Kevin Brockmeier
An Animal Within to Give Its Blessing: On the Value of Nonhuman Creatures in Fiction
Today I hope to articulate some thoughts about a subject that has preoccupied me ever since I began writing—even, I daresay, ever since I began reading: animals, and the strange and specific life they’re able to bring to fiction. You should never trust a speaker until you know his credentials, though, so I’d like to begin as every good craft lecture should, with a catalogue of my childhood pets. There were five of them—a dog, two goldfish, a cat, and a katydid—all of whom joined my life when I was growing up and eventually, sooner or later, left it. Each of those pets comes with a story I’d like to share with you. The peculiar thing is that their stories, while otherwise very different, all end with the same question, which I ask in total sincerity. That question is: “What were they thinking?”
I’ll start with the dog, who was named Scamp, short for Scamper. Scamp was a beautiful long-limbed girl with the build of a Lab but the coat of an Irish Setter, so rich a mahogany color that even on cloudy days you could almost believe she was sunlit. We rescued her from a shelter when I was four, and though my parents promised me I could name her, they exercised their veto power when the name I proposed was “Yogi Bear.” Every so often, Scamp would escape from our backyard and disappear for a day or two. One summer afternoon, I was trying to clip a leash to her collar when she leapt out of my reach and went flashing through our open gate. “Quick, catch her!” my dad shouted. Scamp was much faster than I was, though, and much slower to tire. She bolted in and out of carports, crested hills, and rounded corners. I kept stamping along behind her in my beaten blue tennis shoes, trailing her by a good quarter-block, spotting and then losing sight of her again. I had never run so hard for so long. A stitch developed in my gut. I began wheezing with a sound that reminded me of those paper party whistles that uncurl when you blow into them. House after house rushed by. Soon I became aware that the people I was seeing were just that—not moms and dads; not neighbors; people. Which is to say: strangers. I was lost. How I would find my way home again I had no idea, but I kept chasing her, calling “Stop” and “Here” and “Come back,” and occasionally, when Scamp decided to dally, drawing within a few feet of her, until she took off running through the maze of streets again. By the time she finally came to a stop in someone’s backyard, I was crying with frustration, so disoriented by the darting red blur I’d been pursuing that I failed to recognize the house where we’d ended up. It was my house, my backyard. By the most circuitous route imaginable, she had led me back home. It seems possible she believed we were merely playing a game. It’s just as possible, though, that she realized I was lost and had assumed the responsibility of rescuing me. What, I wonder, was she thinking?
My goldfish were named (by me this time) Boober and Wembley. I won them at a school carnival by tossing tennis balls into a metal rack tilted at a ninety-five-degree angle. Wembley was pinky-sized and the typical goldfish-orange; Boober, thumb-sized and the color of actual gold. They lived in a simple fishbowl, free of gravel or ornamentation, on a stand at the foot of my bed. One day, I scooped a tadpole from the creek behind the apartment complex where we had moved and brought it home as a friend for them. What happened afterward has always been a riddle to me. When I woke up the next morning, Boober and Wembley were swimming this way and that inside their manifestly empty fishbowl. The tadpole had vanished. Then I came home from school, and the tadpole was back, alive, fluttering through the water. Boober was still there, opening his mouth in his usual fish circles. Wembley, however, was floating dead on his side, one eye cottoning over above the waterline. This is the closest my life has ever come to an Edgar Allan Poe-style locked-room mystery. A locked-fishbowl mystery. Where had the tadpole disappeared to, where had it returned from, and what had killed poor Wembley? Boober might have known, but of course I couldn’t ask him. What, I wonder, was he thinking?
