-
ing a symbolic station, a unit of neuronic time. The further down the CNS [central nervous
system] you move, from the hindbrain through the medulla into the spinal cord, you descend
back into the neuronic past” (63).
19. For nonfictional and fictional precursors to Weisman’s account, see Spinney (1996)
and Jefferies (1885), respectively. Unlike Weisman’s, however, both of these accounts are
geographically limited to the city of London and its immediate environs.
20. As Weisman also remarks, “Even today, there are still a few Earthly spots where all our
senses can inhale a living memory of this Eden before we were here. Inevitably they invite us
to wonder how nature might flourish if granted the chance” (5).
21. See figures C.5 through C.7 for examples of the illustrative art included in alterna-
tive zoologies published in print texts. Images featured on the following wiki sites devoted
to speculative evolution offer digital visualizations: http://speculativeevolution.wikia.com/
wiki/Category:Future_animals; http://spec-evo.wikia.com/wiki/Special:Images.
22. In this sense, both Wells’s The Time Machine and Ballard’s The Drowned World, dis-
cussed in the previous subsection, can be read as contributions to speculative biology—with
Ballard’s novel imagining in detail possible future evolutionary trajectories for flora as well as
fauna in the aftermath of (nonanthropogenic) global warming.
23. But see Naish (2015, paras. 1–2) for arguments for a convergent approach to specula-
tive zoology and the processes of forming and testing hypotheses in zoological research more
generally. In any case, speculative or alternative zoology can be distinguished from “crypto-
zoology,” a project mentioned preliminarily in my discussion of Leigh’s and Nettheim’s ver-
sions of The Hunter in the introduction. Focusing on unknown or undiscovered animals, this
project was, as Simpson (1984) notes, first outlined by the Belgian-French zoologist Bernard
Heuvelmans in On the Track of Unknown Animals (1955/2014). (See Simpson 1959 for a
highly critical review of the conclusions reached by Heuvelmans in his 1955 study.) Rather
than counterfactualizing known species lineages by tracing out alternate trajectories of evolu-
tionary development as they unfolded in the past, present, or future, cryptozoology works in
the opposite direction, by seeking to resituate, in the domain of the actual, animal species or
even genera or families (Simpson 1984: 18) that have been categorized by zoological science
as never or only formerly existent, and thus alive only in accounts that run contrary to fact.
24. As Naish (2015) notes, Dixon has suggested more generally that one of the functions
of speculative zoology is to “describe or depict real [evolutionary] processes using fictional
examples” (para. 12).
25. In effect, Ward’s and Rockman’s rat series translates into the timescale of evolution-
ary processes the much more rapid human-to-magpie metamorphosis captured by Matheus
in his illustration of Ovid. In Genettean terms, the narrative speed of the rat series is much
greater (i.e., its duration is far shorter) than that at work in Matheus’s interpretation of the
Notes ■ 333
Ovidian scene. Accordingly, and in line with my earlier account of temporal structuring as an
affordance for engagements with macro-level processes, Ward’s and Rockman’s series can be
read as extrapolating into the realm of emergent phenomena aspects of narrative that make it
such a powerful and effective human-scale morphing technology.
26. Although Tennesen (2015) suggests that after the current mass extinction event
(MEE) the emergence of new flora and fauna will unfold in parallel with the patterns of
emergence hypothesized for previous MEEs (6, 22, 162–63), Myers (1996) outlines rea-
sons for believing that the current MEE will bring a “gross degradation and retardation of
processes such as natural selection, speciation and origination” (37). As Myers puts it, “All in
all, it looks as if the present MEE offers potential for impoverishing impacts on future evo-
lution that in their scope and scale could well exceed those of past MEEs. At the same time,
these unprecedented impacts may even curtail the more ‘positive’ or creative consequences
of MEEs as revealed by certain episodes in the past” (39).
27. For further discussion of gradualist versus saltationist models of evolution, see Blitz
(1992), Dennett (1995: 282–303), Gould (2007), Reid (2007), and Tennesen (2015: 15–
16, 31–32).
28. Woods does concede, however, that whereas “on the whole the evidence of
Paleontology favours the view that evolution proceeded by slow and gradual modifications,”
“there were also times, especially in the early history of various groups, when evolutionary
changes went on more rapidly” (1950: 13).
29. As Dodd and Stanton note, trace fossils provide almost the only record of organisms
that, like spiders and other invertebrates, “have little or no mineralized skeleton and are thus
unlikely to be preserved as body fossils” (1990: 192).
30. Examples of this more recent work on character include Eder, Jannidis, and Schneider
(2010), Gerrig (2010), Jannidis (2004, 2009), Margolin (2007), and Schneider (2001).
31. For further discussion of this research, see, among the other sources mentioned in
chapter 2, Fudge (2002: 105–11), Kaplan (2017), and Stein (2015, 2016a, 2017b).
32. See, for example, the arguments outlined by Bekoff (2013), Burghardt (2010), Crist
(1999), de Waal (2001), Fisher (1996), Plumwood (2002a: 56–61; 2007), and Sober
(2005). Regarding Morgan's Canon itself, although it has played a prominent role in the
history of ethological, comparative-psychological, and related research, Fitch (2010) points
out that this principle of parsimony suffers from a conceptual problem that makes it difficult
to apply in a given instance. The problem is that “we have no a priori grounds for ordering
psychological mechanisms into a linear array from simple to complex . . .. Is an experienced
awareness of pain ‘more complex’ than a complex series of unconscious mental transforma-
tions leading to pain avoidance? Is ‘self-awareness’ more or less complex than remembering
the location of 10,000 stored seeds?” (145).
33. Bekoff suggests that microreductive analyses of animals’ brain states and processes
may not capture what’s going on at meso-level ecological scales. Thus, in explanations of ani-
mal behavior, “Merely referring acontextually to the firing of different neurons or to the activ-
ity of different muscles in the absence of behavioral information and context is insufficiently
informative. Using anthropomorphic language does not have to discount the animal’s point
of view. Anthropomorphism allows other animals’ behavior and emotions to be accessible
to us” (63).
34. For arguments that models of genetic inheritance systems can be mapped onto the
sociocultural level by recasting or rescaling genes as memes, or memorable and replicable
ideas that function as units of cultural transmission, see Dawkins (1976/1989) and Dennett
334 ■ Notes
(1995: 342–69). See, however, chapter 2 for a critique of such (sociobiological or sociobio-

logically inspired) attempts to resubsume processes of cultural evolution under frameworks
for understanding mechanisms of natural selection.
35. Jablonka and Lamb (2005/2014) define culture in species-neutral terms as “the sys-
tem of socially transmitted patterns of behavior, preferences, and products of animal activi-
ties that characterize a group of social animals”—with cultural evolution being definable, in
turn, as “a change, through time, in the nature and frequency of these socially transmitted
preferences, patterns, or products of behavior in a population” (158).
36. For more on variation in birds’ and cetaceans’ songs, see Avital and Jablonka (2000),
Portmann (1990b: 151), Stutchbury (2010: 85–86; 213), and Whitehead and Rendell
(2014). For more on the implications of Donald’s ideas for narrative study, see Herman
(2013: 228–29). For an extrapolation from Peirce’s semiotic theory to sign-involving prac-
tices that cross the species boundary, see Kohn (2013: 27–70). For a synthesis of approaches
to the process by which the human language faculty emerged over evolutionary timescales,
see Fitch (2010).
n G L O S S A R Y
This glossary covers some of the narratological terms used over the course of this study. If a
term is set in small caps within a definition, that term (or a cognate) has its own glossary
entry. For additional information about the keywords included here as well as other rele-
vant terms and concepts, see, among other sources, Abbott (2008a); Herman (2007, 2009,
2013); Herman, Jahn, and Ryan (2005); Herman, McHale, and Phelan (2010); Hühn et al.
(2014); L. Herman and Vervaeck (2005); and Prince (1987/2003).
Actant A term used in structuralist narratology to designate general roles fulfilled by

particularized actors or characters. One such role is Opponent, which is instantiated by
characters (or other elements of storyworlds) as diverse as the dognappers in Woolf ’s
Flush, the strong river current from which Buck rescues John Thornton in The Call of the
Wild, and humankind, in general, in Baker’s The Peregrine.
Agency At the level of the story, agency concerns characters’ ability to bring about delib-
erately initiated events, or actions, within a storyworld. But agency is also a pertinent
concern at the level of storytelling or narration, bearing on who gets to tell what kinds
of stories in what contexts. Feminist narratology explores differences in the sorts of
agency available to male versus female characters and narrators. A narratology beyond
the human broadens the scope of this exploration to include issues of agency vis-à-vis
trans-species interactions and relationships—issues that come into play whether animal
characters or animal tellers are involved.
Anachrony Nonchronological narration, where events are told in an order other
than that in which they can be presumed to have occurred in the storyworld.
Analepsis The equivalent of a flashback in film. Analepsis occurs when events that occur
in the order ABC are told in the order BCA or BAC, with these shifts backward in time
having a more or less extensive reach.
Autodiegetic Narration First-person or homodiegetic narration in which the
narrator is also the main character in the storyworld (as in Reklaw’s Thirteen Cats
of My Childhood).
Backstory A type of exposition often involving analepsis or flashback; a filling in of
the circumstances and events that have led to the present moment in a storyworld,
and that illuminate the larger implications of actual or potential behaviors by characters
occupying a particular narrative “now.”
Counternarrative. See hegemony.
Cultural Ontology A framework for understanding that circulates more or less widely
in a given (sub)culture and that specifies, in the form of common knowledge, (1) what
sorts of beings populate the world and (2) how those beings’ qualities and abilities relate
to the qualities and abilities ascribed to humans.
Deixis Deictic terms like I, here, and now are expressions whose meaning changes depend-
ing on who is uttering them in what discourse context.
Direct Discourse A technique for presenting characters’ verbal utterances or alterna-
tively their unverbalized mental acts, such as perceiving, remembering, inferring, fantasiz-
ing, and so on (see table 6.1 and the surrounding discussion). In direct discourse (DD),
335
336 ■ Glossary
a narrator reproduces a character’s utterance or mental performance in a manner that

(one can assume) mirrors the way it was performed in the storyworld.
Discourse In narratology, the “discourse” level of narrative (in French, discours) cor-
responds to what Russian Formalist theorists called the sjuzhet; it contrasts with the
story (histoire) level, or what the Formalists called the fabula. In this usage, discourse
refers to the disposition of the semiotic cues used by interpreters to fill out or concretize
a storyworld—to the extent required for their interpretive purposes in engaging with
a given narrative.
Discourse Domain An arena of practice that, governed by more or less distinctive inter-
pretive paradigms and protocols for behavior, embeds norms for attributing mental states
and processes to others, human as well as nonhuman.
Duration The ratio between how long situations and events take to unfold in the sto-
ryworld and how much text is devoted to their narration. Variations in this ratio
correspond to different narrative speeds; in order of increasing speed, these are pause,
stretch, scene, summary, and ellipsis.
Ellipsis The omission of storyworld events during the process of narration; in ellip-
sis, narrative speed reaches infinity.
Emplotment The process by which situations and events are linked together to produce
a plot. Retrospective narratives, for example, enable past events more or less widely
separated in time to be chained together into a story line trending toward—and helping
account for—the present moment of narration. The historian Hayden White (2005)
coined the term emplotment to describe this event-connecting dimension of narrative.
Episode A bounded, internally coherent sequence of situations and events that can be
grouped together with other such narrative units to form larger narrative structures.
Event A change of state, creating a more or less salient and lasting alteration in the story-
world. Events can be subdivided into temporally extended processes, deliberately initi-
ated actions, and happenings not brought about intentionally by any agent.
Experiencing I In retrospective first-person or homodiegetic (or autodiegetic) narra-
tion, the younger self who lived through the experiences recounted by the older, narrating I.
Exposition A presentation, sometimes given in the form of backstory, of the circum-
stances and events that form a context or background for understanding the main action
in a narrative.
Extradiegetic Narrator A narrator who does not inhabit the storyworld evoked
by a narrative. Extradiegetic narrators can be homodiegetic, like the narrator of H. G.
Wells’s The Time Machine, autodiegetic, like the older Reklaw who narrates the younger
Jesse’s experiences in Thirteen Cats of My Childhood, or heterodiegetic, like Groff ’s nar-
rator in “Above and Below.”
Focalization Genette’s (1972/1980) term for modes of perspective taking in narrative
discourse. In internal focalization, the viewpoint is restricted to a particular observer
or reflector, whereas in zero focalization the viewpoint is not tied to any localized
position. Further, internal focalization can be fixed, variable, or multiple. Whereas Groff
and Leigh use fixed internal focalization in “Above and Below” and The Hunter, respec-
tively, in Lawrence’s St. Mawr the focalization is variable, shifting between the vantage
points of Lou Witt and her mother, Mrs. Witt. Significantly, in Lawrence’s account the
range of focalizers does not extend beyond the species boundary. Thus in contrast with
Williamson’s filtering of situations and events through the eponymous animal protagonist
of Tarka the Otter, Lawrence does not use the horse at the center of his novel to model
other-than-human phenomenology.
Glossary ■ 337
frame narrative. See hypodiegetic narrative; metalepsis.

