n PREFACE
This book aims to develop a cross-disciplinary approach to post-Darwinian narratives 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 evolutionary 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 environment 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 humananimal relationships. Analysis of these structures and functions can, I argue, clarify the role played by fictional as well as nonfictional narratives in consolidating, challenging, 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 nonfictional narratives that include but extend beyond the realm of the human can promote 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 biosphere. Because so many encounters with animals are mediated through narratively organized discourse, there is pressing need for a comprehensive model of what storytelling practices reveal about (human attitudes toward) the nonhuman world and its inhabitants. A model that integrates structural and contextual analysis, combining 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
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come into view—and that are further multiplied when questions about how narratives 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 multidimensional 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 nonhuman 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 language, 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 experiences 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 experience 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
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 relationality, in which we and other forms of creatural life—fellow members of more-thanhuman 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 foundations 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 colleagues, 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
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 version of the manuscript. I am grateful as well to Sue Coe for her generous permission to reproduce images from Pit’s Letter in chapter 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 initial 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,
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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.
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 systematization 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-disciplinarity has driven—even constituted—narratological research from the start; but whereas the early narratologists, following a larger structuralist trend, looked to linguistics 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 cultural 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 innovation and renewal of the source disciplines from which cognitive narratologists, analysts of narrative vis-à-vis questions of gender and sexuality, and students of visual 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 matter 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
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 nonhuman 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 narratives, 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 particular 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 present 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.
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 nonhuman 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 branching 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 neutrality (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 outcome 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 selection 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 cultural 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 discussed in more detail in the chapters that follow (see, in particular, chapters 3 and 7), 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—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 relationships thematize, contest, and work to reshape models of the sort just described. In this sense, telling different kinds of narratives about humans’ relationships with nonhuman others has the potential to alter understandings of our place within a morethan-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 genealogically 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 humananimal 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 humananimal 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 comparison 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
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 fictional 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 subjectivity 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.
■ REASSESSING 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 antianthropomorphizing 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 species’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 imaginary or fictional animals as being like humans; interpretive = ascribing mentalistic predicates (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 categorical anthropomorphism into species type (= ascribing M-predicates appropriate for
one species to a different species) and predicate type (= ascribing an inappropriate Mpredicate 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 organisms 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 delegitimate 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 unavoidable 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 colonization 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 another’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 raising 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 nonhuman 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 entering into the ‘same-but-different’ world of another similar but differently-situated individual” (59).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 anthropocentrism, 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 groupings and practices are being imported into the study of relationships among nonhuman 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 anthropomorphic 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 biocentric storytelling traditions, and to explore how specific narrative practices shape and are shaped by this interplay.
■ CONTEXTUALIZING THE APPROACH
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 narratives 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 counterparts (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 philosophy, literary theory, and film studies.
On the one hand, although human-animal studies is a burgeoning, crossdisciplinary 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, booklength 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 chapter 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 narratological 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 frameworks) 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 “ecologies 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 consider 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 characters and characterization. The chapters contained in Part II then outline ways of analyzing stories about animal worlds and human-animal relationships via developments in transmedial narratology, scholarship on life narratives, approaches to the study of narrative and mind, models arising from the domain of narrative hermeneutics, 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
to be done to explore how taking research on animals and human-animal relationships 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, character, 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—narrative experiences requires further extension and elaboration when the worlds in question bring multispecies environments into view. In these environments, attributes 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 overcome 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’ interactions 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 position in the unfolding of events, the extent to which these inhabitants acquire the status 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 ecology, 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 chapter 3 and elsewhere, but it is worth highlighting here aspects of this research that will be particularly 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 interconnections 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)
