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Reviewed by:
  • Animal Stories: Narrating across Species Lines by Susan McHugh
  • Brian Deyo (bio)
Susan McHugh, Animal Stories: Narrating across Species Lines. Posthumanities series, vol. 15. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011, 296 pp. $75.00 cloth, $25.00 paper.

If you pick up Susan McHugh’s Animal Stories: Narrating across Species Lines, be careful not to skip the dedication as I did upon my first reading. McHugh’s remarkable capacity to marshal diverse theories to read the affective complexities of human–animal relations can be intellectually demanding—therefore one may easily miss the undercurrent of passionate feeling behind her arguments. Nevertheless, her style of presentation has a way of making one sensible to this paradox. Thus shortly after intuiting the necessity of a second reading, I was relieved to discover my error. Her dedication reads as follows: “My mother-in-law’s collie bitch Susan and my sister’s paint gelding Sioux inspire this dedication to those for whom names can serve as powerful reminders of how kinship is only one among many powerful forms of relating.” The dedication continues to resonate with one’s sensibilities, enticing the reader to imagine extraordinary worlds of affiliation, curiosity, respect, and love intimated by the common mark of a name.

Animal Stories is methodologically principled in its insistence that we read nonhuman animals against the grain of anthropocentric structures of thought and feeling. Broadly interested in the way species life might be “configured in texts,” McHugh radically unsettles the notion that animal representations cannot escape the textual logics and literary conventions through which they are written (p. 9). Thus she is keenly vigilant to the affective power behind the narratives she studies. As she states, “animal narratives … pointedly appeal to the power of affect to defy the regimes that benefit from separation, isolation, and fragmentation of our lives and theirs” (p. 19). Animal narratives, as McHugh argues, have a way of opening the subject to alternative modes of knowing that rationalist (or humanist) epistemologies would seem to preclude or forestall. Moreover, animal narratives, properly engaged, reveal the subject’s dependence on nonhuman animals in ways that give the lie to post-enlightenment ideologies of individualism.

Part 1 of Animal Stories, “Intersubjective Fictions,” analyzes several works of fiction that manage to deconstruct modern forms of individualism as much as they represent “interspecies and intersubjective relations” (p. 3). As McHugh explains, these works both impart and create “a culturally valued sense of interdependence rooted in shared human-animal actions” (ibid.). One of the most interesting premises [End Page 231] in the first two chapters is that, contrary to John Berger’s claim that animal life (or “the wild”) is subject to an absolute erasure—buried, as it were, beneath increasingly modern, instrumentalist, hyper-mediated environments, nonhuman animals are actually with us—indeed, are us—albeit in more complicated ways than we might be inclined to admit. The texts that McHugh strategically chooses to read would appear to be salutary reminders of our individual and collective tendencies to deny precisely who and what we are and, more importantly, the material conditions that shape our becoming.

Chapter 1, “Seeing Eyes/Private Eyes: Service Dogs and Detective Fictions,” offers a series of perceptive close-readings of fictional and visual narratives that both positively represent and, at times, problematically obscure several entangled activist histories: disability rights, animal rights, and civil rights, all of which betray intersecting, ambivalent, and evolving visions of social justice. Starting with the seeing-eye dog fictions of Baynard Kendrick, McHugh examines how and why film adaptations of his novels overlook the complexities of cross-species interdependence. To close-read these narratives, place them in historical context, and subject them to critical scrutiny in a compressed, even-handed prose is no mean feat, and McHugh does just that in this short chapter. Of particular interest is the way she handles the difficulties of textual representation—namely, with respect to the way that normative conceptions of personhood and agency affect the production of narrative form and its reception. As she notes, stories that attempt to foreground “shared human-animal forms of agency” complicate and confuse received notions of able-bodied personhood; they also, at times, run...

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