Next came Percy, our cat. Percy was slender and gray, with a white belly and paws, and so docile with me that I was able to drape him over my shoulders like a fur stole and walk from room to room feeling his purr resonate against my neck. He liked to nap on our set-top cable box for the warmth it shed, and occasionally, adjusting his weight, he would inadvertently change the TV station. Percy was the pet I knew the longest and loved the best, though apparently there is just enough residual superstition in me that I worry my childhood dog might be out there somewhere feeling hurt right now when I say so. By the time we adopted him, the house where my family was living neighbored a rolling field and a thicket of woods. We installed a cat door so that he could come and go as he pleased. One day I was on the phone with a friend when I heard that door flap open, and Percy came trotting into the kitchen carrying the carcass of a vole he had killed. “Percy!” I admonished. “No! Bad cat!” and thwacked him with the side of my hand. He let his catch fall. Over the phone my friend said, “He thinks he’s bringing you a gift, Kevin. You know that, don’t you?” and all at once I did. I felt as if I had broken something important—namely, the sense Percy had always possessed that I meant him well. I wanted to explain myself to him, to apologize. And what, I thought, if he wanted to explain himself to me, too? It was terrible, sickening, sickening because it was impossible, caught as we were in our language trap, our species trap, of mutual incomprehensibility. Pretty consistently this has been the worst thing about being alive for me: feeling incapable of making someone understand that I love them. I collected the vole in a paper towel, took that towel daintily by the corners, and deposited it in our outside trash can. I have no reason to doubt that Percy forgave me. He continued to follow me from room to room. He still liked being near me. In fact, that very night, as usual, he commandeered an illogically large portion of my bed while I slept. But what, I now wonder, in the moment when I struck out at him, was he thinking? What, he must have wondered, was I?
Finally, there was the katydid. I was on the staff at a Boy Scout camp one summer when she landed on my T-shirt. A cricket or a grasshopper I would have brushed away, a mosquito or a horsefly I would have swatted, but the katydid was such a fascinating little lime-green animal-leaf of a thing that I let her be. She spent the next three days accompanying me wherever I went— joyriding essentially, on my skin or my clothing, from the tents to the lake to the showers to the mess hall, letting her wings tilt and sway as she ranged over my limbs. The other boys began referring to her as “Kevin’s bug,” which reinforced the half-paternal, half-proprietary attitude I had adopted toward her. At night, while I slept, she remained perched on my hat. I became accustomed to finding her there when I woke up, waiting for me to dress so that she could begin re-exploring the terrain of my body. One evening, during the flag ceremony, when the trees were choiring so sonorously I could barely hear anything else, she went fluttering off into the woods, and that was the last I saw of her. I still remember the mildly unpleasant nip of her tarsal claws as she ventured over the bare skin of my neck. Not long ago, though, someone suggested that what I had been experiencing as her claws might actually have been her mandibles. And maybe that’s right. Maybe she was trying to digest me. What, I wonder, was she thinking?
One of the most fascinating discoveries I made last year was a book by the Belgian philosopher Vinciane Despret called What Would Animals Say If We Asked the Right Questions? I admire Despret for toppling so many of the distinctions humans like to claim sunder us from the other animals, and also for underscoring the limitations of scientific knowledge when it comes to understanding animal behavior. For instance, she writes:
Experienced experimenters advise young scientists never to work with cats. [Cats] will complete a task quickly enough if you present one of them with a problem to solve or a task to perform to find food, and the graph that measures the cat’s intelligence across comparative studies will show a steeply rising curve. “[The] trouble is that as soon as they figure out that the researcher or technician wants them to push the lever, they stop doing it; some of them will starve to death rather than do it.” She adds, laconically, that this violently anti-behaviorist behavior has never, to her knowledge, been published. The official version has become, do not use cats because they screw up the data.
I suspect that any poet or fiction writer who reads Despret’s work will end up asking the same question I did: whether there is room, beyond that place where science—data—reaches its limits, for art and the imagination to take over.
And it’s with that question that I’d like to venture from autobiography into literature. Specifically, I want to examine an unusual proclamation that Joy Williams made several years ago, when her New and Collected Stories was published. In a feature for the Powell’s Books blog, and later in an interview with Lincoln Michel for VICE Magazine, Williams distributed a list of what she called the “Eight Essential Attributes of the Short Story and One Way It Differs from the Novel.” Here’s what she says:
There should be a clean clear surface with much disturbance below
An anagogical level [“anagogical” is a ten-dollar word meaning, essentially, that something is available to spiritual or metaphysical interpretation]
Sentences that can stand strikingly alone
An animal within to give its blessing
Interior voices which are or become wildly erratically exterior
Control throughout is absolutely necessary
The story’s effect should transcend the naturalness and accessibility of its situation and language
A certain coldness is required in execution. It is not a form that gives itself to consolation but if consolation is offered it should come from an unexpected quarter.
