The Storied Lives of Non-Human Narrators

Lars Bernaerts, Marco Caracciolo, Luc Herman, Bart Vervaeck

Narrative, Volume 22, Number 1, January 2014, pp. 68-93 (Article)

Published by The Ohio State University Press

DOI: 10.1353/nar.2014.0002

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/nar/summary/v022/22.1.bernaerts.html

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 Lars Bernaerts, Marco Caracciolo,
Luc Herman, and Bart Vervaeck

The Storied Lives of

Non-Human Narrators

This essay examines the phenomenon of non-human storytelling. We take our depar-
ture from the paradoxical idea that readers are invited to reflect upon aspects of hu-
man life when reading the fictional life stories of non-human narrators, whether they
are animals, objects, or indefinable entities. By giving voice to non-human things
and animals such as a stuffed squirrel, a lump of coal, or a dog, these narratives may

Lars Bernaerts teaches literary theory at the Free University of Brussels and is a postdoctoral researcher
of the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO) at Ghent University. His research and publications focus on
modern Dutch and Flemish prose, experimental fiction, and narrative theory. He is the author of De reto-
riek van waanzin (The Rhetoric of Madness, 2011), a study of narrative unreliability and rhetorical strategies
in “mad” narration, and he has co-edited Stories and Minds: Cognitive Approaches to Literary Narrative
(with Dirk De Geest, Luc Herman, and Bart Vervaeck; Nebraska, 2013).

Marco Caracciolo is an NWO postdoctoral researcher at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands.
He is mainly interested in phenomenological approaches to literature and cognitive narrative theory. His
work has been published in journals such as Poetics Today, Style, and Phenomenology and the Cognitive
Sciences. With Marco Bernini he has co-authored an introduction to cognitive literary studies in Italian
(Carocci, Rome, 2013). He is currently working on a book-length study of how literary narratives figure
the quality or texture of conscious experience.

Luc Herman teaches literature in English and narrative theory at the University of Antwerp. Apart from
having co-authored the Handbook of Narrative Analysis (with Bart Vervaeck; Nebraska, 2005), he has co-
edited The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Pynchon (with Inger Dalsgaard and Brian McHale; 2012),
and co-authored Gravity’s Rainbow, Domination and Freedom (with Steven Weisenburger; Georgia, 2013).

Bart Vervaeck is a Professor of Modern Dutch literature at the University of Leuven. He has published a
book on postmodern Dutch literature, a comparative study of literary descents into the underworld, and
a study on the “experimental” novelist Sybren Polet. With Luc Herman, he co-published the Handbook of
Narrative Analysis (Nebraska, 2005). His present research focuses on “experimental” postwar Dutch fiction.

Narrative, Vol 22, No. 1 (January 2014)

Copyright 2014 by The Ohio State University
 Non-Human Narrators   69

highlight and even challenge our conception of the human. In addition, they may
confront us with our propensity to empathize with fictional autobiographical narra-
tors and to narrativize our own lives in particular ways. On the level of meaning, there
is a whole range of motifs, themes, and functions with which non-human narration
may be associated in particular narratives. On the level of form and effects, however,
there are interesting parallels between different non-human narrators. It will become
clear that, even though the umbrella term “non-human narration” comprises a great
variety of narrators, these character-narrators have something in common as a nar-
rative device.
In the first part of this essay, we introduce a conceptual framework for the study
of non-human narration, and we give some examples to illustrate its recurring fea-
tures and functions. Instead of examining non-human narration through the lens of a
single concept (e.g., “estrangement” or “the unnatural”), we argue that it is more accu-
rate to conceive of it as the result of a double dialectic of empathy and defamiliariza-
tion, human and non-human experientiality. Non-human narrators prompt readers
to project human experience onto creatures and objects that are not conventionally
expected to have that kind of mental perspective (in other words, readers “empathize”
and “naturalize”); at the same time, readers have to acknowledge the otherness of
non-human narrators, who may question (defamiliarize) some of readers’ assump-
tions and expectations about human life and consciousness. Since this double dia-
lectic always functions in a particular context, we demonstrate it in illustrations and
case studies that cover a range of non-human narrators. In the case studies that make
up the second part of the essay, we first investigate non-human animal narrators in
stories by Franz Kafka and Julio Cortázar, drawing attention to the way in which lit-
erature can challenge readers’ familiarity with mental processes via their empathetic
engagement with animal minds. In order to avoid a view on non-human narration
that is biased by examples from “high literature,” we also analyze inanimate narration
in a nineteenth-century collection of children’s stories. In this case, the device of it-
narration generates narrative interest by means of defamiliarization, which turns the
text into a vehicle for scientific knowledge. In sum, the case studies contain different
kinds of non-human narrators (animals and objects), and different generic features
affecting the text-reader negotiation in which empathy and defamiliarization come
into being.

Non-Human Narration in Literary Fiction

There are many intriguing examples of non-human narrators in literary fiction. In

Italo Calvino’s cosmicomic stories (Tutte le cosmicomiche, 1997), the character narra-
tor is a kind of shapeshifter. In the opening chapter of Julian Barnes’s A History of the
World in 10½ Chapters (1989) the narrator is a witty woodworm. A statue is the ho-
modiegetic narrator in Harry Mulisch’s novella The Statue and the Clock (Het beeld en
de klok, 1989). The narrating voice of Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow (1991), a novel told
backwards, inhabits the body of the protagonist and distances itself from the human
70   Lars Bernaerts, Marco Caracciolo, Luc Herman, and Bart Vervaeck

species. In Rat (1993), the widely read novel by the Polish writer Andrzej Zaniewksi,
a rat gives a detailed account of its life, from its birth to its death. In Two Brothers (Dos
Hermanos, 1995), a novel by the Basque writer Bernardo Atxaga, the story is told by
a bird, squirrels, a star, a snake, and a wild goose. The Flemish author Jan Lauwereyns
has written a novel in which the narrator is a captive monkey that is used as a labora-
tory animal (Monkey Business, 2003). Andrea Kerbaker’s Ten Thousand (Diecimila,
2003) is the story of a book’s life. In The Portrait (Specht en zoon, 2004), by the Dutch
author Willem Jan Otten, the narrator is the canvas of a famous portraitist.
Non-human narration can serve a variety of functions in narrative texts. In some
cases, animal or object narration is a satiric strategy. In children’s literature, non-
human narration can have a didactic function. In other cases, it foregrounds ethi-
cal problems. Often, it reveals the problematic ways in which humans relate to their
physical environment and to other living creatures. Lauwereyns’s monkey narrator,
for example, provides a straightforward invitation to reflect upon the conditions of
lab animals. The monkey, whose skull and brains are penetrated with needles during
experiments in a neuropsychological lab, explicitly asks whether scientific progress
can go on at the expense of the lives of so many animals. Throughout the narrative,
the reader is brought closer to the putative experience of “what it is like” (in Thomas
Nagel’s phrase) to be a monkey in a laboratory.
The novel also suggests that humans tend to reduce animals to objects, an ideo-
logical position that is often lurking in non-human narratives. Along the lines of R. D.
Laing’s analysis of depersonalization in The Divided Self (46–54), a lot of non-human
narratives point to the fact that people may conceive the other (person, animal) as
an object in order to cope with reality and to maintain one’s own subjectivity or su-
periority. In many non-human life stories, the reverse is also foregrounded: we—hu-
mans—have the cognitive habit of animating the inanimate and anthropomorphizing
animals. According to Blakey Vermeule, animism and personification (the attribu-
tion of agency), two processes involved in this anthropomorphizing mechanism, are
“conceptual primitives” (21–24). Not only are these cognitive processes inherent to
the reading experience, but they can also be self-consciously exploited by literary
texts: “Writers can always deliver a shock of mild surprise by personifying things like
pots, kettles, and banknotes. They can exploit the widespread human tendency to-
wards animism while keeping us on the edge of our seats” (Vermeule 26). It is evident
that the reflection upon this human cognitive habit is another recurring function of
non-human narration.
This phenomenological thread in non-human narratives can also be illuminated
with more recent insights into the “what it is like”-dimension of literary fiction (see
Herman, Basic Elements 145–47). By playing with readers’ familiarity with human
experience (“experientiality,” to borrow Monika Fludernik’s term), literary texts can
create phenomenological states that are taken by readers as convincing demonstra-
tions of non-human life. Although non-human narrators vary greatly when it comes
to their physical and psychological design, and to their functions as narrators, they
have two crucial features in common as a narrative device. First of all, they are char-
acter-narrators and/or homodiegetic narrators: they are part of the storyworld they
 Non-Human Narrators   71

