H U M a N I M A L I A 11:1

Brian McCormack

Narrative, Meaning and Multispecies Ethical Ontologies

Introduction. Critical posthumanism, by problematizing the notion of a strict binary
division between human and nonhuman, throws into question a great deal of
assumptions about both human and nonhuman animal meaningful experience.
Meaning is a concept traditionally — in Cartesian metaphysics, for example — thought
to mark the emergence of the human from the nonhuman.1 Although few theorists
today would subscribe to his metaphysics explicitly, Descartes’s substance dualism
plays a formative role in conceptualizations of human/nonhuman distinction. The
reflexive ability to think about one’s thoughts, via language, purportedly allows for the
kind of abstract thinking that engenders autonomous human decision-making. As a
thinking being able to place oneself at a distance from the compulsions of the body, the
emotions, and the immediate environment, the human is said to be free to act in
accordance with rational thought. This relationship between thought, language, and
autonomous action is deemed constitutive of the human and set off against a
deterministic, mechanistic, uncomprehending, and ultimately meaningless nature.
Critical posthumanism troubles both sides of this binary, questioning the rational and
autonomous image of the human while arguing that plenty of nonhuman animals
experience their lives in ways that are meaningful for them.2 To say that meaning-
making is ubiquitous far beyond the human makes a concept of meaning highly
relevant to formulations of multispecies ethical relationships.

An analogous extension of the concept of narrative, however, might seem too highly
suggestive of a uniquely human linguistic ability, or a uniquely human capability for
complex symbolic thought, to do much work for multispecies ethics.3 A notion of
nonhuman animal narrative subjectivity seems inextricable from charges of
anthropomorphism, inaccuracy, and misrepresentation. If such a conceptualization of
narrative cannot address these critical concerns, it may ultimately undermine its own
potential ethical utility, serving not only to make nonhuman animals too human-like,
but also diverting attention away from species-specific forms of meaning-making and
the ethical implications they hold. Yet claiming narrative as a constitutively human
capability implies a further claim about human identity that must, in light of
contemporary critiques of humanism, be placed under critical scrutiny. Trying to isolate
the purely human in relation to the concept of narrative leads to a number of complex
and compounding questions from a critical posthumanist perspective: Do nonhuman
animals narrate? Or is narrative perhaps better described as something humans do
 65

which has analogues in the meaning-making practices of other species? What difference
does a notion of narrative make that a carefully theorized concept of meaning-making
does not? What kind of relationship between human and nonhuman does one’s concept
of narrative reflect? How do humanistic, artistic, and scientific forms of knowledge and
their disciplinary mixtures, blind spots, and overlaps get mobilized or elided in these
debates? What happens when concerns for precision and accuracy in the portrayal and
understanding of nonhuman lives clash with ethical strategies desperately needed to
counter ongoing, intensifying crises of ecological devastation, nonhuman animal
suffering, and mass extinction?

The first part of this essay brings together some important reflections on nonhuman
animal narrative from within recent environmental humanities scholarship that work to
reposition the concept of narrative in relation to an ontology that moves beyond
human/nonhuman and nature/culture dualisms. Perhaps the most important
articulation of such an ontology for a concept of nonhuman animal narrative is that
offered by Val Plumwood. Efforts to reposition the concept of narrative following
Plumwood also draw heavily on Jakob von Uexküll’s theoretical biology and his
understanding of meaning-making processes. I draw out and develop some key points
of connection between nonhuman animal narrative and an Uexküllian concept of
meaning in more detail than has been done so far. Attempts to extend a notion of
narrative beyond the human raise difficult questions of representational accuracy. To
address these questions, I turn in the second part of the essay to recent narratological
literature on nonhuman animal narrative, drawing mainly on David Herman’s efforts to
outline a narratology beyond the human. Herman’s investigations lead from
considerations of representation in fiction to animal agents in life writing and beyond,
contextualizing the question of nonhuman animal narrative in relation to Plumwood’s
dialogical ontology and Uexküll’s Umwelt theory. Plumwood and Herman show how
articulating a cultural ontology that recognizes the human as part of a broader ecology
of selves entails careful experimentation with forms of narrative beyond the human.

Dialogical Ethical Ontology, Meaning, and Narrative Beyond the Human. In her
essay “Nature in the Active Voice,” Val Plumwood argues that overcoming Cartesian
dualism means re-animating matter by embracing a view of the natural world as
creative and agentic: “In re-animating, we become open to hearing sound as voice,
seeing movement as action, adaptation as intelligence and dialogue, co-incidence and
chaos as the creativity of matter. The difference here is intentionality, the ability to use
an intentional vocabulary. Above all, it is permission to depict nature in the active
voice, the domain of agency” (125-126). Describing intentionality beyond the human
means extending and in some cases reconceptualizing key terms such as meaning and

Brian McCormack -- Narrative, Meaning and Multispecies Ethical Ontologies

66

agency, and it is in this context that Plumwood also mentions narrative: “We need to
rethink concepts of meaning and accident in relation to the non-human world, and to
question the reductive and human-centered frameworks that depict places in nature,
often rich in narrative, as the product of meaningless coincidence” (124). Plumwood’s
critique of Cartesian dualism, as well as her call to conceptualize forms of cognition and
communication beyond the human, echo insights put forth by Uexküll nearly a century
ago, when he argued forcefully against the Cartesian paradigm in biology. In this
section I describe how some of Uexküll’s key ideas — his critical account of the
influence of Cartesian dualism in biology, his Umwelt concept, the complex play of
openness and opacity characterizing organismic relations, and his dynamic view of
meaning-making — provide support for or otherwise resonate with Plumwood’s
approach.

Modern science, from Uexküll’s perspective, marginalizes certain kinds of meaningful

experience, particularly those which have a corporeal dimension, and posits far too
absolute a distinction between human and nonhuman. Uexküll’s theory of Umwelten is
meant to counter the tendency to place organisms within a Cartesian spatial grid, a
single world perceived the same way by all. Uexküll saw this tendency as an
anthropocentric residue caused by inappropriately applying models from physics to
biology (“An Introduction” 109). Humans under the influence of Cartesian thought dis-
articulate space from their bodies. Rather than space being something that is
experienced dynamically and bodily, Cartesian thought imposes an impersonal
understanding of space, stretching out in all directions and decentered from an
experiencing subject. Objects in Cartesian space are to be comprehended primarily in
terms of their extension, and all other qualities, now deemed secondary, are treated
with suspicion due to their association with unreliable sensory experience. This way of
describing phenomena is fine for physics, Uexküll argues, but it is absolutely wrong for
biology because it excludes from the beginning the entire perceptual side of life, which
should constitute virtually the whole of biology’s subject matter: “The consequence of
this was that scientists began to deal with the world in the way a deaf person deals with
a street organ. The turning of the roller, the vibration of the tongues and the aerial
waves, these things he can establish — but the tune stays hidden from him” (“The New
Concept” 114). Uexküll wants to shift the inquiry into life away from a perspective that
emphasizes outside forces acting on matter to elicit a reaction. For him, biology should
be the science which asks how organisms perceive and respond to the world as it exists
for them: “Every animal is surrounded with different things, the dog is surrounded by
dog things and the dragonfly is surrounded by dragonfly things” (117). Such a view is
incompatible with Cartesian metaphysics, which conceives of human/nonhuman

Humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies

Volume 11, Number 1 (Fall 2019)
 67

distinction as an absolute difference between two fundamental types of substance. For

Descartes, everything on Earth with the exception of the human mind is made up of the
same inert matter, whose fundamental quality is extension in space. Human minds, in
contrast, are neither inert nor extended in space. Human thought is alone among
worldly phenomena in that it has the capacity to act without first being acted upon.
Nonhuman animals, from this perspective, would lack any subjective dimension
capable of anchoring agency.

