Narratology Beyond the Human: Storytelling and Animal Life by David Herman

Abstract

Reviewed by: Narratology Beyond the Human: Storytelling and Animal Life by David Herman Susan Mchugh David Herman. Narratology Beyond the Human: Storytelling and Animal Life. Oxford UP, 2018. xiii + 400 pp. Nonhuman animals appear in the literatures of virtually all cultures and times, so it stands to reason that no literary form would be free of them either. Yet there seems to be something special about animal stories, as indicated by their overrepresentation in the fast-growing subfield of literary animal studies. What makes narrating the lives of the most obviously animate beings besides humans so especially compelling for literary scholars in the twenty-first century? In his new book, David Herman pursues a bold thesis: stories are an essential tool to transform understandings of as well as to inspire actions that secure survival in more-than-human worlds. Carefully building the argument through an astonishing array of fictional and nonfictional examples and high theory across a range of disciplines, Narratology beyond the Human is a must-read for seasoned scholars and newcomers to the field. Herman revolutionized the study of narrative in the 1990s, coining the term "postclassical narratology" (339) to account for the profound changes that follow movement of the scope of narrative analysis beyond the literary, to encompass concepts and media that were not initially conceived of or valued by the structuralist pioneers of narratology. The book's broad range of subjects—film, fiction, memoirs, graphic narratives, speculative biology—and Herman's adeptness at transcoding among theories of these subjects might be [End Page 557] accounted for by his initial commitment to framing narrative studies beyond the literary: like postclassical narratology, interdisciplinary animal studies is distinguished by its freedom from any one governing discipline, so nonhuman narratology would seem like an obvious choice. Part of what makes this book so compelling, however, is that Herman himself calls attention to the fact that he didn't see it coming. Less than a decade ago, he supported narratology's overwhelmingly anthropocentric faith that stories model exclusively human lives. So what happened? Herman's chapters take readers on the journey toward recognizing that the lives of animals and even whole species themselves shape and are shaped by stories and the worlds that they do and don't make possible. Visualization is a key element, Herman asserts, and the introduction lays out these stakes in part through a comparative reading of Julia Leigh's 1999 novel The Hunter alongside its very different 2011 film adaptation. The book is then divided into two parts, the first of which clarifies the relationship between storytelling and different senses of selfhood. Chapters in that section focus on narratives that depict movements from parsimonious to prolific ontologies regarding the selfhood of other animals; that question or reconfigure human-animal dichotomies through representations of cross-species hybridity or metamorphosis; and that establish kinship networks across species lines. Whereas the first two kinds of stories are developed through literary and graphic-narrative examples, the illustration of the third primarily through autism memoirs demonstrates the applicability of Herman's theory far beyond the ordinary scope of literary studies, and his extraordinary abilities to synthesize concepts from "multispecies ethnography, critical animal studies, disability studies, and narratological work on character and characterization" (87). The book's second part delves deeper into what happens when "storyworlds, or worlds projected via storytelling practices" (100), engage still more directly with possibilities for more-than-human worlds. What follows from these chapters is a compelling case for "rethinking … paradigms for narrative analysis" (117). Graphic narrative emerges as the paramount form for engaging nonhuman subjectivity, and Herman demonstrates how through comparison with influential modernist experimental fiction and contemporary norm-challenging narratives that evoke animal experiences and conceptualize animal minds in complex ways. Knowing already most of the arguments against taking animal stories seriously made Herman's skillful parrying with them in [End Page 558] granular detail all the more gratifying, for it is easy to imagine where students will go with such a strong foundational argument for the value of animal stories. The book's coda, "Toward a Bionarratology; or, Storytelling at Species Scale," offers a foretaste by looking beyond the familiar sense of stories as...