are conjuring up in their tales.1 The non-human narrators at the center of our atten-
tion in this essay are the protagonists of their own story, shedding light on formative
experiences in their lives. Calvino’s cosmicomic stories can be read as a postmodern
autobiography, as Kristi Siegel has argued. Kerbaker’s novella announces itself explic-
itly as the autobiography of a book.
The second common feature is the fact that these narrators spring from and re-
quire the conceptual integration of human and non-human traits. Mark Turner (138–
39) has already shown how conceptual integration or blending can account for the
recurrent motif of talking animals in fairy tales. But of course these blends can be
more or less conventionalized depending on a number of factors—including liter-
ary genre. A talking lion in a fairy tale is not so exceptional in view of the relevant
generic conventions. Or consider the traditional omniscient narrator, who can be un-
derstood, according to Monika Fludernik, as a blend of divine and human features
(“Naturalizing” 17). Unlike the omniscient narrator, the non-human narrators we are
discussing are homodiegetic narrators and they are not always or not yet convention-
alized in literary fiction. A woodworm complaining about the conditions in Noah’s
ark or an immortal shapeshifter narrating his life at the time of the big bang are new
and surprising conceptual integrations. Because of their novelty, these blends draw
special attention to themselves and evoke a new constellation of defamiliarization and
empathy. In that respect, the phrase “conceptual integration” can even be misleading,
since the so-called integration is not always smooth and may lead to “clashes”—in
Fauconnier and Turner’s term (113)—or dialectic tensions between human and non-
human features.
In Strange Concepts and the Stories They Make Possible, Lisa Zunshine explores
fictional blends of the human and the non-human, such as robots, cyborgs, and an-
droids, which she terms “counterontological entities” (Strange Concepts 75). In her
view, the resulting tensions are culturally embedded conflicts of cognitive catego-
rization (51–55), which are solved in the reading process. At first we may assume
that narrators and characters are human-like agents, but the text and the immediate
context (e.g., paratextual indications of genre) continually force us to (re)specify and
adjust our assumptions. An important point made by Zunshine is that cognitive cat-
egories entail standard degrees and kinds of “processing over the folk-psychological
domain,” i.e., ascription of consciousness (63). Whereas an entity categorized as an
animal or a pet is often seen as “friendly,” “sad,” or “angry,” it is less obvious to at-
tribute intentions and emotions to an artifact such as a cup or a pen. On the other
hand, we should not forget that the animal characters we are interested in here are
not just experiencing subjects: they are talking (narrating) subjects, which means that
another cognitively and culturally salient distinction—humans speak, non-human
animals don’t—is collapsed. In short, both object and animal narrators seem to be
“counterontological entities.” Still, we argue that the degree of empathy and defamil-
iarization produced by non-human narrators does not depend only on these general
cognitive predispositions, but also on the specificity of the narrative presentation of
human/non-human blends. When the text presents an animal or a thing as a “char-
acter,” the reader activates the framework of what Fotis Jannidis calls the “Basistypus”
72   Lars Bernaerts, Marco Caracciolo, Luc Herman, and Bart Vervaeck

(Figur und Person 185–95) or “basis type” (“Character”). This rudimentary, proto-
typical structure involves the assumption that the entity has mental states and a body
(Eder, Jannidis, and Schneider 13). A combination of conceptual domains such as “a
speaking canvas” invites the reader to apply the basis type and it requires a particular
(re)categorization.
By and large, the types and the effects of non-human narration emerge from the
way the conceptual integration is configured, i.e., the specific proportion of human
and non-human features. To illustrate the way human and non-human elements are
conceptually integrated, let us consider the following quotation:

[T]he Sun takes about two hundred million years to make a complete revolu-
tion of the galaxy.
Right, that’s how long it takes, not a day less—Qfwfq said—once, as I
went past, I drew a sign at a point in space, just so I could find it again two
hundred million years later, when we went by the next time around. (Cal-
vino, “A Sign in Space” 32; emphasis original)

The human/non-human blend combines a personalized voice suggesting human

mental functioning with a range of non-human features, some of which cannot be
assigned to any living creature or known object. In the example, it is clear that the
intradiegetic narrator of the cosmicomic stories has been around a long time. In fact,
the reader of Calvino’s stories will know that the narrator has always existed. In his
humorous, idiosyncratic style, he comments upon several, sometimes incompatible
formative events in his cosmic life. In some of the stories, the experiencing self takes
the shape of an animal; in other stories his physical form remains unspecified. Still,
human experience is integrated into the non-human make-up of Qfwfq. In every sto-
ry, for example, a feeling of loss is prominent in the narrativization of the past.2 The
narrator’s nostalgic attitude is one of the elements that reinforce his anthropomorphic
side and it may also stimulate the reader’s empathetic involvement. Similarly, all non-
human narrators exploit human experientiality in varying degrees, and they call upon
our ability to attribute consciousness to non-human entities and even to empathize
with them. In what follows, we will clarify this conceptual framework by fleshing out
the two pairs of concepts that can give rise to a “double dialectic” in readers’ engage-
ment with non-human narrators: defamiliarization and empathy, human experienti-
ality and the (un)natural.

Defamiliarization and Empathy

Viktor Shklovsky, one of the early proponents of a formalist approach to litera-

ture and therefore one of the “proto-narratologists” (see Schmid), coined the term
“defamiliarization” (ostranenie) in his attempt to define the specificity of art. Whereas
practical communication confirms the way we look at the world, literature makes the
familiar seem strange. In the famous key passage of his 1917 essay “Art as Technique,”
Shklovsky argues that
 Non-Human Narrators   73

art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel
things, to make the stone stony. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation
of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique
of art is to make objects “unfamiliar,” to make forms difficult, to increase
the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is
an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. (Shklovsky 12; emphasis
original)

The first elaborate example of defamiliarization provided by Shklovksy is Tolstoy’s

Kholstomer, a novella in which a horse functions as an intradiegetic narrator. Shklov­
sky underscores the fact that the perspective of the horse changes the reader’s percep-
tion of the world as he knows it. In narratological terms, it is focalization as well as
voice, characterization, and narrative evocation of fictional minds that collaborate in
realizing this effect.
The sort of defamiliarization Shklovsky identifies is indeed an important factor
of non-human narration: the rat in Zaniewski’s novel Rat or Calvino’s Qfwfq prevent
the reader from assimilating these texts to familiar conventions and expectations.
As Shklovsky phrases it, our automatic perception or our “recognition” of reality is
hampered and replaced by a fresh look. The world of the rats in Zaniewski’s novel
puts our reality into another perspective, as it demonstrates how the rats’ lives are
shaped by the gutters, sewers, trash, and cracks in the human world. Calvino’s narra-
tor talks about his various lives since the beginning of time and even before that. In
that way, he stimulates the reader to reconsider familiar ideas about time and identity.
The reader is invited to adopt a cosmic point of view on the world, which is formally
conveyed through panchronic and panoramic focalization.3 From that vantage point,
human beings can be viewed as nothing but “[s]hapeless, colourless beings, sacks of
guts stuck together carelessly” (Calvino 149), as Qfwfq sees them.
In the context of this essay, defamiliarization will be considered as the effect that
literary texts can bring about on readers by challenging their ideas about what counts
as “normal” or “predictable” in a given genre or narrative situation. Phenomenologi-
cally, this effect involves a sense of strangeness or puzzlement, which may invite read-
ers to self-consciously attend to their expectations. When it comes to non-human
narration, however, Shklovsky’s formalist approach can only offer one part of the
story. We also need a counterbalance for the concept of defamiliarization to clarify
the workings of non-human narration. For this purpose, we will use the concept of
“empathy.” Empathy is the imaginative process whereby readers temporarily adopt
the perceptual, emotional, or axiological perspective of a fictional character, “trying
it on” and experiencing its effects in a first-person way (Gaut; Coplan). Reading the
autobiography of the laboratory monkey in Lauwereyns’s novel, we might become
estranged from human reality, but we are also invited to imaginatively share the cog-
nition and emotion of the monkey in its cage. If we weren’t able to empathize with
it, then the kind of defamiliarization Shklovsky posits could not be actualized in the
reading experience.
Non-human narrators often seem to echo this dialectic of defamiliarization and
empathy. They implicitly and explicitly foreground strategies of distancing and iden-
74   Lars Bernaerts, Marco Caracciolo, Luc Herman, and Bart Vervaeck

