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1In Percival Everett’s parodic Western novel God’s Country (1994), the anti-hero Kurt Marder watches as outlaws burn his farm, kidnap his wife and kill his dog. Each time he tells the story, the dog’s fate seems to draw much more sympathy than Marder’s and even his wife’s. This paradoxical anecdote points, in the ironic mode, at the uncertain boundary between the animal and human realms. In fact, animals are a peripheral, yet constant, presence in Percival Everett’s fiction set in the American West. This is hardly surprising, since Frontier narratives, from the Western to the present, deal with the interface between human beings and nature; animals, wild or domesticated, are key figures in this interaction. If “literature is that discourse whereby humans simultaneously declare their difference from animals, and take the measure of their suggestive similarities” (Robles 2), and metaphors of animality are used to define various degrees of humanity, especially in matters of race, representations of animal life have deeply philosophical implications. Among the vexing questions pertaining to this sphere is that of humanism and the validity, or lack thereof, of this notion in the contemporary world.

2As a matter of fact, in the Western tradition “the anthropogenic, or anthropological machine” (Agamben 26) has defined human nature in a dialectical negotiation of boundaries with two other realms, that of the divine and that of animals, which also encompasses the animality of man. Historically, the first interface was between mortal and immortal creatures, the other between body and soul. Characteristically, the “upper” and “lower” extremes whose middle defined the human condition were brought into contact through the institution of the sacrifice: the killing of an animal as an offering to a divinity had a propitiatory dimension and participated in maintaining the cosmic order.

3As to the universalist humanism born of modernity, it has been associated cognitively with a form of essentialism, “the dialectics of self and other,” and politically with Eurocentrism and imperialism (Braidotti 15). It is impossible to ignore the fact that Renaissance humanism, in praising human reason and perfectibility, delineated an ideal male figure and tended to exclude or belittle women; and that Europeans from the eighteenth to the twentieth century colonized and exploited non-Western peoples in the name of a superior “civilization.” Yet it is not impossible to imagine an updated humanism that must , in order to be coherent with its principles, recognize the humanity of all human beings, and replace dogmatic definitions and criteria with what could be called, in an irreverent paraphrase of Michel Foucault, a “souci de l’humain,” or preoccupation with the human, in the double sense of humanity and humaneness. On the positive side, in their attempt to delineate a cognitive and ethical human sphere, humanists have questioned the authority of religious dogmas, a very salutary stance in the contemporary world, where fundamentalisms of all stripes are back with a vengeance. Another challenge to the notion of humanism, which we will try to address in this essay, originates in our conflicted relation with animality and the fate we impose on animals. To blasphemously paraphrase Jean-Paul Sartre’s famous quote, if “existentialism is a humanism”, humanism may well be a speciesism.

4Drawing loosely from the discipline of Animal Studies, I will attempt to set up a typology and tropology of animal presence in several of Everett’s Western stories and probe their philosophical bearing on the relations between man, nature, and animals. Walk Me to the Distance features a mercy killing reminiscent of Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men and its metaphorical mirroring of the animal and human realms, while submitting that novel’s Darwinian naturalism to critical reconfiguration. In Wounded, the violence exacted on animals by a group of white supremacists is on a par with their deadly racism and homophobia: these examples establish an ethical parallel between the treatment of animals and human beings, as a criterion of humanity. The story collection Half an Inch of Water seems to deepen Everett’s approach to the animal world. Half the stories deal with the relations between humans and animals, from the presentation of trout-fishing or horse-riding as therapy and/or revelation of the Unconscious, to the exploration, in “Little Faith,” of a possible spiritual connection, inspired by a Native American worldview. The ultimate stage of this typological progression from parallelism and analogy to animal mediation, therapeutic or otherwise, involves a form of metamorphosis. The best example of this “becoming-animal” (Deleuze and Guattari) or zootropism (inclination towards the animal) is actually to be found in Everett’s first novel Suder. Beyond the functioning of the “anthropological machine” defining humanity through opposition, both the influence of the Amerindian Weltanschauung and behavioral zootropism may point to the insufficiencies of the Western dichotomy between men and animals, and open up to a more inclusive vision of the continuity between nature and humanity.

Of Rams and Men: Mirrors, Parallels and Analogies

5In Walk Me to the Distance (1985), David Larson, a Vietnam veteran, settles in Slut’s Hole, Wyoming. He rents a room from an old woman, Chloe Sixbury, who lives alone on a ranch with her son Patrick. The latter is mentally deficient, a child in a man’s body, with the sexual drives of a man. One day, David chances upon him having sex with a ewe in the barn, an episode he tolerantly ignores. But when Patrick later rapes David’s young charge, a little Vietnamese girl he nicknames “Butch,” abandoned by her family in a highway service station, the vet takes part in a lynching posse that hang Patrick from a tree in the wilderness. This execution can be analyzed in relation to the ethos of the West and its justification of violence in the physical and ideological space of the Frontier (Feith 90); another way of interpreting this episode is to replace it within the novel’s recurrent probing of the porous dividing line between humanity and animality.

6This plot line obviously echoes John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. In this 1937 novella, Lennie Small, a burly farm hand with a child’s mind, is dispatched in a form of “mercy killing” by his friend George Milton just before being captured and lynched by a mob for the murder of the boss’s wife. Lennie is etymologically an innocent, never intending harm despite the dramatic consequences of his actions. His mental handicap situates him in a prelapsarian space before good and evil; similarly, his infantile sexuality is only expressed in the desire to touch soft things, like mice, rabbits, or women’s hair. Women fear rape and struggle when he tries to stroke their hair; he kills them inadvertently because of his herculean strength. The ultimate tragedy is therefore caused by a misunderstanding.