Uexküll argues that such dualist, mechanistic accounts of behavior should be replaced
by laws analogous to those governing melody, harmony, and counterpoint in music.
Each organism has its own Umwelt, akin to a space or stage on which a life is played out
(A Foray 144). It is built up by the sense organs, which help set the dimensions of this
stage. Uexküll describes the Umwelt of an organism as being like a soap bubble that
perpetually surrounds it. The soap bubble has a double significance, as Brett Buchanan
explains (23). On one hand, it delimits the boundaries of a given organism’s Umwelt —
it constitutes the world as that organism perceives and lives it. On the other hand, it
represents a boundary for the observer: it is a reminder that an organism’s perceptual
world is never entirely available for inspection. Yet most organisms are also imbricated
in complex relationships with an environment and with other organisms throughout
their lives. As much as the concept of Umwelt implies enclosure of an organism in its
own meaningful world, it also implies that those worlds consist of meaningful
relationships. Uexküll’s writings suggest that meaning must be understood in terms of
relations among organisms within specific ecological contexts. Uexküll defines behavior
as a combination of perception (Merken) and action (Wirken) that can only be
comprehended by understanding the role of meaning in living systems as what ties
perception and action together. He argues that perception and action are connected in a
kind of feedback loop called the functional cycle: “In every functional cycle, the same
perception-effect process is repeated. Indeed, one can speak of functional cycles as
meaning cycles whose task is determined to be the utilization of carriers of meaning” (A
Foray 150). As an organism gains experience in their Umwelt, the resources they are able
to bring to new experiences are affected accordingly: “Since every action begins with
the production of a perception mark and ends with the impression of an effect mark on
the same carrier of meaning, one can speak of a functional cycle, which connects the
carrier of meaning with the subject” (145). The Umwelt conveys the idea that the world
as experienced from the point of view of the organism depends overwhelmingly on that
organism’s physiology and what that physiology allows for. Every species gathers,
unifies, and engages with stimuli in their own species-specific ways. This process
engenders a wide variety of Umwelten, ranging from a single functional cycle processing
only one stimulus to a multitude of interweaving functional cycles.

Brian McCormack -- Narrative, Meaning and Multispecies Ethical Ontologies

68

Every organism has its Umwelt, yet the shape or style of each Umwelt can vary
dramatically among species, and in many cases among individuals. How can such
dramatic variation be expressed within the common conceptual space of the Umwelt?
According to Uexküll, an organism’s behavior is directed by what can become
meaningful for them. Meaning depends on physiology, personal history, and relations
with other organisms and objects in the wider environment. Meaningful experience
only makes sense within this self-relational context, which would seem to make
hierarchical divisions among forms of life suspiciously abstract. There does not seem to
be any common ground between two Umwelten that could be isolated or de-
contextualized in order to serve as a basis for ranking behaviors or capabilities. Uexküll
illustrates this incommensurability by contrasting how a human and their dog
companion both relate to their shared home. If you saw your home and the objects it
contains from your dog companion’s perspective, you would most likely conclude that
this is an incomplete description of your house, because a dog’s experience of what is
significant would omit too many things that have significance in the house for a human.
Uexküll points out that a human’s description of a forest would also be likely to leave
out most of what is significant in the forest for other organisms. Uexküll does not say
this, but it is implicit that a dog who lives in a house with humans would also have a
perspective on the house that would not be exhaustively describable from a human
point of view. A dog who makes themselves at home in a human house would have
their own familiar objects, routines, affective attachments and ways of orienting
themselves within that space. To place the differences in meaningful relations formed
within the house by a human and a dog into some kind of more/less hierarchical order,
therefore, would be to ignore crucial self-referential, corporeal, and experiential
dimensions of meaning. Human language in particular and human meaning-making in
general are often described as unique in that they allow access to more of the great
many different sorts of phenomena which can be experienced. Human meaning-making
enables perhaps more features of phenomena, more connections among these
phenomena, and more variable responses than the meaning-making systems of other
animals. The perceived differences in scale that separate human and nonhuman
meaning-making can make any comparability between human and nonhuman
experience seem marginal and misleading. Narrative can be difficult to accept beyond
the human, since it is so clearly bound up with forms of language, memory, and
cultural tradition that appear indelibly human. However, beyond this radical,
linguistically mediated expansion of meaning-making that purportedly distinguishes
the human, a facility with meaning-making often described somewhat vaguely as
“richness,” Uexküll suggests that what are common among forms of life are self-

Humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies

Volume 11, Number 1 (Fall 2019)
 69

referential, dynamic, relational processes that ground and give rise to diverse forms or
styles of meaning-making. Paying close attention to these fundamental, general, and
widespread aspects of meaning helps to enable a different ontological view of
human/nonhuman animal similarity and difference than one informed by Cartesian
dualism. This ontological shift allows for a different perspective on the concept of
narrative.

Uexküll suggests that what affects an organism and what that organism affects are
entangled, and taking this entanglement seriously is instructive. Individuals are never
fully separable from the relationships in which they participate. Rigidly demarcating
perception from action or stimulus from response, while often analytically necessary, is
always at least partially reductive, de-contextualizing, and incomplete. Uexküll
suggests that the problem of meaning is not adequately conceived as a question of how
a stimulus might impinge upon the senses of an organism. This way of framing the
problem cuts off much of the context in which lived experience unfolds. It creates the
illusion that an organism can ever encounter an object in isolation or in a neutral,
unmotivated state. A stimulus does not dictate an organism’s behavior in most cases.
Stimuli must be noticed, they are often sought out, and organisms must respond to or
interpret them in some way. Precisely what it means to notice or interpret a stimulus
varies from organism to organism, and in many cases how a stimulus is received
depends on what other activities the organism is engaged in. The
organism/environment relationship is more sophisticated and deserves richer
descriptions than strict mechanism and linear causality can provide. The
organism/environment relation is best described in dynamic terms: “Every subject spins
out, like the spider’s threads, its relations to certain qualities of things and weaves them
into a solid web, which carries its existence” (A Foray 53). Each organism comprises a
series of dynamic relations with those aspects of the external world that are meaningful
for them. An organism can survive as long as these relations continue to be made
successfully. Differences among organisms amount to variations on the kinds of
relational threads that continually connect self and non-self.