tification. What is often at stake in non-human narration is the ability to acknowledge

similarity and otherness at the same time, to recognize the ratness of the rat, the mon-
keyness of the monkey and the humanness of the rat and the monkey as well as the
ratness and the monkeyness of humans. In that way, stories narrated by non-human
animals can destabilize anthropocentric ideologies. By giving a voice to non-human
animals and facilitating empathy, these narratives can place them on a continuum
with humans, rather than constructing them as opposites. As the case studies will
make clear, empathy and defamiliarization operate not just on the level of the reader’s
interaction with the text, but also on the level of the fictional world. Further, the case
studies demonstrate that empathy and defamiliarization are important factors in the
dynamics of the narrative, since they generate narrative interest, to use Meir Stern-
berg’s terminology (Expositional Modes).

Human Experientiality and the (Un)natural

Invoking Fludernik’s “natural” narratology, we can say that the stories of non-
human entities are narrativized by the projection of human experientiality—i.e., “ho-
listic schemata known from real life” which “can be used as building stones for the
mimetic evocation of a fictional world” (Fludernik, Towards 28). The projection is
triggered by the narrative itself, because non-human agents are endowed with human
sensitivities. In Otten’s novel about the portrait, the narrator expresses shame, bewil-
derment, and desire. However, the canvas also emphatically deviates from human
experientiality in its perception and interpretation of the events:

People are more scared of death than we artefacts. That has become very
clear to me. If you add a thousand fears to my fear, you’ll come close to un-
derstanding human fear. I don’t know what I owe this realisation to—I’m not
human, and I’m about to go up in smoke. Why did I have to know? That it’s
beyond them, people, the thing that is about to happen to me? Having disap-
peared is beyond them. (Otten 151)

Since these narrators seem to depart radically from human beings, the projection of
human experientiality can only be one part of the reader’s engagement with them.
While coming to grips with the non-human and artificial dimension of these nar-
rators, the reader may be invited to consider important aspects of human existence,
including the artificial nature of fiction itself. The violation of conventions that un-
derlies the audience-nonhuman narrator relationship is precisely the focus of atten-
tion of unnatural narratology. Jan Alber, Stefan Iversen, Henrik Skov Nielsen, and
Brian Richardson claim that unnatural narratives violate “the conventions of natural
narrative” (Alber et al. 115) as well as the “conventions of standard narrative forms”
(Richardson, “What Is” 34) and “produce a defamiliarization of the basic elements of
narrative” (“What Is” 34). In his book Unnatural Voices, likewise, Richardson associ-
ates non-human narration with a general development, in modern fiction, toward
the posthuman (3). Posthuman narrators, such as Qfwfq or the woodworm in Julian
 Non-Human Narrators   75

Barnes’s novel, undermine the idea of a stable and unified human identity, and ques-
tion the concept of humanity.
All in all, in many cases we cannot understand non-human narration merely by
applying familiar frames of reference. “Natural” narratology stresses the importance
of human experientiality, while “unnatural” narratology stresses the anti-mimetic as-
pects of non-human narration. Between these two poles, something else happens as
well, as we have suggested, namely the projection of non-human experientiality. Of-
ten, if not always, non-human narrators use techniques of focalization, character-
ization, and consciousness representation to evoke non-human experientiality. Thus,
non-human narration cannot be reduced to the unnatural and the strange, since it is
caught in a dialectic of empathy and defamiliarization, the familiar and the strange,
human and non-human experience. Narrative strategies of voice, focalization, the
evocation of consciousness, and characterization are decisive in the creation of these
tensions. Thanks to them, non-human narration can challenge readers to reconsider
familiar ideas on reality, identity, existence. In our case studies, we wish to demon-
strate this link between narrative strategies, empathy and defamiliarization, and the
reflection upon the human world.
Building on a similar scale set up by David Herman in his recent work on animal
narratives (“Storyworld/Umwelt”), we would like to position our case studies on a
continuum that goes from an anthropocentric mode of representation of non-human
experiences to the imaginative exploration of the phenomenal world of non-human
animals. In some narratives animals are allegorical representations of humans or an-
thropomorphic projections, while other narratives suggest zoomorphic projection or
foreground the “distinctive texture and ecology of non-human experiences” (“Story-
world/Umwelt” 158), thereby evoking “what it is like” to be that animal (160). The
continuum proposed by Herman is similar to the gradual distinction made by Theo-
dore Ziolkowski from a thematological perspective. In an illuminating chapter on
talking dogs, he distinguishes between “‘relativised’ or ‘anthropocentric’ animal nar-
ratives” and “‘absolute’ or ‘cynocentric’” narratives (Ziolkowski 94). While at one end
of the scale non-human narration serves to reinforce preexisting aspects or elements
of a given human culture, at the opposite end narrative can challenge readers’ expec-
tations and worldview, therefore expanding the boundaries of human experientiality.
Our third case study, Annie Carey’s Autobiographies, comes closer to the first
pole, since its talking objects convey a reassuring sense that humans occupy a cen-
tral position in the universe, with objects serving as means towards the realization
of technological and scientific progress. By contrast, the two short stories by Julio
Cortázar (“Axolotl”) and Franz Kafka (“The Burrow”) fall on the opposite end of the
scale, since their narrators seem to question the anthropocentric paradigm: these nar-
ratives prove unsettling because they blur the boundary between the human and the
non-human by asking their readers to imaginatively adopt perspectives radically dif-
ferent from their own everyday experience. Although our case studies do not span
the whole gamut of functions and roles that can be fulfilled by non-human narration,
they aptly illustrate the underlying double dialectic that we see as central to readers’
encounters with impossible narrators.
76   Lars Bernaerts, Marco Caracciolo, Luc Herman, and Bart Vervaeck

Animal Narrators in Cortázar’s “Axolotl” and Kafka’s “The Burrow”