7Of Mice and Men establishes a double articulation between the human and animal worlds. The first relation is one of analogy, as exemplified by the title, a quote from Scottish poet Robert Burns’s “To a Mouse,” an apologue or parable on the vanity of planning ahead, in light of life’s unpredictability: “The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men, / Gang aft agley” (Burns). The parallelism is strengthened by the presence of two “mercy killings,” Lennie’s being anticipated by that of old man Candy’s dog. The other ranch hands took it upon themselves to do away with the animal, under the pretext that it was old and inconveniently smelly. “That dog ain’t no good to himself. I wisht somebody’d shoot me if I got old an’ a cripple,” one of the men said (Steinbeck, Mice 45). The two killings, Lennie’s and the dog’s, feature elements of scapegoating, a form of ritual violence that is supposed to cleanse the community by sacrificing or exposing an individual previously burdened with all the group’s sins and resentment (Girard 155). This function can be carried out by a human being, as in ancient Greece, or by an actual animal, as in ancient Israel. Christian theology is imaginatively mixes both, since the redeemer is a godly human symbolized by a sacrificial lamb. In the figure of the scapegoat, the parallel between species can be said to morph into a chiasmus, through interspecies substitution.

8Lennie Small’s transgression of the species barrier amounts to a double animal tropism. It encompasses both Eros and Thanatos: his love of soft, furry things would be construed by a Freudian reader as a form of pregenital libido, indifferently addressed to human or non-human objects, whereas his bodily strength endows him with the danger often associated with animality, as suggested by comparisons with a horse (Steinbeck, Mice 3), a dog (9) or a bear (2). He is finally killed like an animal. George’s merciful execution of Lennie is only a means to avoid Lennie’s public scapegoating. His “animal” nature, viz. his bodily strength and unruly desires, is what excludes him from human society. Like children, animals symbolize both innocence and a wild nature to be tamed or, in this case, eliminated.

9A similar configuration obtains in Walk Me to the Distance. The animal tropisms in this novel also bring together desire and death, through the mediation of sheep. In its crudity, Patrick’s zoophilic intercourse with the ewe raises the stakes compared to Of Mice and Men. As in Steinbeck’s novel, the misfit’s execution is mirrored by that of an animal, a discarded ram Chloe Sixbury buys at an auction early in Walk Me to the Distance. His horns grow spiraling inwards and squeeze his skull, so that he cannot even walk. As soon as she gets home, she shoots it, as an act of pity: “I’m doing the pathetic creature a favor” (Walk 13). Patrick’s lynching is described partly as retribution and rough justice, partly as a mercy killing, since all alternative solutions – jail, institutionalization, chemical castration – might be worse than death. The execution is implicitly approved by Chloe, his mother, who provides an alibi for the perpetrators. The parallelism between the executions is made even more horrific by an implicit pun: the idea that an oversized “horn” may squeeze an individual’s brain may be transposed to the discrepancy between Patrick’s mental retardation and his unconquerable sexual desire. One question remains: why did Chloe not saw off the ram’s horns, as suggested by a bystander at the auction? This might appear as a logical and ethical blind spot of the text, demonstrating how ingrained the sacrificial conception of violence can be in the Western mentality (Feith 90). But it may be just as productive to consider this feature in terms of Chloe’s characterization, and the projective value animal symbolism has in the novel. Before going to the auction, she had just confided to David, about Patrick: “I’m his mother, but he ain’t a part of me […] I have no children” (Walk 12). Apparently, the ram became identified in her mind with her son. Her attitude towards the ram’s painful life epitomized her ambivalence and sense of shame towards Patrick. Thus, by killing the ram, she also vicariously/symbolically participated in the lynching of her son. Both the ovine and Patrick are figured as scapegoats – or “scaperams” – In the novel.

10An intertextual reading of Everett’s novel in the light of Steinbeck’s shows the later work as a darker corrective to the earlier one. Whereas Of Mice and Men took stock of the passing of the Jeffersonian pastoral ideal of an America of small, independent farmers, as Lennie and George – aptly named Milton – must ultimately renounce in Slut’s Hole, Paradise appears to have already been lost. Lenny’s childlike sexuality retains an aura of innocence that even his murder of women cannot fully erase; had he been sheltered from the world on a farm with plenty of rabbits and puppies to pet, he may no longer have been a threat to others. On the other hand, there is no misunderstanding of the origin of Patrick’s crime. His irrepressible genital sexuality potentially makes him a repeat sexual offender. Whereas Lenny’s mental innocence and meekness still imbue his death with a Christ-like aura, it would be difficult to say the same about Patrick’s.

11Steinbeck’s indebtedness to naturalism ushers in another analogy between the animal and human worlds: the Darwinian overtones that preside over the character’s fates. From this point of view, Lenny was not fit to survive, in spite of George’s efforts, tragic as his demise may be. Furthermore, the micro-society of the ranch is often compared to a pack of wolves, cowed by Curley, the boss’s son, but prompt to turn against the weak, like old Candy, the African American Crooks, or simple Lennie. In Of Mice and Men, Social Darwinism, or the extrapolation of natural evolution into the human sphere, which is commonly identified with to a glorification of the capitalist order in terms of the competition for survival, is imbued with social criticism, denouncing man’s inhumanity towards man. In Walk Me to the Distance, the Darwinian notion of a harsh, pitiless nature, which is an integral part of the myth of the West, seems to underpin the ranchers’ weltanschauung. It establishes a continuity between animal and human existence, based on the notions of “the struggle for life” and the “survival of the fittest.” As preached by the minister at Slut’s Hole’s: “The thing about this country is – well, it’s relentless. It doesn’t let up” (135). David, the Vietnam veteran, who has also known his share of struggles, seems to have no qualms accepting this ethos. Yet, it is less than certain that the narrator concurs, his voice appearing to stand ironically at one remove from the character’s, as well as from such “natural” justifications of a regional – or national – ethos of violence. “Everett never wholly undermines David’s embrace of Slut’s Hole and/or the West as his new home, but he certainly questions the extent to which it requires willful ignorance – that is, acceptance of a version of the frontier myth – on his part” (Maus 137).

