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n Narratology beyond the Human
Narratology beyond
the Human
Storytelling and Animal Life
David Herman
3
3
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers
the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education
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CIP data is on file at the Library of Congress

ISBN 978–0–19–085040–1
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Printed by Sheridan Books Inc., United States of America
For Susan, lover of moth, moorhen, and manatee, of dogwood,
cactus flower, and live oak, of coastal path, desert riverbed,
and Plaza Andalusia
■ CONTENTS
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 FAC 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
28 ■ Storytelling and Selfhood beyond the Human
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
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About 5 p.m. on the 15th the enemy started a heavy barrage and
were seen to be massing on our right, but our guns were at once
turned on these and dispersed the assembly. The Buffs were
relieved the same night by the 2nd Leinsters, and three days later
moved to Burgomaster’s Farm at Dickebusch under Major Vaughan,
the commanding officer, Lt.-Colonel F. C. R. Studd, D.S.O., having
been wounded the previous day. The casualties from the 7th to the
10th inclusive were Captain A. F. Gulland, who died on the 16th, 2nd
Lieuts. Sherwill, H. C. Arnold (died on the 12th), Hilary and Curtis
and 28 men wounded and 4 killed; but during the 14th, 15th and 16th
the loss was more considerable, 2nd Lieuts. Paige, Carlos and
Edwards, with 14 men, were killed; Captain Hall and 2nd Lieuts.
Darling, Wilkinson, Young, Lilley, Greig and Lt.-Colonel Studd, with
89 other ranks, were wounded, though the commanding officer
remained at duty for some time. There were also 4 men missing.
Times in this neighbourhood and at this period were, however, too
strenuous to allow of much rest to anyone, and when the 23rd June
came round again it found the Buffs once more in the trenches and,
forty-eight hours afterwards, under an abnormally heavy fire, which
did little damage to the front line, but found several victims amongst
working parties in rear. 2nd Lieut. J. B. Millard was killed and Major
Vaughan and Lieut. Hancock narrowly escaped from the same shell,
and it is curious that both these officers were slightly hurt by another
one only a few minutes later. 2nd Lieut. A. H. Webb was also killed.
It was decided to push forward certain posts during the night of the
26th/27th, and B Company on the left actually did so and got to the
edge of a wood which was on its front and there consolidated, but A
Company, on the right, found that any advance would be impossible
without heavy artillery assistance. The 23rd of the month brought a
Military Cross for 2nd Lieut. Sherwill. On the 28th relief came in the
shape of the 8th Battalion York and Lancaster Regiment, but the
change over was a nasty job. The enemy appeared to have got wind
of what was going forward and opened a heavy fire, wounding Lieut.
Newcomb and three other men. The 29th took the battalion away. It
travelled by train to Reninghelst for the training area round Lumbres,
and on the last day of the month it marched fourteen kilometres to
Escocuilles.
THE LOOS CRASSIERS
SPOIL (OR THE BUFFS’) BANK
CHAPTER XI
THE WESTERN FRONT
(Continuation till March, 1918)
I. 1st Battalion
A
t the commencement of the last chapter the readers were
reminded that the Russians made a separate peace with the
enemy towards the end of 1917, and that the Americans having
declared war against Germany in April the vanguard of her troops
began to come into action on the 27th October, so that the defection
of the one nation was in the end counteracted by the determination
of the other. As has been said, America at first possessed but a tiny
army, and though a few troops were fighting in Europe at the end of
1917, still her real force could not make itself felt for months
afterwards. Consequently there was an interval between the collapse
of Russia and Rumania and the arrival of a capable American army.
During this space the French and English must bear the whole brunt
of the struggle, and the Germans, whose railways were planned
strategically, with the idea of being able to rapidly transfer armies
from her eastern to her western frontier or vice versa, were not the
people to fail to take full advantage of such an opportunity.
These facts must be borne in mind in studying what follows. As a
matter of fact, our enemies started on the 21st March, 1918, a
mighty effort to sweep us into the sea and overwhelm the French.
This chapter will therefore continue the story of the doings of the
Buffs on the Western front up to this date. Like the previous chapter,
it is a record of trench warfare varied by fighting and the necessary
rest and reorganization which followed each battle.
The most important action was perhaps that of Cambrai, in which
both the 1st and 6th Battalions took part, and it may therefore be as
well first to continue the narrative of these two units: the village of
Mazingarbe is, roughly speaking, four miles from Loos in the
direction of comparative safety, and this place may be considered as
the chief station of the 1st Battalion up to the 15th November—that is