A novel [Williams concludes] wants to befriend you, a short story almost never.
If you’re anything like me, seven of these eight attributes will be swiftly comprehensible to you. That’s not to say that you’ll regard them, as Williams does, as indispensable to the short story, only that you’ll find them more or less intelligible. I myself agree with all of them, save perhaps number five, whose wild erratic exterior voices strike me as essential to a Joy Williams story maybe, but otherwise wholly discretionary. One of the eight prescriptions she offers, however, is strikingly eccentric—number four: “An animal within to give its blessing.”
Now, Joy Williams is surely one of the great imaginative chroniclers of the animal world, a writer who peers into those strangely unearthly earthly faces without favoritism or sentiment, as responsive to them on the page as Robert Bresson is with a camera. But at first glance, for her to assert that a story, any story, might demand the sanctifying presence of a nonhuman animal seems outlandish. Here’s the odd thing, though: I think she’s right. Unreasonable— but right. Nonsensical—but right. When I originally came across her list and its idiosyncratic fourth item, my response was one word, Huh, followed by three more, I’ll be damned, because the truth is, whenever I’ve been able to puzzle-piece an animal into a story, it has indeed, to my thanks and surprise, seemed to offer up a kind of blessing. What that blessing consists of, and why writers might wish to invoke it, is what the rest of this lecture will attempt to illuminate.
My fascination with animals in fiction dates at least as far back as The Saggy Baggy Elephant and extends at least as far forward as the most bizarre and rejuvenating novel I read last year, Yesterday by the mid-twentieth-century Chilean writer Juan Emar, in which, by a Daliesque inversion of the spatial and corporeal order, an ostrich devours and later evacuates a living she-lion. Let me specify, then, that any insights I have are not only a writer’s but a reader’s. I’m going to be donning both of those hats now as I attempt to make the case that there are at least three ways in which animals might be said to bring particular value to a story. I’d like to present them to you one by one, in order of what I might call their felt immediacy—that is, our simple instinctive awareness that something is true.
First, and most obviously, the presence of an animal in a story activates our tenderness. This claim seems so incontestable to me that I’m not sure I even need to muster up an argument for it, but I will. There’s a reason the most widely visited trigger-content catalog on the web is called “Does the Dog Die?” Animals evoke a reflex protectiveness in many people that human beings plainly do not. The same viewers who abhor the death of the beagle that spurs the John Wick franchise into action are unmoved by—and, if anything, relish—the deaths of the 299 human beings he goes on to execute. That this sympathy can be mobilized through fiction just as easily as it can through film is plain to me and has been for roughly twenty-five years.
Content warning: the dog—or in this case, the frog—is about to die.
When I was an MFA student, one of my classmates wrote a story I’ve never been able to forget. In the years since, as I’ve taught my own writing classes, I’ve often described the effect it had on me: an all-over weakening of the body, almost galactically thorough, so overwhelming that it literally made my ears ring. I remember it as a story about a single act of violence, against an animal, that one child sees another child commit on the shore of a lake. Recently, however, I had the chance to reread it. The story’s called “Knowledge,” by Creston Lea, and can be found in his collection Wild Punch. The narrative, it turns out, is largely about a young man who returns to his hometown to deliver the eulogy after his childhood best friend has killed himself. I didn’t recall the suicide, the eulogy, the return home, or the best friend. I didn’t recall the adults into whom the characters had been transformed; didn’t recall that they had aged so much as a single minute out of that one terrible moment of violence. All I had retained from the story were these three sentences, which had erased everything else for me:
Carlton remembered Franky Swan breaking the legs of a brown frog and slicing a small perfect wound into its throat with a black-handled Buck-knife. They were fishing, twelve years old, in the marshy shallows of the river above the state fish hatchery with Brent and Dean Small. Franky put the frog back in the water and they watched it sink to the rocky bottom, where it drowned after a little while.