12Steinbeck’s interpretation of Darwinian thought also had a more original and challenging layer, as exemplified in his notion of “non-teleological thinking,” inspired by his friend, marine biologist Ed Ricketts and exposed notably in their joint venture Sea of Cortez (1941), later reworked and abridged by Steinbeck as The Log from The Sea of Cortez (1951). This wholistic approach encourages the trained eye to see the full picture and concentrate on what is rather than what ought to be, both in the natural and social realm. “This deep underlying pattern inferred by non-teleological thinking crops up everywhere – a relational thing, surely, relating opposing factors on different levels, as reality and potential are related. But it must not be considered as causative, it simply exists, it is” (Steinbeck, Log 124). This defiance towards causal explanation stems from the notion that the latter is inherently limited, because it can never take all factors into account. Judging facts and concepts according to their purpose (teleology) is a fallacy, because in the process the human mind imposes its categories on a complex world. It also assigns responsibility and blame where none apply. This insight therefore also entails a theory of knowledge and language. Of Mice and Men does not fully embody the principles of “non-teleological thinking”: it is structured in part like a tragedy, in which biological and social factors play the part of fate, and the plot is teleologically oriented towards the protagonists’ cathartic demise. Yet, the major role devolved to chance may point to the possibility of alternative outcomes that might have thwarted what passes as causality and destiny. Furthermore, the wholistic, systemic depiction of the novel’s society may bear a stronger critical charge than a mere focus on individual actions and responsibilities. This tension, in Mice, between teleological and non-teleological thinking may echo the discrepancy between Rickett’s contemplative, monistic, almost Buddhist conception of life, and Steinbeck’s more action-driven concern for social justice (Astro xix).

13One may venture that the rewriting of Steinbeck’s novel in Walk Me to the Distance proposes a differential exploration of its philosophical premises, balancing a criticism of some of its cruder naturalistic and Darwinian assumptions with a tribute to the earlier writer’s more complex insights. Everett’s systematic deconstruction and debunking, especially in his more avant-garde novels, of all “assumptions,” cognitive or generic, his dismissal of simple causality for the “Big Picture,” may share some premises with Steinbeck’s non-teleological thinking, in spite of the differences between the two authors. Among the assumptions that are questioned in Walk Me to the Distance is the manner in which we tend to envisage the relation between animals and humans: analogy respects the separation between the two realms, whereas desire or sacrifice tend to blur the distinction, potentially paving the way for more ambiguous, subversive conjunctions.

14In Wounded (2005), the ethical questions involved in the parallel between humans and animals are brought to the fore. In this other Western novel, a group of white supremacists treat minorities and animals in the same sadistic manner. They beat up and finally kill David, the protagonist John Hunt’s homosexual friend, the last in a series of heinous acts that involve slaughtering cows belonging to a Native American rancher, or setting a coyote burrow on fire to burn or asphyxiate a mother and her pups. Hunt, on the contrary, saves and nurtures one of the surviving pups. The novel stages an implicit reflection about the nature and definition of humanity, in both its biological meaning (human) and its moral sense (humane). If, contrary to the Kantian definition of morality that values in the Other a rational being like myself, compassion or empathy are defined as a basis for an ethics, the relationship between humans and animals shifts from an exclusive towards an inclusive rapport. This is the gist of Jeremy Bentham’s famous expression: “The question is not, Can they reason?, or, Can they talk? But, Can they suffer?” (Bentham 144).

15A paradoxical consequence follows: only human beings can be inhuman (in the sense of abjectly inhumane); no-one would think about assessing the morality of a non-human animal’s actions, even a predator. Such violence is usually predicated on a dehumanization of the victim or enemy, who is relegated to a form of animality. A further difficulty arises: how should we treat such inhuman humans? The members of the white militia in Wounded seem to have a very narrow definition of humanity, restricted by race and sexual orientation. They feel justified in exerting violence against all those who are not fully human, or abnormal, according to their criteria. In the end of the novel, Hunt’s Uncle Gus, who is dying of cancer and has nothing to lose, executes them to avenge David, as well as his own past racial humiliations. Such retribution is accepted as a form of justifiable violence, according to the code of the West; at least this is what the sheriff suggests: “‘This is the frontier, cowboy,’ Elvis said. ‘Everyplace is the frontier. Take care of your uncle’ ” (207). But it hardly conforms to the rule of law, within whose ambit even the criminal is considered as a human being, and a subject of rights. Does not the unlawful execution of an inhuman being also dehumanize the perpetrator? This moral problem is given special relevance in the context of racial violence in the United States.