In this section we would like to show that, through the interplay of empathy and de-
familiarization described above, engaging with animal narrators can shed light on
aspects and features of human experientiality. Our first case study—Julio Cortázar’s
short story “Axolotl” (1956)—has a special status in that it can be read as pointing a
metafictional finger at the dialectic of empathy and defamiliarization itself: through
the narrator’s account of his becoming an axolotl (an aquatic salamander), this story
lays bare the psychological processes underlying readers’ responses to non-human
narrators. Franz Kafka’s “The Burrow” (1928, posthumous) defamiliarizes readers’
folk psychology—the skills through which they make sense of people’s behavior (see
Ravenscroft)—by highlighting the difference between human and animal cognition.
The narrator’s attachment to its burrow reveals, at least in our interpretation, the
innateness (or species-specific nature) of some behavioral patterns in non-human
animals.
To what extent can human-made artifacts such as stories reflect animal forms of
cognition? Aren’t they rather the product of the all-too-human imagination of their
authors (and readers)? These considerations bring up the question raised by philoso-
pher of mind Thomas Nagel in a seminal article entitled “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?”
Nagel’s view is that, because of the limitations of our imagination, there is no way for
us to know what the world looks like to creatures different from us in bodily make-up
and sensorimotor capacities. A counterargument to this position has been offered by
J. M. Coetzee in The Lives of Animals: in response to Nagel, the fictional writer Eliza-
beth Costello urges that the experiences provided by literary texts can bring readers
close to paradoxical states such as being dead or being an animal (Coetzee 32).
However fascinating Costello’s argument, we should keep in mind that Nagel is
interested not in the power of the human imagination per se, but in its capacity to
bridge the gap between the first-person approach to the mental (phenomenology)
and the third-person, scientific approach (which is concerned with physical states of
the brain). Thus, Coetzee’s response to Nagel’s argument falls flat since it does not ad-
dress the philosopher’s call for “an objective phenomenology, [one] not dependent on
empathy or the imagination” (449). Literature cannot, by itself, move from an imagi-
nary to an objective phenomenology. And even science is far from bridging that gap:
to date, there is no way to show that a phenomenological description accurately rep-
resents an animal’s—or even a person’s—subjective experience. Of course, literature
may involve and convey knowledge that enjoys scientific status in a given culture
and time: individual readers often do learn scientific “facts” from literature (more on
this in the last part of this essay). But as far as experience is concerned, there is no
scientifically sound way to prove that literary explorations of animals’ life worlds are
more than an exercise of the imagination. And this is quite unproblematic, since the
significance of literary practices lies elsewhere: rather than producing new scientific
knowledge, literature plays on the values and meanings that are embedded in human
experience (see Gibson 108–12).4 Defamiliarization and empathy have an important
role in this process: the creation of imaginary phenomenological worlds is rewarding
 Non-Human Narrators   77

because it meets our curiosity about other ways of experiencing the world—the very
drive that prompts us to ask the question “What is it like to be a bat?” In sum, litera-
ture can create the illusion that readers experience the world from the perspective of
a non-human animal. This is a psychological effect that is brought about by way of
defamiliarization, i.e., by “making strange” what the audience takes to be normal or
customary modes of engagement with the world.
Before moving on, it is worth highlighting that our reading of Cortázar’s and
Kafka’s short stories is only one of the possible strategies for dealing with their strange
narrators. We will see in a moment that both narrators tend to act and talk in a de-
ranged way, bordering on obsessive-compulsive behavior and acute anxiety. Linking
these characters to mental disorders is another way of accounting for their funda-
mental “strangeness,” thus making possible narrative empathy. This anthropocentric
interpretation does not rule out—but rather complicates—our reading, which turns
on the specificity of animal cognition vis-à-vis the human mind: the ambiguity of
these animal figures leaves room for both interpretations, thus feeding into the dialec-
tic of human and nonhuman experientiality outlined in the introduction.

Empathy and Captivation in “Axolotl”

Our first case study—Cortázar’s “Axolotl”—uses the resources of fiction to call

attention to both the reader’s projection into the phenomenological world of an ani-
mal and its defamiliarizing effects. These processes are staged through the narrator’s
empathetic identification with an axolotl. The character’s identification is so intense
that it eventually leads to his metamorphosis into the animal, as announced at the
beginning of the story: “There was a time when I thought a great deal about the axo-
lotls. I went to see them in the aquarium at the Jardin des Plantes and stayed for hours
watching them, observing their immobility, their faint movements. Now I am an axo-
lotl” (Cortázar 3). The rest of the text traces the development of the narrator’s obses-
sion with this animal, alternating between the character’s narrating self—an axolotl—
and his recollections of his past human self.
At first we see the character pondering about a version of Nagel’s question: what
is it like to be an axolotl? In his attempt to empathize with the axolotls, however,
the protagonist slides towards the register of “mythology,” as he himself acknowl-
edges (6). The animals are displaced into a timeless dimension where they are now
“slaves of their bodies,” now “witnesses of something,” now “horrible judges” (7). The
character’s response to the animals, to their otherness, is strongly guided by human
experientiality and in particular by cultural conventions: the easiest way to imagine
an experience radically different from ours is as an otherworldly experience. This
anthropocentric bias reaches a peak when the protagonist constructs a heavily ste-
reotyped scenario in which the axolotls are “lying in wait for something, a remote
dominion destroyed, an age of liberty when the world had been that of the axolotls”
(8)—a sentence that almost reads as a parody of the mythological tone and motifs of
fantasy literature.
78   Lars Bernaerts, Marco Caracciolo, Luc Herman, and Bart Vervaeck

In contrast to the protagonist’s wild ramblings, the scene of his transformation

into an axolotl has a plain, almost anticlimactic ring:

[There] was nothing strange in what happened. . . . I saw from very close
up the face of an axolotl immobile next to the glass. No transition and no
surprise, I saw my face against the glass, I saw it on the outside of the tank,
I saw it on the other side of the glass. Then my face drew back and I under-
stood. (8)

Notice the shift in focalization that occurs between the second and the third sentence.
Initially the phrase “I saw” refers to the sensory perception of the human charac-
ter; shortly afterward the same phrase points to a new center of consciousness (the
axolotl), with a sudden switch between perceiving subject and perceived object. The
character’s metamorphosis into an axolotl is accomplished in purely dualist, Carte-
sian fashion as an incorporeal transfer of consciousness between two living bodies.
The transformation does not stem from the character’s willful projection into the ani-
mal mind, but rather from the supernatural power exercised over him by the crea-
tures: “[they were] devouring me slowly with their eyes, in a cannibalism of gold. At
any distance from the aquarium, I had only to think of them, it was as though I were
being affected from a distance” (7). The empathetic bond is thus established almost
unconsciously, as a result of forces that elude the character’s control.
To better understand this point, we would like to draw a parallel between the
character’s experience and Martin Heidegger’s account of animals’ “captivation” in
their world. As Giorgio Agamben explains in The Open, for Heidegger the “mode
of being proper to the animal is captivation (Benommenheit)” (52). Unlike Da-sein
or humans, animals are “poor in world” because they have to rely on the environ-
ment without having the conceptual tools to relate to it as a world—i.e., without
recognizing its being. In Heidegger’s words, “the animal finds itself suspended, as it
were, between itself and its environment, even though neither the one nor the other
is experienced as a being” (Heidegger 248; qtd. in Agamben 54). This non-reflective
coupling between the animal and its environment defines what Heidegger calls “cap-
tivation.” His example—taken from Jakob von Uexküll’s work—is especially instruc-
tive. If an experimenter cuts away a bee’s abdomen after it has started feeding on
some honey, the insect will continue feeding undisturbed while the honey flows out
of its body. Heidegger comments: “This shows convincingly that the bee by no means
recognizes . . . the absence of its abdomen. . . . [It] continues its instinctual activity
regardless. . . . [The] bee is simply taken by the food” (Heidegger 242; qtd. in Agam-
ben 52–53).
There is a close resemblance between the bee’s being “taken by the food” and the
way in which the protagonist of Cortázar’s story is “devoured” by the axolotls. In a
sense, the narrator’s fascination with the axolotls mirrors the animals’ own captiva-
tion in their environment, thereby paving the way for his final transformation into
one of them. For Cortázar, becoming an animal involves “losing world,” abandoning
human self-consciousness in favor of a state of blind captivation. This is a gradual
process, of course. At first the character appears to be well aware of his transforma-
 Non-Human Narrators   79

