Authored animals: creature tropes in Native American fiction.

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.

Louis Owens, the novelist, created an animal with an enormous head and a thyroid condition, a giveaway dog named Custer. The presenter said, "Indians and dogs go together.... It's an ancient, honorable alliance. A good dog warms the. lodge during those hard winters and warns when the stealthy enemy approaches. And Custer's a sweet dog; look at that face. He's just a little nervous right now" (Owens, 1994, p. 147; Vizenor, 1995, p. 190).

Jack London created a clever, heroic, proletarian animal character in The Call of the Wild. "Buck did not read the newspapers, or he would have known that trouble was brewing, not for himself, but for every other tide-water dog." Buck, with domestic deference, "accepted the rope with quiet dignity. To be sure, it was an unwonted performance: but he had learned to trust in men he knew, and to give them credit for a wisdom that outreached his own."

London was an evolutionist and ap advocate of social justice; moreover, he celebrated selective variations of heroic individualism in his stories. and novels. Sometimes his animals and humans were matched to the same temperament and seasons. "It was beautiful spring weather, but neither dogs nor humans were aware of it" (London, 1982a, pp. 1, 7, 55). Nature was a superior character in one of his short stories, and the point of view was much wider than individualism. "Nature was not kindly to the flesh. She had no concern for that concrete thing called the individual. Her interest lay in the species, the race" (London, 1982b, p. 357).

Mary Allen observed in Animals in American Literature that London created "romantically realistic heroes in his dogs," an inclination that dismissed naturalism. "His dogs not only survive but they triumph. Within the realm of actual behavior, the exceptional dog is capable of deeds that humankind finds noble. Because adaptability is more important than sheer savagery, the triumphant animal is much more than the most powerful predatory beast" (Allen, 1983, pp. 78, 79).(5)

Such heroic and ironic animals are the encore of more than mere realism and evolutionism; rather, these are distinct creations of mutant omniscience, a marvelous punctuated equilibrium in literature. Surely some authors are punctuationalists at heart, but the contradictions of their animal characters are denatured on the "human horizon" of existential reason. Animals that are seen more in iconic silence than heard in nature are poselocked in evolution, the mutant caricatures of anthropomorphism.

The forms of reason "are not independent of our animal nature; rather, they depend crucially on that animal nature," argued George Lakoff in Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things. "Imagination is not mere fancy, for it is imagination, especially metaphors and metonymy, that transforms the general schemes defined by our animal experience into forms of reason . . . " (Lakoff, 1987, pp. 368, 586).(6)

My rifle was cold that autumn. Colder now in this remembrance of the death of a common red squirrel. Oak leaves rattled on the wind. The squirrels hunched in the trees out of reach but not sight, their natural escape distance. They sensed my distance, a hunter without the earned honor and chance of the chase. The squirrels were in cold sight; their thighs the amusement of my aim. My weapon, not the bond of my imagination, was the instrument of their death, but not now in the silence and closure of these words.

"Men with only hand weapons do not need to invent stern codes to insure that hunting is a challenge rather than an amusement," wrote Paul Shepard in The Tender Carnivore. "The hunter's confrontation of the enigmas of death and animal life inspire attitudes of honor and awe expressed in ceremonial address" (Shepard, 1973, p. 150, 154).(7)

The sun shimmered on the leaves. I waited and then fired my rifle at a red squirrel. The bullet shattered the bones in his shoulder. He tumbled to the ground near the trunk of an oak, bounced once, and then reached out with one paw to climb back into the tree. The other paw was bloodied, loose, turned under, dead. He reached with his other paw to the tree, to climb out of my sight; again and again he fell back. Blood flowed down his body. He watched me in the distance of one eye. His escape from me would be eternal. The hunter and the author were the entire cause of his miseries, silence, and death.

The Boy Scouts of America and the Izaak Walton League taught me and other hunters of my generation the monomercies of the coup de grace. We learned as hunters, and later as authors, never to let a wounded animal suffer. Wounded animals were put out of their miseries, at heart our miseries of the animal other in literature.