Free Direct Discourse A technique for presenting characters’ verbal utterances or alter-
natively their unverbalized mental acts, such as perceiving, remembering, inferring, fan-
tasizing, and so on (see table 6.1 and the surrounding discussion). In free direct discourse
(FDD), a character’s verbal or mental performances, instead of merely coloring the nar-
rator’s presentation of events as they would in free indirect discourse, come across
as being presented in a raw, unfiltered way, maximally free of narratorial mediation. In
contexts of thought presentation, some analysts reserve the term “interior monologue”
for relatively extended stretches of FDD (Prince 1987/2003: 45)
Free Indirect Discourse A technique for presenting characters’ verbal utterances or
alternatively their unverbalized mental acts, such as perceiving, remembering, inferring,
fantasizing, and so on (see table 6.1 and the surrounding discussion). Couched as a report
given by a narrator, free indirect discourse (FID) also typically contains expressiv-
ity markers (for example, emotive responses signaled by the use of exclamation marks,
or dialect features) that point to the speech or thought patterns of a particular character.
According to the “dual-voice hypothesis” about FID—named as such by Pascal (1977)
and also discussed, in somewhat different terms, by Cohn (1978)—free indirect discourse
represents a fusion of a narrator’s and a character’s discourse, in a broad sense of “discourse”
that includes not just patterns of expression but also ways of evaluating and understanding
the world. See Banfield (1982) for a very different account of the structure and functions
of FID.
Frequency The ratio between the number of times something is told and the number of
times it can be assumed to have occurred in the storyworld. In singulative narration,
there is a one-to-one match between how many times an event occurred and how many
times it is told; in iterative narration, something that happened more than once is told
once; and in repetitive narration, the number of times something is told exceeds the fre-
quency with which it occurred in the storyworld.
Gap A lacuna or omission in what is told or in the process of telling. Omissions in the tell-
ing constitute ellipses; those in the told underscore the radical incompleteness of fic-
tional worlds (how many books were on the shelves of the Samsas’ apartment in Kafka’s
The Metamorphosis? In Hines’s Duncan the Wonder Dog, how many different cities had
Pompeii the animal terrorist visited over the course of her life?).
Hegemony The dominance of a particular view or group over other views or groups, often
through a process of manufactured consent whereby those in a subordinate role are
induced to participate in their own domination. A key question for narrative inquiry, in
general, is how stories can both shore up hegemony in the form of “master narratives”
but also critique such domination by way of “counternarratives” that contest entrenched
accounts of how the world is (see Bamberg and Andrews 2004). The present study fore-
grounds a more specific version of this question: namely, how the dialectic between
master narratives and counternarratives bears on the broader cultural ontologies
underpinning humans’ ways of orienting to other forms of creatural life. How far do anal-
yses of hegemonic power structures carry over to the domain of trans-species interac-
tions and relationships, given the extent to which humans directly and violently impose
anthropocentric species hierarchies on the wider biotic communities of which they are
members?
Heterodiegetic Narrator A narrator who has not participated in the circumstances
and events about which he or she tells a story (compare the narrators of Groff ’s “Above
and Below” and Lawrence’s St. Mawr).
338 ■ Glossary
Homodiegetic Narrator A narrator who has participated (more or less centrally) in

the circumstances and events about which he or she tells a story (compare the narrator
of Le Guin's “The Wife's Story”). At the limit, homodiegetic narration shades off into
autodiegetic narration.
Hypodiegetic Narrative A story within a story. Many texts feature embedded or hypo-
diegetic narratives, as when the titular character (and narrator) of Sewell’s Black Beauty
broadens the scope of his account of inhumane institutions and practices by relaying
other horses’ narratives about mistreatment, or Nicodemus the rat tells Mrs. Frisby his
life story as part of the larger narrative conveyed by O’Brien’s Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of
NIMH. But in some instances writers use the strategic conflation or entanglement of nar-
rative levels known as metalepsis to engage in critical and reflexive ways with the very
discourse they are using to project nonhuman worlds.
Ideology. See hegemony.
Indirect Discourse A technique for presenting characters’ verbal utterances or alterna-
tively their unverbalized mental acts, such as perceiving, remembering, inferring, fanta-
sizing, and so on (see table 6.1 and the surrounding discussion). In contrast to direct
discourse, in indirect discourse (ID) a narrator reports in a more or less summary
fashion characters’ utterances or mental performances, rather than reproducing them
verbatim.
Interior Monologue. See free direct discourse.
Intradiegetic Narrator A character who serves as a narrator in his or her own
right, like Nicodemus the rat in O’Brien’s Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH; in other
words, a character in a storyworld who in turn narrates a story within the story, that is,
a hypodiegetic narrative.
Master Narrative. See hegemony.
Metalepsis A conflation or entanglement of narrative levels, as when characters situated
in a story within a story (or hypodiegetic narrative) migrate into the diegesis or
main narrative level, or vice versa, or an extradiegetic narrator, recounting events
from a position outside the storyworld, becomes enmeshed with or a participant in
those storyworld events. The two types of metalepsis just mentioned—a conflation of
the hypodiegetic and diegetic levels (see fi gures 1.4 and 1.5), and a conflation of the die-
getic and extradiegetic levels (see figure 1.6) —are both exemplified in Reklaw’s Thirteen
Cats of My Childhood, as discussed in chapter 1. More generally, from the perspective of
a narratology beyond the human, metalepsis can be viewed as a strategy for questioning
and destabilizing the frameworks for understanding trans-species relationships that are
bound up with cultural ontologies.
Mind Style In Fowler’s (1977) original account, this term refers to the process whereby
“cumulatively, consistent structural options [such as choices in vocabulary and the use of
transitive versus intransitive verbs], agreeing in cutting the presented world to one pat-
tern or another, give rise to an impression of a world-view” associated with a character or
narrator (76).
Monomodal Narration Forms of narrative practice that exploit a single semiotic chan-
nel (e.g., print text, silent film, or telephone conversations) to evoke a storyworld.
Multimodal Narration Forms of narrative practice that exploit more than one semiotic
channel (e.g., words and images, utterances and gestures, or an image track and a sound-
track) to evoke a storyworld.
Glossary ■ 339
Narrating I In retrospective first-person or homodiegetic (or autodiegetic) narra-

tion, the older, narrating self who tells about the situations and events experienced by
the younger, experiencing I.
Narration The process by which a narrative is conveyed; depending on the semiotic
medium used, this process can involve complex combinations of cues in different chan-
nels (visual, auditory, tactile, etc.), yielding multimodal vs. monomodal narration.
Also, some theorists of narrative make narration the third term in a tripartite model that
includes the story level, the discourse or text level on the basis of which the story can
be reconstructed, and the narration as the communicative act that produces the discourse.
narrative discourse. See discourse.
Narrative Embedding. See hypodiegetic narrative; metalepsis.
Narrativity That which makes a story a story; a property that a text or discourse will have
in greater proportion the more readily it lends itself to being interpreted as a narrative. As
discussed in c hapter 4, many narratologists hold that a key factor contributing to narrativ-
ity is a focus on human or human-like individuals experiencing events in storyworlds. By
contrast, the present study argues that in stories in which nonhuman animals feature as
focal participants, narrativity is sometimes constituted on different grounds: in the very
attempt to imagine how a different kind of intelligent agent might negotiate the world.
Narratology An approach to the study of stories that grew out of francophone structur-
alism in the middle to late 1960s. Narratologists drew on methods used in structuralist
analyses of other cultural practices; thus, instead of working to develop interpretations
of individual narratives, they focused on how to describe narrative viewed as a semiotic
structure or system—that is, as a system by virtue of which people are able to produce
and understand stories. The frameworks for narrative inquiry grouped by some analysts
under the rubric of postclassical narratology (Alber and Fludernik 2010; Herman 1999),
including cognitive narratology, feminist narratology, transmedial narratology, and oth-
ers, build on the work of classical, structuralist narratologists but supplement that earlier
work with concepts and methods that were unavailable to story analysts such as Roland
Barthes, Gérard Genette, A. J. Greimas, and Tzvetan Todorov during the heyday of struc-
turalism. For its part, the project of developing a narratology beyond the human does not
limit itself to expanding the range of postclassical approaches to narrative study. Besides
exploring how ideas from fields concerned with animal worlds and human-animal rela-
tionships afford new insights into the structures and uses of stories, the project reassesses
the place of scholarship on narrative within a wider context of inquiry, a broader system
of values and commitments, taking stock of how stories and traditions for analyzing them
relate to the broader cultural ontologies that undergird humans’ ways of orienting
to a more-than-human world.
Narrator The agent who produces a narrative. Some story analysts distinguish among
autodiegetic, extradiegetic, heterodiegetic, homodiegetic, and intradi-
egetic narrators.
Order A way of describing the relation between two temporal sequences: the sequence of
events that can be assumed to have unfolded in the storyworld, and the unfolding of
the discourse used to recount that sequence. When these two sequences are aligned, the
result is chronological narration. anachrony results when the sequences are dis-aligned,
yielding analepses (or flashbacks), prolepses (or flashforwards), and sometimes com-
plex combinations and embeddings of the two.
340 ■ Glossary
Pause The slowest possible narrative speed; a type of duration in which the narrator’s
discourse continues to unfold, even though the action has come to a standstill.
Plot Abbott (2007) distinguishes among three senses of the term plot: a type of story (as
in “marriage plot”); the combination and sequencing of events that makes a story a story
and not just an assemblage of events (compare narrativity); and a sense similar to
that of discourse, by which theorists emphasize how the plot rearranges and otherwise
manipulates the events of the story. See also emplotment.
Postclassical Narratology. See narratology.
Prolepsis The equivalent of a flashforward in film. Prolepsis occurs when events that
occur in the order ABC are told in the order ACB or CAB, with these shifts forward in
time having a more or less extensive reach.
Reach A measure of the amount of time covered by an analepsis or a prolepsis. Thus
defined, reach provides a basis for distinguishing between internal and external subtypes
of these temporal jumps. In internal analepsis, the time shift reaches back to an earlier
moment that falls within the period covered by the main action of the narrative. In exter-
nal analepsis, by contrast, the time shift reaches back to a moment that comes before the
period covered by the main action of the narrative.
Reflector A term coined by the novelist Henry James to designate the center of conscious-
ness through whose perceptions events are filtered in a text that uses heterodiegetic
narration. A paradigm case would be Gregor Samsa in Kafka’s The Metamorphosis.
Scene Scenic presentation is a narrative speed or mode of duration in which one can
assume a direct equivalence between how long it takes for things to happen in the story-
world and how long it takes the narrator to recount those happenings.
Story In informal usage, story is a synonym for narrative. In narratology, the “story”
level of narrative (in French, histoire) corresponds to what Russian Formalist theorists
called the fabula; it contrasts with the “discourse” (discours) level, or what the Formalists
called the sjuzhet. In this sense, story refers to the chronological sequence of situations and
events that can be reconstructed on the basis of cues provided in a narrative text.
Storyworld The world projected by a narrative text or discourse; this world takes
shape through the combined efforts of the text’s designer(s) and its interpreters. Herman
(2013) argues that interpreters of narratives use textual designs to frame, to the extent
required by their interpretive purposes when engaging with a given narrative, answers
to questions about the when, what, where, who, how, and why aspects of such projected
worlds. In other words, textual cues (across any number of narrative media) constitute
affordances for building and negotiating storyworlds.
Stretch A narrative speed or mode of duration faster than pause but slower than scene,
in which both narration and action progress but what is told transpires more rapidly than
the telling.
Subworld The world that characters inhabit imaginatively when fantasizing, dreaming, or
hallucinating (Werth 1999: 210–58), or for that matter when they project storyworlds
by performing narrational acts of their own, as intradiegetic narrators who
thereby generate hypodiegetic accounts.
Summary A narrative speed or mode of duration faster than scene but slower than
ellipsis; summaries are more or less compressed accounts of storyworld occurrences.
Tellability A quality of situations and events that allows them to stand out against the
backdrop formed by everyday expectations and norms, and thus be worth reporting.
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n INDEX
Aaltola, Elisa, 236, 241 analepsis. See multiscale narration; reach

Abbott, H. Porter, 259, 260, 263, 292, analytic philosophy. See narratology
296n4, 300n8, 318n7, 318n8 Andrews, Kristin, 27, 28, 299n5,
A Big Little Life (by Dean Koontz), 40 300n6, 300n7
“Above and Below” (by Lauren Groff), anecdotal evidence. See narrative
26, 33–38, 49–50, 63–64, 301n15, animal agency. See animals
301n17, 302n22 animal allegory, 112, 139–40, 143–44, 149,
action theory. See animal narratives; 171–72, 266, 280–81, 316n33. See
narratology also animal comics; animal narratives;
Adams, Carol J., 9, 84, 124, 159 multiscale narration; narrative
Adams, Carol J., and Josephine animal alterity. See animals
Donovan, 9, 124 animal assistants. See animals
aesthetics. See human-animal relationships animal autobiography, 82, 144, 157,
affordances, 316n24. See also narrative 170–201, 245, 262, 321n33. See also
Agamben, Giorgio, 318n5, 319–20n17 animal comics; animal narratives;
Ahuja, Neel, 297n12 animalographies; autobiografiction;
“A-Hunting of the Deer” (by Charles autobiography
Dudley Warner), 55–56, animal behavior. See animal cultures;
206–207, 229 animal narratives; animals; discourse
Alaimo, Stacy, 297n12 domains; multiscale narration;
Alber, Jan, and Monika Fludernik, 119 narratology
Albert, Alexa, and Kris Bulcroft, 312–13n18 animal comics
Allee, W. C., Richard Hesse, and Karl animal allegory in, 149
P. Schmidt, 122 and animal autobiography, 195–99
allegorical laddering. See multiscale and animal geographies, 118,
narration 121, 122–34
allegory. See animal allegory; multiscale vis-à-vis comics history, 117, 120,
narration; narrative 301–302n21
Allen, Colin, and Marc Bekoff, definition of, 118
299n5, 303n27 experiential frames in, 136–37,
Allen, Colin, and Michael Trestman, 299n5 315–16n22
Allen, Greg, 326n24 and folk ethologies, 121–22, 313n4
Allen, Michael, and Lesley McLean, 297n12 and the funny animals tradition,
Almiron, Núria, Matthew Cole, and Carrie 117, 120
P. Freeman, 313n1, 317n41 and graphic adaptations of Kafka’s
alternate (or counterfactual) history. See The Metamorphosis, 121, 127–34,
narrative 238, 313n3
alternative comics. See animal comics and graphic memoirs about animal
alternative (or speculative) zoology. See companions, 38–39, 40–50
animals; multiscale narration and graphic narrative theory, 119
Ambros, Barbara M., 105 and human-animal studies, 117–18
375
376 ■ Index
animal comics (cont.) anti-anthropocentrism in, 50, 55, 76,