16Patrick’s hanging, in Walk Me to the Distance, may be said to have “powerful and indelible racial overtones” (Maus 136). In a past that is hardly past – in the light of the mass incarceration of, and endemic police brutality directed against, minority, especially African American subjects (Alexander) – many black men were lynched, strung up from trees in similar fashion, because of the widespread myths of the black buck and black rapist, whose bodily strength and sexual appetite were seen as threats to white womanhood. Alleged animality and mental deficiency were often mobilized as justifications for acts of terror and vengeance against racial minorities. Upping the ante in this respect, Everett’s latest volume, a scathing parody of a slave-rearing manual, The Book of Training, by Colonel Hap Thompson (2018), reads like a horse- or dog-raising primer: “The trainer must always maintain a clear vision of the entire project. He has to create, maintain an intercourse with an animal with whom he shares no real common language, whose mind will frequently and naturally be elsewhere, who has no means of comprehending the purpose or logic of the training” (Training 25). David Larson’s and Uncle Gus’s acceptance of the Western ethos becomes all the more ironic in this “racial” light, but while Walk Me to the Distance explores these issues suggestively, from various angles, it refrains from clear-cut conclusions and leaves the burden of ethical choice to the reader.

Animal Therapies

17Through parallelism and analogy, the animal and human worlds can mirror each other. In this dispensation, transgression of the boundaries between species reveals the animality of human beings, often in the form of “monstrous,” tragic pathologies that lead to sacrifice and scapegoating. But the relation between humans and animals can also have more positive connotations. The first four stories in the recent collection Half an Inch of Water (2015) involve some form of healing mediated by animal figures, in what could be visualized as circuits or feedback loops.

18For example, the protagonist of “Wrong Lead,” Jake Sweeney, owns a horse-riding center and gives riding lessons to a woman, Sarah Daniels, who both loves and is afraid of horses. An incident serves as a catalyst: when setting about to cross a stream in the wilderness, Jake warns Sarah of the presence of a snake; the woman tenses, the horse feels it and recoils, almost throwing her off the saddle (Half 83). To this confrontation with her fears is added another lesson Sarah brings back from the outing: to guide a horse, you have to know where you are headed. As Jake says, “I’m sitting on a behemoth with a brain the size of a Brazil nut. He can only process so much. All he needs to know is that I’m going over there” (82). At their next meeting, Sarah tells Jake that “he convinced her to leave her husband” (87). When the husband comes to confront him, Jake ends up giving him a riding lesson as well: “Listen, I don’t know you or your wife, but here you are at my house looking for answers. You asked me why she loves horses. I’m going to see if this helps you understand” (92). The end of the story is inconclusive: Sarah arrives and watches her husband riding, while Jake goes away to take care of his ex-wife’s neglected roses.

19The text reads like a pastiche of a horse-whisperer story, but devoid of the sentimentality of this sub-genre of Western literature. There is notably no idealization of the bond between horses and men: “I like horses. They’re honest. I haven’t had one cheat me or lie to me or betray me. And they allow me to ride them” (92). This rather negative definition reads more like misanthropy than hippophilia – yet note how Jake conflates humans and animals in bestowing on horses the human qualities he admires – or it might illustrate the Western tough guy’s reluctance to express feelings. Jake also denies the inherent wisdom that is supposed to accrue from closeness to animals, or the deep metaphorical implications of the activity of taming them: “All I wanted was for your horse to cross the creek” (87); “Why does every-fucking-body think I’m trying to say more than I am?” (91). Yet, independently of sentimental clichés, Sarah and her husband’s adventure hints at the projective nature of our relations with horses. The projections may be Freudian; their makeup might also be mimetic, or synecdochic. Sarah’s fear of horses may be symptomatic of a more general fear, be it existential anguish about the future, discomfort with her own physical nature, or dissatisfaction with her marriage. In this case, the determination she learnt during the crossing of the creek, the overcoming of an obstacle, was converted into a desire for action in this broader context. The ambivalent relationship with the instructor, mediated by the horse, could be compared to psychoanalytic transference, in both its dimensions of empowerment and sexual attraction. The husband’s initiation into horse riding under his wife’s gaze might be beneficial for the couple, by creating a common ground of shared understanding. But the story emphatically refrains from any definitely happy, therapeutic ending, a narrative “assumption” which might just amount to a “wrong lead.” The text probes rather than extolls animal mediations.

20Implicit in these mediations is a peculiar psychosomatic complex. The horse is an empathetic, volitive and emotional creature, which has its own individuality yet acts as an extension of the rider’s will. In Western culture, the relation between the rider or charioteer and his horses has often been compared to that between body and soul, coded in terms of dominance. In Plato’s Phaedrus, the soul is depicted as a team composed of two horses and a charioteer, whose task is made all the more difficult that one of the animals is unruly and draws the soul towards the ground and earthly desires (Plato 69). Aristotle, on the other hand, envisaged the soul not as a separate entity but as the life principle within the body, an insight encapsulated in the common Latin origin of the words “animal” and “anima.” There were three varieties of souls: the vegetative soul, encompassing the functions of growth and nutrition; the animal soul, characterized by motion and sensation; and the human soul, endowed with intellect and reason (Aristotle 61-63). One may surmise that there is in horse riding a projective dimension that lowers our center of gravity, as it were, establishing a centaur-like compound of animality and humanity, leading optimally to a reconciliation of our faculties rather than a mere will to mastery. But this equestrian philosophy may reach further: Giorgio Agamben argues that if in most of Western culture the disjunction between animality and humanity, upon which “humanism” is predicated, is thus located within the human, it may have only limited definitional and conceptual validity (Agamben 16).

