Do Fictional Animals Matter?
Searching for Meaning in the Stories That Make Us
I weird myself out sometimes. Halfway through a movie like Nocturnal Animals, I’ll start wondering when the metaphor about nocturnal animals will come into play. I should know by this point that movies and books with animal in the title rarely have anything to do with actual animals, but I just can’t stop myself; my watchlist and TBR are filled with titles like Man Bites Dog, Bunny, and Unlikely Animals. After I’m let down by the abundance of humans in these stories, I think, Why in the world am I so obsessed with animals?
One answer is that I have an addictive personality. When I find something I love, I sink my teeth in like a tick and refuse to let go until I’m bloated and sick of the taste. It’s not healthy. But I think that’s why I love stories so much. They offer new fictional worlds for me to gorge myself on. Twenty years later, I can still practically quote every line of the original Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy, as well as recall what the cast and crew said in the hours of behind-the-scenes footage.
While I eventually weaned myself off the habit of back-to-back rewatches, that fervor for the things I love has never dissipated. My childhood love of animals has only grown as I’ve aged, and my fanaticism over movies like Pirates of the Caribbean has metamorphosized into a deep appreciation for the art of storytelling. The sumptuous pairing of stories and animals offers my emotional palate a continuous feast, as I consume stories from the lens of an animal lover and utilize the stories I write, watch, and read to elevate my animal advocacy.
As important as all that is to me, I frequently find myself wondering if the fictional animals I constantly obsess over really matter—and if they should matter to other people. But before I can address that, there are two other questions I need to ask first. Let’s start with this one…
Does fiction matter?
Stories teach us about the world. The stories of our youth leave an indelible mark upon our psyches, seared into our gray matter so that they influence our personality, and therefore our actions, for the rest of our lives. They taught us what it means to be good and bad, to be (or not to be) the kind of people we met inside fictional realities.
It’s not only highly imaginative children who experience this, or those always with their nose in a book who learn how to be good people. We all do it, because fiction is nonfiction. At least, that’s what our brains think. Every little piece of information we take in becomes a part of the story of our lives. Like birds plucking up bits of grass and twigs to weave into a nest, we are constantly sifting through information that will help us survive, picking and choosing what matters most to us.
After all, we are each the protagonist in our own plot, plodding through life towards an inevitable conclusion and searching for meaning in the characters, settings, and complications we encounter along the way. It doesn’t matter if the stories we’re drawn to are fiction or nonfiction—our brain interprets them all the same. As Lisa Cron writes in Story Genius,
“Stories instill meaning directly into our belief system the same way experience does—not by telling us what is right, but by allowing us to feel it ourselves.”
So, yes, fiction does matter. The next question then becomes…
Do animals matter?
On a practical level, human civilization simply would not exist without animals. (Disregarding the fact that we are also a species within the animal kingdom.) From the great apes before we became Homo sapiens, back to the first creatures who gulped down air rather than water, back to the microscopic organisms in the deep trenches of prehistoric oceans—all life began in the same place. We rarely appreciate how truly awesome existence is.
As humans evolved over millennia, we cohabitated with other animals, sharing the land, water, and plants in our ecosystems. The ancestors of modern wolves, sheep, goats, and cows became the dogs we share our homes with today and the meat we eat. More than any other species, horses helped us create and connect cities across vast landmasses. Cities of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were so dependent on horses that the 1872 horse flu epidemic ground American society to a standstill—despite a very low mortality rate. Horses’ inability to work for a few days disrupted all production, trade, and travel.
For better or worse, humanity’s dominion is built upon the lives and deaths of animals.
But that cold reality strips away the inner worlds of animals. Anyone who has known a dog or cat or pig or goldfish doesn’t need the entire history of human-nonhuman relationships to understand that animals matter; we know they matter because they are their own individuals. We can look into their eyes, or feel their reaction to our touch, and understand there’s more than bones and blood and muscle beneath their skin. The very fact that animals remember us and form relationships with us proves that storytelling is not an exclusively human concept. We play roles in their stories too, as friends, guardians, and villains.
But I find there’s no greater evidence for the existence of animals’ subjective consciousness than their ability to dream. David M. Peña-Guzmán writes in When Animals Dream,
The “link between dreaming and subjectivity means that there can be no dream without an ego. It is hard to even imagine what such a dream would look or feel like. In an egoless dream, who would be dreaming? From what perspective would the dream be experienced?”
We are the protagonists in our waking lives and also in our dreams. Since scientists have proven that the animals they’ve studied also dream, we can infer that animals have at least some level of self-awareness to be able to play the starring role in the fictive scenes their brains conjure while asleep.
So, now that we’ve established that animals matter not only to us but also to themselves, we’ll circle back to my initial question…
Do fictional animals matter?
The oldest known artwork, painted upon the Lascaux caves in France 20,000 years ago, features animals most prominently. Jim Mason writes in the updated edition of An Unnatural Order that, though ancient foragers ate mostly plants, “animals were the main thing on our ancestors’ minds.” He continues,
“The primal worldview saw people in partnership with, and having respectful views of, animals and nature. Animal cousins were admired for their cunning, power, speed, ferocity, and elusiveness. They were seen as ancestors, as kinfolk, as having souls like people. Animal life animated and ensouled the world, gave meaning to its mystery and order to its chaos.”
Animals continue to be a fount of endless fascination and education. Those stories we loved so much as children nearly always featured animals—from Mickey Mouse and Dr. Seuss to Scooby-Doo and Spiderman. In many ways, animals are our teachers, shepherding us through adolescence and into adulthood.
Though our ancestors reveled in animals’ majesty, today we rarely do so after childhood. The animals we see most often are the pests creeping within our walls, the mundane wildlife in our backyards, and the two species we treat like children in our homes—plus the occasional caged beasts in zoos or those trapped within the screens of nature documentaries.
Because we have so separated ourselves from the natural world, the inspiration we draw from animals and the earth rarely breaks the rigid boundaries we’ve set up in real life. For how often we pluck out pieces and characteristics of animals to create fiction, we so rarely consider animals as whole individuals with their own stories to tell.
Let me reiterate here that fiction is a mirror of reality. It shows us a reflection of ourselves, but we can twist and turn it to see entirely new things. It can reflect light back out into the world or absorb darkness. We can make silly faces in it and play pretend, or it can show us a painful, unfiltered truth. The animals we see in fiction inform how we perceive and treat animals in our lives, and the way we perceive and treat animals in our lives informs how we create them in fiction. Fictional animals matter because fiction matters and because animals matter; they—us—we—are all one and the same.
On my mind: Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt
Beware! Impending spoilers!
Remarkably Bright Creatures is a virtually perfect novel. Unfortunately, the author’s depiction of animals feels inconsistent, making the protagonists less empathetic than they’re meant to be. Opening from the perspective of an elderly octopus in an aquarium, he describes his imprisonment and his attempts to escape into the nearby ocean. But the story isn’t really about him, and he becomes less important as the plot goes on.
In the story’s climax, the two human protagonists—brought together by working night shifts at the aquarium—aid the octopus’ escape from the aquarium to live out his final days in freedom. Yet in the denouement, the primary protagonist makes a large donation to the very aquarium her octopus friend fought so desperately to escape. Either the author entirely forgot how traumatized he was in that prison, had intended his gripes about the aquarium to come across as cheeky melodrama, or truly believed he was a special octopus with feelings far superior to the other animals and octopuses that still remained in their cages. Frankly, I’m baffled by that part of the otherwise heartfelt ending.