and nonhuman subjectivity, 118, 123, 125, 139, 168, 187–99, 237–38,
120–22, 135–56 247, 275, 290, 303n28, 323n44
and science fiction, 153–55 and autism, 87, 89–90, 91, 93, 95–98,
self-narratives in, 301n20 101–102, 103, 263, 311n4
and speech balloons, 146–49, 151 and the Bildungsroman, 158
and transmedial narratology, 117–20 and bioagents at species scale, 288–91
and trans-species semiotics, 148–49 and biodiversity, 234, 251, 279, 330n2
and Umwelten, 118, 122, 142–43, 145, and biomimicry, 289
150–51, 153–55, 156 (see also animal and biomutations (= shifts of species
fables; animal narratives; animals; category), 15–16, 26–27, 50, 51–52,
narrative; narratology) 57, 58, 66–86, 121, 133, 140, 152–53,
animal consciousness. See animals; selfhood 191, 200, 249, 251–53, 267, 270,
animal cultures (or traditions), 10, 79, 191, 289–90, 296n3, 304n3, 307n25,
229, 260, 293–94, 334n35. See also 307n28, 308n32, 308n33, 309n42,
multiscale narration 309n44, 310n49, 310n50, 315n17
animal experimentation. See animals and Buddhist practice, 236
animal fables, 80, 82, 112, 247 characterization in, 101–102, 285–91
animal geographies. See animal comics; for children and young adults, 54,
animal narratives; discourse 68–76, 172–73, 181–83, 187, 308n30,
domains; human-animal 308n31, 308n32, 321n29, 322n38
relationships; Umwelt and chimeras (in bioscience/
Animal Liberation Front (ALF), 183–84, biotechnology), 290–91
196, 321n33 and comparative ethology, 159, 167, 239,
Animal Man (by Grant Morrison, Chas 246–47, 329n20
Truog, Doug Hazelwood, and others), as confabulation, 43
151–53, 317n36 and cross-species identifications, 15,
animal minds. See animal comics; animal 26–27, 50, 51–67, 121, 299n19
narratives; animals; narrative; and cultural ontologies, 2, 4, 19, 20–21,
selfhood; Umwelt 25, 29, 32, 33, 35, 36, 49, 52, 59,
animal narratives 63–64, 66, 68–86, 90, 172, 174, 186,
and action theory, 241–47 210–12, 310n49
across media, 119–20, 313n1, and deep ecology, 238
317n40, 317n41 and the defamiliarization of human frames
and agent-environment interactions, of reference, 55, 82, 152–53, 168, 174
139–45, 155, 163, 166–68, 170, 205– and discourse domains, 212–13, 217–32
206, 209, 283, 284, 316n23 and emergent individuals, 286–91
and allegorical projection, 262 and emotion, 11, 12, 15–16, 17, 41, 47,
and animal attribution storytelling 55, 61, 91, 106–107, 109, 111, 129,
techniques, 87, 111–12 172, 189, 211–12, 218–19, 220, 227,
and animal biographies, 157–70, 199 228, 329n20
and animal geographies, 118, 121, and empathy across species lines, 8,
122–34, 234, 238, 242–43, 63, 71, 150, 172–73, 174, 247, 262,
314n5, 315n14 299n3, 330n6
and animal riddles, 181–83, 321n29 and environmental culture
and animal welfare, 172, 173, 185, 194 (Plumwood), 155
Index ■ 377
and environmental dystopias, 325n17 metanarrative commentary in, 238–40

and epistemic modality, 178–79, 180–99, and mind style (Fowler),
320n25, 321n26 208–210, 324n8
and ethnozoology, 159 and modernist methods of narration,
and ethograms, 303n27 157–58, 160, 163–70, 201, 319n11
and extinction, 10, 19, 21–22, 234, 245, and narrating I vs. experiencing I, 40–42,
272, 274, 278–79, 325n16, 328n10 49, 83–84, 121, 123, 126, 191–92,
and face wants (Goffman), 176–78, 306n20, 306n22
180–99, 320n24, 322n37 and narrative space, 123–34
and falsifiability, 161, 164, 166, 183, 184, and narratological approaches to speech
186, 213, 229, 321n31 and thought presentation, 19,
and fascist discourse, 238, 239, 328n13 202–203, 205–212, 230–31, 298n14,
and the fiction-nonfiction distinction, 59, 299n21, 319n13
79, 157, 161, 162–64, 165–66, 167–68, and the “nature fakers” debate,
172, 174, 177, 181–95, 202–204, 228–30, 234n5
210–32, 252, 253, 264–66, 271, and the nonfiction novel, 165
288–91, 305n16, 320n20, 321n34 as nonserious literature, 159, 318n3
and folk ethologies, 159, 242 and overextensions of the register of
and framing and footing (Goffman), action, 246–47
175–99, 200, 320n21, and postmodernism, 58, 80
320n22, 320n23 and proprioceptive awareness, 56, 226
garden-path structures in, 81 and the Proteus Principle (Sternberg),
and generic hybridity, 18–19, 157, 160, 76–77, 206–208, 310n49
161–64, 165–66, 167–70, 172, 179–80, and the questioning of the human-
191, 236–38 nonhuman distinction, 52, 69, 84–85,
and genre vs. medium, 157, 195 100, 102, 123–27, 133, 163–64, 204,
and hermeneutics, 233–36, 239–48, 307n25, 308n33, 310n50
325n12, 327n5 in sandplay, 111
and heterophenomenological in science journalism, 249–52, 274
density, 226–30 and “speaking for another” (Schiffrin),
and heterophenomenology, 176–95, 199, 200, 262, 323n44
203–204, 217–32 and species ventriloquism (Field),
and historical fiction, 218, 325n16 247, 292
and horror fiction, 220, 325n17 and subworlds (Werth), 69–71
inclusive definition of, 33–34 and trans-species ecologies of selves,
in kinetic drawings, 111 13, 14, 25–26, 29–33, 36, 43, 45–49,
and mental-state attributions, 20–21, 59–60, 63, 65, 69, 75–76, 78, 80, 83,
41–42, 54, 61, 65, 80, 95–96, 113, 90, 94–96, 98, 100, 112, 170, 187,
157, 164, 165, 167–70, 184, 195, 200, 190–91, 203, 230, 236–37, 238,
202–204, 210–32, 323n1, 324n5, 245, 302n22
324n6, 333n33 and trans-species relational networks,
and metabiography, 158, 164, 167–68 237, 240, 248
and metafictional play, 192, and Umwelt modeling, 41, 42, 140, 141,
193, 322n40 142–43, 144, 153–56, 163–64, 167–
and metalepsis as modeling 70, 183, 186, 191, 204–205, 206, 207–
resource, 46–48, 66, 70, 303n28 210, 212, 230, 231–32, 322n35
378 ■ Index
animal narratives (cont.) and the discourses of science,

and (un)readable animal minds, 72–73, 143, 178, 188–89, 196,
203–204, 212–17 216–17, 309n37
and zoegraphy (Hengel), 318n5 vis-à-vis disfavored human groups,
(see also animal autobiography; 10, 301n15
animal comics; animal fables; and ecological processes, 123,
animalographies; animals; animals 324n3, 328n11
discussed in this book; “chipping in” in education, 68–69, 95–96,
vs. “butting in”; cultural ontologies; 181–83, 321n29
discourse domains; extinction and ethology, 159, 160, 167, 216, 222,
narratives; fairy tales; human-animal 231, 235, 239, 242, 246–47, 292,
relationships; Möbius strip; multiscale 327n7, 328n13, 329n20, 331–32n17
narration; narrative; narrativity; and evolutionary processes, 3, 52, 53, 66,
narratology; neurocosmopolitanism; 67, 76, 80–81, 83, 92–93, 102, 155,
neurotypicality; pet memoir; 191, 229, 246, 250–51, 258, 264–
shapeshifters; shifts by therians; 94, 306n19, 309–310n46, 320n17,
species; Umwelt; xenofiction) 324n8, 331n13
animalographies (Huff and Haefner), experimentation on, 19, 64, 80, 106,
173, 183–84. See also animal 135–37, 142–43, 152–55, 185,
autobiography; animal comics; animal 187–89, 193, 195–99, 244–45,
narratives 322n39, 323n45, 329n22
animal riddles. See animal narratives and extinction, 10, 11–12, 242, 243,
animals 245, 272, 274, 278–79, 297n12,
as agents vs. objects, 216–17, 298n15, 298n16, 325n16, 328n10,
241, 242–47 330n2, 333n26
and alterity, 65, 144, 306n20, in factory farming (= industrialized
306n21, 322n37 agriculture), 185, 189–90
and the Americans with Disabilities Act in family therapy, 13, 16, 27, 87, 103–112
(ADA), 98, 312n11 in film, 11–22, 298n13, 298n15,
in animal-assisted interventions, 27, 299n20, 317n41
87, 89–103 as focalizers, 20, 55–56, 80, 144, 160,
and animal identifications in therapy for 164–70, 303n28, 316n25, 319n12
children, 53–54, 107–112 in the genre of fantasy, 71–73
and autism, 91, 93, 95–98, 101–102, as healers, 91–93, 95
103, 311n4 and the Holocaust, 149, 188–89, 322n39
and bias toward charismatic megafauna, 7 and human languages, 43, 70–71, 79, 83,
biosocial aspects of, 295n3, 297n11 96, 144, 146–49, 150–51, 153, 154,
vis-à-vis the categories of “human” and 155, 161, 169, 171, 174, 182, 210, 238,
“nonhuman,” 32, 295n1 300n8, 320n18, 334n36
and children’s ontogenetic development, vis-à-vis identity categories, 10,
54, 68–69, 91–92 297n12, 301n15
in circuses, 183 as imaginary others of civilization, 84,
and consciousness, 27–28, 307n25, 308n35, 309n43
299–300n5, 300n6 and instinct, 230, 326n21, 326n22
in cryptozoology, 299n22, 332n23 instrumentalization of, 187,
Descartes’s (mechanomorphic) 188, 193, 196, 198, 244–45,
conception of, 6, 239, 296n7 322–23n42, 329n22
Index ■ 379
as kintypes for members of the therian in speculative zoology, 274–80, 288–89,

community (= otherkin), 52, 53, 332n21, 332n22, 332n23, 332n24
59, 304n5 as “transitional objects” (Winnicott),
and life-writing practices, 17, 19, 157–70 54, 91–92
in marine environments, 92, 182, and the US Navy Marine Mammal
193–94, 195, 204–205, 209, 211–12, Program, 322–23n42
300n7, 322–23n42, 323n43 and the US space program, 245
in medieval bestiaries, 310n50 weaponization of, 153–55, 322–23n42
and metacognition, 299–300n5 as “wild messengers” (= avatars of
as metaphors, 127–28 deceased humans), 105
in nature writing, 55–57 and the York Retreat, 91
and niche construction, 10, 209, 229, 293 in zoos, 84, 183, 192 (see also animal
vis-à-vis nonhuman actants (Latour), comics; animal cultures; animal
32, 174 narratives; animals discussed in
ontological contradictions involving, this book; animal shelters; cultural
90, 96–98, 127, 195, 301n14, ontologies; discourse domains;
312n12, 329n22 extinction narratives; indicator
and other-than-human social species; mass extinction events;
collectivities, 187–88, 195–96 multiscale narration; narrative;
and paleoanthropology, 273 narratology; pets; selfhood; service
and paleoecology, 265, 272, 274, 283–85 animals; speciation; species; therapy
and paleogeography, 274 animals; Umwelt; vivisection)
and paleontology, 222, 265, 274, animals discussed in this book
281, 282–83 alligator, 35, 36, 37
and paleozoology, 299n22 anole lizard, 75
patriarchal associations of with women, ant, 66, 238
9, 84–85, 159, 192–93, 310n51 ape, 83–84, 191–93, 267
perceptual abilities of, 166, 169–70, barn owl, 40
193–94, 207, 213–14, 244, 319n15, bat, 213–14
320n18, 323n43 blackbird, 125, 314n10
problem-solving abilities of, 229, 244, black swallowtail butterfly, 321n32
326n21, 326n22 blue tit, 293
as property, 61, 65, 85 bonobo ape, 28
in psychotherapy, 91–92 bottlenose dolphin, 300n7
and racial or ethnic difference, 172, 200, bull, 189
239, 297n12 cat, 26, 38–39, 40–50, 53, 70–71,
and regionally (and situationally) distinct 80, 322n39
song types, 293, 334n36 chicken, 189
in science fiction, 10, 73–76, chimpanzee, 61, 64–65, 75–76,
153–55, 255–56, 267, 270–71, 191–93, 300n7
289–90, 297n12 cockroach, 133
in the sciences vs. the humanities, 178 corvid, 40, 207–208, 218–19
and selfhood beyond the human, 25–26, coyote, 271–72, 288
27–30, 32–33, 42–43, 47–50, 66, coywolf, 250, 251, 271–72, 288
75–76, 80, 83, 86, 94–96, 98, 100, crocodile, 247–48
140, 178, 187, 190, 231–32, 296n2, deer, 55–56, 148, 206–207
300n12, 311n9 desert shark, 276, 278
380 ■ Index
animals discussed in this book (cont.) rat, 36, 72–73, 129, 185, 187–89,
dinosaur, 125, 274–75 278–79, 244–45, 284, 301n19,
dog, 39–40, 53, 54–55, 61, 63–64, 322n39, 329n22
78–79, 135–37, 157–70, 184, 188, reptile, 270–71
189, 193, 215, 225–30, 265–66, 288, rhesus monkey, 300n7
306n19, 319n15 sanderling, 209, 211–12
dolphin, 92, 182, 193–94, 195, 323n43 snake, 35, 36, 37
donkey, 80 songbird, 310n47
dragonfly, 314n7 starling, 246
dung beetle, 132–33, 314n12 thylacine (= Tasmanian tiger),
dusky seaside sparrow, 245, 11–22, 298n15
298n16, 328n10 tiger, 84–85, 309n42
eel, 152 toad, 250
elephant, 40, 183, 193, 194–95, tortoise, 193
300n7, 321n33 trapdoor spider, 284–85
fish, 264–65 tungara frog, 251
fox, 59, 77–78, 209, 211–12 warbler, 314n7
freshwater pearl mussel, 262 werewolf, 52, 81, 304n3
frog, 35, 148, 181, 196 whale, 181, 232
gorilla, 300n7 white-tailed eagle, 217–18, 325n16
grolar bear (= pizzly bear), 250, 288 wolf, 53, 78–79, 81–82, 239, 266, 288
gull (black-backed), 219–20 (see also animal narratives; human-
gull (herring), 219–20 animal relationships; species)
honey bee, 139 animal shelters, 184, 196
horse, 40, 61–63, 89, 144, 185–86, animal traditions. See animal
200, 322n35 cultures
jackal, 239 animorphs series (by K. A. Applegate), 74,
lion, 149–51, 317n34 307–308n29. See also Invasion, The
louse, 273 Anscombe, Elizabeth, 240
magpie, 249, 251, 300n7 Anthropocene, 257, 330n5
mite, 273 anthropocentricism
mouse, 187, 278–79 vis-à-vis anthropomorphism, 7, 296n7
mussel, 193, 262 vs. biocentrism, 4, 33, 35, 37, 127, 129–
Ohio crawfish, 182–83, 321n31 30, 133–34, 193, 251, 330n5
orangutan, 300n7 vis-à-vis Darwin’s work, 4, 52
orca, 232 ironic inversion of in Kafka’s
otter, 168 “Investigations of a Dog,” 174 (see also
parashrew, 276–77, 288–89 animal narratives; cultural ontologies;
parrot, 52, 82–83 human-animal relationships)
passenger pigeon, 242 anthropodenial (de Waal), 6
peregrine hawk, 56–57, anthropology. See human-animal
207–208, 220–21 relationships; narratology
pig, 40, 189–90 anthropomorphism, 5–7, 296n6, 296n7,
pig embryo, 307n28 316n28, 317n35, 329n19, 333n32,
pigeon, 238–39, 242–44 333n33. See also anthropocentrism
plover, 220 Arad, Diana, 16, 107, 111
predator rat, 276 Aristotle. See scale of nature
Index ■ 381
Arluke, Arnold, and Clinton R. Sanders, “becoming-animal” (Deleuze and