This passage was even more vivid in my mind than it was on the page. Something about the incident as the story depicted it appalled me. The fragility of a frog’s gullet, the violation. That thin inflating membrane, like the membrane of a balloon, only less elastic, more vulnerable. I saw it so clearly. And this might be one of the blessings, as Joy Williams would have it, that the presence of animals can bestow on fiction: they induce not only sympathy but clarity. When Marilynne Robinson, our workshop teacher, asked us what effect this moment had produced in us, I answered without so much as a second’s pause, as gravely as Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now, “Horrible! Horrible!”
Here’s another passage that summons up that same protective instinct in me. It’s much kinder than the first, much tenderer, but just as amphibian. This one comes from a novel by Ida Vitale called Byobu, a short observational roundelay of a book that takes the most quotidian details of the world and saturates them with close attention, and thereby meaning. The vision of life Vitale presents is not without threat or pessimism, but her book possesses such a playful spirit that even at its most cynical it can’t help but seem comic, as if all the grays it observes were actually silver. The novel was released by Charco Press in 2021 and was the first work of prose by the then-ninety-eight-year-old Uruguayan writer to be translated into English. See if these paragraphs inspire the same solicitousness in you that they do in me:
Byobu, obeying an irrational urge, reaches out his hand and strokes the toad’s back or, more precisely, what on a human being would be a shoulder. The little creature sits motionless beneath the gentle circular movement. This doesn’t cease to amaze Byobu, who prolongs his gesture. When after several minutes he decides it’s time to be on his way, something incredible happens: the caressee raises one of its front legs and its body on the side where the hand moves back and forth. Byobu and the witness realize that it is doing its part to enjoy this impossible caress, never before received, never before given.
An encounter . . . has just occurred between a spurned toad who loves to be caressed and a human hand that can spare five happy minutes giving it this pleasure.
The moment Vitale imagines here is gentle, fanciful, companionable, funny— the exact counterbalance of the moment Creston Lea imagines in “Knowledge.” My response to them was equally counterbalanced—on the left-hand scale, I felt profoundly comforted; on the right, profoundly troubled. The twin intensity of those reactions is evidence enough, at least for me, of the feeling of protectiveness that animals can engender on the page.
The particular blessing I’ve been describing, the blessing of sympathy, is one that animals have conferred on us through literature for as long as literature has existed—or at least certain animals have; in the Iliad or the Bible, the horses bestow the blessing of sympathy, and the deer do, but not, say, the locusts. The second value of animals in fiction, however, is not, like the first, immemorial. It is specifically contemporary: the value of heightened reality. To readers of earlier centuries, I suspect, animals meant something not lesser but other than they do today. They served as emblems of the ordinary world within which people lived out their days, a world of roads and lawns and markets and carriages, and foxes and bears and lynxes and donkeys. This may be a story, these emblems said, but see how it’s decorated? It looks just like life, doesn’t it? Aren’t you ready to believe it? Animals didn’t heighten reality, in other words; they thickened it. Now, however, most animals, with the notable exception of house pets, are conspicuously absent from the background hum of our days, so rare that they generate a mild tint of the irreal when they’re introduced onto the page. As John Berger noted in his famous essay “Why Look at Animals?”: “Everywhere animals disappear. In zoos they constitute the living monument to their disappearance . . . Nowhere in a zoo can a stranger encounter the look of an animal. At the most, an animal’s gaze flickers and passes on. They look sideways. They look blindly beyond . . . That look between animal and man, which may have played a crucial role in the development of human society, and with which, in any case, all men had always lived until less than a century ago, has been extinguished.” The great disappearance Berger describes becomes more apparent every year, and is why, in fiction, when we meet the gaze of an animal, we suddenly feel we are occupying a world that is not fantastic, exactly, but slightly separate from our own.
In illustration, let me share a story by the Guatemalan author Augusto Monterroso, another significant Latin American writer who has been far too sparsely translated into English. Of his dozen books, only two have been published in the U.S. or the U.K., though one of them, oddly, his slim collection of tiny wiseass fables The Black Sheep, has appeared in two different translations. The following very short story, called “The Ass and the Flute,” is from the most recent of those:
For a long time, a Flute that nobody played any more had been lying discarded in the countryside, until one day an Ass who happened to be passing by snorted heavily onto it, causing it to produce the sweetest sound of their lives, that is to say, the life of the Ass and the life of the Flute.