One of the most important of these relational threads in which meaning-making is

situated is an organism’s relationship to its past and future. What processes are already
underway that might condition or color an encounter between organism and
environment? Uexküll argues that organisms do not encounter objects in a contextual
void, as if there were no dynamic, complex web of relationships — to self and the body,
to relevant environmental features, to past experience and future needs — through
which the same object may be experienced in many different ways. Uexküll gives the
example of a hermit crab reacting to the presence of a sea anemone (A Foray 95). The

Brian McCormack -- Narrative, Meaning and Multispecies Ethical Ontologies

70

crab will behave toward the sea anemone differently, according to what needs are most
pressing for the crab. The pressing needs come first, in other words, not the anemone.
Those needs are a relation to future behavior that drives present action. The present
action is likewise informed by the recent past (whether the crab has eaten recently, for
example). These relations to external phenomena emerge, in turn, from a dynamic of
self-relation. Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, in their collaborative
endeavours to develop the concept of autopoiesis, see living as a process in which
organisms are unified sets of relations engaged in the act of re-creating their own
components (Autopoeisis; Tree). Autopoiesis is the dynamic process of self-maintenance
by way of self-creation that gives an organism autonomy as a unified whole, and which
also gives it autonomy from any deterministic, passive relation to an outside
environment. In the process of autopoiesis, organism and environment are both in
constant states of transformation. Meaning arises within such a self-relational context. A
living system is an ongoing process that, by maintaining its organizing relations,
constantly alters its structure. It is a dynamic construction of the relation between inside
and outside which, through its relationship to itself, provides a context within which
the world becomes accessible. This relation is a dynamic rather than static structural
understanding of an organism. An organism can also be conceived in terms of multiple,
ephemeral selves at different levels of biological organization, as biosemiotician Jesper
Hoffmeyer explains (26). Self-relation does not occur only at the level of the holistic
organism. An organism is an ongoing production of self comprised of other selves. The
term “self” points to this dynamic relationship, which need not entail consciousness in
any straightforward or familiar sense of that term. What is categorized as human
consciousness is one self-relational process among others that together comprise human
meaningful experience. Whether or not other organisms have analogous processes to
human consciousness should not be the only basis for thinking selfhood.

I refer to an Uexküllian notion of meaning as process-based because for Uexküll

meaning emerges via dynamic, temporal, context-specific, self-referential, recursive,
relational processes. Because these relational processes may manifest in radically
different ways across species, an ethical theory that takes them into account must focus
on developing open-ended, communicative, and context-sensitive conceptual
frameworks capable of promoting care across particularity and difference. Plumwood
argues that philosophers have for the most part neglected specific ethical relationships
between humans and nonhumans, limiting themselves to debating the applicability of
abstract concepts such as intrinsic value and moral considerability. As a result, they
avoid the task of developing an adequate ethical response to the nonhuman world.
Responding adequately to the nonhuman, Plumwood argues, means developing

Humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies

Volume 11, Number 1 (Fall 2019)
 71

communicative ethical frameworks that include them as participants. It means

articulating alternative notions of human virtue that motivate us to care for nonhumans
as subjects. These alternative virtues can be sought, she argues, by developing a
dialogical ethical ontology that enables richer, less reductive ways of individuating,
configuring, and describing the world. Openness and attention are stances that underly
“dialogical and communicative relationships of sensitivity, negotiation and mutual
adaptation of the sort we need in the context of the environmental crisis” (Environmental
Culture 169-170). One of the aims of a dialogical ethical ontology is to counter arbitrary
species value hierarchies. Interspecies equality in morally relevant categories can be
expressed in terms of sameness or identity, but it can also be formulated in terms of
difference. Sameness, Plumwood argues, is too simplistic because it is too reductive.
Equality grounded in difference, however, can lead productively to a notion of
incommensurability or non-ranking. Interspecies equality, if it is grounded in
difference, can be a way of showing the inadequacy of hierarchy: “between beings with
very different and only intersecting capacities, ranking is not possible in any accurate or
meaningful way” (173).4 Non-ranking is a meta-ethical principle that minimizes
hierarchical thinking and approaches cross-species conflict in context rather than falling
back on general principles that purport to class beings into the categories of valuable
and expendable (174). Uexküll’s concept of the Umwelt, by articulating a species-specific
notion of meaning-making irreducible to a single standard which could be abstracted in
order to serve as a measuring stick for comparing disparate forms of cognition, helps to
show the inadequacy of hierarchical thinking and serves as a starting point for
conceptualizing affinity across difference.

Plumwood offers a pathway for thinking affinity across difference by arguing for a
post-Cartesian concept of mind grounded in something other than human-like
consciousness: “A post-Cartesian reconstruction of mind that emphasizes intentionality,
for example, could enable us to extend our recognition of mind-like qualities much
more widely into the world and give better recognition to radical difference”
(Environmental Culture 176). For Plumwood, extended formulations of intentionality and
mind comprise a counter-hegemonic practice of openness to agentic and dialogic
potentialities beyond the human. Part of such a practice involves describing nonhuman
animal subjects as narrators. She calls this the intentional recognition stance: “Being able
to conceive others in intentional terms is important to being open to them as possible
communicative, narrative and ethical subjects. Extending intentionality to the non-
human is crucial for extending to them a narrative conception of ethics” (177).
Intentional description is also characterized by Plumwood as a way of moving away
from Eurocentric, colonialist aspects of anthropocentric humanism: “Acknowledging
the legitimacy of intentional modes of description of the non-human world is also

Brian McCormack -- Narrative, Meaning and Multispecies Ethical Ontologies

72

necessary if western philosophy is to avoid its implicit eurocentrism in dismissing as

’primitive’ or less than rational the non-western cultures that often frame the world in
thoroughly intentional and expressly narrative, communicative and agentic terms”
(178).

Thom van Dooren and Deborah Bird Rose credit Uexküll with being one of the first
systematic thinkers of what they refer to as nonhuman storying. Uexküll’s
understanding of animal worlds as subjective, meaningful “life stories” arising from
complex feedback loops of perceptions and actions lays important groundwork for later
ethological, philosophical, and biosemiotic, among other, research projects. Narrative is
what, for van Dooren and Rose, connects one event to another within a specific context
that produces meaning: “The significance of narrative is in the meaning-making that
connects the lives of living beings to the worlds they inhabit” (“Storied-places” 4). At
the same time, however, it is not at all clear whether Uexküll himself or many of those
theorists who take up his project in different ways would accept even a heavily
qualified notion of nonhuman storying. Van Dooren and Rose are, as they point out,
taking this research in new directions. Specifically, they extend Plumwood’s dialogical
ethical ontology by proposing a concept of nonhuman storying that incorporates key
aspects of an Uexküllian understanding of meaning. As van Dooren and Rose point out,
narrative can facilitate and relate together radically different meaning-making practices:
“Unlike many other modes of giving an account, a story can allow multiple meanings to
travel alongside one another; it can hold open possibilities and interpretations and can
refuse the kind of closure that prevents others from speaking or becoming” (“Lively
Ethography” 85). Because stories are ongoing, revisable, and able to incorporate
complexity, narrative forms are ideal for thinking multispecies community in shared,
overlapping worlds.