177, 216, 313n19 Guattari), 315n16
Armbruster, Karla, 173 Bekoff, Marc, 5, 292, 299n5, 317n35,
Arnds, Peter, 304n3 333n32, 333n33
Assad, Andrew, and Norman Bell, Allan, 240, 327n5
H. Packard, 259–60 Benkov, Edith Joyce, 304n3
Augustine, 52 Bennett, Charles F., Jr., 122
Austin, J. L., 240 Benston, Kimberly W., 329n22
autism. See animal narratives; animals; Benyus, Janine M., 289
human-animal relationships; Bernaerts, Lars, Marco Caracciolo, Luc
neurocosmopolitanism; Herman, and Bart Vervaeck, 8, 174–
neurotypicality 75, 177, 296n2, 316n25
autobiografiction (Saunders), 162, 172, 191 Bernstein, Richard, 327n6
autobiography, 179–80. See also animal bestiaries. See animals
autobiography; animal narratives; Bildungsroman. See animal narratives
animalographies; narrative; selfhood bioagents. See animal narratives; multiscale
Avital, Eytan, and Eva Jablonka, 79, 229, narration
293, 297n12, 334n36 biocentrism, 33, 123, 127, 129–30, 190,
251, 292, 306n19, 314n11, 331–
Bacchilega, Cristina, 310n50 32n17. See also anthropocentrism;
Bachelard, Gaston, 307n27 human-animal relationships
Baetens, Jan, 117 biodiversity. See animal narratives;
Baetens, Jan, and Éric Trudel, 237 animals; extinction narratives; mass
Baetens, Jan, and Hugo Frey, 117, 302n21 extinction events
Baker, Steve, 120 biogeography. See multiscale narration;
Ball, Donald W., 312n17 zoogeography
Banfield, Ann, 319n13 biomimicry. See animal narratives
Barad, Karen, 88, 257, 311n3 biomutations (= shifts of species category).
Baron-Cohen, Simon, 102 See animal narratives; narrative
Barthes, Roland, 286 biophilia hypothesis. See human-animal
Bartosch, Roman, 8, 17, 298n14 relationships
Bartowski, Frances, 105, 307n28 bioscience/biotechnology. See animal
Bateman, Benjamin, 301n16 narratives; animals; cultural
Bateson, Gregory, 320n21 ontologies; human-animal
Baylis, Françoise, 307n28 relationships
Bear, Mark F., Barry W. Connors, and biotic community (Leopold), 299n1,
Michael A. Paradiso, 319n15 327n4. See also human-animal
Bearzi, Maddelena, and Craig relationships
B. Stanford, 229 Bird, Alexander, 296n1
“Beast in the Jungle, The” (by Henry Bird Lovers, Backyard (by Thalia Field),
James), 301n16 143, 202, 233–48, 292, 298n13,
Beautiful Joe (by Margaret Marshall 326n18, 326n20, 327n5, 328n10,
Saunders), 185, 186 329n18, 329n22
Beauvoir, Simone de, 124, 192–93 Bird Rose, Deborah, et al., 297n9, 317n40
Bedau, Mark A., 258 Birds, The (by Daphne du
Bedau, Mark A., and Paul Maurier), 219–20
Humphreys, 258 Bishop, Gail, et al., 105
382 ■ Index
Black Beauty (by Anna Sewell), 33, 144, Bynum, Caroline Walker, 51–52, 57, 59, 66,
185–86, 200, 316n31, 322n36 67, 82, 85, 252, 296n3, 304n2, 304n4.
Blackfish (by Gabriela Cowperthwaite), See also human-animal relationships
232, 326n24 Byrne, Ruth M. J., 142
Black, Max, 142–43, 316n29
Blitz, David, 261, 275, 333n27 Calarco, Matthew, 148, 295n1, 297n12,
Bloch, Ernst, 74, 309n38 306n20, 320n17
Boardman, Kathleen A., 325n15 Callard, Felicity, and Des Fitzgerald, 88
Bockting, Ineke, 324n8 Call of the Wild, The (by Jack London),
Boes, Tobias, 158 143–44, 227–30, 265–66, 281,
Bolton, Benjamin, 297n12 282, 306n17
Borrell, Sally, 298n13 Candea, Matei, 29, 300n10, 326n23
Bowen, James, 302n24 Caracciolo, Marco, 135, 325n10
Bowen, Murray, 107 Carey, Lois, 107, 110–11
Bowen, Roger, 81 Carrithers, Michael J., Louise J. Bracken,
Bowlby, John, 91 and Steven Emery, 7, 200, 245, 262,
Braidotti, Rosi, 28, 97, 296n2, 263, 330n5
297n12 Carruthers, Peter, 27–28, 300n6
Brewer, Scott, 17 Carson, Rachel, 324n3. See also “Undersea”;
Brewster, Bradley H., and Antony Under the Sea-Wind
J. Puddephatt, 300n8 Carsten, Janet, 312n17
Briggs, Julia, 318n2 Carter, Angela, 77, 97, 309n45. See also
Brockmeier, Jens, and Hanna “Tiger’s Bride, The”; “Wolf-Alice”
Meretoja, 234–35 Case, Caroline, 53, 107
Broderick, Damien, and Van Ikin, 81 Casey, Susan, 322–23n42, 323n43
Brodesco, Alberto, 330n3 Cassou-Noguès, Pierre, 330n3
Brown, Lisa, 117, 122, 159 Castle, Gregory, 158
Brown, Lydia, 90 categorization processes. See narrative
Brown, Penelope, and Stephen C. Levinson, Cavalieri, Paola, 97
176–77, 181, 320n24 Certeau, Michel de, 315n19
Bruner, Jerome, 30, 155, 207, 218 Chaney, Michael A., 117, 297n12, 313n1
Bruni, John, 144, 306n17 characterization. See animal narratives;
Buchanan, Brett, 320n17 multiscale narration; narrative
Buchbinder, Mara, 320n22 charismatic megafauna. See animals
Buck, Gunther, 233 Charles, Nickie, and Charlotte Aull Davies,
Buddhism. See animal narratives 80, 104
Buller, Henry, 314n6 Charon, Rita, 310n1
Burghardt, Gordon M., 5, Chatman, Seymour, 286
317n35, 333n32 children’s literature. See animal narratives;
Burkhardt, Richard W., Jr., 328n13 animals
Burroughs, John, 228, 229, 230, 324n5, chimeras (in bioscience/biotechnology).
326n20, 326n21 See animal narratives; species
Burt, Jonathan, 298n13, 317n41 “chipping in” vs. “butting in” (Schiffrin),
Bussmann, Hadumod, 179 176–78, 180–99, 262, 323n44. See also
Bye, Bye Birdie (by Shirley Hughes), 121, animal autobiography; animal narratives
123–27, 134, 314n8, 314n9, 314n10 Churchland, Patricia S., 324n9
Bykofsky, Stu, 183 Chute, Hillary, 121
Index ■ 383
“Cinderella” (by Charles Perrault), 72 cross-species identifications. See

circuses. See animals animal narratives; human-animal
Clan Apis (by Jay Hosler), 139 relationships; narrative
Clark, Alan J., and Robert M. May, 7 Crutzen, Paul J., and Eugene
Clark, Andy, 258–60, 303n26, 316n23 F. Stoermer, 330n5
Clarke, Bruce, 67, 307n27 cryptozoology. See animals
class (socioeconomic). See human-animal Crystal, David, 320n25, 321n26
relationships Csicsery-Ronay, Istvan, Jr., 74,
climate change. See multiscale narration; 309n38, 309n39
species Culler, Jonathan, 286
Clutton-Brock, Juliet, 4, 74, 80, 100, 126 cultural ecology. See human-animal
Coetzee, J. M. See Disgrace; Elizabeth relationships
Costello; Lives of Animals, The cultural ontologies
cognitive ecosystems (Hutchins), 170 of Amerindian peoples, 32–33
cognitive estrangement (of science and bioscience, 68, 143, 229n22,
fiction), 73–74, 75–76. See also 289, 290–91
animal comics; animals; multiscale conflicts (or contradictions) among, 90,
narration; novum 127, 301n14
Cohn, Dorrit, 161, 202, 223–24, 318n42, as constellations of discourse domains,
319n11, 319n13, 320n20 20, 201, 202, 231, 243, 325–26n18
Cole, Thomas R., Nathan S. Carlin, and definition of, 2, 25, 32, 300n10
Ronald A. Carson, 88, 310n1 and ecologies of selves, 8, 20–21, 25, 29,
Colombat, Jacqueline, 172 32, 35, 174, 178, 187, 190, 195, 217,
colonialism. See human-animal 231–32, 236, 243, 296n2, 321n29
relationships as impacted by narrative experimentation,
comix. See animal comics 19, 157, 160, 172, 199, 201, 202, 210,
comparative ethology. See animal 232, 233–36, 240, 241–48, 329n22
narratives; animals; narratology mixing of in magical realism, 72
Corbeyran, Éric, and Richard Horne, and ontological conservativism, 236,
127, 131–34 241–42, 247
Corngold, Stanley, 127–28, 314n12 vis-à-vis possible-worlds theory, 32
Corvus: A Life with Birds (by and trans-species hermeneutics, 234
Esther Woolfson), 207–208, (see also animal narratives; animals;
218–19, 325n18 discourse domains; narrative;
cosmological deixis (Viveiros de Castro), narratology; selfhood)
32. See also cultural ontologies; Curious Critters (by David Fitzsimmons),
discourse domains 182–83, 321n31, 321n32
Cosslett, Tess, 179, 180, 316n31
counterfactual history. See D’Aeth, Tony Hughes, 298n13
narrative Damasio, António, 27
counterfactuals. See multiscale narration; Dannenberg, Hilary P., 125–26, 268, 269,
narrative 300n9, 331n16
Crane, Kylie, 298n14, 298n17 Danta, Chris, 67, 290
Crist, Eileen, 143, 216–17, 236, 242, 292, Dardenne, Robert, 165
327n8, 330n5, 333n32 Darwin, Charles, 2–4, 52, 83, 191, 192, 259,
critical animal studies. See human-animal 261, 275, 282, 293, 296n4, 314n11,
relationships 320n17, 326n19, 326n21, 329n20,
Cronin, Keri, 317n41 330–31n7
384 ■ Index
Daston, Lorraine, 257, 327n4 and norms for engaging with animal (as
Daston, Lorraine, and Gregg Mitman, well as human) minds, 202, 212, 216,
107, 143 219, 220–32, 235, 241–47, 309n37,
Dauenhauer, Bernard, and David 325–26n18, 333n32
Pellauer, 327n3 and parsimonious vs. prolific allocations of
Davies, Steven, 306n19 animal subjectivity, 203, 222, 225–32,
Dawkins, Marian Stamp, 6 292, 325–26n18, 326n19, 333n32
Dawkins, Richard, 333–34n34 and reductionist or eliminativist models
Deacon, Terrence W., 258 of mind, 203, 221
De Angelis, Richard, 313n1 relationships among, 242–47,
Degnen, Cathrine, 33, 68, 321n29 325–26n18
DeKoven, Marianne, 83, 305n12 and the register of actions vs. events,
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari, 315n16 222–23, 225, 229–30, 231, 232,
DeMello, Margo, 82, 105, 171 236, 240–47, 325–26n18, 327n8,
Dennett, Daniel C., 3, 203, 212, 213, 214–15, 328–29n16, 329n18, 329n20,
217, 221, 296n4, 313n4, 323n1, 329n22, 333n33
324n9, 325n11, 325n12, 325n13, and scale, 254–56
325n14, 333n27, 333–34n34. See also and the science of animal behavior,
eliminativist models of mind 216–17, 222, 229, 242, 325n15,
Derrida, Jacques, 297n12 327n8, 329n20, 333n32 (see also
Desblache, Lucile, 310n50 animal narratives; animals; cultural
Descartes, René. See animals ontologies; eliminativist models of
Descola, Philippe, 29, 32, 300n10, 326n23 mind; human-animal relationships;
Desmond, Jane C., 105 multiscale narration; narratology;
De Waal, Frans B. M., 6, 235, reductionist models of mind; species)
300n5, 333n32 Disgrace (by J. M. Coetzee), 63–64,
disability and disability studies. See human- 306n19, 325n10
animal relationships Dixon, Dougal, 274–78, 279,
disavowal (Rohman). See human-animal 288–89, 322n24
relationships Doctor Rat (by William Kotzwinkle), 185,
discourse analysis. See narratology 188–90, 321n33, 322n39
discourse domains Dodd, Robert J., and Robert J. Stanton, 282,
and activity types (Levinson), 221–22 283, 284–85, 333n29
as bridge between cultural ontologies Dog Boy (by Eva Hornung), 309n45
and mental-state attributions, 201, Dog Days of Arthur Cane, The (by T. Ernesto
202, 212, 231–32, 235, 300n11 Bettancourt), 309n44
and the concept of “frames,” 320n21 “Dogology” (by T. Coraghessan
as cutting across the fiction-nonfiction Boyle), 78–79
divide, 202–203, 212, 213, 217–32 Dog’s Life, A (by Ann Martin), 185, 186–87
definition of, 202, 221–22, 301n11 Doležel, Lubomír, 32
and ecologies of selves, 221 Domning, Daryl P., 274
and heterophenomenology, 219, 222–32 Donald, Merlin, 293, 334n36
and ideas of species difference, 237 Donoghue, Philip C. J., and M. Paul
and language games Smith, 282
(Wittgenstein), 221–22 Donovan, Josephine, 84
and Morgan’s Canon (= Law of Douglas, Mary, 315n15
Parsimony), 292, 326n19, 333n32 Dowling, Terry, 81
Index ■ 385
Drowned World, The (by J. G. Ballard), emplotment. See narrative