The first mercy bullet tore the fur and flesh from his skull. The second bullet smashed his jaw and exposed his teeth, a hideous death mask. I fired twice more to end his miseries; the bullets shattered his forehead and burst through one eye. He held onto the rough trunk of the oak tree with one paw; at last, the blood bubbled slower and slower from his nostrils. I touched his back; my hands were warmed with his blood. At last his death was mine that autumn.

Erich Fromm in The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness wrote that the hunter

returns to the natural state, becomes one with the animal, and is

freed from the burden of the existential split. For modern man,

with his cerebral orientation, this experience of oneness with

nature is difficult to verbalize and to be aware of, but it is still

alive in many human beings.... It is amazing how many

modern authors neglect this element of skill in hunting, and

focus their attention on the act of killing. After all, hunting

requires a combination of many skills and wide knowledge

beyond that of handling a weapon (Fromm, 1973, pp. 132, 133,

136).(8)

The hunter, then, is a natural presence; the contrarious author is a secular creationist, the eternal animal, the animal other of animism and the untramundane. The creation of animals, the literal and simile versions, is traced and measured in nature, authors, and literature. Otherwise, the animals in literature would be mere impostures of nature in the minds of their authors.

Paul Shepard observed in Thinking Animals:

When totemic thought, with its instinct for animal imagery, is

carried forward into totemic culture, the wild animal groups are

regarded as sets containing necessary secrets for human

conduct, translated by myth and applied to actual human

situations by speculatwwve thought. When it is carried forward into

caste or class thought, on the other hand, the wild animals are

likely to be seen as atavisms ruled by mysterious powers or

mindless passions, while the domesticated animals represent

puerile expressions of our civilized egos (Shepard, 1978, pp.

256, 260).(9)

Mary Allen noted that metaphorical animals "far outnumber the literal animals in literature," and authored animals are bestial, carnal, utilitarian, pastoral, exotic, stoical, heroic, and more, but "man's creations did not outdo the uncanny subjects in nature."

God, for instance, "created his whale easily in a day," observed Allen. Herman Melville "shows us the wrenching difficulty of the task." Gradually he "builds his literal whale alongside the myths of whales, later showing the view from the outside working back in.... Not only does he inspire a wealth of metaphysical possibilities, but as a literal animal the sperm whale is so composed as to make an extraordinary but distinctly American character (Allen, 1983, pp. 5, 6, 7, 12, 19, 33, 34).(10)

Native American Indians are commonly perceived as being in close association with nature and the natural presence of animals; these associations are sources of native omniscience and consciousness. The literary interpretations of this presence have presumed the doctrines of nativism, animism, naturalism, realism, and other theories.

N. Scott Momaday created a sacred landscape of bears and eagles in the myths, metaphors, and traces of native ceremonies. He imagined an environment that is twice real, in the same sense that an oral performance is both real and imagined in the sovereignty of motion; authored landscapes are twice natural as the stories and the seasons change. He wrote in his memoir The Names: "The names at first are those of animals and of birds, of objects that have one definition in the eye, another in the hand, of forms and features on the rim of the world, or of sounds that carry on the bright wind and in the void. They are old and original in the mind, like the beat of rain on the river, and intrinsic in the native tongue, failing even as those who bear them turn once in the memory, go on, and are gone forever" (Momaday, 1976, p. 3).

Joseph and Barrie Klaits observed in the introduction to Animals and Man in Historical Perspective that people "love and pity animals; we also use, abuse, and fear them. Animals are our companions, our amusements, and our sustenance. We pursue animals to satisfy our tastes in food and fashion or to enjoy the raw pleasure of destruction. The pursuit can also be creative, as when we seek their images through art and literature" (Klaits and Klaits, 1974, p. 1).

Animals are imagined in nature and literature, translated, and compared in memories, narratives, and cultural contexts. The animals of literature are twice their nature: the real in visions and environments and the authored animals of a narrative creation. The authored animals are as diverse as the real, the species of imagination: captured, domestic, wild, transmuted, and fantastic.