Incapable of understanding what had happened, for rationality was not their strong point and both believed in rationality, they hurriedly went their separate ways, ashamed of the best thing that either of them had done in the course of their sad existences.
That’s the whole story: two sentences; one hundred words. It delights me for any number of reasons—not least of all the way it seems to glow with an aura of Aesopian wisdom even though its only actual moral is everything is sad, but isn’t music sweet? but still: everything is sad. For our purposes, however, I merely want to point out that right now, within the context of our moment, an Ass that “believed in rationality” seems barely less likely than “an Ass who happened to be passing by.” When I step outside today, I’m not going to see either one of them.
Or take this passage from Kelly Link’s “Stone Animals,” a story about a married couple with two small children and a third on the way who buy a remote country house into which an enigmatic sense of Faerie-like menace gradually asserts itself:
He took the last train home. By the time it reached the station, he was the only one left in his car. He unchained his bicycle and rode it home in the dark. Rabbits pelted across the footpath in front of his bike. There were rabbits foraging on his lawn. They froze as he dismounted and pushed the bicycle across the grass. The lawn was rumpled; the bike went up and down over invisible depressions that he supposed were rabbit holes. There were two short fat men standing in the dark on either side of the front door, waiting for him, but when he came closer, he remembered that they were stone rabbits. “Knock, knock,” he said.
The real rabbits on the lawn tipped their ears at him. The stone rabbits waited for the punch line, but they were just stone rabbits. They had nothing better to do.
These rabbits burgeon across both the grounds of the house and the imagination of the story. Where there were several, suddenly there are many; where there were many, suddenly umpteen; until finally—
The moon shines down and paints the world a color he’s never seen before. Oh, Catherine, wait till you see this. Shining lawn, shining rabbits, shining world. The rabbits are out on the lawn. They’ve been waiting for him, all this time, they’ve been waiting. Here’s his rabbit, his very own rabbit. Who needs a bike? He sits on his rabbit, legs pressed against the warm, silky, shining flanks, one hand holding on to the rabbit’s fur, the knotted string around its neck. He has something in his other hand, and when he looks, he sees it’s a spear. All around him, the others are sitting on their rabbits, waiting patiently, quietly. They’ve been waiting for a long time, but the waiting is almost over. In a little while, the dinner party will be over and the war will begin.
“Stone Animals” is a beautifully haunting example of what one might call the suburban weird, a story in which all the interrelationships and reliabilities with which middle-class families usually color their lives turn spectral, ambiguous, as if Richard Yates were scripting Poltergeist. This equation, it occurs to me—Richard Yates plus Poltergeist—might just as easily add up to Shirley Jackson as it does to Kelly Link, but Kelly Link has a taste for pop that Shirley Jackson doesn’t, and she writes with a less flowing, more pointillistic style—so Richard Yates plus Poltergeist plus, say, Donald Barthelme. Anyway, the story exhibits what the cultural theorist Mark Fisher identifies as the allure of the weird and the eerie: “A fascination for the outside, for that which lies beyond ordinary perception, cognition and experience.” Beyond and ordinary are the words I wish to highlight here. Link’s rabbits are not agents of the ordinary but agents of the beyond. And she doesn’t have to contort them to make them so, it seems to me, because of the heightened reality in which they already reside. They possess a kind of strangeness or otherness simply by virtue of the fact that Link’s writing now, in our age of disappearances.
Every art form has its particular capacities—purposes it is better equipped to fulfill than any other art form. This doesn’t make one art form innately superior to another, at least in any grander sense; it just means that there are functions to which each one is naturally suited and other functions that will pose a challenge to it. The provisions of fiction make it uncommonly good at representing what it feels like to inhabit other minds. A story can take up the aims of film, music, painting, or even dance, but producing a convincing little language-illusion of someone else’s consciousness is what fiction does best. Fiction is a space where inner lives are made available. Even the youngest and least experienced readers recognize it as such a space. Animals assume an unusual force there, it seems to me, for the simple reason that language is being applied to them. Through language, the symbolic inner lives of animals are made every bit as accessible to us as the symbolic inner lives of human beings, and indeed, the opening stance of a work of fiction is the same toward each of them: they are words in a plain of text, representing possible minds, waiting for their depths to be sounded. And just as the human beings in a story could reveal their memories, souls, and experiences to us at any moment, so too could the animals.
