Authored animals: creature tropes in Native American fiction - In the Company of Animals

The anthropomorphist ascribes and traces human emotion and motivations to animals and nature; these modes of narration cause misconceptions in both science and literature.

John Stodart Kennedy named feelings, motivations, and thought the three sources of mental experiences, sources that are subjective and independent of motion or human action. Granting animals the same introspection as humans, without pretense or intentional tropes, would be "unwarranted anthropomorphism" (Kennedy, 1992, p. 9).(1)

Arguably there are warranted anthropomorphic ascriptions in narratives; literary ascriptions that are figurative and create a creature presence rather than a causal representation of animal consciousness.

William James considered consciousness, the assumptions of introspection, and wrote that "everyone assumes that we have direct introspective acquintance with our thinking activity as such, with our consciousness as something inward and contrasted with the outer objects which it knows. Yet I must confess that for my part I cannot feel sure of this conclusion" (James, 1992, p. 432).(2)

Kennedy pointed out in The New Anthropomorphism that the "most widely held scientific reason for assuming that there must be some measure of consciousness in animals is the Darwinian principle that evolution has been a continuous process" (Kennedy, 1992, p. 15). Novelists and scientists, with tropes and theories, create a sense of nature and a mode of evolution, the narratives of our creation and presence. Kennedy observed,

Altogether, then, it seems likely that consciousness, feelings,

thoughts, purposes . . . are unique to our species and unlikely

that animals are conscious. If we were entirely logical about it

these probabilities would be enough to make us try to avoid

anthropomorphic descriptions of animal behavior. But we are

not entirely logical about it, and we have to ask why scientists as

well as laymen should be so addicted to anthropomorphic

expression (Kennedy, 1992, p. 24).

Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, for instance, asserted in the introduction to When Elephants Weep: 7`he Emotional Lives of Animals that "animals cry. At least they vocalize pain or distress, and in many cases seem to call for help. Most people believe, therefore, that animals can be unhappy and also that they have such primal feelings as happiness, anger, and fear.... I try to show that animals of all kinds lead complex emotional lives" (Masson and McCarthy, 1995, pp. Xii, xxii, 219).(3)

The novelist creates a presence of animals and nature with tropes and descriptions that are not bound to the modes of scientific causation or objective representations. "The fundamental difficulty, however, when we wish to avoid anthropomorphism, lies in the nature of our ordinary language," argued Kennedy. "Our everyday language would be crippled without its constant use of metaphors and analogies," and anthropomorphic analogies "readily generate misunderstanding." On the other hand, "wholly objective language is almost impossible to achieve completely and attempts at it are usually clumsy and prolix because they are inevitably strained compared with our everyday speech" (Kennedy, 1992, p. 158, 159).

Nature is a narrative creation, and nature is a trope; pristine nature is untamed, unnamable, elusive, and precarious. At the same time, nature, natura, is our creation in a lazy loan word. We trace our presence in animals, a warranted narative creation. The memories of oral performances are silenced and creation deferred as cultural evidence in the causal discoveries and translations of the social sciences.

The nature of authored creation is silence, a written narrative of tropes, discoveries, observations, representations, comparisons, and transitive closures. Likewise, the authored animals in literature are wild tropes, fantastic creatures, and others are mundane similes of domestication. The most elusive animals are in the heart of the native hunter, to be sure, and in the mind of the novelist.

The animals created in literature are no more distinct than their animal authors, distinctions, to be sure, and simulations of the abstruse other in the similes of descent and evolution. The author, as the animal and unaccustomed hunter, overcomes wild animals in the authored familiarities of literature, the episteme of authored animals.

Roland Barthes observed that no one without formalities can "pretend to insert his freedom as a writer into the resistant medium of language because, behind the later, the whole of History stands unified and complete in the manner of a Natural Order. Hence, for the writer, a language is nothing but a human horizon which provides a distant setting of familiarity, the value of which, incidentally, is entirely negative" (Barthes, 1968, p. 9).(4)

Common sense, the outcome of causal reason, representation, speciesism, and theories of evolution are conversions of chance and pristine nature. The most inscrutable animals are tamed in the authored familiarities of human nature, the inescapable consequences of reason, iconic silence, and the philosophies of grammar; at the same time, certain animals are memorable characters with their own manners, consciousness, and points of view in literature.