Language, then, is one of the real environments of the authored animals, the names, memories, and manners of the real as a narrative. Authored animals are real in the nature of tropes, the figurations that trace and redouble both the imagination of the author and the baited reader in what becomes a marvelous conception, an arcane animal of the shared pleasures of creation.

Authored animals, however, are burdened, as they would be in any environment, by the literary styles of their authors, the very sustenance of creation. The animals of literature must depend upon the turns of tropes, the practices of simile, metaphor, and metonymy, as the necessities of authored nature.

"In the language of prose, besides the regular and proper terms for things, metaphorical terms only can be used with advantage," observed Aristotle in Rhetoric. "Metaphor, moreover, gives style clearness, charm, and distinction as nothing else can: and it is not a thing whose use can be taught by one man to another. Metaphors, like epithets, must be fitting, which means that they must fairly correspond to the thing signified: failing this, their inappropriateness will be conspicuous; the want of harmony between two things is emphasized by their being placed side by side" (1984, 1404b32-34, 1405a8--13). The difference between metaphor and simile, he noted, "is but slight."

Thomas McLaughlin, in his essay "Figurative Language," pointed out more than a "slight" divergence in the measure of tropes. "A simile is a comparison of terms. Unlike metaphor which requires the reader to do the work of constructing a logic of categories and analogies, a simile states explicitly that two terms are comparable and often presents the bases for the comparison.... Metonymy accomplishes its transfer of meaning on the basis of associations that develop out of specific contexts rather than from participation in a structure of meaning." Moreover, metonymy "places us in the historical world of events and situations, whereas metaphor asserts connections on the basis of a deep logic that underlies any use of words" (Lentricchia and McLaughlin, 1990, pp. 83, 84).

John Searle, in his essay "Metaphor," wrote that the meaning of "metaphorical utterances" is systematic. The "knowledge that enables people to use and understand metaphorical utterances goes beyond their knowledge of the literal meaning of words and sentences." He argued that a "literal simile" is a "literal statement of similarity," and that "literal simile requires no special extralinguistic knowledge for its comprehension...." (Searle, 1.979, pp. 93, 105, 123).(11)

Philip Wheelwright declared that metaphor is an "element of tensive language" (1962, pp. 70, 148).(12) Donald Davidson explained "metaphor as a kind of ambiguity: in the context of metaphor, certain words have either a new or an original meaning, and the force of the metaphor depends on our uncertainty as we waver between the two meanings" (Davidson, 1978, pp. 32, 33). Robert Rogers, in a psychoanalytic exploration of figurative language, noted that one "puzzling aspect of the expressive capaciousness of metaphor takes the form of an image's potential for focusing both thought and emotion in a particularly intense, economical way" (Rogers, 1978, p. 7).

Janet Martin Soskice, in Metaphor and Religious Language, defined metaphor as that "figure of speech whereby we speak about one thing in terms which are seen to be suggestive or another." She noted that the "greatest rival of metaphor, simile, in its most powerful instances does compel possibilities. Simile is usually regarded as the trope of comparison and identifiable within speech by the presence of a `like,' or an `as,' or the occasional `not unlike.'" Still,

to regard simile as necessarily mere `same-saying' of the trivial

sort is greatly to misrepresent that trope. Simile may be the

means of making comparisons of two kinds, the comparison of

similars and dissimilars, and in the latter case, simile shares

much of the imaginative life and cognitive function of its

metaphorical counterparts. For this reason, we can say that

metaphor and simile share the same function and differ

primarily in their grammatical form (Soskice, 1985, pp. 15, 58,

59, 60).(13)

Soskice, it seems, would share the more classical view that the difference between metaphor and simile "is but slight." However, the author noted, a simile cannot "be used in catachresis." Simile cannot create the lexicon, as does "dead end" or the "leaf of a book."

George Lakoff and Mark Johnson provide one of the most accessible descriptions of metaphor in Metaphors We Live By.