270–71, 332n22 Endal (by Allen Parton and Sandra
Dubbs, Chris, 315n20 Parton), 39–40
Duckworth, Renée A., 331n7 entanglement (Barad), 88, 257, 311n3. See
Dukas, Reuven, 229 also human-animal relationships
Dunayer, Joan, 311n10 environmental humanities. See animal
Duncan, Jim, 314n5 narratives; human-animal
Duncan the Wonder Dog (by Adam Hines), relationships; narratology
146–49, 155, 316n32 environmental narratives (Weik von
Dwyer, Annie, 171–72, 200 Messner). See multiscale narration
environmental sociology. See human-animal
Eakin, John Paul, 42 relationships
Easterlin, Nancy, 293 epigenetics, 293, 330–31n7. See also
ecocriticism. See human-animal multiscale narration
relationships epistemic modality. See animal narratives
ecofeminism. See human-animal Ereshefsky, Marc, 261
relationships Erwin, Douglas, 283
ecological humanities. See animal narratives; ethics. See human-animal relationships
human-animal relationships; ethnicity. See animals; species
narratology ethnozoology. See animal narratives
ecological psychology. See multiscale ethograms, 303n27. See also animal
narration narratives; animals; narratology
ecology. See animals; human-animal ethology. See animal comics; animal
relationships; multiscale narration; narratives; animals; narratology
narratology; species Eva (by Peter Dickinson), 75–76, 290–91
ecology of minds, 168–70. See also animal evidentials, 320n25. See also animal
narratives; cultural ontologies narratives
Edel, Leon, 319n11 evolution. See animals; multiscale narration;
Edelman, Gerald M., 27–28, speciation; species
300n6, 300n8 Ewert, Jeanne, 313n3, 316n33
Eder, Jens, Fotis Jannidis, and Ralf Experimental Animals (by Thalia Field), 143
Schneider, 286, 333n30 explanation vs. understanding (in
education. See animals hermeneutics), 233, 235, 239–47,
Eisely, Loren, 325n15 262, 326–27n1, 327n5. See also
eliminativist models of mind, 203, 221, animal narratives; cultural ontologies;
324–25n9 hermeneutic circle; narratology
Elizabeth Costello (by J. M. Coetzee), extinction. See animal narratives;
193, 325n10 animals; extinction narratives; mass
emergence and emergent phenomena. See extinction events
multiscale narration; species extinction narratives, 74, 237, 245, 275,
emergent individuals. See animal narratives; 278–79, 298n16, 298n17, 325n16,
multiscale narration 328n10. See also animal narratives;
emerging infectious diseases (EIDs). See animals; mass extinction events;
human-animal relationships multiscale narration
emotion. See animal narratives
empathy. See animal narratives; human- face and face wants. See animal narratives
animal relationships Fairclough, Norman, 320n24
386 ■ Index
fairy tales, 74, 77, 83, 84, 310n50. See also Flush (by Virginia Woolf), 144, 157–70,
animal fables; animal narratives; 193, 318n2, 319n12, 319n16, 320n18
animals; fantasy; narrative Fly, The (by David Cronenberg), 289–90
falsifiability. See animal narratives; “Fly, The” (by George Langelaan), 289–90
narrative; Umwelt Fly, The (by Kurt Neumann), 289–90
Fantastic Voyage (by Isaac Asimov), focalization. See animals
255, 330n3 folk ethology. See animal comics; animal
Fantastic Voyage II: Destination Brain (by narratives
Isaac Asimov), 330n3 folk psychology, 313n4
fantasy (= the marvelous), 71–72, 74, 77, fossils. See multiscale narration
82, 309n39. See also animal narratives; Foster, Charles, 56, 304n7
animals; fairy tales; narrative Fowler, Roger, 208–209, 324n8
Faris, Wendy B., 72 framing and footing (Goffman). See animal
fascism. See animal narratives narratives
Fauconnier, Gilles, and Mark Francione, Gary L., 61, 97
Turner, 331n15 Franklin, Adrian, 172
feminist narratology. See narratology Frawley, William, 178
feral child. See human-animal relationships Freeman, Carol, 298n13
Ferguson, Kevin L., 299n3, 302n24 Freud, Sigmund, 3, 62, 64, 65, 84, 271,
Ferguson, Moira, 144, 200 311n10, 329n20
Ferguson, Niall, 319n14 Friend Like Henry, A (by Nuala Gardner),
fictional minds. See narrative 87, 89, 93–103, 107, 311n9
fiction-nonfiction distinction. See animal Frisch, Karl von, 159
narratives; cultural ontologies; Frost, Laurie Adams, 302n24
discourse domains; narrative Frye, Northrop, 280
fiction vs. lying. See narrative Fudge, Erica, 67, 97, 195, 196, 299n3,
fictive kinship. See human-animal 301n14, 302n23, 333n31
relationships funny animals. See animal comics
Field, Thalia, 237–38, 240, 328n14. See also
Bird Lovers, Backyard; Experimental Gaard, Greta, 297n12
Animals Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 233, 327n6
Field, Thalia, and Eric P. Elshtain, 237, Gallagher, Shaun, 316n23
240, 327n9 Gallagher, Shaun, and Daniel D. Hutto, 215
Field, Thalia, and Miranda F. Mellis, 236, Gallup, George C., 28, 300n7
237, 328n12 Gardner, Jared, 117, 302n21
Field, Thalia, et al., 237, 328n11 Gardner, Jared, and David Herman, 118, 119
Fine, Aubrey H., 91 Gawande, Atul, 92
Finn, Howard, 162 gender. See human-animal relationships;
Fisher, John Andrew, 5–6, 333n32 narratology
Fissell, Mary, 128, 315n14 Genette, Gérard, 69–70, 144, 164, 263–64,
Fitch, W. Tecumseh, 333n32, 334n36 266, 308n34, 319n12, 332–33n25
Fitzgerald, Des, and Felicity Callard, 88 genograms. See human-animal relationships
“flexible personhood” (Shir-Vertesh), 312n12 genre. See animal narratives; cultural
Flint, Christopher, 174 ontologies; narrative
Florida Everglades, 331n8 geophysics. See multiscale narration
Fludernik, Monika, 135, 156, 318n42 Gerbasi, Kathleen C., et al., 58
Index ■ 387
Gergen, Kenneth J., and Mary M. Gergen, Hartigan, John, 296n2

13, 25, 26, 30, 34, 42, 300n9 Harvey, Colin B., 118
Gerrig, Richard J., 333n30 Hatfield, Charles, 117, 302n21
Gibson, J. J., 253–54 Hearne, Vicki, 238, 323n1
Giffney, Noreen, and Myra J. Hird, 297n12 Heft, Harry, 253–54
Gil, Eliana, 111 Heidegger, Martin, 80, 167, 319–20n17
Glendening, John, 81, 310n46 Heise, Ursula K., 261, 297n12, 328n10,
Glenk, Lisa Marie, et al., 98 330n2, 330n5
Godfrey-Smith, Peter, 261 Heise, Ursula K., John Christensen, and
Goffman, Erving, 175–76, 180, 181, 200, Michelle Niemann, 297n9
320n21, 320n23, 320n24. See also Hellman, John, 165
animal narratives hermeneutic circle, 327n6
Golden Ass, The (by Apuleius), 74 hermeneutic theory. See animal narratives;
Goldman, Jane, 318n6 cultural ontologies; explanation vs.
Goodall, Jane, 235 understanding; hermeneutic circle;
Goodey, C. F., 99–100, 297n12, 312n14 narratology
Goodley, Peter, 99, 312n13 Herzing, Denise L., and Thomas I. White,
Gordon, Cynthia, 320n21, 320n22 97, 229
Gorman, David, 224, 320n20, 326n20 heterophenomenological density. See
Gould, Stephen Jay, 333n27 animal narratives
Great Chain of Being (Lovejoy). See human- heterophenomenology. See animal
animal relationships; scale of nature narratives; discourse domains; human-
Greenwood, John D., 292, 326n19 animal relationships; narratology
Grier, Katherine C., 69, 104–105, 310n47 Heuvelmans, Bernard, 299n22, 333n23
Griffin, Donald, 27–28, 300n5, Heyes, Cecilia M., 300n7
300n7, 300n8 Himmer, Steve, 298n13
Griffin, James A., et al., 311n6 Hinchman, Lewis P., 299n1, 327n4
Grivell, Timothy, Helen Clegg, and historical fiction. See animal narratives
Elizabeth C. Roxburgh, 59, Hodges, Wilfrid, 141–42
304–305n9, 305n12, 305n14 Hodgson, Kate, and Marcia Dowling, 16,
Groensteen, Thierry, 120 107–110, 313n20
Grunwald, Michael, 331n8 Holland, Jennifer S., 105
Grusin, Richard, 296n2, 297n12 Holm, Nicholas, 128
Guess, Carol, and Kelly Magee, Holocaust. See animals
105–106, 171 Homer’s Odyssey (by Gwen Cooper), 40
Guest, Kristin, 144 horror fiction. See animal narratives
Horse Boy, The (by Michel Orion Scott),
Hagenbeck, Carl, 192, 322n40 90, 101
Halliday, M. A. K., 209, 234n8 Horse Boy, The (by Rupert Isaacson), 87,
Hamburger, Käte, 202, 319n11 89–90, 93–103, 311n5
Hamlet, 287 Howell, Philip, 105
Haraway, Donna, 32, 39, 42, 94, 173, 226, How the Dead Dream (by Lydia
297n12, 302n24, 311n10, 317n39 Millet), 301n19
Harding, Jennifer Riddle, 268 Hoy, David Couzens, 328–29n16
Harel, Naama, 173–74 Huff, Cynthia, and Joel Haefner, 173,
Hart, H. L. A., 329n17 183, 317n41
388 ■ Index
human-animal relationships emic vs. etic approaches to, 107–112

and animal geographies, 10, 97, as entanglement, 88–89, 93–103, 158
121, 122–34, 297n12, 311n10, and environmental sociology, 300n8
314n6, 314n7, 315n14, 315n19, and farm animals, 185, 189–90, 296n5
327n2, 329n21 and the feral child, 309n45
art’s potential impact on, 17 and fictive kinship, 104–106, 312n17
and biocentric approaches to and gender, 71, 84–85, 97, 124, 170,
aesthetics, 306n19 310n50, 311n10, 314n8, 315n21
and the biophilia hypothesis, in genograms, 16, 87, 107–112, 313n20
92–93, 308n31 and heterophenomenology, 203, 204,
and bioscience/biotechnology, 19, 214–32, 323n1
67–68, 105, 187, 244–45, 290–91, and history from below (oral
307n28, 315n14, 329n22 history), 103
within biotic communities, 13, 22, 26, and the homogenization of difference,
30, 78, 106, 148, 200, 234, 240, 327n4 173, 212, 214–15
and co-evolution, 226, 251, 266, 272 and human exceptionalism, 97, 126, 155,
vis-à-vis colonizing projects, 12–13, 17, 193–94, 248, 275, 317n40, 320n17
19, 296n6, 298n17 and humans’ domination of other
and companion animals, 10, 26–27, species, 9, 84, 125, 129, 134, 153, 155,
38–50, 133–34, 155, 184, 196, 159, 197, 243–44, 309n41, 309n43
215, 242, 296n5, 297n12, 302n22, vis-à-vis humans’ intraspecies
302n24, 317n39 relationships, 40–42, 49, 301n15,
and the concept of vermin, 127–34, 306n20, 308n31, 308n35, 89–90, 94,
314n12, 314n13, 315n14, 329n21 98–100, 101–102, 121, 126, 311n4
and the creaturely, 299n4 and humans’ phylogenetic evolution,
and critical animal studies, 92–93, 102, 155, 226, 250, 251, 256,
96–98, 298n13 264–65, 266, 272, 273, 293, 324n8,
cross-cultural approaches to, 95, 128, 330–31n7, 334n36
314n12, 315n14 and hybridity vs. metamorphosis
and cultural ecology, 122, 160, 297n10 (Bynum), 51–52, 54, 55, 56–57, 58,
diachronic approaches to, 95, 296n2 67, 82, 85–86, 252, 304n2, 307n26
and disability, 89–90, 93–103, 196, and interspecies ethics, 10, 17, 42–46, 49,
297n12, 311n4, 312n13, 312n15 97, 105, 297n11, 297n12
and disavowal (Rohman), 35, 61–62, and intersubjectivity, 94, 160,
129, 192, 198, 301n18, 322n41 173, 323n1
and the domestic-wild distinction, and liminality (V. Turner), 54, 92
61–62, 78–79, 281, 306n17, 306n18, vis-à-vis the medical humanities, 88–103,
316n30, 331n13 310n1, 315n14
and ecocriticism, 298n13 medieval conceptions of, 51–52, 59,
and ecofeminism, 9, 159, 66, 252
297n12, 298n18 and meta-empiricism, 58, 59
and the ecological or environmental and metempsychosis (= body hopping),
humanities, 8–9, 18, 297n9, 317n40 52, 59, 82–83
and embodiment, 56, 215, 219, and modes of textual action, 234, 237,
226, 253–54 240–47, 248, 328n15
and emerging infectious diseases and multispecies ethnography, 94,
(EIDs), 315n14 159–60, 297n10, 299n1
Index ■ 389
and the naming of animals, 155, anthropomorphism; biocentrism;