Plumwood argues that intentionality and narrative are key aspects of an ethical
approach sensitive to selves in context: “Narrative ethics, supplying context and
identity, can help us configure nature as a realm of others who are independent centres
of value and need that demand from us ethical relationships and responses”
(Environmental Culture 188). Plumwood argues that narrative is important for
constituting the moral identity of actors and actions.5 Intentional description enables
narrative, which provides context and reveals relationships. Van Dooren and Rose
follow Plumwood in describing nonhuman animals as narrative subjects. They ask what
a minimal notion of storying, capable of identifying a wide range of selves, might look
like. Importantly, they argue, a concept of storying need not include the capacity to tell
stories to another, only the ability to construct a storied experience of the world

Humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies

Volume 11, Number 1 (Fall 2019)
 73

(“Storied-places” 4). Accounting for minimal storying would be a means of marking

sites of meaningful experience. Embodiment and memory are two essential aspects of
meaning-making that form the basis of a concept of minimal storying. Plumwood
argues that embodied communication is one site from which meaning-making may be
describable as narrative. Embodied action and the ability to identify and respond to it
constitute one crucial source of interspecies communication: “Reading embodied action
is part of all our lives, and is the common language of embodied beings” (Environmental
Culture 192). Embodied action must be approached in broad and open-ended terms
with an eye toward countering biases in favor of human-like communication (193).
Joshua Russell describes an embodied, communicative aspect of interspecies encounter
that suggests the presence of narrative: “Animal narrativity describes the qualitative,
felt sense that stories are present in animal bodies, gestures and relationships. It also
situates narrative within the more-than-human world, rather than categorizing it as a
uniquely human characteristic” (“Animal Narrativity” 146). Van Dooren and Rose
propose a broad concept of story that “emerges out of an ability to engage with
happening in the world as sequential and meaningful events” (“Storied-places” 3).
Narrative does more than place events in chronological order; it forges meaningful
relations among those events and situates them within a wider context. Narrative is the
term van Dooren and Rose use for describing both what connects events together and
what distinguishes them as discreet: “The significance of narrative is in the meaning-
making that connects the lives of living beings to the worlds they inhabit” (4). Memory
can be intergenerational or genetic, it can condition or derive from lived experience, in
some cases it can be communicated, and it is often bound up with future projection (13).
Identifying different forms of memory and attending to embodied communication are
part of a practice of openness to forms of narrative beyond the human: “But living well
with others can never be about just learning to tell new stories; it must also involve
learning new kinds of attentiveness to the stories of others — even if they are unspoken
or are told in other-than-human-languages” (Flight Ways 78).

Van Dooren and Rose pursue a narrative ethics by asking how different populations of
animals understand, negotiate, value, and actively shape their places. They refer to
these meaningful multispecies temporal and spatial relations as storied-places
(“Storied-places” 1). Storied-places are sites of multispecies encounter. For a place to
become a home, there must be successful negotiation amongst its denizens. Storied-
places, then, are also multiple overlapping and entangled meaning-making practices
that range beyond the individual. Van Dooren and Rose describe places as embedded in
histories and systems of meaning. It is not that meaning is projected onto a landscape —
meaning and matter are co-constitutive. Other animals are often physically and
conceptually de-contextualized from their places by humans, usually with disastrous

Brian McCormack -- Narrative, Meaning and Multispecies Ethical Ontologies

74

consequences. One way to place other animal lives more carefully into context is to find
ways to understand them as forming meaningful relations with their places, and
storying is one term that can convey these meaningful relations. Van Dooren and Rose
work through the concept of storied-places by focusing on the philopatric practices of
little penguins and flying foxes near Sydney. These distinct populations are not akin to
collections of genetically driven machines operating in a neutral space: “As with the
penguins, for whom a burrow is far more than habitat, flying foxes inhabit not just trees
but worlds of meaning” (16). They situate their studies of little penguins and flying
foxes in large urban settings. Learning to co-exist in these places involves developing an
ethic of conviviality that is adaptive and receptive: “Conviviality thus requires that we
make an effort toward inclusiveness, that we endeavor wherever possible to make room
for that other in our activities in shared places” (17). The concept of storied-places
serves to highlight the meaning-making practices that transform ecological settings into
homes. Storied-places divert thought away from a Cartesian view that conceives the
world as empty space populated by isolated individuals. To form ethical attachments to
those nonhuman residents whose storied-places overlap with ours is to take account of
their meaning-making practices and negotiate new, more amicable multispecies
relationships.

One of the aims of nonhuman animal narrative is to re-embed human meaning-making

practices alongside those of other species. David Herman’s expanded concept of
narrative reframes storytelling and interpretation within a trans-species ecology of
selves (Narratology x). Narrative is not, for Herman, a uniquely human capability, and it
can be geared toward indicating and mapping multispecies entanglements just as easily
as it can help to deny them. Drawing out this positive potential is a crucial component
of the ethical task laid out by Plumwood: “At issue is a culture that, through forms of
imaginative writing as well as philosophical, political, jurisprudential, and other
discourses, fosters, first, a process whereby humans come to recognize themselves as
inextricably embedded in and dependent on more-than-human environments, and
second, a process whereby other animals come to be recognized in turn as part of
human culture(s)” (155). In Narratology Beyond the Human, Herman develops a cross-
disciplinary approach incorporating narratology and cultural studies of animals and
human-animal relationships. Narratological concepts and analytic resources, he argues,
have yet to be fully applied to animal- and human-animal studies, while the study of
human/nonhuman multispecies ecological and cultural entanglements holds the
potential to reshape how the practice of narrative is understood. Herman makes an
instructive comparison between his project and recent work in anthropology which
seeks to reposition the human subject within a wider ecological context.6 He pursues a

Humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies

Volume 11, Number 1 (Fall 2019)
 75

concept of narrative that is applicable beyond distinctively human experience: “This

model resituates processes of storytelling and story interpretation, as well as the
analytic frameworks that have been developed to study those processes, in a trans-
species ecology of selves, marked by a prolific allocation of possibilities for subjective
experience across species lines” (x). The next section examines the question of
nonhuman animal narrative from the point of view of recent work in narratology.
Critics question attempts to represent nonhuman minds faithfully, stressing the
inaccessibility of subjective experience to rigorous scientific study. They point out that
disciplinary divisions engender very different standards when it comes to describing
nonhuman animal minds. Yet as Herman points out, there is no easy way to draw lines
separating what is and what is not an acceptable form of nonhuman animal narrative.

Narratology, Nonhuman Subjectivity, Disciplinary Divisions, and Mental

Continuity. In his seminal essay “What is it like to be a Bat?” Thomas Nagel argues that
a first-person, phenomenological experiential perspective cannot be assimilated to a
third-person, scientifically objective perspective. There will always be a remainder or
gap between the two, and this gap increases exponentially when the experience in
question belongs to a nonhuman animal. A bat’s experience is likely to be very far
removed from that of a human, and the subjective qualities of bat experiences are
almost entirely inaccessible to scientific methods, which means that there is no way to
ensure that representations of them would be accurate. To pursue detailed accounts of
nonhuman subjectivity that build on or otherwise complement Plumwood’s pioneering
work necessitates addressing and accounting for the partial opacity and inaccessibility
of nonhuman experience. To be effective, representations of nonhuman minds must be
carefully managed, contextualized, and qualified. Despite these difficulties,
representations of nonhuman animal experience can be powerful strategies for
challenging anthropocentric cultural assumptions about species hierarchies, nonhuman
agency, and human identity. As Herman points out, literary animal stories are a crucial
resource for challenging anthropocentric value hierarchies: “By modeling the richness
and complexity of “what it is like” for nonhuman others, stories can underscore what is
at stake in the trivialization — or outright destruction — of their experiences”
(“Storyworld/Umwelt” 159). The same set of events in a storyworld7 can take on
multiple and sometimes radically divergent experiential profiles for different agents
(158). The tension between two different accounts of a nonhuman animal’s experience
(as Herman demonstrates, for example, in his analysis of the graphic novel Laika)
dramatizes the damage that is caused when a subject’s experiential perspective is
undervalued or ignored. The representation of Laika’s suffering from her perspective,
juxtaposed with the way it is elided in other representational strategies placed within
the same frame, helps to illustrate how taking meaningful experience seriously can