21The ethologist and philosopher Baptiste Morizot further states: “The paradox I want to track here is that, if we are heirs to a morality that figures our inner life in animal form, yet our tradition is wrong about what an animal is […] The stakes are to do justice to our inner animalities, through a better understanding of the animals out there, which we have taken as models for our intimate passions” (Morizot 177-78). He suggests replacing Plato’s and Descartes’s hierarchical “charioteer’s morality” (180), whose intent is to rein in the passions, with another view, inspired by Spinoza, a “diplomacy” that nourishes certain desires more than others to coax the body-soul continuum into increasing freedom and confidence (189). An illustrative allegory is drawn from a Cherokee tale, in which the self is composed of a noble, joyous white wolf and a vile, arrogant black wolf: we are the one we feed (188-89). Even though Morizot valorizes wild animals over domestic ones, his gentle approach of positive moral reinforcement is quite similar to Jake’s respectful treatment of his horses and customers.

“Totemic” Animal Tales

22Two other stories from the same collection, “Stonefly” and “Little Faith,” expand on this spiritual theme. The former is a “fishy” fishing story with overtones of magic realism and intertextual connections with William Faulkner’s As I lay Dying (1930). The protagonist, Daniel Lowry, is a fourteen-year-old boy traumatized by his sister’s drunk drowning in a pool of water in a nearby river: “Daniel would not smile for six years. And when he finally did, no one knew why. It was likely he didn’t either” (29). Every Saturday, as a sort of ritual, he goes fishing further down the river. He always lets his catch go, except the last fish of the day; “He would clean it, fry it, eat it, and then go about his chores” (29). One day, after the destruction of a beaver dam changes the physiognomy of the creek, Daniel is lured upstream to where his sister died: “He thought about his therapist and how this was just the sort of thing she’d want to hear and he knew he’d never tell her. He’d never tell her, because it didn’t amount to anything. He did not feel a thing and had no thought beyond recognition of that place” (33). He starts returning to the spot regularly and often sees a giant trout there. One day, he fishes it, in an epic fight reminiscent of Hemingway, pulls it out of the water, exchanges gazes with the creature, and leaves it suffocating on the beach: “He walked back to the edge of the pool and looked down at the fish. Remarkably, it was still alive, but he left it where it was, where it needed to be. After all, he thought, it couldn’t have been there in the first place.” He smiled as he left (41-42).

23This strange, ambiguous story seems to be fishing for psychological interpretations: the traumatic event of the sister’s drowning, the lack of affect, the repetitive gestures and habits all point to post-traumatic stress disorder. Several symbolic elements allude to the removal of a mental block: the breaking of a dam, the return to an avoided place, even the ensuing conversations among the family that lift a veil of silence on Rachel’s death. If angling is often a metaphor for the plumbing of the depths of the unconscious, the apparition of the giant fish must symbolize the return of the repressed. Yet, the psychoanalytical view may be challenged by the discredit in which Daniel’s ineffectual therapist is held. Other, competing epistemic systems are also proposed. If we seize the magic realist1 cues in the text, the uncanny trout might not represent but be the drowned sister; her literal return in this reincarnated form would then be the prelude to a reconciliation and a lifting of the trauma. But this happy outcome is denied by the text. A third line of interpretation lurks under the surface, connecting Daniel’s story with Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. In this 1930 novel, a child, Vardaman Bundren, having lost his mother Addie, superimposes this death onto that of the fish he has just killed, and which will be prepared for the whole family to eat: “cooked and et; cooked and et” (Faulkner 34). This surprising linkage bespeaks an effort to fathom the mystery of death. It might even express unconscious guilt for the mother’s passing, as if by catching the fish he had concomitantly brought about Addie’s demise. This associational logic culminates in a form of identification – “My mother is a fish” (49) – that might be called “totemic” or as Ruben Ellis calls it, “a kind of displaced totemic relationship of individual and alter ego” (Ellis 410).2 One might suspect that Faulkner’s depiction of Vardaman’s grieving process is indebted to Freud’s interpretation of totemism in his 1913 Totem and Taboo. Freud defined the totem as “an animal (whether edible and harmless or dangerous and feared) and more rarely a plant or a natural phenomenon (such as rain or water), which stands in a peculiar relation to the whole clan. In the first place, the totem is the common ancestor of the clan; at the same time it is their guardian spirit and helper” (54). The clan is under strict prohibition to kill or eat its totem animal, yet at certain special occasions such sacrifice is an occasion for celebration, and a ritual feast takes place, when the sacred animal is consumed collectively (201). Another key function of totemism is the regulation of matrimonial alliances and the prevention of incest. Freud’s hypothesis is that the totem unconsciously represents the father, and the dual treatment of the animal corresponds to the emotional ambivalence children feel towards their progenitor, as a result of the Oedipus complex (192). Furthermore, as the subtitle of the essay makes explicit, Freud believed that, since ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, there are many psychological commonalities between children and “primitives.” (190). So Vardaman’s totemic “bricolage,” with its gender inversion, appears to be born of a coincidence, and to encapsulate his ambivalent feelings towards the mother and matriarch – love, presumably with a tinge of incestuous desire, resentment at her abandonment, and the resulting guilt. His shock at envisioning the eating of the fish (“cooked and et”) may evoke the filigreed presence of the totemic meal, violating a double taboo, culinary and homicidal. Or the whole process may just be a coping mechanism to make sense out of the outrage of loss and grief, an improvised spiritual move to ward off death. After all, Vardaman will later bore holes into the coffin to let his mother breathe, acknowledging or wishing for her continuing presence (Faulkner 51).