to say, that it was the resting-place when trenches were not occupied
somewhere near Loos or Hulluch. Of course, there were certain
alterations, for troops took turn to go into the reserve of the division
or some higher formation, and the more important that portion of the
army was, the further back from the front line were stationed its
reserves; for instance, on the 13th July the Buffs went into divisional
reserve for a week at Fouquieres, near Bethune, and for a time in
October they were in G.H.Q. reserve at Flechin.
The most important and the pleasantest change of programme,
however, was a long period of rest at Monchy Breton (about twelve
miles west of Mazingarbe), which is an area set apart for giving a
change of scene to tired troops. The battalion was allowed a month
here which, in addition to training, was devoted to sport and health-
giving recreation; a composite company, under the command of
Captain Strauss, it secured the highest number of marks in the
brigade sports and won the divisional challenge cup for the smartest
turn-out and work in an attack scheme.
During the period between the 1st July and the 15th November
officers and men of the 1st Battalion received a considerable number
of decorations and honours: on the 3rd July the Corps Commander
inspected C and D Companies, which had furnished the raiding party
on the 23rd June; after offering his congratulations he presented
Military Medals to Sgts. Cross, Goodall and Poole, Corpl. Sindon
and L.-Corpl. Spenceley, and to Privates Halliday and Searle, all of C
Company. In D Company Military Medals were given to Sgts. Barker,
Buss, Evans and Moorcock, Corpl. Duff, and to L.-Corpls. Curd,
Green and Page. During this period Lieuts. Marshall, Moss and
Wyatt were awarded the M.C., and Captain Jacobs and Lieut.
Worster the clasp to the M.C.; C.S.M.’s McDonough and Randall
received the D.C.M., the latter also being given a commission and
posted to C Company; Pte. Sage received the M.M., and Corpl. Duff
the Decoration Militaire (Belgian).
On the 30th August B Company, having gone to relieve one of the
K.S.L.I., A and D Companies being already in front-line trenches with
C in support, the enemy at 8 p.m. ventured an attack on our three-
company front, which was quickly dealt with by the Canadian
gunners and our Lewis guns. Notwithstanding this repulse another
hostile attack was launched at 2 o’clock next morning, but this again
was stayed by our Lewis guns and we did not suffer much.
Another incident worthy of note was the departure from France of
Captain Birrell, the adjutant, who left the battalion on the 10th
October after no less than two years and ten months’ service on the
Western front and was succeeded by Lieut. Davies. This length of
war service, other than at the base or on the staff, was very
exceptional indeed. On the 1st November the 1st Battalion marched
to meet their comrades of the 6th at Grand Bouret. Early in the
month the question of combined infantry and tank work in the field
became an extra tactical study that all must learn.
As to casualties, they of course continued. There is a horrible
regularity in recording these. Men were always being killed or
wounded. A battle removed a lot of good fellows in a few hours,
trench warfare corroded the battalion strength little by little, and this
had to be patched up either by raw hands from England or men who
had already done their share but, after being invalided, had to come
out again. Ten men were wounded on the 26th August, one killed
and five wounded on the 30th. 2nd Lieut. G. E. Sewell died of
wounds on the 2nd September and two men were killed and two
wounded on the same day, five more getting hit on the morrow.
Eighteen men of the pioneer company were gassed on the 5th
September. A little bit of joyful news reached the regiment in the
middle of September, namely, that the gallant Harrington, who had
done so well on the 24th June and who had been missing since that
date, was still alive, though a prisoner in Germany. A Company on
the 16th October lost eight men killed and three wounded, the
enemy opening a barrage on our front line at 8 p.m. On the 15th
November, Sir Douglas Haig having planned a further attack on the
German lines, the 16th Brigade, in which the 1st Battalion still
served, was attached to the Third Corps to take part in the same,
and the battalion entrained for Peronne and moved to the forward
area on the 17th.
II. 6th Battalion
There is a great high road running dead straight from Arras east-
south-east for four-and-twenty miles to Cambrai. Two miles and a
half from Arras along this road lies the village of Tilloy, and three
miles further on Monchy is to the north and Wancourt to the south of
it. Two miles south-east of the latter place and about two miles to the
south of the great road is the scene of the 7th Battalion’s fight on the
3rd May, 1917—the village of Cherisy. It was round these places that
the 6th Battalion fought and endured up till the 23rd October, when it
retired away west to a more peaceful region for a few days and there
saw a good deal of the 1st Battalion.
On the 1st July the 6th moved from Arras to the Wancourt line,
and on that date it mustered 33 officers, but only 483 other ranks.
While in this sector it was sometimes in front, sometimes in support
and sometimes further back.
Amongst the various excavations of this region is what is known