Metaphor is for most people a device of the poetic imagination

and the rhetorical flourish--a matter of extraordinary rather

than ordinary language. Moreover, metaphor is typically viewed

as characteristic of language alone, a matter of words rather

than thought or action. For this reason, most people think they

can get along perfectly well without metaphor. We have found,

on the contrary, that metaphor is pervasive in everyday life, not

just in language but in thought and action. Our ordinary

conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is

fundamentally metaphorical in nature (Lakoff and Johnson,

1980, pp. 3, 4).(14)

Authored animals are the tropes of human severance, an environment of iconic silence. Metaphor and simile are the traces of creations, memories, and narrative conversions, the nature and presence of animals in literature. Tropes are the associations of naturalism and sources of animal consciousness. Likewise, there are many epistemic tropes, literary styles, and critical distinctions, the essence of authored animals in literature.

Bestialities, brute consciousness, and other memorable tropes show that the monotheistic separation of animals has never been sincere. That human horizon of authored animals must reveal the diversities of creation in native literature.

N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Silko, Louise Erdrich, Louis Owens, and Gordon Henry, Jr. are native novelists with diverse cultural experiences and distinctive literary styles. The authored animals in their novels are both mythic and mundane; the metaphors and similes of animal creations are as diverse as the authors.

Grey, the main character in The Ancient Child by Momaday, is a metaphor of native identities. "Her father was Kiowa and her mother Navajo, and the two cultures came together in her easily, more or less." She imagined the death of Billy the Kid, and she "dreamed of sleeping with a bear. The bear drew her into his massive arms and licked her body and her hair. It hunched over her, curving its spine like a cat, until its huge body seemed to have absorbed her own. Its breath which bore a deep, guttural rhythm like language, touched her skin with low, persistent heat" (Momaday, 1989, p. 17).(15)

The authored bear is a metaphor, a dream, a mythic character in the narrative. The simile of the bear is the comparison and description -of sound and motion. The presence of the bear is a metaphor of transcendence. The heat of the authored animal is natural, human, and animalism. Formost, the bear is the mythic healer of human separation in a narrative. That separation is never closed, but metaphor is a sense of presence, the source of shared imagination in a novel. "Living beyond civilized life, sexually and boldly aggressive, the bear gives vent to a massive and uncontrolled appetite, upsetting rule and restriction," wrote Paul Shepard and Barry Sanders in The Sacred Paw. "But in its display of maternal care and concern, the bear is the very essence of civility and order. Standing for both male and female characteristics, the bear would appear to have no gender" (Shepard and Sanders, 1985, p. 130).(16)

Set is an artist in The Ancient Child, separated from a sense of native presence; he is an orphan and returns with the spiritual power of his ancestors. The return is a shared occurrence in the memories of the bear. His return is a metaphor of motion, survivance, and native sovereignty.

Set took the medicine bundle in his hands and opened it. The

smell of it permeated the whole interior. When he drew on the

great paw, there grew up in him a terrible restlessness, wholly

urgent, and his heart began to race. He felt the power of the

bear pervade his being, and the awful compulsion to release it.

Grey, sitting away in the invisible dark, heard the grandmother's

voice in her mouth. When Set raised the paw, as if to bring it

down like a club, she saw it against the window, huge and

phallic on the stars, each great yellow claw like the horn of the

moon (Momaday, 1989, pp. 303, 304).

The metaphor of the bear and the medicine bundle are obscure and unnamable powers, but the simile of the "horn of the moon" is direct and abates the uncertainties and shadows of the medicine.

Momaday told Charles Woodard in Ancestral Voices that he was "serious about the bear" and "identified with the bear" because he is "intimately connected with that story. And so I have this bear power. I turn into a bear every so often. I feel myself becoming a bear, and that's a struggle I have to face now and then" (Woodard, 1989).

Momaday turns the metaphors of authored animals into an unrevealed presence, the tensive myths of creation and native solace in House Made of Dawn. The mere mention of the bear is traced in sound, motion, and the memories of the characters.

Abel came to cut wood for three dollars. Angela "watched, full of wonder, taking his motion apart." The sound of the axe was incessant. "Once she had seen an animal slap at the water, a badger or a bear. She would have liked to touch the soft muzzle of a bear, the thin black lips, the great flat head. She would have liked to cup her hand to the wet black snout, to hold for a moment the hot blowing of the bear's life. She went out of the house and sat down on the stone steps of the porch. He we, there, rearing above the wood." Later, they came together. "He was dark and massive above her, poised and tinged with pale blue light. And in that split second she thought again of the badger at the water, and the great bear, blue-black and blowing" (Momaday, 1968, pp. 31, 32, 33, 64).