24Of course, the fish in “Stonefly” might be just a fish, and all the symbolic interpretations we have floated so far may have no actual bearing on the case; yet Daniel’s charged reaction invites more than a literal reading. In all the figurative comprehensions, psychoanalytical, magic realist, or intertextual, the fish is or represents Rachel, the drowned sister. The ending is all the more disturbing since by letting it die unattended, the boy seems to forfeit all possibility of reconciliation or resolution. His final smile may be construed as a sadistic impulse, an environmentally incorrect move that precludes reconciliation with nature, possibly the expression of his resentment towards his sister and her negative impact on his life. Structurally, the end brings symmetry, in the form of a reverse drowning, undoing the anomaly of the original traumatic event. This may be the meaning of the cryptic “it couldn’t have been here in the first place” (42). The modal “couldn’t,” in lieu of the expected “shouldn’t,” draws attention to a sense of unreality, as if Daniel were aware that the fish must be a figment of his bereaved imagination, a fictive transitional object allowing him to process his grief and be freed from the past. Ironically, this belief in the illusory nature of the animal may itself be an illusion, and a real fish be left to gasp on the bank. Of course, letting an actual animal die may be symbolic of David finally being able to let his sister go, precluding the possibility of return.

25The readers themselves are left gulping for meaning like a fish out of the water. We waver between the interpretive options of healing, sadism, or madness, a confusion resulting from a metafictional suspension of generic “assumptions,” a refusal of interpretive closure similar to Daniel’s suggested refusal of emotional closure. The status of the creature hovers between plain literal existence, animistic spirituality, and psychological projection. These are three of the common modes of subsistence of textual animals in fiction. This self-reflexive move seems to problematize the ideological implications of animal characterization in literature. Specifically, there is much at stake in Everett’s revisiting of Faulkner’s canonic modernist totemism. Whereas Reuben Ellis claims that Faulkner’s take on the totem stems from a rather accurate knowledge of Native American culture (Ellis 410), one may think that the Freudian hypotext, especially the correspondences it draws between the minds of children, neurotics and First Nations, betrays a questionable primitivism. As a matter of fact, Freud’s notions were used in the West’s association of non-whites, particularly Africans, with cannibalism. The uncomfortable, suspended ending in “Stonefly” may endow the story with the dimension of a critical pastiche, drawing the reader’s attention to the need to question canonic representations of animals – and humans – in literature.

26“Little Faith,” which centers on a Native American character, may be seen as a corrective to such a biased notion of “totemism.” Sam Innis, a black veterinarian, is called to help find a vanished Amerindian girl, whose deafness makes the search all the more difficult. Following her tracks, he finds her in the hills, surrounded by rattlesnakes, yet unharmed. He goes to fetch and carry her back and, in spite of all the precautions taken not to disturb the snakes, he is bitten twice. The man and child have to spend the night out in the wilderness. Innis’s wounds swell, which spells almost certain death. During the night, he has a vision of his Native friend Dave in the flames of the camp fire, but this clichéd variation on the theme of Indian spirituality is discredited: “Here you are, hallucinating stereotypes,” his friend says, debunking the dream from within the dream (24). In the morning, when the sheriff and a paramedic reach them, Sam is still alive, and the swelling has gone. The paramedic wonders at the miracle of two “dry” bites, yet Sam senses that the child is responsible for the cure. On parting, she signs “You will be fine now,” and when her father says “she’s special,” Sam answers “Yes, she is” (26).

27As in “Stonefly” there is a dimension of magic realism in the story, more clearly connected to the Native American worldview. Since it is unlikely that Sam should have survived the two bites, the healing is attributable either to his dream vision or Penny, the little girl, who seems to have a special spiritual affinity with the snakes. As if they were her “totemic” animal helpers, they refrain from harming her, and may have imparted her some of their wisdom and the ability to cure their bites. Even her deafness reinforces the association, since snakes have long been deemed (mistakenly) to possess no auditory organs and merely “hear” vibrations on the ground through bone conduction. Penny therefore seems to have “snake medicine,” and be endowed with some shamanic powers. “Little Faith” is a tribute to Native American spirituality, recalling Everett’s own stay on the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming when in his thirties (Maus 29). The story’s discreet, respectful magic realism avoids the pitfalls of Faulkner’s primitivism or the local color totemism of some nature writing, of the kind pastiched in “Stonefly.”

28“Little Faith” confronts the protagonist’s Western conception of animal life to the widely different Native American one – our narrow vision of the relation between humans and other species may make us people of “little faith.” In the Native view there is a continuity rather than fixed boundaries between the several reigns; animals are endowed with spirits, they can establish privileged relations with some chosen humans to whom they serve as guides (coming into contact with your animal helper is the purpose of the vision quests conducted as coming-of-age rites by Plains Natives). Shamans are not only able to harness animals’ powers and medicine; they can also metamorphose into animals. This is the meaning, for example, of the well-known Lakota exclamation “mitakuye oyasin – all my relatives – plants, animals, humans, all one big universal family” (Lame Deer 268). In Native American thought, “humanism” is therefore a term devoid of meaning, since human specificity does not imply human exclusiveness and separation from the other species who share the natural world with us. “Little Faith” may seem quite exceptional in Everett’s oeuvre in its radical reconfiguration of the relation between animals and humans. But this recent development was actually prefigured in his very first novel, Suder, in which an actual metamorphosis takes place, showing how consistent the animal imagination has been in Everett’s literary career.