tion into an axolotl, to the point that he refers to it linguistically and understands
what happened conceptually (“Then my face drew back and I understood”). Yet after
his metamorphosis things begin to change: human language falters, and the narra-
tor is comforted by an inexpressible—and highly ambiguous—contact with a fellow
creature. We read “that [horror] stopped when a foot just grazed my face, when I
moved just a little to one side and saw an axolotl next to me who was looking at me,
and understood that he knew also, no communication possible, but very clearly” (9).
Unlike the “I understood” that immediately follows the transformation, the one that
appears in this passage suggests a form of practical knowledge (Heidegger’s “Verste-
hen”) which is neither reflective nor conceptual.5 What the other axolotl knows, but
can only be hinted at in human language, is the bliss of complete absorption in one’s
being.
With one further turn of the interpretive screw, we may view “Axolotl” as a meta-
fictional reflection on the audience’s empathy for non-human characters. Cortázar’s
text seems to hold a mirror up to readers’ engagement with minds that are radically
different from their own, showing that the defamiliarizing effect of relating to non-
human narrators can be channeled through empathetic perspective-taking. Narra-
tive empathy is not the result of the reader’s conscious efforts to imagine herself in
a character’s shoes, but rather depends on the persuasive force of stylistic devices
which (like the mysterious axolotls) call forth empathetic responses almost against
the audience’s will. Sometimes the reader’s empathy for characters can give rise to
a state of “absorption” (Nell) or “identification” (Gaut) whereby she becomes fully
conscious of her own perspective-taking—of her “becoming another” through nar-
rative empathy. This imaginative projection is hinted at here by the narrator’s obses-
sion with—and transformation into—a non-human animal. In turn, by inviting its
audience to follow in the narrator’s footsteps, Cortázar’s story manages to push back
the limits of human experientiality, giving its readers a glimpse into the non-human,
in the form of an inexpressibly meaningful look between the narrator and another
axolotl. This does not mean that readers take on the consciousness of the axolotl,
however: as argued by Coplan (150), in empathy the “self-other differentiation” is
always preserved, so that the audience may come to see the world from the axolotl’s
perspective without giving up their own perspective.

“The Burrow” and Animal Cognition

While the power of Cortázar’s short story lies in its representing a transfer of
consciousness between a human being and an animal, our second case study—Kafka’s
“The Burrow”—fully immerses the audience in the strangeness of an animal’s thought
patterns. This story has been read figuratively by many commentators: the animal’s
thirty-page-long monologue has been interpreted as an allegory for human ration-
ality and selfhood, for Kafka’s existential condition, and even for his relationship with
writing.6 However, following a recent trend in Kafka criticism (see Lucht and Yarri),
we will offer a more literal interpretation of “The Burrow”—one that takes at face
value Kafka’s attempt at rendering the experience of a non-human animal. The nar-
80   Lars Bernaerts, Marco Caracciolo, Luc Herman, and Bart Vervaeck

rator of this short story is a mole-like creature which dwells at length—almost obses-
sively—on its masterpiece: the sprawling burrow to which it has devoted its life. As
we read into the story we realize that the burrow is much more than a form of shelter,
since it is deeply ingrained in the animal’s identity: “The joy of possessing [the bur-
row] has spoiled me, the vulnerability of the burrow has made me vulnerable; any
wound to it hurts me as if I myself were hit” (Kafka 355).
What is interesting, however, is that the animal is unable to verbalize the reasons
for its deep attachment to its construction: “you do not know me if you think I am
afraid, or that I built my burrow simply out of fear” (325). And again: “there is no
need for me even to take thought to know what the burrow means to me; I and the
burrow belong . . . indissolubly together” (340). The pre-reflective, pre-verbal nature
of the animal’s relationship with its burrow ought to catch the reader’s attention: in
a story where the animal’s thought patterns are so openly displayed in verbal form,
why are the reasons for its attachment to the burrow underdetermined? In our in-
terpretation, Kafka’s text revolves around, and reveals, the innateness of the animal’s
burrowing instinct—which cannot be verbalized through direct thought report (see
Palmer 76), but only hinted at because it cuts below the narrator’s conscious thoughts.
Research on animal cognition can clarify this point. In Thinking without Words,
philosopher José Luis Bermúdez distinguishes between two kinds of explanation for
the way animals behave. Some explanations are psychological, since they construct
a behavioral pattern as goal-directed and, in some cases, dependent on a decision-
making process. By contrast, other explanations appeal to “innate releasing mecha-
nisms—namely, fixed patterns of behavior that are more complex than reflexes, often
involving a chained sequences of movements rather than a simple reaction, and that
yet seem to be instinctive” (7). As is well known, innate mechanisms were at the cen-
ter of the classical ethological theories of Konrad Lorenz and Nikolaas Tinbergen
(see Schiller). These mechanisms can result in behavior that looks, from a human
vantage point, irrational or even absurd. Here is the example used by many philoso-
phers of mind:

The Sphex wasp . . . leaves a paralyzed cricket in a burrow with its eggs, so
that its offspring will have something to feed on when they hatch. When
it captures a cricket, it drags it to the entrance of the burrow, then leaves
it outside for a moment while it enters, seemingly to check for intruders.
However, if an interfering experimenter moves the cricket back a few inches
while the wasp is inside, she repeats the sequence: dragging the insect to the
burrow’s entrance, then entering briefly once more alone. And this sequence
can be made to “loop” indefinitely many times over. (Carruthers 211–12)

The wasp’s apparently mindless movements follow an instinctual logic that is close-
ly reminiscent of the narrator’s single-minded obsession with the burrow in Kafka’s
story. The absurdity of the narrator’s actions becomes apparent in the second part of
the text, when it is suddenly woken up by a whistling noise, which it immediately at-
tributes to a predator coming after it. Here the narrator sounds even more fixated on
the burrow, to the point that it starts pacing around restlessly:
 Non-Human Narrators   81

I cannot endure the place, I rise up and rush, as if I had filled myself up there
with new anxieties instead of peace. . . . I listen at ten places chosen at ran-
dom and clearly notice the deception; the whistling is just the same as ever,
nothing has altered. . . . I go once more the long road to the Castle Keep [the
main room of the burrow], all my surroundings seem filled with agitation.
(347)

In a sense, the strange noise heard by the animal works in the same way as the re-
searcher’s moving the cricket away in the experiment just described. Both events trig-
ger puzzling behavioral patterns that seem to repeat themselves in a loop, without
any clear purpose or explanation. Margot Norris argues that Kafka’s mole-like animal
functions “as a poetic analogue to an imagined ontological and psychological condi-
tion whose teleology is pure survival” (28). But something even more visceral than
the animal’s survival instinct seems to be at stake here. If the narrator fears a predator,
why doesn’t it just escape from the burrow? As the animal itself makes clear, “the bur-
row is not a mere hole for taking refuge in. When I stand in the Castle Keep . . . then
all thought of mere safety is far from my mind, then I know that here is my castle . . .
which can never belong to anyone else, and is so essentially mine that I can calmly
accept in it even my enemy’s mortal stroke” (340).
The character appears to be trapped in and by the evolutionary logic that has de-
termined its burrowing instinct: the animal cannot help burrowing, but at the same
time it is too “captivated” (to use Heidegger’s term) in this impulse to refer to it in a
self-reflective way. This is one of the few passages in which the animal’s burrowing
instinct seems to emerge from its ratiocinative stream of consciousness: “I am still
trembling with agitation just as I was hours ago, and if my reason did not restrain me
I would probably like nothing better than to start stubbornly and defiantly digging,
simply for the sake of digging, at some place or other” (349). Far from being only a
response triggered by fear, the narrator’s anxiety could be taken as an indication of
the phenomenology of innate behavior. Thus, the short story uses language as a ve-
hicle to reach a dimension of animal experience that is both nonlinguistic and largely
unknown to its readers: while humans do have some instinctive reflexes (blinking,
withdrawing one’s hand from a hot object), none of them results in a fixed sequence
of actions as complex as the wasp’s dragging the cricket or the narrator’s burrowing.
Indeed, the vast majority of our behaviors is learned rather than innate. In a sense,
then, by exposing the audience to a behavioral pattern that falls beyond the scope of
human experientiality, Kafka’s text highlights the specificity of human forms of cog-
nition vis-à-vis the narrator’s animal mind.7
In his psychoanalytic theory of narrative, Peter Brooks writes, “Narratives por-
tray the motors of desire that drive and consume their plots, and they also lay bare
the nature of narration as a form of human desire” (61). We suggest that Kafka’s story
questions this anthropocentric paradigm at the same time as it defamiliarizes read-
ers’ folk psychology by using a non-human, innate behavioral program as the trigger
of the narrative dynamics. Further, as hypothesized above, empathetic perspective-
taking is crucial in bringing about this defamiliarizing effect on readers: the audience
does not observe the animal’s behavior from the outside, as in the experiment with
82   Lars Bernaerts, Marco Caracciolo, Luc Herman, and Bart Vervaeck