Susan Scarberry-Garcia observed, in her study of House Made of Dawn, that this "sensual image which depicts Abel's bear-like physique and presence has been dismissed in the criticism as a forlorn white woman's fantasy about having a dark elemental man as her ideal lover" (Scarberry-Garcia, 1990, p. 52).(17)

Momaday told Charles Woodard that many "things happen in House Made of Dawn that I can't explain in a logical way. They are based upon insights which I think are valid, but those insights are not fully conscious. That is, they weren't consciously developed. They exist beneath the level of everyday consciousness, but they are nonetheless real" (Woodard, 1989).

The metaphor of the bear is an ancient presence in the novel, the motivation of natural reason, and the style is an inscription of native realism. "The elements constituting a work obey an internal logic, not an external one," observed Oswald Ducrot and Tzvetan Todorov in the Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Sciences of Language. "Motivation is thus a variant of realism. It is not conformity to the genre, but a cloak that the text casts prudently over the rules of the genre" (Ducrot and Todorov, 1979, pp. 261, 263).(18)

Leslie Silko encircles the reader with witches, a hard metaphor that turns the creation stories in Ceremony. Alas, the hardhearted witches invented white people, a distinctive trope that overcomes the temptations of simile and the mere comparison of opposition and wicked extremes.

The old man shook his head. 'That is the trickery of the

witchcraft,' he said. 'They want us to believe all evil resides with

white people. Then we will look no further to see what is really

happening. They want us to separate ourselves from white

people, to be ignorant and helpless as we watch our own

destruction. But white people are only tools that the witchery

manipulates; and I tell you, we can deal with white people, with

their machines and their beliefs. We can because we invented

white people; it was Indian witchery that made white people in the

first place.

Long time ago in the beginning there were no white people in this world there was nothing European And this world might have gone on like that except for one thing: witchery. This world was already complete even without white people. There was everything including witchery (Silko, 1977, pp. 132, 133).

Louis Owens pointed out that "Betonie's words and the story of witchery underscore an element central to Native American oral tradition and worldview: responsibility." This sense of responsibility, of course, is a metaphor that denies closure; the actions, connections, and intentions are not causal but obscure ceremonies. "To shirk that responsibility and blame whites, or any external phenomenon, is to buy into the role of helpless victim" (Owens, 1992a, p. 93).

The authored animals are connected to the environment, not to the similes of human consciousness. Silko creates animals with a natural character; the metaphors are their presence and motivation. Simile is used in the novel to describe motion and to compare animals to the environment, not to assay human characteristics. For instance, the "mountain lion came out from a grove of oak trees in the middle of the clearing. He did not walk or leap or run; his motions were like the shimmering of tall grass in the wind. . . . Relentless motion was the lion's greatest beauty, moving like mountain clouds with the wind, changing substance and color in rhythm with the contours of the mountain peaks: dark as lava rock, and suddenly as bright as a field of snow" (Silko, 1977, pp. 195, 196).

The authored animals in novels by Momaday, Silko, Owens, and others are metaphors that are motivations of character; some of their animals are introspective and with consciousness. These authors use simile as motion, comparisons to be sure, but not as mere attributions of animal and human characteristics. The simile, of course, is more than the signature of "like" and "as" or "mere 'same-saying,'" as Janet Martin Soskice has pointed out. However, the style of simile is a common comparative in narratives; the most limited or direct is the "literal simile" described by John Searle.

Louise Erdrich has used a style of tropes in Tracks that is closer to the literal or prosaic simile than to the obscure metaphors of motivation; the other authors mentioned here seldom used the literal style of simile. For instance, "she shivered all over like a dog," and he's "hiding from you like a dog," and "I'd go off in the bush like a sick dog first, alone," and his "head shaggy and low as a bison bull," and she "leaned over the water, sucking it like a heifer," and the "bear followed, heeling her like a puppy," and the "man was bearded, hug, clumsy-looking like a weak-sighted bear," and more (Erdrich, 1988, pp. 10, 37, 54, 60, 89, 168).