Suder, or Ornithotropia

29Suder is a strange mixture of the existentialist and the surrealist novel. It follows Craig Suder, a baseball player for the Seattle Mariners whose game has hit on a slump, and who is alienated from both his life and his wife. He even has a bout of impotence. Several of the surrealistic elements in the novel are grotesque happenings, of the type which Derek Maus in his recent book has linked with the literary mode of Menippean Satire (Maus 107). One of these threads is concerned with animals, featuring extremes of size and weight, from elephants to birds. At one point in the novel, Suder, on the run from a drug dealer, hides in a mountain cabin with Renoir, an elephant rescued from a circus who must be protected from hunters and taxidermists, and Jincy, a young girl trying to escape domestic violence. The cabin has become a Noah’s ark, a refuge for misfits and runaways of all species, a variation on the theme of the Western wilderness as utopia and paradise.

30Craig’s desire for freedom ushers in the main animal leitmotif, leading to his supposed transformation into a bird. The avian theme goes a long way back to his childhood memories of Bud Powell, Charlie “Bird” Parker’s pianist, who stayed at the Suder home for a while. In his present hour of gloom, the protagonist becomes infatuated with the famous saxophonist’s art, and more specifically his 1946 standard “Ornithology,” a sort of portrait of the artist as a volatile. Suder plays the record to all the people he encounters, and even attempts to play the saxophone, to no avail. So he decides to change tack, and switch from comparison to identification, no longer living like a bird, but as a bird. The first stage of this grotesque/surrealistic metamorphosis begins as a joke, only to be pursued literally: Craig starts eating worms. He then sets on a program of neck exercises to acquire a bird’s ability to touch all parts of his body (152). In a further mimetic attempt, he tries to catch a cold so as to raise his body temperature to avian levels, even going to the length of kissing an ugly woman with a runny nose (153). After shaving his whole body for aerodynamism, he sets about building his wings, out of a frame of plastic tubing, whose extremities are joined by slats. The lifting power is secured by trash bags cut into strips and wrapped around the frames, and feathers glued to the structure one at a time (164). In the end, he takes flight from a high rock – after a free fall, he slowly glides down in circles. The exhilaration brings about another take-off, in the form of an erection, ending his long spate of impotence. In the last paragraph, Suder is reminded of a bird-watching friend who always calls every bird he sees by its Latin taxonomic name. “Then I see Beckwith on the ridge with the hunters and he’s pointing up at me. I imagine him to say: ‘Homo Sapiens.’ And I says, ‘Craig Suder’” (171).

31As so often in Everett’s works, this startling metamorphosis is susceptible of a variety of interpretations. It may be an obsessive identification on Freudian terms, in an Oedipal scenario. Bud Powell and, vicariously, Charlie Parker fulfilled the function of ideal father figures during a conflicted childhood when the real father was often distant; they used to be empowering images of masculinity that Suder is trying to recapture when his manhood is under attack. “Bird,” and the avian associations of this nickname, encapsulated virtuosity, freedom, and jazz as opposed to Suder’s blues (Maus 129).3 The final soaring can also be interpreted as a revisiting of the legend of the Flying African that ends Toni Morrison’s 1977 Song of Solomon. But the act of replacing the spiritual or shamanic flight of the original with a plastic and feather apparatus can only point to a parody of this folk symbol of freedom along the lines of racial identity. Suder seems to be “in greater need of ‘an assertion of the aggressive and radical autonomy available in the grotesque’ than of a liberation that simultaneously solidifies a racial or ethnic bond” (Maus 114).4

32As a matter of fact, the transformation is only partial, and does not lead to stable identifications of an oedipal or racial nature. Rather than being subjected to (re)categorization, it constitutes a stylized impersonation that escapes categories. It exerts the violence of the grotesque against any definite forms, hybridizing the human, animal and plastic realms in unstable, metamorphic configurations (Stewart 116). By bringing forth not the genus “Homo Sapiens” but the individual Craig Suder, it represents an assault on the taxonomies defended by such people as Beckwith: taxonomies are indeed taxing, for they limit possibilities and arrest mutations.5 After all, according to G. Agamben, the naturalist Carl Linnaeus gave our species the name Homo Sapiens not as a substantive characteristic (wisdom or consciousness) but as a question, derived from the adage “nosce te ipsum” (“know thyself”). It spells out the paradoxical injunction for humans to recognize themselves as also other (animals, apes) in order to gain full consciousness of what they are. “Homo sapiens, then, is neither a clearly defined species nor a substance: it is, rather, a machine or device for producing the recognition of the human” (Agamben 26). While one may see this differentiating mechanism as the root of humanist arrogance, its ironic questioning may also preclude essentialist complacency.

33Suder’s ornithotropism, his “devenir-oiseau,” implies becoming a bird and flipping one too – at fixed assumptions and linguistic categories. On one level, it can be viewed as a praise of folly since his oddball obsession has had some curative power. This brush with, or downright madness echoes the mother’s, who had taken to running maniacally around town in stiflingly warm clothes; Suder’s father had gradually learned to play along with her folly as a measure of solidarity and to save his marriage – and in the process relativize the notions of reason and normalcy. Perhaps the virtues of madness, like those of Dali’s “paranoïa critique,” lie in its defying categorization. Paradoxically, Suder’s bird tropism is a way to come into his own, not by sticking to categories but by muddying them: it might be said that he became a better man for being a bird. This is what Deleuze and Guattari would define as an act of deterritorialization; they detect such metamorphic trends (becoming-animal, becoming-woman, becoming-child) in most phases of change, when former identities are unsettled, either in alienation or to welcome new possibilities: neuroses and madness, existential growth, shamanism, artistic creation. It is to be noted that these radical transformations do not imply mere imitation or a shift from one essence to another, since they are an attack against the very notion of essentialism.