the Sphex wasp, but is encouraged to adopt its perspective by sharing the animal’s
captivation in burrowing. Via narrative empathy, literature can provide a convincing
first-person account of the phenomenology of animal life. What makes this account
convincing is that it resonates with readers’ presuppositions and beliefs about ani-
mal cognition, including of course scientific knowledge. However, such knowledge is
not produced by the text but only brought into play by its interpretation. Indeed, it is
doubtful that a reader could arrive at this interpretation of Kafka’s story without be-
ing familiar with Konrad Lorenz’s and Nikolaas Tinbergen’s ethological theories (or
similar accounts of innate behavior in animals). In the next section we will focus on
a different aspect of the nexus of literature and scientific knowledge: we will see that
literary texts can didactically convey a scientific worldview.

It-Narration in Children’s Literature

One of the central dichotomies used in defining human nature is the distinction be-
tween object and subject.8 As subjects, humans are basically different from objects.
And vice versa: objects never become human subjects. However, there are many ways
in which objects are humanized. On a social and cultural level, things often function
as markers of social class and cultural status, as Pierre Bourdieu, Jean Baudrillard,
Arjun Appadurai, and many others have shown. Objects also symbolize psychologi-
cal identity (Bacal and Newman); think only of expensive cars, fashionable iPads,
and other objects that define the owner and thereby acquire subjective value. Sub-
jects use objects not only to define themselves, but also to think about themselves
(Turkle). Philosophically speaking, thinking is always about objects in the etymo-
logical sense of things that “throw themselves in front of us,” and science defines itself
in close alliance with the objects it studies (Daston, Biographies 2). According to the
“distributed cognition” hypothesis (Hutchins), thinking is even done through objects:
pen and paper, navigation systems in ships and aircraft, computers, diagrams, etc. In
that sense too, subjects (including scientists) describe themselves in terms of objects.
Things that Talk (2008), a collection of essays on objects, indicates that this intercon-
nectivity is omnipresent and challenges “Kantian categories of objectivity and sub-
jectivity” (24).
Less ubiquitous is the form of interaction between objects and subjects we want
to study, namely the process whereby objects become speaking subjects, most often
as intradiegetic narrators. Probably, most people will think that process is limited
to fanciful forms of fiction, such as fairy tales—for instance the speaking tin soldier
or drop of water in H. C. Andersen’s tales, or the living dolls in E. T. A. Hoffmann’s
Nussknacker und Mausekönig. Though talking objects may seem unusual, they have
in fact been quite popular in modern fiction since the Age of Enlightenment. In a
section entitled “Object Narratives in the Eighteenth Century,” Jan Alber convinc-
ingly argues that “‘the speaking object’ was gradually being naturalized during the
eighteenth century” (“Diachronic” 50). The so-called circulation novels (Flint) tried
to come to terms with the newly formed capitalist circulation of goods that turned
humans into objects.
 Non-Human Narrators   83

More generally, “[a]utobiographies of inanimate things” proliferated when the

novel came into existence, and object narration “shadowed its senior colleague, the
novel, for well over a century” (Lamb xvi). This long life of object narratives is charted
in The Secret Life of Things (Blackwell), which provides an in-depth analysis of the
immensely popular object autobiography of the eighteenth and nineteenth century.
The Victorian novel was so obsessed with objects that even when these things did
not actually begin to talk, they still carried a heavy symbolic load, metaphorically
and metonymically alluding to social class, cultural history, and philosophical ideas
(Freedgood). As such, “the prose of things” (Wall) reveals—and in that sense talks
about—crucial aspects of the social, cultural, and economic context surrounding the
prose text.
Talking things thus seem to be natural in at least two senses of the word; they are
an aspect of modern fiction, and they are quite widespread. Moreover, these objects
are usually quite ordinary. At first sight, there is nothing exceptional about a drop of
water or a lump of coal. The whole problem of stories with narrators as ordinary as
these is therefore related to the following question: how do you turn these everyday
things into exciting, interesting, and successful stories that have readers asking for
more? In narratological terminology, this raises the question of the narrative’s tellabil-
ity (see Ryan). Is having an it-narrator sufficient for a story to be interesting, or is it
rather a complicating factor?
At first sight, tellability is less problematic in fanciful narratives such as fairy tales
than in scientifically oriented stories that attempt to elucidate how nature works by
passing the word to such natural things as a drop of water and a piece of flint. In what
follows we focus on a scientifically oriented story of this sort, namely Annie Carey’s
Autobiographies (1870). Boel Westin has demonstrated that, along with animal narra-
tion, it-narratives were quite popular in eighteenth-century children’s literature. The
typical object narrative was “a moral tale” (49) that used imagination to present “a
new kind of individuality, a humanisation” (45). Of particular relevance to the Carey
collection is her remark that these stories “are often composed as narrative lessons
in natural science” (51) and often illustrate Darwin’s theories, which were becoming
increasingly popular at the time.
First we discuss the stories’ defamiliarization, and then we look at the degree of
empathy they induce. After that, we deal with narration and characterization, fol-
lowed by focalization and consciousness evocation. Our approach culminates in a
short assessment of the ideological and normative aspects of the autobiographies.

Defamiliarization: The Strangeness of Common Things

The full title of Annie Carey’s Autobiographies is Autobiographies of A Lump of

Coal; A Grain of Salt; A Drop of Water; A Bit of Old Iron; A Piece of Flint. The ob-
jects mentioned are invariably presented in the stories as ordinary, common, hardly
worth noticing. This presentation takes shape through the dialogue between the talk-
ing objects and four children: fourteen-year-old Adelaide, twelve-year-old Arthur,
eleven-year-old Edith, and “little” Lilly (13). The extradiegetic narrator who offers the
84   Lars Bernaerts, Marco Caracciolo, Luc Herman, and Bart Vervaeck

dialogue to the reader is only rarely heard. The children see the grain of salt as “such
a common thing” (25) and the piece of flint as “nothing more . . . than a piece of com-
mon flint” (113; emphasis original). This apparent lack of interest is the starting point
of the it-narration: the object begins its story to show how deceptive this ordinary
appearance actually is.
The procedure by which narrative interest is aroused is the same in the five sto-
ries: everyday, natural things and events are turned into something unexpected and
mysterious, and therefore something that warrants attention. The bit of iron calls its
power “most remarkable” (102) and goes on to talk about the effect of its being re-
heated and gradually cooled as “almost stranger still” (103).
The vocabulary used to turn ordinary things into exciting and exceptional story
elements prominently features words like “strange,” “exceptional,” “wonderful,” and
“unsuspected.” The children are invariably taken in and seem to be listening to some
detective story rather than to a scientific and educational exposé. When the iron says
that it is pure only in other worlds, the children exclaim “in a breath”: “What can you
mean?” (91); and when it talks about magnetism, the children are enthralled: “You
have been a true magnet to us,” says Edith (112). The three master functions of an in-
teresting story proposed by Sternberg (Expositional Modes) can thus easily be found
in these seemingly dry scientific talks: the it-narrators create suspense, which elicits
the children’s curiosity and surprise.
While unnatural narratives are often said to be processed by the reader via some
form of naturalization (see Alber, “Impossible Storyworlds”), Carey’s natural science
stories turn nature itself into something unfamiliar and strange, and thereby acquire
narrative interest. This implies a moral, namely that there is nothing more interesting
than nature and life itself. The drop of water formulates this lesson explicitly: “You
will ever find that the realities of life are far more wonderful than any thing that your
fancy can possibly imagine” (56).