as “The Long Trench,” which, commencing about 1,200 yards south
of Keeling Copse, runs southward and is continued in that direction
by Tool Trench. In this long work was the 6th Battalion on the 10th
July, when it received orders to raid the enemy’s shell holes east of
Tool Trench at 7.30 a.m. the next day. The enemy, however, had
made his own plans and, taking the initiative himself, attacked at 5
a.m. after an exceptionally heavy bombardment of guns of all sorts
and sizes, smoke and liquid fire being also used. This heavy rain of
projectiles was directed not only on Long and Tool Trenches, but on
the supports. The infantry attack was directed chiefly on Long
Trench, and the Germans managed to penetrate at one point after
feinting or making a holding attack along the whole front of it. Having
effected his penetration he rapidly deployed and occupied shell
holes in rear or on our side. 2nd Lieut. Stevens, who was holding a
post near by, at once realized the situation and organized and
carried out a counter-attack along Long Trench, and almost at the
same time L.-Corpl. Edgington and two men, who were all on duty
with the 37th Brigade Sniping Company, seeing that the attack was
serious, at once dashed up to ascertain the true situation. These
three went up Long Trench for three or four hundred yards till they
reached the point where the break through had occurred. Here, of
course, they came across a lot of Germans who hurled bombs at
them. The corporal, however, was a good and resolute Buff soldier,
and he, posting one of his men in an advantageous position in the
trench, with the other commenced to erect a block or stop in the
work. He was soon joined by 2nd Lieut. Stevens and another man,
and between them they consolidated the block and opened fire at
close range on a number of the enemy. About two hours and a half
later on the Buffs tried a counter-attack which was duly preceded by
artillery preparation, but it failed owing to the heavy machine-gun fire
it was subjected to. The enemy’s aeroplanes were very noticeable
during this affair, flying low over our lines all day, particularly during
the attack. 2nd Lieut. Gunther was killed, as were 9 men; another
officer and 26 men were wounded, and there were 30 missing. Long
Trench was recovered a week later by the 35th Brigade and the
Royal West Kent Regiment.
On the 3rd August, at 6 p.m., the Buffs being then in rear in what
was called the Brown Line, the enemy opened a heavy barrage and
later attacked Hook Trench. Two officers and one hundred men of
the Buffs were sent up about 8.30 to aid the Queen’s and West Kent
in the front line. The attack was beaten off and heavy casualties
were inflicted on the enemy, who withdrew, leaving several
prisoners. On the 6th August the whole brigade was relieved and
went into Beaurains Camp, near Arras. 2nd Lieuts. Hunt, Mason-
Springgay, Russell and Sowter, with eighty-six men, who had been
training for a raid, proceeded from here to take their part in an
organized minor adventure which took place on the 9th of the month
and which was most successful: the moral of the enemy had every
appearance of being severely shaken and he suffered heavy
casualties; his trenches were entered, many dug-outs destroyed and
eighty prisoners brought back, and it was just a regimental
misfortune that the men of Kent were in the flank which became
subject to the enfilade fire and consequently suffered the following
casualties and failed to get on as far as was hoped.
2nd Lieuts. J. Russell and F. I. Sowter missing, Mason-Springgay
wounded and thirty-five men either killed, wounded or missing. It was
afterwards ascertained that both Russell and Sowter had been killed.
The raid party returned to camp about 3 a.m., played in by the
Drums.
On the 24th August, while in the Levis Barracks at Arras, Corpl.
Horton, L.-Corpl. Parker and Ptes. Hoare, Lane and Scott heard they
had been awarded the M.M., and about the same time, while in the
trenches again, news came of a M.C. for 2nd Lieut. Mason-
Springgay.
On the 1st September the Royal Fusiliers, aided by the Buffs’
covering fire, made a neat little raid, sustaining only one casualty
and bringing in twenty-six prisoners; and the next day a telegram
came saying that 2nd Lieut. Stevens had the M.C. and Pte. Barham
the M.M. An attempt was made by the enemy on the 24th to raid the
brigade front, but it was repulsed with loss.
The 3rd October brought the battalion thirty-three casualties,
including 2nd Lieut. Needman killed. This was because the Sussex
Regiment, on the Buffs’ left, made a raid and the German heavily
barraged the latter corps’ lines. Two days afterwards 2nd Lieut. N. E.
FitzRoy Cole and one man were killed in the front line. The 24th of
October took the 6th Battalion off westward, and the 29th found it
billeted at Vacquerie le Bourg.
November opened with more than one pleasant meeting with the
1st Battalion. The 6th marched to Frevent with this object on the 1st
November, and two drawn matches at football were played between
the units, first at Beaudricourt and afterwards at Vacquerie, but the
real business of life at this time was training and preparation for a
coming attack. On the 16th the battalion entrained for Peronne, and
by the 19th it was in position of assembly behind the village of
Gonnelieu, which is about four miles south of Ribecourt, in the