196, 299n3 cultural ontologies; discourse
and nondomesticated animals, 55–58 domains; humanimals; multiscale
and paternalism, 173, 181–82 narration; narrative; narratology;
and Peircean semiotics, 334n36 pets; selfhood; shifts by therians;
and posthumanism, 10, 67, 97, 173, 183, speciesism; Umwelt)
296n2, 297n12 humanimals, 191, 197, 200, 290, 291,
and predation, 52, 78, 80, 124, 149, 305n12. See also animal narratives;
247–48, 272, 314n8, 325n17 animals; human-animal relationships
and rationality as a criterion for the human-animal studies. See animal comics;
human, 16, 85, 99–100, 275, 296n7, animal narratives; human-animal
308n31, 312n14 relationships; narratology
and religion, 207, 236 human evolution. See human-animal
and self-narratives, 13–16, 25–27, relationships; multiscale narration;
30–32, 33–50, 51–52, 53–54, 58–60, narrative
62–68, 171 Hunn, Eugene S., 159
and sexuality, 97, 124, 297n12, Hunter, The (by Daniel Nettheim),
311–12n10 11–22, 298n13, 298n15, 299n20,
and slavery, 144, 172, 185, 186, 200, 232 328n10, 333n23
and the social insects, 66, 307n24, 318n4 Hunter, The (by Julia Leigh), 11–22,
and sociobiology, 66, 105, 307n24, 298n13, 298n14, 298n15, 299n19,
333–34n34 305n13, 328n10, 333n23
and socioeconomic class, 301n15, 318n1 Hurley, Susan, 316n23
and species hierarchies, 4, 21, 28–29, Hurwitz, Brian, 88, 310n1
33, 37–38, 50, 52, 63, 64, 68–69, Huss, Ephrat, and Julie Cwikel,
72–76, 78–86, 100, 102–103, 125–27, 107, 313n20
129, 133–34, 137, 153, 167, 168–70, Hutchins, Edwin, 170
192, 196, 235, 236, 243–44, 251, Hutto, Daniel D., 30
271, 317n38, 319–20n17, 320n19, hybridity vs. metamorphosis (Bynum). See
327n9, 328n11 human-animal relationships
and the speciesism-patriarchy nexus, 9,
84–85, 159, 192–93, 310n51 Iadonisi, Rick, 179, 180
and territorialization (Deleuze and Icarus myth, 239
Guattari), 129–34, 315n16 ichnology. See multiscale narration
and therian communities (= otherkin), Illies, Joachim, 35, 295n4
10, 15, 52–53, 57–60, 304n5, indicator species, 245. See also animal
304–305n9, 305n10 narratives; animals; extinction
and transhuman families, 12, 13, 16, 18, narratives; species
27, 86, 87, 96, 97–98, 103–112, 123, Ingold, Tim, x, 160, 295n3, 299n1
129–30, 132–34, 199, 247, 312n15, inheritance systems (in post-Darwinian
312n16, 312–13n18, 313n19, 326n21 evolutionary theory). See multiscale
and trans-species anthropology, 94, 159, narration
160, 297n10, 299n1 Inheritors, The (by William Golding), 324n8
and “triangling” (M. Bowen), 106–107, interspecies ethics. See human-animal
313n19 (see also animal comics; relationships
animal narratives; animals; Invasion, The (by K. A. Applegate),
Anthropocene; anthropocentrism; 67, 74–75
390 ■ Index
“Investigations of a Dog” (by Franz Kafka), Katcher, Aaron, 53–54, 92

174, 315n16 Katcher, Aaron, and Gregory G. Wilkins,
Irvine, Leslie, 172, 300n8, 300n9, 302n24 92, 311n6
Island of Dr. Moreau, The (by H. G. Wells), Kean, Hilda, 105
80–81, 83, 290, 309–310n46 Keen, Suzanne, 8, 149–50, 151,
Ittner, Jutta, 144, 167, 173, 322n37 317n34, 317n38
I Was a Rat! (by Philip Pullman), 72–73, Kellert, Stephen R., 92
308n33, 308n35, 309n37 Kellert, Stephen R., and E. O.
Wilson, 308n31
Jablonka, Eva, and Marion Lamb, 79, 191, Kendall-Morwick, Kara, 170
229, 293, 294, 330–31n7, 334n35 Kennedy, John S., 5, 212
Jahn, Manfred, 319n12 Kennedy, Merrit, 274
Jakobson, Roman, 128 Kennedy, Merritt, and Colin Dwyer,
James, Erin, 8 19, 298n17
James, Simon P., 215 King, Shelley, 72, 309n36
Jameson, Fredric, 309n38 kintypes. See animals
Jamieson, Dale, 300n5 Kirksey, S. Eben, 160, 297n10
Jannidis, Fotis, 286, 333n30 Kirksey, S. Eben, and Stefan Helmreich, 32,
“Jealous Husband Returns in Form of 94, 159–60, 297n10, 299n1
Parrot” (by Robert Olen Butler), 52, Kladstrup, Liesbeth, and Susana Tosca,
82–83, 310n47, 310n48 118, 313n3
Jefferies, Richard, 332n19 Kline, A. S., 330n1
Jenkins, Henry, 313n3 Kockelman, Paul, 300n8
Jennie (by Paul Gallico), 69–71 Kohn, Eduardo, x, 8, 29, 30, 32–33, 35,
Jerolmack, Colin, 128–29, 315n14, 94, 148, 159, 160, 174, 282, 295n4,
315n15, 329n21 296n2, 297n10, 299n1, 301n12,
Johnson, Mark, 125–26 301n13, 326n23, 334n36
Johnston, Catherine, 314n6 Kokkola, Lydia, 308n32
Johnston, Jay, 304n5, 305n10, Korthals Altes, Liesbeth, 234, 327n4
305n12, 305n16 Kuhn, Thomas S., 1, 4, 295–96n1
Johnstone, Barbara, 314n5, 320n22 Kuiken, Don, 27–28
Jones, E. M., and E. M. Tansey, 310n1 Kuper, Peter, 127, 132–34
Jones, Lyle V., and David Thissen, 312n14
Jones, Robin M. Niesenbaum, 107, 110, 111 Labov, William, 268, 269
Joosen, Vanessa, 72, 308n35 Lady into Fox (by David Garnett), 52,
Joye, Yannick, and Andreas de Block, 92–93 77–78, 83
Laika (by Nick Abadzis), 135–38, 140,
Kafalenos, Emma, 318n42 142–43, 153, 315n20, 315n21,
Kafka, Franz, 3, 303n28, 315n16, 329n20. 315–16n22
See also animal comics; “Investigations Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson,
of a Dog”; Metamorphosis, The; 128, 139
“Report for an Academy, A” Laland, Kevin N., and Bennett
Kagan, Jerome, 323n2 G. Galef, 293
Kahler, Erich, 163, 319n11 Lanser, Susan S., 118
Kaplan, Sarah, 291, 307n28, 333n31 Lassén-Seger, Maria, 74, 304n2, 308n30,
Karlsson, Fredrik, 7 308n31, 308n32, 308n33, 309n41,
Karttunen, Laura, 268 309n42, 309n43
Index ■ 391
Lassie Come-Home (by Eric Knight), 61, Lovejoy, A. O., 80, 100, 126, 320n19
107, 225–27, 326n22 Lucy (by Laurence Gonzales), 28, 67,
Latour, Bruno, 32, 33, 143, 174, 296n2, 290–91, 307n26
301n12, 318n5 Lukács, Georg, 319n11
Latour, Bruno, and Steve Woolgar, 143 lying. See narrative
Lau, Kimberly J., 310n50
Law of Parsimony (= Morgan’s Canon). See Macdonald, Helen, 40
discourse domains MacIntyre, Alisdair, 30
Lawrence, D. H. See St. Mawr Mac Rae, Hazel, 312n17
Lawrence, Michael, and Laura McMahon, magical realism. See cultural ontologies
298n13, 317n41 Mairowitz, David Zane, and Robert Crumb,
Laycock, John, 53 127, 130, 132–34
Lear, Linda, 324n3 Mallet, James, 261, 331n10
Leech, Geoffrey, and Michael Short, 205, Mamatas, Nick, 53
210–11, 231 Manimal, 307–308n29
Lefèvre, Pascal, 127 Marcus, Laura, 162, 170, 172, 179–80,
Le Guin, Ursula K., 9, 112, 124, 159, 318n1, 318n6, 319n9, 321n27
308n31, 309n39. See also “Wife’s Margolin, Uri, 268, 333n30
Story, The” marine environments. See animals
Lehtimäki, Markku, 8 Marino, Lori, 229
Leigh, Julia, 19. See also Hunter, The Marino, Lori, and Scott O. Lilienfeld, 93
Lejeune, Philippe, 179, 180, 320n20 Marley and Me (by John Grogan), 40
Leopold, Aldo, 299n1, 327n4 Martin, Paul, 272
lepidoptery, 318n4 Marvin, Garry, and Susan McHugh,
Levinson, Boris, 91–92 96, 117
Levinson, Stephen C., 221–22 Marzluff, John M., and Tony Angell, 229
Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 107 mass extinction events, 274, 279, 283,
Lewis, Thomas S. W., 157, 162, 330n5, 333n26. See also animal
318n2, 318n6 narratives; animals; extinction
lifeworld. See multiscale narration narratives; multiscale narration
life writing. See animal autobiography; Matheus, Jean, 249–50, 332–33n25
animal narratives; animalographies; Maus (by Art Spiegelman), 143–44,
animals; autobiography 149, 316n33
Link, Alex, 297n12 McCallum, Robyn, 291
Linnaeus, 244 McCance, Dawn, 96, 117
Lives of Animals, The (by J. M. Coetzee), McGoldrick, Monica, Randy Gerson, and
193, 303n28, 325n10 Sueli Petry, 107, 313n20
Lloyd, Dan, 27–28, 300n6 McHugh, Susan, 8, 159, 235, 297n12,
Lockwood, Jeffrey A., 261 303n27, 327n7
Loesberg, Jonathan, 180 McHugh, Susan, and Robert McKay, 117
London, Jack, 230, 326n21. See also Call of McIntyre, Dan, and Dawn Archer, 234n8
the Wild, The; White Fang McMahon-Coleman, Kimberley, and
Long, William J., 229, 326n20 Roslyn Weaver, 304n3
Lorenz, Konrad, 216, 238, 239, 246–47, McMullen, Matthew N., Keith D. Markman,
292, 326n20, 328n13 and Igor Gavanski, 268
Lorimer, Jamie, and Krithika Srinivasan, McNeill, Lynn S., 71
123, 297n12, 301n15, 314n6 MacPherson, Malcolm, 40
392 ■ Index
medical humanities, 88, 310n1, 310–11n2, Monk, Ray, 157, 161, 162–63, 166,
315n14. See also human-animal 318n7, 319n10
relationships; narratology Montgomery, Sy, 40
medieval period. See animals; human- Mooallem, Jon, 273
animal relationships; narrative Moore, David S., 330–31n7
Melson, Gail F., 53–54, 68, 91, 92, Moore, Patrick W. B., 323n43
107, 311n6 Morgan, C. Lloyd, 5, 292, 326n19, 333n32.
Melzack, Ronald, 305n14 See also discourse domains
memes. See multiscale narration Morgan’s Canon (= Law of Parsimony). See
mental-state attributions. See animal discourse domains
narratives; cultural ontologies; Morpho Eugenia (by A. S. Byatt), 66, 105,
discourse domains; human-animal 307n24, 318n4
relationships; narrative; Umwelt Morris, Paul, Margaret Fidler, and Alan
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 297n11 Costall, 303n27, 317n35
metabiography. See animal narratives Morton, Timothy, 256–58, 330n4,
metacognition. See animals 330n5, 331n8
meta-empiricism, 73. See also human- Moss, Betty, 310n50
animal relationships Mrs. Dalloway (by Virginia Woolf), 166,
metafiction. See animal narratives 167, 319n12
metalepsis. See animal narratives Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH
Metamorphoses, The (by Ovid), 249–52, (by Robert C. O’Brien), 185,
288, 330n1, 332–33n25 187–88, 322n38
metamorphosis. See animal narratives; multiscale narration
human-animal relationships; and allegorical laddering, 263,
multiscale narration; narrative 265, 280–85
Metamorphosis, The (by Franz Kafka), via allegorical projection, 262, 280–85
103, 127–34, 144, 310n49, and animal traditions (or cultures),
315n15, 315n16 293–94, 334n35
metanarrative commentary. See animal and biogeographical changes, 21, 260,
narratives 276, 282–83, 331n8
metempsychosis (= body hopping). See and characters as bioagents, 288–91
human-animal relationships and comparative evolutionary biology,
Middle Ages, the. See animals; human- 269, 271, 279–80, 281
animal relationships; narrative via counterfactual scene-building,
Midgley, Mary, 99 21–22, 268–80
Mikkonen, Kai, 67, 145, 304n2, 307n27 and counterfactual species
mind style (Fowler). See animal narratives histories, 269–74
mirror recognition. See selfhood cross-generic scope of, 252
Mitchell, Robert W., 303n27 via the cross-mapping of trait codes,
Mitchell, Robert W., Nicholas S. Thompson, 280, 285–91
and H. Lyn Miles, 8 definition of, 21–22, 252–53
Möbius strip, 126 and devolutionary processes, 270, 271
models and modeling practices. See and discourse domains, 254–56
narrative and ecological psychology, 253–54
modernism. See animal narratives and emergent phenomena, 253, 256,
Mohanty, Chandra Talpade, 173 257–60, 264, 285–91, 330n4,
Molloy, Claire, 313n1, 317n41 332–33n25
Index ■ 393
and environmental narratives (Weik von multispecies ethnography. See human-

Messner), 330n6 animal relationships
and epigenetic inheritance systems, multispecies storyworlds. See narrative
330–31n7 My Dog Tulip (by J. R. Ackerley),
via external analepses, 21–22, 264–66, 54–55, 107
269, 331n13 Myers, Norman, 279, 333n26
and extinction narratives, 245, 274,
275, 278–79 Nabokov, Vladimir, 318n4
and the fossil record, 264–65, 272, Nading, Alex, 315n14
273–74, 281–85 Nagel, Thomas, 135, 202, 203, 212, 213,
and geophysical processes, 21, 271, 274, 217, 219, 221, 257, 324–25n9,
282–83, 332n18 325n10, 325n11
and gradualist vs. saltationist models of Naish, Darren, 274, 279, 332n23, 332n24
evolution, 282, 333n27, 333n28 naming of animals. See human-animal
and the human-scale (meso-level) relationships
lifeworld, x, 21, 149, 252, 253–58, narrating I vs. experiencing I. See animal
264, 265, 267, 279, 280, 282, 292–94, narratives
331n8, 332n18, 332–33n25 narrative
and hyperobjects (Morton), 256–58 and allegory, 280
and ichnology, 283–85, 333n29 and alternate history, 331n16
and macro-level processes and and animal subjectivity, 19–21, 38–39,
phenomena, 253–54, 256–94, 330n8, 41, 42, 47–49, 55, 75, 77, 80, 96, 118,
331n13, 332n18, 332–33n25 120–22, 135–56, 159–60, 161, 165–
and memes, 333–34n34 66, 171, 184, 202–204, 207–210,
and micro-level processes and 217–32, 311n9
phenomena, 253–55, 330n3, and antifoundationalist epistemology,
332n18, 333n33 237, 328n12
and narrative speed, 266–67, 289–90 and categorization
and Peircean semiotics, processes, 286–91
281–82, 334n36 and characterization, 285–91, 333n30
and the principle of and the concept of anecdotal evidence,
uniformitarianism, 284 93, 103
risks of, 292–94 and containing and contained spaces,
in science fiction, 255–56, 267, 125–27, 314n10
270–71, 289–90 and counterfactual scenarios, 142, 146,
and speculative (or alternative) zoology, 153, 181–82, 263, 268–80, 319n14,
274–80, 288–89, 332n21, 332n22, 331n15, 331n16
332n23, 332n24 as cultural technology, 155, 262, 236,
and supragenetic inheritance systems, 332–33n25
293–94, 333–34n34 as driver of human evolution,
via temporal structuring, 263–67, 293, 334n36
268–74, 332–33n25 (see also and emplotment, 31, 42, 48, 66, 239,
animal narratives; animals; 263, 300n9
extinction narratives; human-animal and falsifiability, 223–24
relationships; mass extinction events; and fictional minds, 163, 167–68, 202–
narratology; speciation; species; trace 203, 318n7, 319n11, 223–25
fossils) and fiction vs. lying, 326n20
394 ■ Index
narrative (cont.) narrative space. See animal narratives;