This equality of address is startling. It suggests the possibility of knowing the animals in a work of fiction much more swiftly and intimately than we could ever know them in the real world, as a result of which they seem to announce themselves not with a diminished presence but with a richer one. We could, sooner or later, through conversation, achieve a similar intimacy with actual human beings. Not so with animals. And this is the third blessing that animals bring to fiction: they arrive as sudden little consciousness-wells in the field of a story. Down, down, down their minds go, and down, down, down we go with them, much further than we could conceivably go in the ordinary unwritten world.
For a display sample, let me turn to what might be the single most celebrated work in the canon of the modern short story. Of course, the instant I crown a story with that laurel, I immediately want to tally up all the other candidates: “The Dead,” “Hills Like White Elephants,” “The Metamorphosis,” “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” The story I mean, though, is Anton Chekhov’s “The Lady with the Dog”:
The stories told of the immorality in places like Yalta are to a great extent untrue; he despised them, and knew that such stories were for the most part made up by persons who would have been glad to sin if they had been able; but when the lady sat down at the next table three paces from him, he remembered these tales of easy conquests, of trips to the mountains, and the tempting thought of a swift, fleeting love affair, a romance with an unknown woman, whose name he did not know, suddenly took possession of him.
He beckoned coaxingly to the Pomeranian, and when the dog came up to him, he shook his finger at it. The Pomeranian growled, Gurov shook his finger at it again.
The lady looked at him and at once dropped her eyes. “He doesn’t bite,” she said, and blushed.
The lady here, Anna Sergeyevna, comes to possess an extraordinary richness. The Pomeranian does not. But for a moment, as they’re introduced onto the page, before the story’s mode of address has crystallized, either of them could become the subjects of Chekhov’s attention. The consciousness of the Pomeranian doesn’t—but could—startle us by revealing itself, and that, all by itself, startles us into recognizing the story’s capacity for consciousness.
There are readers, probably plenty of them, who would resent such a maneuver. When William Maxwell devoted a chapter in his slim masterpiece So Long, See You Tomorrow to the perspective of a farm dog, his colleagues at The New Yorker all tried to convince him it was a mistake and that, before the book was published, he should “put the thinking dog to sleep.” Maxwell refused to buckle. “I am not silly over dogs in general, and as it stands I don’t think there is a single detail that I do not believe to be easily possible,” he replied. “Any piece of writing involves choices, and I chose to do it this way is what it amounts to.” When I was writing my first novel, The Truth About Celia, I devised one section as a kind of relay race of shifting perspectives, in which the baton of the story’s point of view was passed from one character to the next at the beginning of each paragraph. Midway through the page count, in a spirit of transgression, I handed the proceedings over to a squirrel for a while. “My editor is going to hate this,” I thought. My editor hated it. And yet I am convinced that it had a salutary effect on the rest of the novel, and on every other consciousness it depicted, lending a sense not only of play but, paradoxically, of gravity to the book.
I’m going to offer one last example of the effect I’m describing, from the book I happened to be reading when I began my work on this lecture, a novel called Wedlock by A. J. Langguth. Langguth was a Southern California writer best known as a biographer and historian. Early in his career, though, he authored three novels, the first of which, Jesus Christs, with a plural “s,” is ingenious—a sort of postmodern, iterative, seed-scattering interpretation of the Gospels, one that takes the familiar New Testament stories and allows them to echo inside various milieus, with the same cast of players, down through the millennia. So singularly and worshipfully irreverent is the book that I sought out Langguth’s other two novels, both of which, as far as I can tell, have been out of print for roughly fifty years. Wedlock is about the failed marriage landscape of 1960s Los Angeles. I’m borrowing this small cluster of sentences from the book’s second page:
Inside the bus terminal they were already waiting: three tall men and one short girl carrying a dog. The girl bounced on her toes in a show of excitement. The fat Pekingese in her arms stirred from its usual torpor to bark twice at the bus.