vicinity of which the 1st Battalion stood. Before describing the parts
taken by the Buffs in the action before Cambrai it may be well to
explain shortly why the battle came to be fought.
It was now past the middle of November and the collapse of the
Russians had already become so apparent that large bodies of
Germans had been withdrawn from their Eastern front to swell the
armies in France, and it was quite clear that more and more would
be arriving shortly. Under these adverse circumstances Haig
determined on a surprise attack on a considerable scale before more
reinforcements could arrive, and so he directed General Byng to
attack in front of Cambrai, reckoning that that portion of the German
line was not quite so strongly held as some others and that it would
take the enemy forty-eight hours to draw troops from other portions
of his front to the rescue. Secrecy and despatch, therefore, were the
main points to be considered, and it was for these reasons that the
fight under notice differed from almost all others in so far that no
artillery preparation was to take place, but the overcoming of wire
and other obstacles was to be entrusted to the action of tanks, and
careful arrangements were made for their initial employment and
close co-operation with the infantry. It would occupy too much space
to describe this battle in detail, but it must be understood that,
though the British attack achieved considerable success at first, the
enemy was able ultimately to increase his force about Cambrai,
particularly in guns, and so he managed at last such a mighty
counter-attack that about the last day of the month our original
offensive was perforce changed into a somewhat anxious defensive
operation.
Imperial War Museum Crown Copyright
A NEW TRENCH
III. Cambrai
Now, on the 20th November and following days the Third Army
Corps consisted of the 6th Division, which included the 1st Battalion
of the Buffs, the 12th Division, with the 6th Battalion, and the 20th
Division. This Corps attacked with the 12th Division on the right, the
20th in the centre and the 6th on the left, and the zero hour was 6.20
a.m. Thus it came about that the 1st Battalion moved out preceded
by B Battalion of tanks and in artillery formation from the vicinity of
Villers Plouich.
The first objective, the village of Ribecourt and the spur to the
south-east of it, was soon taken, D Company, which formed the first
wave, securing that portion which was entrusted to the 1st Battalion.
The ground won was known as the Blue Line and was part of the
main Hindenburg entrenchment.
The rest of the 1st Battalion co-operated with the divisional
sniping section and then passed through and secured the second
objective, the Brown or Hindenburg support line, one thousand yards
further on.
These positions were taken with small loss, the Buffs only having
eight men killed and thirty-three wounded. This was satisfactory
enough, as the two points which had caused anxiety to the divisional
commander were Couillet Wood and Ribecourt, whereas the first fell
to the Buffs and the latter to the 71st Brigade. The formations
adopted were suitable; the hostile artillery was weak; the enemy was
late in opening fire and it was scattered and inaccurate when
opened; the tanks had no difficulty in crossing the trenches; the
enemy appeared to be surprised and demoralized; the positions
were quickly consolidated because there was no hostile fire, and in
fact all was very well. The 6th Division had a most successful day:
the bridge at Marcoing had fallen, and everything had gone like
clockwork; the artillery pushed forward to advanced positions, as did
the machine guns which were brought up by pack animals. The next
morning the Buffs, with the assistance of the tanks, completed the
clearing of Noyelles. This was a creditable bit of initiative on the part
of Captain Moss, who, finding the place but lightly held, collected a
few men and with two tanks captured the village there and then.
Meanwhile a little further south the 12th Division was equally
successful. During the whole of the 19th, battalion after battalion of
tanks, R.E. equipment, ambulances and so on had been coming up
to the front and, in accordance with Operation Orders, had been
doing so in absolute silence. The scheme for the 20th had included
five objectives. The 37th Brigade was assembled on the right of the
36th and it was to go forward on a two-company frontage only. The
two companies of the 7th East Surrey were given the task of seizing
the first objective, and the remainder of this battalion was to take the
second. The third and fourth objectives were allotted to two
companies each of the 6th Buffs and the Royal West Kents had the
fifth.
The Surreys were quite successful; then the Buffs moved forward
in artillery formation and, crossing the first lines of defence, moved
on with marked success, sending back numerous prisoners and
attacking the Hindenburg Line. There took place some fierce hand-
to-hand fighting and a systematic “mopping up” of dug-outs, but
everything went like clockwork and by the afternoon the battalion
headquarters was in Pam-Pam Farm with three companies holding
Lateau Wood and B Company at Bonavis, though the progress had
been delayed somewhat by machine-gun fire from the two named
farms, and the enemy had been difficult to drive from Lateau Wood.
At 3.45 p.m. the West Kent reported to brigade headquarters that