Empathy, Friendship and Other Things

The question we would now like to turn to is to what extent the it-narrators be-
come human subjects. Putting things simply, one might say that the talking objects
in Carey’s stories remain objects. They may describe themselves by means of meta-
phors taken from the human realm, but they always remain the things they are. For
instance, they do not go to school, they have no parents, they do not fall in love or die.
Their humanoid characteristics are largely restricted to the domain of metaphoric
language.
The central human metaphor used by the objects is friendship. In the story of the
lump of coal, the two seem interchangeable. When heat works on coal, “he destroys
all my existing family relationships, so much so, that my elements are obliged to seek
out new friendships, which they do among themselves, but especially with the oxygen
of the atmosphere” (20). Water drops “keep together” as long as they are “quite warm”;
“but no sooner do we get chilly than we begin to separate.” To which Arthur replies,
“There comes a coolness between friends” (69).
 Non-Human Narrators   85

Other metaphors link the objects with the human world: “the sound of a little
crack” made by the coal on the fire, is perceived by the children as a quiet form of
laughter (10); gems are valued highly, because “more of our conceptions and desires
are gratified and realized” by gems than by ordinary stones (116). This procedure can
be linked with the social and psychological value of objects mentioned above: they
symbolize and embody human longings and ideas.
Human metaphors are not only used to describe objects. The reverse procedure
(humans are described in terms of objects) is applied too. For instance, Arthur is a bit
impulsive, which the piece of flint describes as “striking fire”: “Gently, sir: I am, my-
self, generally believed to strike fire pretty easily, but I really think you out-do a piece
of flint in your readiness to send forth sparks” (135). The humor and irony underpin-
ning these metaphors can be found quite often in the stories, for instance when the
salt makes the children “thirsty for knowledge” (36), when the drop of water speaks
“in liquid tones” (53), and when the iron turns out to have “a rather rough and rusty
voice” (89).
Apart from the metaphoric interaction between objects and humans, there is
little emotional empathy between the characters in Carey’s stories. The children do
not show any emotional involvement with the objects, which, in turn, do not appear
to be human. It seems as if such a limited form of humanization might run counter to
the educational and scientific aspirations of the text.
Apart from the metaphoric interaction between objects and humans, there is lit-
tle emotional empathy between the characters in Carey’s stories. The children do not
show any emotional involvement with the objects, which, in turn, do not appear to be
human. It seems as if such a limited form of humanization might run counter to the
educational and scientific aspirations of the text. Indeed, if the relative lack of empa-
thy between the characters and objects functions as a model for readers, it might well
prevent them from developing the minimal amount of empathy required to surrender
to the didactic aim of the stories. However, such a potential effect must be considered
with reference to the generic frames at hand.

Naturalization, Narration, Characterization

Genre is one of the four levels Monika Fludernik (Towards 347ff.) singles out in
her discussion of the ways in which we naturalize narratives. Two generic frames are
explicitly mobilized in Carey’s stories. First there is the autobiography, a very popular
genre in the nineteenth century that was regarded as the truthful, almost scientific
rendering of facts about an individual’s life. Indeed, as Laura Marcus has argued, au-
tobiography was at that time placed at the intersection “between literature and sci-
ence” (56).
The second generic frame, namely the fairy tale, seems to contradict the first, as
fairy tales are not exactly truthful or scientific. However, its confrontation with the
autobiography follows the logic of defamiliarization explained above: the almost sci-
entific autobiography of natural things is at least as interesting as the fantastic fairy
tale. Thus, the lump of coal says to the children, “Meanwhile, as you all seem to wish
86   Lars Bernaerts, Marco Caracciolo, Luc Herman, and Bart Vervaeck

for a fairy tale, I will, if you please, tell you one which I think is as wonderful as any
fairy tale can be, and that is—‘My own history.’ Now these children were in the habit
of reading a great many fairy tales; therefore they were not much surprised at hear-
ing a voice from the Coal as many grown-up people would have been” (10). The fairy
tale naturalizes the unnatural, the autobiography turns the common and the natural
into something fantastic and thrilling. Together, they suggest that science, reality, and
truth are far more exciting than fiction and fantasy. In order to get across, science’s
tellability does not seem to require a great deal of readerly empathy with the charac-
ters or the narrator.
As already mentioned, the extradiegetic voice is only rarely heard. The narrator
never uses the I-form (i.e., he remains invisible) and makes very little effort to de-
scribe the setting, let alone to tell a story full of exhilarating events and round char-
acters. In fact, the first paragraphs of every story provide a very short and simple ex-
tradiegetic introduction to the act of intradiegetic narration performed by the talking
object.
In addition, in these texts diegesis and storytelling make way for mimesis and
dialogue. The five stories are made up completely of questions and answers exchanged
between the children and the talking things. Both parties ask questions and formulate
answers. The narrative situation is obviously that of a lesson or of a classical, Platonic
dialogue (the children are well brought up and benefit from a classical education; they
read, amongst others, Homer [45] and Pliny [123]). Both narrative situations are di-
dactic in form and intent, and aim at enhancing insight and knowledge. Storytelling
is subordinated to instructive dialogue, narrative progression to scientific progress,
and literature to science.
As to characterization, we learn very little about the character of Carey’s chil-
dren and about the time and place where they live; “here in England” is just about as
specific as the setting gets (91). In contrast, we learn a lot about the character of the
objects, which is invariably complex and compound, in that it consists of many differ-
ent elements, e.g., “carbon, hydrogen, sulphur” in the case of coal (14).
Character is a central and explicit issue, not in the sense of narrative agency,
but rather in the sense of scientific definition and characterization. The central terms
used in the characterization of the objects (such as their color and shape) are of-
ten italicized or placed between quotation marks to indicate the importance of these
characteristics. In addition, characterization is meditated upon, e.g., when the bit of
old iron explains, “But in judging of the character of a thing or of a person, you should
consider not only what they appear to be at the present moment, but what they may
be capable by proper treatment of becoming in the future” (95).

Focalization and Consciousness: Knowing, Feeling, and Serving

The most obviously humanoid characteristic of Carey’s it-narrators is their self-

consciousness, indispensable to any autobiography. The structure of the it-stories is
broadly identical in the five cases: the objects talk about their history and their rela-
tions, and then go on to discuss their individual nature and their present usage. In
their exposés they show a vast knowledge of their field, but they also realize that they
 Non-Human Narrators   87

do not know everything. They often use phrases of uncertainty such as “I believe” (34)
and “at least not that I am aware of ” (27). This is not a sign of weakness. It reflects
the nature of knowledge and of science, which are always progressing and will never
reach complete, God-like omniscience. The collection preface claims that “knowledge
is progressive” and that the facts given in the stories may in future turn out to be in-
correct, “but this is unavoidable” (iv).
Science therefore does not deal in omniscience, and neither do the it-narrators
or the children. Central to the aims of science as presented in this collection and to
the aim of this book is sustaining and enhancing interest and curiosity: like the chil-
dren, Carey’s readers should be encouraged to try and learn more every day. The use
of dialogue as the central means of consciousness evocation perfectly ties in with this:
as a discussion, it ensures interest and at the same time makes clear that knowledge is
partial and provisional.
As to focalization, Carey’s stories hardly mention the objects’ sensory percep-
tions—which again indicates their low degree of humanization—but, in return, they
provide some insight into the likes and dislikes of the it-narrators. They are irritated
by human actions that show disregard of their essential nature. For instance, the lump
of coal is displeased when people hit it to break it down (21). But they are pleased
when humans help them to fulfill their natural calling, for instance when the children
place the drop of water in the sun so that it may turn into vapor. In helping objects,
humans not only help nature, but also turn its objects into tools that help them, e.g.,
to produce energy. Time and again, the objects proclaim that they are at their best and
happiest when they succeed in serving humans. The bit of old iron sums it up nicely:
“It is my great desire and constant tendency to unite with my friend oxygen, . . . while
by so doing I can in any way benefit your race” (101).
The children’s experience is changed drastically through the it-narrations. They
learn to look upon so-called ordinary things as miracles of nature. “It is your eyes that
are touched,” the grain of salt says when Lilly perceives its extraordinary form, “and
you see me more correctly” (26). Again, the objects have a serving role: they serve to
educate the perceptions and the minds of the children.