and genre, 17, 18–19, 76–77, 157, Möbius strip; narrative
161–64, 165–66, 172, 179–80, 191, narrative world making. See narratology
195, 202–203, 217–32, 236–38, narrativity
309n36, 318n7, 318n8, 318–19n9, definition of, 155
319n10, 320n20, 331n16 in storytelling beyond the human, 138,
and medieval theories of interpretation, 156, 317n40, 318n42
252, 304n4 and what it’s like (Nagel), 135
and medium-specific affordances, 15, 16, narratology
17–18, 20, 43, 46–47, 120–21, 129– and action theory, 263, 328n15, 329n17
30, 133–34, 137–38, 144–55, 195, vis-à-vis anthropology, 29, 32–33,
298n13, 301n20, 317n41 315n14, 315n15
and metamorphosis, 191, 249, 304n2, and discourse analysis, 175–80, 320n24,
307n27, 307–308n29, 308n32, 320n25, 327n5
308n33, 310n50 and the ecological or environmental
and modeling practices, 141–43, humanities, 18, 178, 317n40
151–53, 182, 204–205, 208, 230, and ethology, 159, 222, 234–36, 247–48,
260–94, 331n9 303n27, 327n7
and multispecies storyworlds, 118–22 feminist approaches to, 118–19
and object vs. animal narrators, and hermeneutic theory, 19, 234–36,
174–75, 177 240–41, 247–48, 325n12, 326–27n1,
paradigmatic vs. syntagmatic axis 327n4, 327n5
of, 285–86 history and evolution of, 1–2, 234, 237n4
and place vs. space, 314n5 vis-à-vis human-animal studies, 8–11, 25,
and relationality, 13–16, 17, 25–26, 30– 202–203
31, 33–50, 53, 62–66, 81, 95, 106, 110, and interactional sociolinguistics, 175–78
171, 196, 230, 300n9, 301n15, 301n19 and interpretation, 234–35,
and signposts of fictionality, 224 237n4, 327n5
and species-scale phenomena, 21–22, 84, and the medical humanities,
191, 200, 236, 237, 245, 246–47, 248, 310n1, 315n14
251–52, 253–94, 317n39 and narrative world making, 9, 32, 100–
and temporality, 263–67, 268–74, 101, 118, 119, 329n18
332–33n25 and phenomenology, 202–204, 214,
and trait-codes, 286–91 (see also animal 319n11, 323n1, 325n11
comics; animal narratives; animals; and philosophical anthropology,
cultural ontologies; discourse 234, 327n3
domains; multiscale narration; and the philosophy of mind, 168,
narrativity; narratology; species) 202–203, 212–17, 224–25, 316n23,
narration. See animal narratives; human- 319n11, 324–25n9
animal relationships; multiscale and the philosophy of science, 88,
narration; narrative 256–61, 311n3
narrative media. See animal comics; postclassical approaches to, 9, 119
narrative; narratology and postwar analytic philosophy, 240–41
narrative medicine, 88, 310n1. See also and public health initiatives, 315n14
animals; animal narratives; human- and the sociology of science, 216–17
animal relationships; medical structuralist approaches to, 263–64,
humanities 266, 285–86
Index ■ 395
and transdisciplinarity, 88–89, 160, 199– ontological conservativism. See cultural

201, 217, 295n2, 323n2 ontologies
transmedial approaches to, 117–19, Opotow, Susan, 97
313n3 (see also animal narratives; otherkin. See animals; human-animal
cultural ontologies; discourse relationship; shifts by therians
domains; multiscale narration; Ovid, 304n4. See also Metamorphoses, The
narrative; narrativity)
Narraway, Guinevere, and Hannah Pagliai, Valentina, 320n21
Stark, 12, 17 paleoanthropology. See animals
Natov, Roni, 308n35 paleoecology. See animals
nature fakers. See animal narratives paleogeography. See animals
Neanderthals, 251, 273, 288 paleontology. See animals
Nelles, William, 8, 82, 316n25 paleozoology. See animals
neurocosmopolitanism (Savarese), 90, Pan (the god), 306n18
99, 102 Parrish, Gillian, 236
neurotypicality, 90, 98, 100, 103 Partridge, Christopher, 58
niche construction. See animal cultures; Pascal, Roy, 319n13
animals; multiscale narration “Patches” (by P. D. Stevens
Nicolson, Harold, 158, 161–62, 318–19n9 et al.), 227–30
Nightingale, Florence, 91 Paterson, H. E. H., 331n10
Nimer, Janelle, and Brad Lundahl, 311n6 patriarchal institutions. See animals; human-
Noë, Alva, 169–70, 216, 236, 242, animal relationships
254, 316n23 Pavel, Thomas, 32, 72, 288
nonfiction. See animal narratives; cultural Pavlides, Merope, 91
ontologies; narrative Pavlov, Ivan, 3, 329n20
nonfiction novel, 165 Payne, Tonia L., 82, 112
Norris, Margot, 3–4, 62, 305–306n17, Pearson, Jacqueline, 84
314n11, 329n20 Pedersen, Helena, 68–69
Norris, Michele, 322n36 Peirce, C. S., 281–82, 334n36. See also
novum (in science fiction), 73–74, 75, 80, human-animal relationships;
154, 155, 267, 270, 290, 309n38, multiscale narration
325n17. See also animals; cognitive Peregrine, The (by J. A. Baker), 56–57, 59,
estrangement; multiscale narration 207–208, 209–210, 220–21, 304n7,
304n8, 305n13, 324n7, 325n18
object vs. animal narrators. See animal pet memoir, 39–40, 54–55, 302n24
autobiography; animalographies; pets
narrative vis-à-vis companion, service, and therapy
Odling-Smee, F. John, Kevin N. Laland, and animals, 97–98, 302n23, 302n25
Marcus W. Feldman, 229, 293, 297n12 definition and historical emergence
Odyssey, The (by Homer), 74 of, 302n23
Ogden Laura A., Billy Hall, and Kimiko in family photographs, 105, 313n19
Tanita, 296n2, 297n10 memorialization of, 105, 313n19
O’Haire, Marguerite E., 91, 93 and power relations, 155, 302n23 (see
Oliver, Michael, 312n13 also animals; animals discussed
Only the Animals (by Ceridwen in this book; human-animal
Dovey), 171, 185, 191–94, 262, relationships; service animals;
322n40, 322n41 therapy animals)
396 ■ Index
Philo, Chris, and Chris Wilbert, 122–23, Rapp, Rayna, and Faye Ginsburg, 90,
128–29, 134, 297n12, 311n10, 314n6, 311n4, 312n15
315n19, 327n2 Ratelle, Amy, 69, 172, 187, 297n12, 308n31
philosophical anthropology. See narratology rationality. See human-animal relationships
philosophy of mind. See narratology reach, 264
philosophy of science. See narratology Read, Herbert, 53
Pick, Anat, 299n4 reductionist models of mind (or
Pick, Anat, and Guinevere psychophysical reductionism),
Narraway, 317n41 324–25n9
Pier, John, and José Ángel García Regan, Tom, 97
Landa, 156 Reid, Robert G. B., 333n27
Pike, Kenneth L., 107 Reiss, Diana, and Lori Marino, 300n7
Pit’s Letter (by Sue Coe), 185, 195–99, register of actions vs. register of events. See
323n44, 323n45 discourse domains
plant life, 296n2, 309n41, 314n13 Reklaw, Jesse. See Thirteen Cats of My
Plotnick, Joshua M., Frans B. M. de Waal, Childhood
and Diana Reiss, 300n7 “Report for an Academy, A” (by Franz
Plumwood, Val, 6, 9, 18, 78, 80, 155, 167, Kafka), 83–84, 185, 191–93, 267,
178, 247–48, 291, 296n6, 296n7, 289–90, 303n28, 305n12, 315n16
297n9, 297n12, 317n35, 317n40, Reynier, Christine, 157
329n19, 333n32. See also animal Richards, I. A., 180
narratives Richards, Susan, 40
politeness theory (Brown and Levinson), Richardson, Brian, 318n42
176–78. See also animal narratives; Ricoeur, Paul, 26, 30–31, 41, 222, 233–36,
narratology 239–41, 248, 318n42, 326–27n1,
Pollock, Mary S., 310n50 327n3, 328n15, 329n17, 331n11
Portmann, Adolf, 303n26, 314n7, Rifas, Leonard, 120
334n36 Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith, 308n34
Portner, Paul, 320n25 Ristau, Carolyn A., 300n5, 303n27
postclassical narratology. See narratology Ritchie, Donald A., 103
postcolonialism. See human-animal Ritivoi, Andreea Deciu, 30, 42, 171
relationships Robertson, Venetia Laura Delano, 53, 58,
posthumanism. See human-animal 59, 304n5, 305n10, 305n11
relationships Rockman, Alexis, 278–79, 332–33n25
postmodernism. See animal narratives Roese, Neal, and James M. Olson, 142
Power, Emma R., 296n2 Rogers, Katharine, 71
Pride of Baghdad (by Brian K. Vaughan and Rohman, Carrie, 301n18, 306n19, 315n21
Niko Henrichon), 149–51 Rollin, Bernard E., 303n27
Prince, Gerald, 118, 156, 205, 264, 268, 269 Romanes, George, 326n19
public health. See narratology Room of One’s Own, A (by Virginia
Woolf), 170
Qirko, Hector N., 104 Roosevelt, Theodore, 229, 230
Quatermass and the Pit (= Five Million Years Rorty, Richard, 328–29n16
to Earth), 256, 330n3 Rothman, Joshua, 304n7
Roulstone, Alan, Carol Thomas, and Nick
race/racial difference. See animals; species Watson, 312n13
Ransom, Roger L., 142 Ruby, Jay, 105
Index ■ 397
Ryan, Marie-Laure, 32, 313n3 in nonhuman animals, 27–30, 32–33,

Ryan, Marie-Laure, and Jan-Noël 94–95, 300n8
Thon, 313n3 and the questioning of the human-
nonhuman distinction, 51–52
Sagan, Carl, 266, 331n14 Ricoeur’s approach to, 30–31, 41
Saha, Jonathan, 314n6 and species hierarchies, 28–29, 50,
saltationist models of evolution. See 63 (see also animal comics; animal
multiscale narration narratives; animals; autobiography;
Salter, Colin, 298n13 human-animal relationships)
Saunders Max, 157, 162, 172, 192 self-narratives. See animal comics;
Savarese, Ralph James, and Lisa animal narratives; animalographies;
Zunshine, 90, 99 autobiography; human-animal
Savvides, Nikki, 172 relationships; narrative
scale. See multiscale narration Semino, Elena, 324n8
scale of nature (Aristotle), 4, 74, 79– Semino, Elena, and Kate Swindhurst, 324n8
80, 83, 100–102, 126, 170, 251, Serpell, James, 80, 100, 297n12,
309n41, 320n19 302n23, 317n39
Scalise Sugiyama, Michelle, 293 Serpell, James, and Elizabeth S. Paul, 104,
Schaeffer, Jean-Marie, 224 302n23, 312n16, 313n18
Schiffrin, Deborah, 176–77, 180, service animals, 39, 97–98, 302n25,
320n22, 320n24 312n11. See also human-animal
Schimmel, Schim, 200 relationships; pets; therapy animals
Schneider, Ralf, 101, 286, 287, 333n30 Seton-Thompson, Ernest, 229, 326n20
Scholtmeijer, Marian, 311n10 sexuality. See human-animal relationships
Schwalm, Helga, 172 shapeshifters, 58, 121, 145. See also
Science. See animals; discourse domains; animal narratives; human-animal
human-animal relationships; relationships; narrative
narratology Shapiro, Kenneth J., 215
science fiction. See animal comics; animals; shifts by therians (mental, phantom,
cognitive estrangement; multiscale physical), 59–60, 305n10, 305n13,
narration; novum 305n14, 305n15. See also human-
science journalism. See animal narratives animal relationships
SeaWorld, 232, 326n24 Shir-Vertesh, Dafna, 312n12
Secret Agent, The (by Joseph Siddiqi, Asif, 315n20
Conrad), 311n4 Simmons-Mackie, Nina, Debbie Kingston,
self-awareness. See animals; selfhood and Misty Schultz, 179, 320n22
selfhood Simon, Bart, 173
core vs. autobiographical forms of Simpson, Gaylord George, 299n22, 333n23
(Damasio), 27 Singer, Peter, 97
and the criterion of self-awareness, 27– Singh, J. A. L., and Robert
29, 299–300n5 M. Zingg, 78–79
and cultural ontologies, 29, 35, 36, Skloot, Rebecca, 97–98, 302n25, 312n11
49–50 slavery. See human-animal relationships
definition of (Kohn), 301n13 Smith, Craig, 318n3, 319n16
and the genre of autobiography, Smith, Felisa A., Scott M. Elliot, and
180, 321n27 Kathleen Lyons, 284
and mirror recognition, 28, 300n7 Smith, Julie, 173, 299n4
398 ■ Index
Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson, 42, species hierarchies. See human-animal
170, 172 relationships; selfhood
Snaith, Ana, 318n6 Species Identity Disorder, 58
Snow, C. P., 323n2 species ventriloquism (Field). See animal
Sober, Elliott, 6, 333n32 narratives
sociobiology. See human-animal speciesism (Ryder), 85. See also animals;
relationships human-animal relationships; species
socioeconomic class. See human-animal speculative biology (and zoology). See
relationships animals; multiscale narration
sociology of science. See narratology speech balloons. See animal comics
speciation, 269–70, 293, 333n26 speech presentation. See animal narratives
species Spiegelman, Art, and Françoise
vis-à-vis animal cultures (or animal Mouly, 316n33
traditions), 79, 260 Spill Simmer Falter Wither (by Sara Baume),
and anxieties about race, 249 306–307n23
and behavioral repertoires or Spinney, Laura, 332n19
performative displays, 83, 191, 192 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 173
and chimeras (in bioscience/ Stanley, Steven, 279
biotechnology), 67–68, 105, Stanzel, Franz Karl, 138, 164
290–91, 307n28 Stein, Daniel, and Jan-Noël Thon,
and climate change, 250, 251, 271, 288 119, 313n3
concepts of, 250, 260–61, Stein, Rob, 291, 307n28, 333n31
328n10, 331n10 Sternberg, Meir, 76–77, 199, 206,
and conservationism, 261–62 264, 310n49
Darwin’s conception of, 261 St. Mawr (by D. H. Lawrence), 61–63
as emergent biological structures, 252, Stoljar, Daniel, 324n9
258–60, 261, 264 Stonor Eagles, The (by William Horwood),
and evolution, 258, 260 217–18, 325n16
hybridization of, 239, 249–52, “Storm-Bird, Storm-Dreamer” (by J. G.
256, 288–91 Ballard), 325n17
and ideology, 249, 315n17 storyworld. See narrative; narratology
loss of, 234, 245, 262, 328n10 Strachey, Lytton, 158, 161, 166, 318n7
personification of (Carrithers et al.), Stueber, Karsten R., 233
262, 263 Sturrock, June, 66
vs. populations, 261 Stutchbury, Bridget, 334n36
relevance of for human-animal subworlds (Werth). See animal narratives
interactions, 178, 262 Suddendorf, Thomas, 300n8
and species monism vs. species pluralism, Suvin, Darko, 73–74, 77, 154,
253, 260–61 (see also animal 309n39, 325n17
narratives; animals; animals discussed Swinford, Dean, 127, 314n12
in this book; discourse domains; Switek, Brian, 282
extinction narratives; human-animal
relationships; indicator species; Tammi, Pekka, 199
mass extinction events; multiscale Tannen, Deborah, 105, 313n19, 320n21
narration; narrative; scale of nature; Tannen, Deborah, and Cynthia Wallat,
selfhood; speciation; Species Identity 176, 320n21
Disorder; speciesism) Tapper, Richard, 69
Index ■ 399
Tarka the Otter (by Henry Williamson), 168 Tyler, Tom, 6, 297n12