they were in touch with the Buffs and that no enemy was in sight.
The battalion casualties for the 20th were 5 officers wounded and
105 other ranks killed, wounded or missing, mostly only wounded.
On the 21st the positions occupied were consolidated. Much
movement of lorries was noticed on this day behind the enemy’s
lines. Strong patrols, however, from the regiment covered the
bridges over the canal. It became apparent on the 23rd that the
German artillery had been considerably reinforced, as the hostile
shelling very perceptibly increased in volume. On this date Captain
A. F. Worster of the 1st Battalion died of wounds. He had been
twelve months with the battalion and was greatly respected and
universally loved. He had twice won the M.C.
On the 26th both battalions were relieved and withdrawn, the 1st
into the Hindenburg Line as divisional reserve, and the 6th into
support, though it sent up strong working parties to labour on the
communication and front trenches for the West Kent Regiment, as a
counter-attack on the part of the enemy now seemed imminent, he
having evidently been greatly reinforced. On this date Lt.-Colonel
Green left the 1st Battalion to assume command of a brigade.
On the 30th November a great German counter-attack was
launched. Being in divisional reserve, the 1st Battalion did not on the
first day suffer much from the shock, though six men were wounded;
but the following morning it reinforced the troops who were now
holding the line round Gonnelieu and La Vacquerie, where the
enemy had broken through the previous day. Here Major B. L.
Strauss, who was commanding, was killed, as were seven of his
men, another dying of his wounds. Captain Allen, the adjutant, was
wounded but continued for a while to command the battalion which
duty had devolved on him. Captain Tibbles, R.A.M.C., Lieut. Blake,
2nd Lieuts. Clark, Fisher and Owen, C.S.M. Vincer and forty-five
others were also injured.
In the evening Captain Pill, R.A.M.C., attached to the Bedfords,
took over medical charge, Allen retired to the dressing station, Major
Hardy, of the York and Lancasters, assumed temporary command
and the Buffs were withdrawn again into divisional reserve to go up
once more in the night of the 3rd to take up a defensive flank on
Highland Ridge, as the enemy had broken through near Marcoing
that morning. One company of R.E. and the Brigade Pioneer
Company were attached for aid on Highland Ridge.
On the 5th December five men were killed and sixteen wounded,
one of whom died the following day, on which date a new doctor,
Lieut. McVey, relieved Captain Pill. Three were killed on the 7th and
Lieut. L. F. Clark died of his hurts; two of the men were lost in the
same way on the 8th. On this latter date the Buffs were relieved from
the Ridge and moved back into trenches in rear of the main
Hindenburg system. On the night of the 9th they moved further back
still and on the 11th were taken twenty miles westward to Courcelles
to refit, and Lt.-Colonel Power, who had commanded the 2nd
Battalion at Ypres when Colonel Geddes was killed, was appointed
commanding officer.
CAMBRAI
The 6th Battalion suffered severely on the 30th November, but
showed that the men were made of magnificent fighting material.
The enemy’s offensive was most successful on the sector which was
on the right flank of the battalion. Here he penetrated right through to
the rear, and the first news the men in the line had of this success
was that their own brigade headquarters was being attacked behind
them. This attempt, however, was beaten off by the staff, the
orderlies and the signallers, though the transport, which was bringing
up water and supplies, was captured. This hostile movement of
course exposed the Buffs’ flank. Dense German masses were
successful on the other flank also, but a ray of light in the gloom was
occasioned by a very successful counter-attack made by the Buffs
on Pam-Pam Farm, which had fallen. This place was recaptured and
the enemy’s advance in this region held up for three hours.
Overwhelming masses, however, at last proved impossible to
withstand and the small garrison withdrew fighting from shell hole to
shell hole. The enemy was now on front, flanks and even in rear, and
the struggle was hand-to-hand, obstinate and desperate. It was a
case of the remnants of a fighting unit cutting its way back through
all obstacles to regain a line that was forming in rear. This was finally
effected and the line straightened out, but, as may be supposed, it
was a bloody affair and our casualties numbered 14 officers and 317
other ranks, Major C. F. Cattley, M.C., being amongst the killed. The
new position taken up was successfully held against all attacks,
though it formed a very acute angle, as the divisions on the right and
left had fallen back, leaving, of course, a greatly exposed salient.
The line was held, however, until relief came next day, when the
battalion moved back to the old British front, which was heavily
gassed by means of shells.
On the 2nd December this battalion moved back into billets in
Heudicourt, thence, on the 5th, to Dernancourt and on to Albert,
where train was taken to Thiennes, in the peaceful country some
seven or eight miles south by west of Hazebrouck, for the necessary
rest and refit and to receive and train fresh men from England to fill
the terrible gaps.
IV. 1st Battalion