Brian McCormack -- Narrative, Meaning and Multispecies Ethical Ontologies

76

counter anthropocentric interspecies value hierarchies. Herman introduces a sliding

scale ranging from what he terms course-grained to fine-grained modes of representing
experience. How subjects negotiate opportunities for action can be represented from
outside their perspective (course-grained), or from within their perspective (fine-
grained). In examples like Laika, it is the contrast between mind-ascribing and mind-
eliding modes, rather than the fidelity of the representations of Laika’s experience, that
performs the critical function. Even in these cases, however, accuracy in representations
of nonhuman minds matters. A highly implausible or extremely anthropomorphic
representation of Laika’s experience would not be as effective as one which takes into
account the fact that she is a dog.

To begin to address the issue of accuracy, Herman maps a range of representational

strategies employed in nonhuman animal narratives.8 The most anthropocentric end of
the spectrum, which includes forms such as allegory, is a virtual mapping of human
subjectivity onto the nonhuman animal. Anthropomorphic projection is at the midpoint,
characterized by the use of human language, facial features, and other
anthropomorphic elements to convey nonhuman animal experience. What Herman
terms zoomorphic projection differs from anthropomorphic projection in that it uses
human elements to draw analogies to convey “what it is like” for nonhuman
experiencing subjects. Anthropomorphic projection involves familiarizing the
nonhuman, therefore, while zoomorphic projection more often employs the nonhuman
in the task of defamiliarizing the human (“Storyworld/Umwelt” 174). The least
anthropomorphic approach Herman labels Umwelt exploration. Umwelt exploration
draws on Uexküll’s theoretical biology to develop methods for analyzing attempts to
emulate how a particular animal engages with a surrounding world. Herman’s
invocation of the Umwelt suggests that it matters who is and who is not a self. Not all
experiences are the same, and not all nonhuman animal narratives need be read as
anthropomorphic projections of human subjectivity. Herman suggests via his
classificatory scheme that nonhuman animal narratives can be constructed with more or
less attention and care to the specificities of species, even if they remain inevitably
exploratory.

In contrast to Herman’s approach, Bernaerts et al. conceptualize all forms of nonhuman

narration in terms of a double dialectic of empathy and defamiliarization. For them,
nonhuman narrators encourage readers to empathetically project human experience
onto beings that are not expected to have such experiences. Because they are not
human, however, these nonhuman narrators serve to defamiliarize aspects of human
experience:

Humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies

Volume 11, Number 1 (Fall 2019)
 77

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

acknowledge similarity and otherness at the same time, to recognize the
ratness of the rat, the monkeyness of the monkey and the humanness of
the rat and the monkey as well as the ratness and the monkeyness of
humans. In that way, stories narrated by non-human animals can
destabilize anthropocentric ideologies. By giving a voice to non-human
animals and facilitating empathy, these narratives can place them on a
continuum with humans, rather than constructing them as opposites.
(“The Storied Lives” 74)

Nonhuman narrators in this scheme would serve specific purposes such as satire,
didactic functions including ethical lessons incorporating phenomenological “what it’s
like” experiments, or strive to de-objectify inanimate objects in favor of animistic
accounts of the world. However, empathy and defamiliarization, as Bernaerts et al.
describe them, are too general and too human-centered to comprise an analytic
framework capable of accounting for the specific requirements of portraying the
experience of another species. This becomes clear when they include inanimate objects
together with nonhuman animals in their analyses. The authors do not ground empathy
in encounters among distinct selves, but limit its scope to the projection of human-like
qualities onto nonhumans, which makes it hard to understand such an empathetic
relation as having the ethical force capable of overcoming dualism in favor of mental
continuity among species alluded to in the above quote. According to Bernaerts et al.,
nonhuman narrators “undermine the idea of a stable and unified human identity, and
question the concept of humanity” (75). But if nonhuman animal narrative is only the
projection of human experience onto nonhumans, then does it matter whether the
projection captures something accurate about the other animal? It is difficult to see how
a truly empathetic relation capable of putting into question both anthropocentric
humanism and the dualism it maintains could arise solely from such a solipsistic
practice of projection. As Plumwood points out, empathy and the ethical frameworks it
is bound up with are about dialogue and the recognition of relationships rather than
projection: “I am not talking about inventing fairies at the bottom of the garden. It’s a
matter of being open to experiences of nature as powerful, agentic and creative, making space
in our culture for an animating sensibility and vocabulary” (“Nature in the Active Voice”
126; emphasis in original).

Herman, following Plumwood, argues that narrative can act as a bridge between
human and nonhuman by figuring the Umwelten of creatures different from ourselves.
He claims further support for this position via enactive cognitive science, which

Brian McCormack -- Narrative, Meaning and Multispecies Ethical Ontologies

78

describes the mind as distributed across brain, body, and world. The enactive approach
suggests that minds arise in the interplay between an intelligent agent and the world
they inhabit (minds are not isolated interior or immaterial). As Alva Noë explains in
Out of Our Heads: “Mind is life. If we want to understand the mind of an animal, we
should look not only inward, to its physical, neurological constitution; we also need to
pay attention to the animal’s manner of living, to the way it is wrapped up in its place”
(Noe 42).9 The enactivist model especially refrains from a simple description of the
mind as what exists between perceptual inputs and behavioral outputs. Enactivists do
not posit firm divisions between action, perception, and cognition. Herman describes
how enactivist cognitive science accounts for the organism/environment nexus which
grounds cognition and underlies both human and nonhuman meaningful experience:

This synthesis of post-Cartesian ideas of mind with ethological work

provides grounds for pursuing research premised on the continuity rather
than the discontinuity between human and nonhuman experiences. New
questions for research, and new metrics of value, emerge when human as
well as nonhuman experiences are grounded in agent-environment
interactions; across species these interactions differ in quality but not in
their basic structure. (“Storyworld/Umwelt” 163-164)

The assertion of cross-species mental continuity does not itself ensure that a concept of
narrative is an appropriate tool for mapping this continuity, however. For Bernaerts et
al. narrative can only raise, but not address, the problem of knowing “what it is like” to
be another animal. For them, following Nagel’s assertion of a gap between first- and
third- person perspectives, there are important disciplinary constraints that prevent
literary narratives from being acceptably rigorous sources of knowledge of nonhuman
animals, because literature cannot lead to an “objective phenomenology” (“The Storied
Lives” 76). Their solution to this impasse is to point out that literature does not aim to
do scientific description or to provide accurate representations of nonhuman minds.
Rather, literature works on the values and meanings embedded in human experience,
keeping the question of other, nonhuman animal worlds suspended (76). Nonhuman
narratives, they argue, can only create the illusion of experiencing the world from
another animal’s perspective. It is something that happens only inside the mind of the
human reader, in other words.