For if becoming animal does not consist in playing animal or imitating an animal, it is clear that the human being does not “really” become an animal any more than the animal “really” becomes something else. Becoming produces nothing other than itself … The becoming-animal of the human being is real, even if the animal the human being becomes is not; and the becoming-other of the animal is real, even if that something other it becomes is not. (Deleuze and Guattari 238)

This process does not only depict Suder the protagonist’s bird fluke; it can also serve as a comment on the creative process at work in Suder the novel.

No art is imitative, no art can be imitative or figurative. Suppose a painter “represents” a bird; this is in fact a becoming-bird that can occur only to the extent that the bird itself is in the process of becoming something else, a pure line and pure color … The painter and musician do not imitate the animal, they become-animal at the same time as the animal becomes what they willed, at the deepest level of their concord with Nature. (Deleuze and Guattari 304-305)

34Everett’s first novel is therefore a manifesto of his anti-mimetic, non-essentialist, grotesque and metamorphic aesthetic. Like Suder’s wing-like frames, the book is an artefact that creates/transforms its creator and finally takes flight. Its aspiration to emancipation is enacted on several levels: it claims liberation from gravity, from identity (politics), and linguistic classificatory systems. Among those is the “anthropological machine,” the means of production of the category of humanity through opposition to the animals without, and the animality within.

35Everett’s Western novels and short stories feature many animals, whose textual functions range from parallelism and comparison with the human world to mediation, therapeutic or projective, to identification and metamorphosis. This animal postulation, or zootropism, often leads to a blurring of the separate categories of human and animal, culminating in forms of “becoming-animal” that remind of Deleuze and Guattari’s radical antiessentialist philosophy. One may wonder whether an evolution can be detected from Suder’s Da Vinci-like glider to the Native American shamanic outlook in “Little Faith,” from a machinic arrangement to a spiritual connection with the non-human realm. Probably not. Nothing seems to be further from Everett’s mindframe than the notion of linear progression. Furthermore, Suder may already bear the influence, beside Toni Morrison’s Flying African legend, of Native American culture, with which he had had first-hand acquaintance. Under the ostentatious grotesque transformation, there might be a hidden tribute to tribal spirituality. Interestingly, Amerindian novelist Gerald Vizenor also chose to represent a Native trickster character engaging in a form of shamanic flight on an ultralight airplane in his 1986 Griever: An American Monkey King in China. The diverse ways in which animals are represented in Everett’s work may be variations on a theme, in rhizomatic rather than linear fashion. They tie in with the author’s constant exploration of language and imagination, as well as his systematic deconstruction of dichotomic, taxonomic thought.

36As to the question that has kept resurfacing all along this essay, that of humanism, it may be safe to state that Percival Everett would not identify as a humanist, because of his defiance of all limitative categories, especially tautological ones. After all, humanism is a form of hermeneutic circle, trying to define the specificity of humanity from a human perspective. Even though this might be a pressing question, no unbiased answer can be found, except in the hypothesis playfully emitted by Derrida: “And say the animal responded?” (Derrida 119), ventured in an effort to “break with the Cartesian tradition of the animal-machine without language and without response” (119), and to revoke in thought the privilege of the human position.

37For the same reason, his enmity to rigid taxonomies, it is difficult to imagine Everett as an “animalist.” All the more so that some of the discourses of Animal Rights advocates feature arguments that, from an African American point of view, cannot but appear as questionable. One of these is the comparison between animal exploitation and human slavery: “Some may shift uncomfortably at comparisons between human and nonhuman slavery. They shouldn’t” (Wise 22). Even though the logic of the progressive extension of rights to ever more numerous disenfranchised groups makes sense, the equivalence between ownership and forced labor of human beings and animals is awkward and insensitive at best. It might even backfire by shocking us into a reminder of the difference in nature between, and the dissimilar ethical obligations we owe to, our fellow humans and animals. Another argument concerns the indexation of human rights on autonomy and rationality: “a great many human beings don’t make the cut” (Wise 31). Wise proposes to have recourse to a “scale of practical autonomy” to define which rights could be applicable to different species according to their perceptual, emotional, volitional and cognitive abilities (33). This scale is inspired by the actual practice of judges who limit the rights and legal autonomy of children or severely retarded human beings (39). One may think there is something shocking in such measurement, which could represent a throwback to times when the abilities of African slaves, for example, were compared to those of horses or dogs or, later, when eugenicist notions and discourses claimed to improve the “race” through forms of artificial selection similar to those of animal breeding. What bearing would such a notion have on the ethics of lynching Patrick Sixbury?

38Everett’s oeuvre constitutes a fictive space where writer and reader can explore existential, ethical and philosophical options by probing and questioning our mental and linguistic assumptions. One of these themes is that of the relations between animals and humans. Just like their human counterparts, animal characters are “paper beings” – or “paper tigers” – with no necessary correlation with the world beyond the texts. In this respect, the fishing lures lovingly manufactured in the guise of insects by several Everett characters to fool fish into predatory reflex and a grim fate, self-reflexively point to artistic creation as an artisanal gesture and to a poetics of the simulacrum (see Watershed 6). Some of these fictive animals are even “intertextual beasts,” revisiting the treatment of animals in other fictions like those of Steinbeck or Faulkner. Yet, the biotope of Everett’s Western fiction addresses “real” issues, by featuring widespread coexistence between human and nonhuman animals, an implicit advocacy for a humane (how language traps us!) treatment of living creatures of all species, and a fundamental questioning of the boundaries of our humanity, sometimes to the point of vertigo, or “becoming-animal.” This is the fictional space of zootropia, the literary ecosystem we have attempted to chart, in the humble manner of hunter-gatherers of meaning in Everett’s œuvre.