Here we see five characters emerging: three men, a girl, and a dog; tall, short, and fat. I wouldn’t claim that any of them spring to immediate life—I would claim, in fact, that none of them do. The dryness of the passage, though, is what allows it to be instructive. The curious fact is that the dog, observed just as passingly as the people, seems fuller, more individual, eagerer to be understood. I think this has something to do with language itself, and how generous it is, and how normative: the way it approaches each and every sentience as though it were capable of being articulated. A human character who is no more than a bare word on a page seems like a child’s drawing of a stick figure, afloat on a white background. An animal, with just as little detail, seems considerably more vivid. The animal suggests more than itself, whereas the human, without sustained concentration, is always in danger of suggesting less. Give both of them a name, and what emanates from that name will be larger in one case than the other.
These, then, are the gifts—the blessings—I am convinced animals bring to fiction: the blessing of sympathy, the blessing of heightened reality, and the blessing of enriched consciousness. Animals offer these blessings whether or not they are treated as fully rounded characters, even when they are merely part of a story’s color or texture. In return, fiction offers animals its own blessing: the prospect of revealed interiority, of seeing not only into their eyes but through them. On the page, and perhaps only on the page, can we find the answer to that question I posed at the beginning of this address, the question our lives never answer definitively: What are they thinking? And if the animals in a story do not hide from that question, neither, their presence reminds us, do the human beings—the people old or young, living or dead, the people we’ve imagined, the people we’ve known and failed to understand. In everything, there is the animal of itself.
Fifty Impressive Novels with Prominent Animal Characters: A Menagerie (Arranged alphabetically by animal)
alligators: Swamplandia! by Karen Russell
ants: Ant Colony by Michael DeForge
bees: The Bees by Laline Paull
bears, black: Bear by Marian Engel
bears, brown: Tender Morsels by Margo Lanagan
bears, Marsican: The Bears’ Famous Invasion of Sicily by Dino Buzzati
bears, teddy: Winkie by Clifford Chase
beetles: The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
cats, domestic: The Guest Cat by Takashi Hiraide
cats, Mephistophelian: The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
cats, stray: Cabo de Gata by Eugen Ruge
chickens: Elmer by Gerry Alanguilan
chimpanzees, as family members: We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler
chimpanzees, as murder witnesses: The Poison Oracle by Peter Dickinson
cockroaches: The Cockroaches of Stay More by Donald Harington
cows: The Wall by Marlen Haushofer
crows: Grief Is the Thing with Feathers by Max Porter
dingoes: The Animals in That Country by Laura Jean McKay
dinosaurs: Hot Pterodactyl Boyfriend by Alan Cumyn
dogs, Great Danes: The Friend by Sigrid Nunez
dogs, guard: Faithful Ruslan by Georgi Vladimov
dogs, terriers: Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog) by Jerome K. Jerome
dragons: The Dragon Griaule by Lucius Shepard
ducks: Fup by Jim Dodge
elephants, African: The White Bone by Barbara Gowdy
elephants, Indian: The Tusk That Did the Damage by Tania James
elephants, nonspecific: The Magician’s Elephant by Kate DiCamillo
extraterrestrial fuzz beings: Little Fuzzy by H. Beam Piper
foxes: The Blue Fox by Sjón
giraffes: Giraffe by J.M. Ledgard
horses: Winter’s Tale by Mark Helprin
impossible creatures, contemporary: Strange Beasts of China by Yan Ge
impossible creatures, legendary: The Circus of Dr. Lao by Charles G. Finney
insects, various: The Life of Insects by Victor Pelevin
lions: The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz by Russell Hoban
mice: Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
newts: War with the Newts by Karel Čapek
octopuses: From the Wreck by Jane Rawson
ostriches: Yesterday by Juan Emar
parrots: The Mutations by Jorge Comensal
pigs, not to mention spiders: Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White
polymorphs, bioengineered: Borne by Jeff VanderMeer
polymorphs, empirical: Palafox by Éric Chevillard
rabbits: Watership Down by Richard Adams
rats: Firmin: Adventures of a Metropolitan Lowlife by Sam Savage
sea monsters: Mrs. Caliban by Rachel Ingalls
sheep: A Wild Sheep Chase by Haruki Murakami
turtles: Turtle Diary by Russell Hoban
unicorns: The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle
whales: Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
—compiled by Kevin Brockmeier, January 20, 2023