Marco Caracciolo further problematizes the idea that a literary narrative can faithfully
represent a nonhuman animal mind, pointing out that any such attempt simultaneously
exposes the limits of the human imagination. Imagining the perspective of another

Humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies

Volume 11, Number 1 (Fall 2019)
 79

animal in a narrative may throw human assumptions about other animals off balance,
but not without pointing to its own biases. There is thus a built-in limitation in
nonhuman narrative practices. Caracciolo contrasts representation of nonhuman minds
in literary narratives with recent efforts to make phenomenology useful for cognitive
science.10 These projects have very different goals, methods, and disciplinary
constraints, and Caracciolo argues that their differences have important implications for
attempts to blend literary and scientific accounts. He cites Herman’s use of Uexküll in
his description of the category of Umwelt exploration as one problematic elision of this
gap. Although, as Caracciolo acknowledges, scientific and literary accounts can
influence each other (and in the case of Uexküll’s A Foray and many other examples,
they blend together), the disciplinary differences between them matter:

Granted, literary (imaginary) accounts of animal Umwelten may build on

existing scientific knowledge, and they may serve a heuristic function in
advancing it. This points to the feedback loop between literary and
scientific explorations of mind, which Herman himself has often
productively highlighted. Yet bringing to light this feedback loop should
not lead to collapsing distinctions between a literary project and a more
scientifically oriented phenomenology. (“Three Smells Exist” 486)

Human experiences are difficult to describe in detail, Caracciolo argues, but

phenomenological methods have been refined to produce accounts of “what it is like”
for humans to experience a wide range of phenomena. Nonhuman experiences cannot
be accounted for in the same way. We can only make very general descriptions that lack
crucial yet inaccessible details. Literary description can go far beyond reliable scientific
description, but only because it is not subject to the same rigorous disciplinary
constraints, and that is why it is not trustworthy. Caracciolo argues that literary
accounts build on presuppositions (they become plausible to the degree that they
accord with beliefs about the world), while phenomenological description brackets
them. Realism in literary representation of nonhuman minds is achieved, he argues, via
a three-step process: a literary representation must resonate with readers’ expectations
and beliefs; it must be detailed enough to offer what appears to be a holistic account of
nonhuman animal experience; and it must draw on familiarity with everyday life in a
way that is defamiliarizing in order to show a set of cognitive abilities that is distinct
from the human (487). If these conditions are met, the representation will appear
convincing. It gives rise to what Caracciolo calls a cognitive illusion. A scientific
phenomenology, on the other hand, needs to bracket imagination and presuppositions
in a way that literary practices cannot: “a principled science of experience should be
able to bracket presuppositions and sideline the researcher’s imagination... If we draw a

Brian McCormack -- Narrative, Meaning and Multispecies Ethical Ontologies

80

dividing line between literary narratives and the project of building a science of
experience, as I try to do in this article, what function can be ascribed to fictional
accounts of animal phenomenology?” (488). The function, Caracciolo argues, is to make
apparent the limits of human knowledge.

The project of building a science of experience has never been entirely confined to the
inside of any one discipline, however. Uexküll helps make meaning a key concept for
thinking the nonhuman, necessitating and enabling a cross-disciplinary investigation of
meaning-making that now draws closer those forms of life it had once helped keep
apart. That Uexküll was a scientist, and that A Foray, his most celebrated work
regarding nonhuman worlds, is a highly literary account intended for a popular
audience,11 makes his work one particularly interesting site for thinking the relations
between the sciences and the humanities as well as between the human and the
nonhuman. Uexküll is far from unique in seeking to bring his scientific approach to
nonhuman animal experience to a popular audience. Susan McHugh traces a complex
web of influence running through the production of 20th century ethological
knowledge, cultural representations of exotic and charismatic species primarily via
visual media, and the narrative weaving of nature and culture, scientific and humanistic
inquiry in popular ethology books. Animal stories tell us about disciplinary boundaries
and transgressions. McHugh points out that while literature has long been tasked with
defending human exceptionalism from the cold rationality of the sciences, figures such
as Jane Goodall and Konrad Lorenz have employed literary depictions of nonhuman
life, complete with embellishments and fictional accounts, to make these sciences
accessible beyond their borders. Although she does not explicitly do so, it would be
easy for McHugh to place Uexküll as a key figure in this lineage:

While groundbreaking ethological studies provide the basis for policy and
other changes in the ways in which people live with animals in
industrialized societies, best-selling ethological narratives of life in the
field influence broader imaginative engagements with elusive species like
the great apes that are otherwise largely mediated through film, video and
digital media. Obscuring the more mundane realities of data-driven
science, such stories promote instead popular ethologists themselves as
skillful storytellers. But in so doing, they also forge links in chains of
literary influence, raising questions about how this pioneering scientific
field traces its roots back to fiction, and continues to send out shoots
through visual narrative forms. (Animal Stories 212)

Humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies

Volume 11, Number 1 (Fall 2019)
 81

McHugh argues that, from Anna Sewell to Frans de Waal, nonhuman animal narratives
do important work to improve the treatment and understanding of the more-than-
human world, and they sometimes lend support for ethological work in the field as
opposed to the lab. In such cases, an excursion into literary worlds can double back
recursively and affect funding priorities within the sciences. The effects of present-day
scientific insights also affect literature, not only in terms of what is produced today but
in how literary accounts of the past are read differently: “Now that scientists are
identifying the interdependence of life forms even below the cellular level, the
pervasive companionship of human subjects with members of other species appears
ever more elemental to narrative subjectivity, a dark matter of sorts awaiting literary
analysis” (2). These examples suggest that, when the sciences and humanities mix, the
effects are neither unidirectional nor predictable, but diffractive. How does the work of
translation from scientific study to popular literature parallel other cross-disciplinary
movements? How does disciplinary authority work in these scenarios?

Caracciolo is certainly correct to point out crucial disciplinary differences between a

scientifically informed phenomenology and a literary narrative practice. Yet claiming
that a scientific phenomenology is the only legitimate way of rigorously accessing and
accounting for nonhuman experience would severely weaken any possibility of a
dialogical ethics. One would ultimately be forced to call positions like Plumwood’s
largely fictional or illusionary, because assumptions about nonhuman agency integral
to a dialogical ethics would quickly overstep what can be verified by a highly regulated
scientific phenomenology. For Plumwood’s dialogical ethics to perform the work of
shifting human understanding of nature away from Cartesian dualism, nonhuman
animal narratives cannot be conceived merely as cognitive illusions. Moreover, if the
legitimate function of literary animal narratives is to point out the limits of human
knowledge, then calling all non-scientific animal narratives fiction may also
dramatically affect their power to challenge anthropocentric assumptions. If one of the
presuppositions we have going into a reading (which, in Caracciolo’s formulation,
comprise a necessary aspect of literary realism) is that it bears no resemblance to actual
animals or their experiences, then wouldn’t this undermine their effectiveness? Fully
utilizing the resources of a narratology beyond the human, Herman shows, means
relocating the task of demarcating between reliable knowledge and wild imaginative
projection. Rather than trying to adjudicate proper and improper uses of narrative at
the level of discipline or genre, such questions cannot be abstracted from particular
instances of individual nonhuman animal narratives themselves, treating
representational accuracy as one consideration among others within a complex and
shifting cultural context. Herman agrees with Caracciolo that efforts to present
nonhuman experiences in literary texts in the attempt to critique anthropocentric

Brian McCormack -- Narrative, Meaning and Multispecies Ethical Ontologies

82

attitudes enact the appropriation they are trying to counter, but Herman sees this
limitation as suggesting the need for these texts to show their constructed nature
(“Animal Worlds” 429). He follows Plumwood and others in thinking more deeply
about how academic disciplines, cultural assumptions, and multispecies ecologies are
entangled with one another in ways that confound any notion that they can be neatly
demarcated. Herman offers such an expanded view of narrative in his hermeneutic
reading of Thalia Field’s Bird Lovers, Backyard. Field interweaves narration with
commentary on the nature of narrative itself, and plays with normative conventions
that mediate traffic between the register of action (motivations, goals, projects) and the
register of events (movements in time and space). Herman’s discussion of Field
suggests that, rather than simply offering an account of “what it is like” for any
particular nonhuman animal, narratives can actively incorporate, address and animate
these questions (“Hermeneutics” 18).