Taylor, Charles, 236, 237n3, 328–29n16
Taylor, Natalie, 300n5 Uexküll, Jakob von, 118, 159, 160,
Tennesen, Michael, 274, 279, 282, 283, 284, 167, 303n26
333n26, 333n27 Umwelt (Uexküll)
territorialization (Deleuze and Guattari). and animal geographies, 314n7
See human-animal relationships definition of, 215, 303n26
therapy animals, 97–98, 302n25. See also interspecies vs. intraspecies variation in,
human-animal relationships; pets; 145, 153, 166–67, 325n13
service animals modeling of in narratives, 41, 42, 118,
therians (or therianthropes). See human- 140, 153–55, 159, 160, 167
animal relationships; shifts by therians and the question of falsifiability, 141–
Thirteen Cats of My Childhood (by Jesse 43 (see also animal comics; animal
Reklaw), 26, 30–31, 38, 40–50, 107, narratives; discourse domains)
121, 122, 126, 146–48, 304n1 underground comics. See animal comics
Thompson, Evan, 118, 303n26, “Undersea” (by Rachel Carson), 204–205,
316n23, 324n4 206, 208, 324n3
thought presentation. See animal narratives Under the Sea-Wind (by Rachel Carson),
Thwaites, Thomas, 56 209, 211–12, 324n3
“Tiger’s Bride, The” (by Angela Carter), uniformitarianism (in paleoecology). See
84–85, 310n51 multiscale narration
Timbuktu (by Paul Auster), Unsaid (by Neil Abramson), 61, 311n4
303n28, 322n37 Until Tuesday (by Luis Carlos Montalván and
Time Machine, The (by H. G. Wells), 267, Bret Witter), 39, 225–27, 230, 302n5
269–70, 271, 275, 279, 332n22 Urbanik, Julie, 10, 122–23, 297n12
Tinbergen, Nikolaas, 328n13
Todorov, Tzvetan, 71–72, 77 Vanderbeke, Dirk, 66, 307n24
Toolan, Michael, 205, 210–11 Van Dijck, José, 330n3
Torrance, Steve, 316n23 Van Dooren, Thom, 297n12, 328n10
Tovares, Alla V., 105 Varela, Francisco J., Evan Thompson, and
trace fossils, 265, 283–85, 333n29. See also Eleanor Rosch, 316n23, 316n24
multiscale narration Varsava, Nina, 28, 307n26
trait-codes. See multiscale narration; narrative Veevers, Jean E., 303n23
transdisciplinarity. See narratology Vegetarian, The (by Han Kang), 309n41
“Transformation Day” (by Lucy Ives), Velasquez-Manoff, Moises, 249–52, 260,
79–80, 100 271–72, 288
transmedial narratology. See narratology vermin. See human-animal relationships
trans-species anthropology. See human- Viney, William, 311n7
animal relationships Vint, Sherryl, 74, 297n12
Trevarthen, Colwyn, 215, 297n11 Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo, 32, 326n23
Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt, 296n2, 297n12 vivisection, 80, 290. See also animals;
Tuan, Yi-Fu, 302n23, 314n5, 317n39 human-animal relationships
Tuke, Samuel, 91
Turner, Mark, 168 Wall, Cynthia Sundberg, 174
Turner, Stephanie S., 19, 297n12 Walsh, Froma, 107–108, 109–110,
Turn of the Screw, The (by Henry James), 311n6, 312n18
72, 306n21 Walsh, Richard, 259
400 ■ Index
Walther, Sundhya, 297n12 Woods, Henry, 282, 333n28

Ward, Peter, 278–80, 288, 332–33n25 Woolf, Virginia, 159, 161–63, 170, 318n1,
Warner, Marina, 74, 309n41, 309n42 318–19n9, 319n10, 319n11. See
War Horse (by Michael Morpurgo), 322n35 also Flush; Mrs. Dalloway; Room of
War of the Worlds, The (by H. G. One’s Own, A
Wells), 309n40 Woolfson, Esther, 40, 325n18. See also
WE3 (by Grant Morrison and Frank Corvus: A Life with Birds
Quitely), 153–55 World without Us, The (by Alan Weisman),
We Are All Completely beside Ourselves (by 272–73, 332n19, 332n20
Karen Joy Fowler), 33, 64–65, 107, Wroe, Nicholas, 314n8
306n20, 306n21, 306n22 Wundt, Wilhelm, 326n19
Weik von Mossner, Alexa, 8, 255 Wystrach, Antoine, and Guy Beugnon, 229
Weisberger, Mindy, 19, 298n17
werewolves. See animals discussed in xenofiction, 81. See also animal comics;
this book animal fables; animal narratives;
Werth, Paul, 32, 69 narrative
Wesley (by Stacy O’Brien), 40 Xia, Zhenhai, 298
White Fang (by Jack London),
316n30, 331n13 Yezbick, Daniel F., 120
Whitehead, Anne et al., 310n1, 315n14 Yong, Ed, 274
Whitehead, Hal, and Luke Rendell, 334n36 Young Adult Literature (YAL). See animal
Whitehouse, David, 315n21 narratives; animals
“Wife’s Story, The” (by Ursula K. Le Guin), Young, Robert L., and Carol
80–82, 304n3 Y. Thompson, 300n8
Wilkins, John S., 261, 328n10 Your Inner Fish (by Neil Shubin), 264–65,
Wilkinson, Lise, 315n14 270, 273, 282–83, 331n12
Willett, Cynthia, 10, 42, 295n3, 297n11
Willmott, Glenn, 117 Zahavi, Dan, 27
Wilson, Cindy C., 104, 105, 312n17 Zapf, Hubert, 159, 160, 167, 297n10
Wilson, E. O., 307n24 Zhuravlev, Andrey, and Robert Riding, 270
With Animal (by Carol Guess and Kelly Ziolkowski, Theodore, 316n25
Magee), 105–106 Zipfel, Frank, 165
Wittgeinstein, Ludwig, 221–22, 240 zoegraphy. See animal narratives
Wodak, Ruth, and Michael Meyer, 320n24 zoogeography, 122, 220, 324n3. See also
Wolch, Jennifer R., and Jody Emel, 314n6 animal comics; animal narratives;
“Wolf-Alice” (by Angela Carter), 309n45 human-animal relationships;
Wolf, Werner, 156 multiscale narration
Wolfe, Anne B., 302n23 zoos. See animals
Wolfe, Cary, 28, 97, 297n12

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PA R T I ■ Storytelling and Selfhood beyond the Human

1 Self-​Narratives and Nonhuman Selves 25

PA R T I I ■ Narrative Engagements with

4 Multispecies Storyworlds in Graphic Narratives 117

This book aims to develop a cross-​disciplinary approach to post-​Darwinian narra-

further in ­chapter 1. As will become evident in my discussion, any given account

But what is more, I have chosen to concentrate on narratives postdating Darwin’s

As already suggested by this sketch of some of the conceptual problems bound up

account the complexity (and co-​constitutive effects) of human-​animal interactions

to be done to explore how taking research on animals and human-​animal relation-

• Work by Adams (1990), Adams and Donovan (1995), Le Guin (1987/​1994),

• A broader rethinking of traditional, human-​centric approaches to ethics to

Storytelling and Selfhood beyond the Human

Narrative Engagements with More-​Than-​Human Worlds

In this connection, it is instructive to compare the degree to which (and the

In addition to analyzing how self-​narratives situate human agents in the space

Before I embark on my investigation of storytelling and selfhood beyond the human,

Research on mirror self-​recognition raises other potential difficulties for analysts

emphasis on maintaining humans’ exceptional or paradigmatic status vis-​à-​vis other

that grounds storytelling practices in what Kohn describes as an “ecology of selves”

to be reframed within a wider, transhuman conception of self-​other relations. The

a point of view” (2007: 4). Accordingly, if perspectives, ways of experiencing the

Originally appearing in 2006 in volume 2 of his self-​published series of minicom-

register and respect nonhuman phenomenologies has been instrumental in trans-

More generally, suggesting something of the scope of humans’ interconnections

Figure 1.2 Animal biography as confabulatory practice.

Figure 1.4 Narrative metalepsis and selfhood beyond the human (I).

Figure 1.5 Narrative metalepsis and selfhood beyond the human (II).

Figure 1.6 Narrating I, experiencing I, and the transhuman space of selfhood.

Figure 1.7 Claiming agency by recognizing selfhood beyond the human.

Building on my discussion of self-​narratives in the previous chapter, the present

questioning or reconfiguring the human-​nonhuman distinction as such. In what

I begin with a discussion of nonfictional examples, drawing on self-​narratives

Children’s Identifications with Animal Subjects

Identifying with Animal Subjects in Memoir

In ­chapter 1, I discussed a number of memoirs about service and therapy animals

Self-​Narratives in Therian Communities

In Robertson’s (2013) account, the therian or therianthrope movement “is perhaps

premised on parsimonious allocations of possibility for selfhood beyond the spe-

demonstrate how established narratives can impede the potentially transformative

A preliminary methodological issue should be registered here. Pace Bynum

Biomutations in Literature for Children and Young Adults

Biomutation in Characters’ Subworlds: Gallico’s Jennie

narrators. Genette situated such stories-​within-​the-​story at the hypodiegetic level,

Semi-​marvelous Metamorphoses: Pullman’s I Was a Rat!

discourses of science, participate in this same effort to recontain such disruptive

Biomutation as Cognitive Estrangement:

If Gallico insulates species transformations in a bracketed-​off subworld, and if

Biomutations in Other Fictional Narratives

Proteus Principle, or the plural, fluctuating correspondences between textual form

Tales of Others’ Transformations

protagonist’s initial self, Ives’s narrative ostensibly adheres to a hierarchical system of

Tales by the Transformed

Given the patriarchal assimilation of women to the category of other-​than-​human

Drawing on Bynum’s (2001) distinction between hybridity and transformation as a

More generally, in focusing on trans-​species entanglements revealed in and cre-

in question. As discussed below, these multilayered trans-​species entanglements

1 Self-Narratives and Nonhuman Selves 25

PA R T I I ■ Narrative Engagements with

This book aims to develop a cross-disciplinary approach to post-Darwinian narra-

further in chapter 1. As will become evident in my discussion, any given account

account the complexity (and co-constitutive effects) of human-animal interactions

to be done to explore how taking research on animals and human-animal relation-

• Work by Adams (1990), Adams and Donovan (1995), Le Guin (1987/1994),

• A broader rethinking of traditional, human-centric approaches to ethics to

Narrative Engagements with More-Than-Human Worlds

In addition to analyzing how self-narratives situate human agents in the space

Research on mirror self-recognition raises other potential difficulties for analysts

emphasis on maintaining humans’ exceptional or paradigmatic status vis-à-vis other

to be reframed within a wider, transhuman conception of self-other relations. The

Originally appearing in 2006 in volume 2 of his self-published series of minicom-

Building on my discussion of self-narratives in the previous chapter, the present

questioning or reconfiguring the human-nonhuman distinction as such. In what

I begin with a discussion of nonfictional examples, drawing on self-narratives

In chapter 1, I discussed a number of memoirs about service and therapy animals

Self-Narratives in Therian Communities

narrators. Genette situated such stories-within-the-story at the hypodiegetic level,

Semi-marvelous Metamorphoses: Pullman’s I Was a Rat!

If Gallico insulates species transformations in a bracketed-off subworld, and if

Given the patriarchal assimilation of women to the category of other-than-human

More generally, in focusing on trans-species entanglements revealed in and cre-

in question. As discussed below, these multilayered trans-species entanglements

Contextualizing Animal-Assisted Intervention (AAI)

Some analysts distinguish between animal-assisted activities and animal-assisted

1. Cross-species entanglements arising from the particular human-animal inter-

Ethnographic approaches to human-animal interactions of the sort recounted by

Cross-disciplinary conversations being conducted under the headings of critical

Fictive Families and Trans-species Affiliation

mothering (and fathering)—breach the species boundary. Indeed, in this fictional

Figure 3.8 Sample genogram of a trans-species family system.

animal-attribution storytelling technique described by Arad (2004) establish

on animals and human-animal relationships, I highlight two key questions deserving

The Spaces of Species—and Species

I argued in chapter 1 that in Reklaw’s autodiegetic account in Thirteen Cats of My

Figure 4.3 Human-roach reunion, as imagined by Gregor Samsa.

or shallower interactions—and thereby gauging anthropogenic impacts across the

world—by elaborating a counterfactual conditional that involves, in effect, a shift

animals cannot be taken in and of itself as a marker of human-centrism, just as the

Figure 4.9 Human-Source-Animal-Target (HSAT) projections in Pride of Baghdad.

In what I have labeled Animal-Source-Human-Target projections, there is another

Figure 4.10 Animal-Source-Human-Target (ASHT) projections in Grant Morrison, Chas

In a previous study (Herman 2011b), I characterized early twentieth-century liter-