After Cambrai the 1st Battalion, except for a short time near
Moreuil, was kept out of the trenches till the 25th January, 1918, on
which date it relieved the 9th Battalion of the Norfolks at Demicourt,
about half-way between Bapaume and Cambrai. During this interval
it had been lent to the 3rd Division and posted at Ervillers, Noreuil
and Courcelles, all of which places are fairly close together.
Christmas was spent at Courcelles in a quiet and restful manner, and
a slight change of scene occurred soon afterwards by a move to
Bellacourt, near Riviere, which is somewhat nearer Arras. The arrival
in this place was marked by the rejoining of Captain Jones, D.S.O.,
of the R.A.M.C., who, an old, much respected and greatly beloved
medical officer to the battalion, had been over fifteen months absent
from his friends.
The New Year brought some honours with it. The late Major
Strauss was gazetted to a M.C.; Sgt. Pass got the D.C.M.; and the
M.M. came to Ptes. Alexander, Elliott, Wilson and Wright; and Lt.-
Colonels Green, D.S.O., and Power, Major Blackall, Lieut. Whitlock,
Corpl. Troy and Pte. May were all mentioned in despatches. The
21st January took this unit to Fremicourt, near Bapaume, and into
divisional reserve, and the 25th, as has been said, back into the
dreary trench work again. Captain Marshall on this date, who had
already the M.C., was awarded the D.S.O. The trench tour was quiet
enough, for the enemy was nearly a mile away, and the battalion
was back at Fremicourt on the 3rd February.
Here, or rather at Le Bucquiere close by, on the 8th, a somewhat
startling and apparently an unexpected change of organization took
place which affected nearly everybody in the army. It had been
decided that infantry brigades would be of more use, or at any rate
that certain saving of power would be effected, if, instead of four,
they should consist in future of only three battalions. This resulted in
the disbanding of many brave and tried units which had repeatedly
proved their value. Thus the 16th Brigade lost the 8th Battalion of the
Bedfordshire Regiment which had been comrades of the Buffs, York
and Lancaster and Shropshire Light Infantry since March, 1915,
when they came into the brigade in place of the Leicester Regiment.
Of course, the disbanding of these units did not mean that the
soldiers composing them went home to their mothers. They merely
were transferred to other battalions in the form of huge drafts. Thus
our own 8th Battalion of the Buffs, which had so nobly upheld the
ancient honour of the regiment on many a stricken field, now ceased
to exist in the same way as did the 8th Bedfords, and in
consequence the 1st and 6th Buffs became the richer for strong
reinforcements of fighting men. Five officers and 250 other ranks
arrived at Le Bucquiere from the 8th for the 1st Buffs.
On the 12th February the battalion went into trenches at
Lagnicourt, near Queant, and it was at this place when it received
the shock of the German great offensive in March. It was in February
a quiet and fairly comfortable place, though on the 14th an unlucky
shell killed three N.C.O.’s of D Company in a dug-out and blew a
fourth clean through the roof. Beugnatre was the rearmost resting-
place for Lagnicourt, and each battalion of the brigade of course took
its turn there.
Now that the Russians had finally collapsed and so set free the
enormous hostile armies which, up till now, they had, at any rate in
part, kept occupied, the whole of Central Europe had for some time
been crowded with troop trains bringing division after division from
east to west; these divisions had been specially trained for open as
opposed to trench fighting, and the Kaiser and his staff fondly hoped
they would suffice to drive the French to Paris and the English into
the sea, more particularly as thousands of Russian guns were now
available for German gunners to use on their western foes. It was