Narratology beyond the human innovates analytical tools for drawing out how
complex cultural assumptions are reworked in nonhuman animal narratives. Rather
than a series of claims about animal minds purporting to be accurate representations,
nonhuman animal narratives can themselves be interpreted as sites of contestation and
debate concerning multispecies ecologies. Plumwood’s call to re-animate matter entails
using a notion of narrative capable of shifting human cultural assumptions away from
Cartesian dualism. Questions of realism and accuracy do not disappear in these
contexts, but Herman’s work helps to show that nonhuman animal narratives cannot be
classified as mere illusions or anthropomorphic projections that disrupt species
differences which would otherwise, from a different disciplinary location, be clearly
marked out.

Conclusion. Building on Eileen Crist’s assertion that there is no neutral language when
it comes to describing nonhuman animal behaviors and minds (Images of Animals 10),
van Dooren and Rose knowingly risk the charge of anthropomorphism in order to
pursue a more inclusive mode of accounting for nonhuman meaningful experience:
“This context requires us to develop a language that is capable of prompting
recognition of similarity and responsibility, between embodied, social creatures.
’Storied-places’ and an ethics of conviviality provide one such language” (“Storied-
places” 5). They also point out that storied-places cannot be fully accounted for, and
that the absence of a comprehensive understanding is not an invitation to abandon this
practice in favor of one which purports to be exhaustive (9). For these reasons,
nonhuman animal narratives are strategic, context-sensitive, experimental, and
exploratory, which means that they will remain open to skepticism and charges of

Humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies

Volume 11, Number 1 (Fall 2019)
 83

anthropomorphism. But as an ethical strategy, a notion of nonhuman animal narrative

is a way of aligning oneself with a commitment to developing more companionable
multispecies relationships. Nonhuman animal narratives, as they are developed in a
multispecies ethics of conviviality, are about making, rather than representing, worlds.
Plumwood offers an ontological ethical framework that refuses to hold up the project of
building more equitable multispecies communities until universally agreed-upon
representations of nonhuman subjectivities arrive, as Rose points out: “she was not
making truth claims about the world, but rather was asking what kind of stance a
human can take that will open her to a responsive engagement in relation to nonhuman
others” (“Val Plumwood’s Philosophical Animism” 97). Plumwood’s ethical approach
focuses on facilitating human access to a nonhuman world full of meaning: “Rather
than querying others, it asks the human to query herself, and it seeks to open the
human to the experience of others in the contexts of their own communicative and
expressive lives” (98).

At the same time, however, it matters how nonhuman meaningful experience is

conceptualized, identified, and responded to. Narrative does not apply to all animals,
nor does it apply to every action taken by an animal, human or nonhuman. Narrative is
also at risk of drawing attention away from more precise modes of accounting for
divergent forms of lived experience. The tension between attempting to make room for
nonhuman meaningful experience (which is an ethical necessity) and the impossibility
of doing so with full confidence is not resolved in literary practices that incorporate and
dramatize these tensions. Employing a concept of narrative beyond the human is an
ethical act, but one that must be undertaken with care.

In the first part of this essay, I describe how Uexküll’s Umwelt theory offers a way of
understanding meaning that can support Plumwood’s dialogical ethical ontology. For
Uexküll, the human Umwelt is both partially open to and entangled with others and
partially closed and untranslatable across species. It is not a realm of subjective
experience that can be transcended to reach purely objective knowledge. As Plumwood,
van Dooren, and Rose point out, being in relationship means being responsive to and
striving to be open to others within the limits of one’s communicative and expressive
capabilities. Narrative would not simply be a projection of the human onto the
nonhuman but a way of seeking better relationships, using the most effective
conceptual tools available to us. The second part of the essay draws on Herman to show
how nonhuman animal narratives incorporate and keep alive rather than obscure and
elide questions of representational accuracy. An ontological context that emphasizes
entanglement across difference does not take the partial inaccessibility of nonhuman
minds as a valid reason to avoid engaging with them. On the contrary,

Brian McCormack -- Narrative, Meaning and Multispecies Ethical Ontologies

84

reconceptualizing the cognitive, communicative and affective worlds of other animals is

a necessary prerequisite for living well with them. Since we live in a time of escalating
ecological crisis, building a more viable multispecies future is also an urgent ethical
necessity, and extending a notion of narrative helps this process. Just as there is no
neutral language for describing nonhuman animal behaviors and minds, there are very
few neutral ways of forming relationships with them. We already know what kinds of
relationships an ontological framework influenced by Cartesian dualism brings into
being. Uexküll, Plumwood, and Herman help us imagine new ones.

Notes
1. Noam Chomsky argues that Descartes was correct to distinguish the human on the
basis of the uniquely creative and malleable nature of human language: “The essential
difference between man and animal is exhibited most clearly by human language, in
particular, by man’s ability to form new statements which express new thoughts and
which are appropriate to new situations” (Cartesian Linguistics 59). For Descartes,
nonhuman animals are like machines in that they can only react to stimuli within
carefully circumscribed contexts, such as crying out when harmed. What they cannot
do, in his opinion, is respond meaningfully: “But it is not conceivable that such a
machine should produce different arrangements of words so as to give an appropriately
meaningful answer to whatever is said in its presence, as the dullest of men can do”
(Descartes, quoted in Cartesian Linguistics 59). Jacques Derrida points out that: “Now,
when it comes to the relation to ’the Animal,’ this Cartesian legacy determines all of
modernity.... Descartes’s ’text’ is of course not the cause of this large structure, but it
’represents’ it in a powerful systematicity of the symptom” (For What Tomorrow 65).