Ideology: Normative and Informative

Carey’s stories show that objects obey “laws so wonderful that your greatest men
gladly spend their nights, as well as days, in trying to understand them” (54). When
science lays bare the fundamental order of nature, it enables humans to use objects in
the proper way, thereby enabling these objects to become themselves and to realize
their full potential. In this way, a perfect harmony is created between nature, things,
and humans. That harmony may be called divine, as it shows the godly order under-
pinning nature. The drop of water explains the movement of various layers of water
by appealing to “the great Creator [who] first divided the waters from the waters, and
will continue so to do till He shall bid them cease” (73).
A little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing. Or, as the iron says, “Knowledge
that is not clear is of no use in the world” (102). Knowledge and information must
show the path to order, otherwise they are false and unreliable. This path may be pro-
88   Lars Bernaerts, Marco Caracciolo, Luc Herman, and Bart Vervaeck

visional, as we mentioned earlier, but the general objective is clear. One final distinc-
tion between subjects and objects is important here. Humans live for a short while,
whereas natural things like water and coal are continually transformed and being
reborn. Because we live for such a short time, we may not see their eternity. But in
nature everything goes in cycles. “Nothing is ever really lost—nothing ever actually
destroyed,” the lump of coal says (23). The old iron agrees: “In any case and in every
case I know I shall not be destroyed” (102). In the short span of human life there is a
politically correct translation of this kind of continuity, and that is liberal conserva-
tism. The grain of salt states, “I am a Liberal-Conservative, one of the best kind, for I
do not preserve bad things, but good ones, by helping them to keep their spirit, their
life, their goodness” (43; emphasis original). Human politics are harmonized with
natural laws. This ideological and large-scale reconciliation of subject and object may
be what educational it-narratives of Carey’s type are all about. In contrast to the sto-
ries by Kafka and Cortázar, these narratives do not call into question the reassuring
ideology of progress and its anthropocentric bias.

Conclusion

In the previous pages we have encountered quite a few strange narrators: a talking
lump of coal, a portrait pondering the mystery of human emotions, a man metamor-
phosed into a salamander, a cosmic entity as old as the universe, a mole-like creature
confined to the depths of its burrow, and so on. What all these characters have in
common is that—at least according to the scientific worldview of modern Western
culture—they are impossible narrators. Yet talking objects and animals are less inher-
ently paradoxical than it may appear at first. On the one hand, the pervasiveness of
these figures seems to derive from—and reflect—humans’ evolved tendency to per-
sonify the natural, non-human world. On the other hand, the conventions underlying
literature as a socio-cultural practice can naturalize non-human narrators, making
them less unusual for those familiar with the relevant conventions: for instance, we
have seen that object narrators were fairly common in eighteenth- and nineteenth-
century literature, and may not have seemed particularly strange to contemporary
audiences (and especially to readers of specific genres, such as children’s literature).
By contrast, other stories foreground the paradoxical nature of non-human narration
much more explicitly: the experiences they provide to their readers are unsettling
because they question the culturally drawn boundaries of human “nature” by casting
new light on our conventions and values.
Having been put to a variety of uses in the course of literary history, non-hu-
man narration offers an excellent example of Sternberg’s “Proteus Principle” (see
Sternberg, “Proteus”), the idea that no direct correlation can exist between narrative
form and function: the function of a technique—together with its effect on readers—
depends on a number of factors including the audience’s expectations as well as the
context in which a particular narrative device is employed. Along similar lines, non-
human narration can both support an anthropocentric ideology (in Carey’s Autobi-
 Non-Human Narrators   89

ographies) and challenge anthropocentric worldviews by gesturing towards a dimen-

sion of animal experience that is largely unknown to human readers (in Cortázar’s
and Kafka’s short stories). In order to do justice to the Protean aspect of non-human
narration, we have explored the psychological mechanisms that, to different degrees
and in various combinations, underlie readers’ responses to this narrative device. Our
central proposition has been that the versatility and complexity of non-human nar-
ration result from a double dialectic of empathy and defamiliarization (on the one
hand), human and non-human experientiality (on the other). First of all, the audi-
ence may adopt the non-human narrator’s perspective via narrative empathy, thereby
learning to see the world—and in particular their own, human world—through the
narrator’s defamiliarizing eyes. Animal and object narrators are defamiliarizing for
partially different reasons: talking animals seem to challenge the idea that animals
do not possess linguistic abilities—an idea that is central to cultural representations
of human uniqueness (see Schepartz). Object narrators collapse the cognitively basic
distinction between animate and inanimate entities (see Johnson). It could be argued
that because of the cognitive basicness of this distinction, object narrators are likely
to be more defamiliarizing than animal narrators. However, in our view it is difficult
to make this claim a priori: the extent to which a defamiliarizing effect is produced
on readers depends on their predispositions as well as on the specific strategies and
meanings brought into play by the text. Both animal and object narrators have great
potential for defamiliarization, and this is why we decided to bring them together in a
single category, “non-human narrators.” Combined with narrative empathy, defamil-
iarization can generate narrative interest by producing startling insights: as our case
studies have shown, it can expand the audience’s understanding of the physical world
(in the Carey text, the object narrators call attention to invisible natural forces and
phenomena), animal cognition (Kafka’s story revolves around the burrowing instinct
of its protagonist), and the text-reader interaction itself (Cortázar’s “Axolotl” lays bare
the workings of narrative empathy).
Through this process, non-human narration may push back the limits of human
experientiality—the audience’s repertoire of beliefs and values—by inviting them to
engage with characters and experiences that they construe as strange and “unnatural,”
but which are in fact the products of the human creativity of their authors—and of
readers’ own imaginings and interpretations. Human and non-human experientiality
are always caught up in a dialectic, so that their boundaries are constantly renegoti-
ated as a result of complex historical and cultural dynamics.

Endnotes
1. This means we are excluding non-human focalizers, such as the dog in Paul Auster’s Timbuktu
(1999), from our corpus. See Williams Nelles’s essay on animal focalization.
2. See Crompthout.
3. See in particular Calvino’s “The Spiral” (137–51). For the terminology, see Herman and Ver-
vaeck’s Handbook of Narrative Analysis 75–76.
90   Lars Bernaerts, Marco Caracciolo, Luc Herman, and Bart Vervaeck

4. On the relationship between art and knowledge, see John. Our argument does not deny the pos-
sibility of a two-way exchange between literature and cognitive science. However, in our view this
exchange should build on a recognition of the distinctiveness of literary practices, with their focus
on the qualitative, evaluative, interpretive, historical dimensions of people’s engagement with the
world. Until such dimensions can be fully reconciled with the scientific method and outlook,
the gap between literary experience and scientific knowledge will seem constitutive rather than
incidental.
5. In his commentary on Being and Time, Hubert Dreyfus writes that, for Heidegger, “our under-
standing [i.e., Verstehen] of our being is never fully accessible since (1) it is embodied in skills and
(2) we dwell in our understanding like fish in water” (35).
6. For an overview of critical approaches to Kafka’s “The Burrow,” see the bibliography in Gray et al.
7. As pointed out above, our reading is meant to complement, rather than replace, the more tradi-
tional, “existentialist” interpretation of Kafka’s short story—according to which the narrator gives
voice to a recognizably human anxiety.
8. Several studies suggest that infants as young as five months old grasp the distinction between
people and objects. See, e.g., Johnson.

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