clear to everybody, from the Commander-in-Chief to the last recruit
from England, that a great offensive might commence on any day
and we were busily engaged in preparations. Battlefields were made
ready for defence, strong points heavily wired and mine fields laid as
protection against tanks. This attack was expected in the early
morning of the 13th March and the whole British front was covered
with a series of listening patrols, special precautions were taken and
all ranks exhorted to quit themselves like men. On the 19th the
rainless spring weather, which had lasted a fortnight, gave place to
mist, with cold showers. On the 20th before midnight orders came to
withdraw all working parties, to man all battle and alarm posts before
dawn, and to be in readiness for the enemy’s onslaught.
V. 6th Battalion
The 6th Battalion did not come into the front line again till the
22nd January, 1918, on which date it was at Fleurbaix, in the
direction of Armentieres. The interval had been passed round
Merville and Estaires. Some well-deserved decorations came to the
unit in January and some medal ribbons were presented by the Army
Commander. Captain Ferrie and 2nd Lieut. Gray got the M.C., L.-
Corpl. Parker a bar to his M.M., and the decoration itself came to L.-
Corpl. Clements and Pte. Woodcock. A little later 2nd Lieuts. Kidd,
Stevens and Turk were gladdened with the news that each had the
M.C.; Lt.-Colonel Smeltzer, M.C., was given the D.S.O., and R.S.M.
Jeffrey the M.C.
Though Fleurbaix itself was reached on the 13th January, the
battalion did not move into the front line in that region till the 22nd,
and then it was quiet enough till relief came and a move back some
five miles or so to Sailly, except that there was a certain amount of
bombardment on the 28th, and just before relief was due the next
day an enemy’s party of about twenty attempted a raid on a post
known as “Richard.” They worked round behind this point with a view
to cutting off the retreat of its little garrison, but at the exact moment
the relieving party of Fusiliers arrived on the scene and the raiders,
caught between two fires, were surprised and dispersed.
There was a good deal of work to be done in February in the way
of preparation for the coming assault, and the 6th of the month saw
the battalion in the front-line trenches, after C.S.M. Woodhams had
heard on the 4th that he had got his D.C.M. The 9th of the month
brought the big draft from the now defunct 8th Battalion of the Buffs.
This consisted of 5 officers and 200 men.
Remaining in the same vicinity for many days, now in brigade
reserve at Rouge-de-Bout, then in divisional at Nouveau Monde, and
again in the trenches, all the men’s energies were directed to work at
defensive positions; for the British army and its allies were now for a

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Narratology Beyond the Human:

Storytelling and Animal Life David

Narratology Genevieve Liveley

Heidegger's Metaphysical Abyss: Between the Human and

Human and Animal Minds: The Consciousness Questions

The Secret Life of Pigs: Stories of Compassion and the

Disembodied Brains: Understanding our Intuitions on

The Work-Life Balance Myth David J. Mcneff

Universal Life: An Inside Look Behind the Race to

The Ethics of Killing. Life, Death and Human Nature 1st

Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press

© Oxford University Press 2018

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in

You must not circulate this work in any other form

CIP data is on file at the Library of Congress

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

Storytelling and Selfhood

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

THE WESTERN FRONT

(Continuation till March, 1918)

II. 6th Battalion

IV. 1st Battalion

You might also like

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