2. For a clear and comprehensive critical posthumanist critique of the rational and
autonomous image of the human, see Braidotti’s The Posthuman. The following passage
from Elizabeth Grosz's Becoming Undone offers an evocative account of what the
humanities might become once the meaning-making practices of humans are
recontextualized alongside those of myriad others:

...if there are a hundred thousand potential languages, expressive

impulses, and modes of bodily communication, from human language to
the dancing of bees and the song performances of birds, to the chemical
language of cells themselves within every living body, then new notions
of collectivity, new notions of social production, new modes of linguistic
analysis are waiting to be born, waiting to be commensurate with and
adequate to the multiplicity of life-forms to which they apply. A new

Humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies

Volume 11, Number 1 (Fall 2019)
 85

humanities becomes possible once the human is placed in its properly

inhuman context. (Becoming Undone 21)

3. David Herman shows how the concept of narrativity — what makes a text a narrative
— has in most cases been conceived as intimately bound up with human subjectivity
(Narratology 156, 339). Eduardo Kohn argues that symbolic thought is a uniquely human
form of semiosis (How Forests Think 133). In this essay, I do not attempt to rigorously
parse narrative forms into categories such as fiction/nonfiction. Because I am discussing
theorists who are working to shift the concept of narrative onto new ontological
ground, the question of how to classify forms of narrative must be reconsidered from
within this new conceptual arrangement. This is a complex issue and ranges far beyond
the scope of this essay. I seek instead to outline some of the general features of this new
approach to narrative and its relations to ethical theory and concepts of meaning. For a
careful discussion of genre and other modes of categorization as they relate to more-
than-human narrative forms, see Herman, Narratology.

4. Matthew Calarco offers a helpful discussion of the advantages and disadvantages in

conceptualizing human/nonhuman animal distinction on the basis of identity,
difference, or what he refers to as indistinction. For Calarco, Plumwood is a
paradigmatic example of the indistinction approach, which he also endorses (Thinking
Through Animals 61).

5. Marc Bekoff and Jessica Pierce make a similar point in their book Wild Justice. They
point out the necessity of employing a form of “narrative ethology” to help make sense
of the behavior of other animals, while also discussing the difficulties in utilizing
narrative strategies for scientifically rigorous ethological studies (36-37).

6. See for instance Ingold, Kirksey and Helmreich, and Kohn.

7. Herman defines a storyworld as the world as it is projected by a narrative — built up

by the writers as well as the interpreters of the text (Narratology 340).

8. For a more detailed discussion, see Herman, Narratology.

9. See also Varela, Thompson, and Rosch’s The Embodied Mind.

10. Caracciolo draws primarily on the work of psychologist Russell T. Hurlburt.

11. See Brentari 135.

Brian McCormack -- Narrative, Meaning and Multispecies Ethical Ontologies

86

Works Cited
Abadzis, Nick. Laika. First Second, 2007.

Bekoff, Marc and Jessica Pierce. Wild Justice: The Moral Lives of Animals. U Chicago P,
2009.

Bernaerts, Lars, Marco Caracciolo, Luc Herman, & Bart Vervaeck. “The Storied Lives of
Non-Human Narrators.” Narrative 22.1 (January 2014): 68-93.

Braidotti, Rosi. The Posthuman. Polity, 2013.

Brentari, Carlo. Jakob von Uexküll: The Discovery of the Umwelt between Biosemiotics and
Theoretical Biology. Springer, 2016.

Buchanan, Brett. Onto-Ethologies: The Animal Environments of Uexküll, Heidegger, Merleau-

Ponty, and Deleuze. State U of New York P, 2009.

Calarco, Matthew. Thinking Through Animals: Identity, Difference, Indistinction. Stanford

Briefs, 2015.

Caracciolo, Marco. “Three smells exist in this world: Literary Fiction and Animal
Phenomenology in Italo Svevo’s ’Agro and His Master.’” Modern Fiction Studies 60.3
(Fall 2014): 484-505.

Chomsky, Noam. 1966. Cartesian Linguistics: A Chapter in the History of Rationalist

Thought. 3rd Edition. Cambridge UP, 2009.

Crist, Eileen. Images of Animals: Anthropomorphism and the Animal Mind. Temple UP,
1999.

Derrida, Jacques, and Elisabeth Roudinesco. For What Tomorrow...: A Dialogue. Trans. Jeff
Fort. Stanford UP, 2004.

Descartes, Rene. “From the Letters of 1646 and 1649.” The Animals Reader: The Essential
Classic and Contemporary Writings. Linda Kalof and Amy Fitzgerald, eds. Bloomsbury
Academic, 2007. 59–62.

Humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies

Volume 11, Number 1 (Fall 2019)
 87

Field, Thalia. Bird Lovers, Backyard. New Directions, 2010.

Grosz, Elizabeth. Becoming Undone: Darwinian Reflections on Life, Politics, and Art. Duke
UP, 2011.

Herman, David. “Animal Autobiography; Or, Narration beyond the Human.”

Humanities 5.82 (2016). Accessed 3 July 2019. Online.

_____. “Animal Worlds in Modern Fiction: An Introduction.” Modern Fiction Studies 60.3
(Fall 2014): 421-443.

_____. “Hermeneutics beyond the Species Boundary: Explanation and Understanding in

Animal Narratives.” Storyworlds: A Journal of Narrative Studies 8.1 (Summer 2016): 1-30.

_____. Narratology beyond the Human: Storytelling and Animal Life. Oxford UP, 2018.

_____. “Storyworld/Umwelt: Nonhuman Experiences in Graphic Narratives.” SubStance

40.1 (2011): 156-181.

Hoffmeyer, Jesper. Biosemiotics: An Examination into the Signs of Life and the Life of Signs.
Trans. Jesper Hoffmeyer and Donald Favareau. U of Scranton P, 2009.

Ingold, Tim. Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description. Routledge,
2011.

Kirksey, S. Eben and Stefan Helmreich. “The Emergence of Multispecies Ethnography.”

Cultural Anthropology 25.4 (2010): 545-576.

Kohn, Eduardo. How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human. U of
California P, 2013.

Maturana, H. R., and F. J. Varela. Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living.
Reidel, 1980.

_____. The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human Understanding. Shambhala,
1987.

McHugh, Susan. Animal Stories: Narrating across Species Lines. U Minnesota P, 2011.

Brian McCormack -- Narrative, Meaning and Multispecies Ethical Ontologies

88

Nagel, Thomas. “What is it like to be a Bat?” The Philosophical Review 83.4 (1974): 435-
450.

Noë, Alva. Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the
Biology of Consciousness. Hill and Wang, 2010.

Plumwood, Val. Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason. Routledge, 2002.

_____. “Nature in the Active Voice.” Australian Humanities Review 46 (2009): 113–29.

Rose, Deborah Bird. “Val Plumwood’s Philosophical Animism: Attentive Inter-actions

in the Sentient World.” Environmental Humanities 3.1 (2013): 93–109.

Russell, Joshua. “Animal Narrativity: Engaging with Story in a More-than-Human-

World.” Animal Subjects 2.0. Jodey Castricano and Lauren Corman, ed. Wilfrid Laurier
UP, 2016. 145-173.

Uexküll, Jakob von. 1934. A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans: With A Theory
of Meaning. Trans. Joseph D. O’Neil. U Minnesota P, 2010.

_____. “An Introduction to Umwelt.” Semiotica 134.1/4 (2001): 107–110.

_____. “The New Concept of Umwelt: A Link between Science and the Humanities.”
Semiotica 134.1/4 (2001): 111-123.

van Dooren, Thom. Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction. Columbia UP,
2014.

van Dooren, Thom and Deborah Bird Rose. “Lively Ethography: Storying Animist
Worlds.” Environmental Humanities 8:1 (May 2016): 77-94.

_____. “Storied-Places in a Multispecies City.” Humanimalia 3.2 (2012): 1–27. Online.

Varela, Francisco J., Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch. The Embodied Mind: Cognitive
Science and Human Experience. The MIT Press, 1991.

Humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies

Volume 11, Number 1 (Fall 2019)