Erdrich names moose, pigs, bears, cats, and other animals, but the most common authored animal in Tracks is the dog. The animal and dog are generic creations more often than not, and few animals are characters in a natural environment. The generic animal is a generic and literal simile.

"I think like animals, have perfect understanding for where they hide," said Nanapush. The generic animal is the binary beast in a prosaic simile. "Moses, who had defeated the sickness by turning half animal and living in a den," is an authored human as the beast. "He said the animals understood what was happening, how they were dwindling," is an instance in the novel of generic animal consciousness (Erdrich, 1988, pp. 35, 40, 139).

Tracks has more dogs on the page than other animals. One unnamed authored animal has character and is more memorable than the other generic dogs in the novel. "Lily had a dog, a stumpy mean little bull of a thing with a belly drum-tight from eating pork rinds. The dog was as fond of the cards as Lily, and straddled his barrel thighs through games of stud, rum poker, vingt-un. The dog snapped at Fleur's arm that first night, but cringed back, its snarl frozen, when she took her place" (Erdrich, 1988, p. 18).

Custer, the authored animal in Bone Game by Louis Owens, is a memorable character in the tensive metaphor of his name. The names of some animals are ironic, and other authored animals have a sense of presence and character without a name. In another scene, a character in the novel recommends a guard dog: "I mean it. You should get a dog. . . . A big, mean one. And remember, dogs don't like ghosts or witches. We keep them around the hogans at home just for that" (Owens, 1994, p. 96).

Owens, in The Sharpest Sight, creates a tricky bond between a rabbit and hunter. "Cherokee rabbits were smart. They lived by tricks in a world of words and had a good time doing it." Cole "raised the rifle and aimed the notched sight at a spot just below the rabbit's ear. 'Time for a trick,' he whispered to the rabbit. He pulled back the hammer and shounted" (Owens, 1992b, p. 12). The presence of the rabbit is not lost in a prosaic simile.

Gordon Henry, Jr., for instance, has created a wild and comic scene of two dogs stuck together in a natural sexual dance, a white dog, a brown dog, and, in the end, one dead dog, in his novel The Light People.

Boozhoo tried to separate the dogs, and then he turned to his own magic, "my sideline vocation, my years of training. First I tried mental magic: I attempted to project the image of a piece of meat into the mind of the dancing white dog. For a minute I thought it worked, since I heard the white dog give off a low growl and I thought I saw his mouth water. But the dogs remained stuck together. . . . "

LaVerve was drunk; he arrived with his rifle and shot the white dog. "But the only thing that changed was the dog dance; the white dog whimpered as he remained fast to the brown female, following behind her in a more frantic dance that still failed to separate them." LaVerve tried again to pull the dogs apart, and bloodied his hands before he took another drink and drove away drunk in his pickup.

Boozhoo carried the dogs

back to Seed's place. . . .Seed studied the dogs. He spoke without

looking up at me. 'We've got to get this dead one off before he

stiffens up.' Seed slid out of his chair then and leaned over the

dead white dog. He whispered into the dog's ear. I didn't hear the

words or the language, but when he settled back into his chair he

told me to take the white dog out and bury it. I did as he told me,

and I expected the white dog to remain fast to the

brown, but when I lifted the dead dog the two dogs separated

and the brown dog ran off into the darkness (Henry, 1994, pp.

170, 171).

The presence of authored animals in these selected novels are real as tropes of imagination. The creatures in native literature are seldom mere representations of animals in nature or culture, wild, domestic, generic, or otherwise; however, there is an unnamable presence, traces of a familiar nature, comic motivation, native reason, and author introspection. Owens, Momaday, Silko, Erdrich, and Henry use metaphor to turn the pleasures of the unnamable into animal characters. Momaday transmutes both humans and animals on a landscape of lyrical metaphors and descriptions. Erdrich uses literal and prosaic simile in her novel more than the other authors. Owens and Henry create a comic and ironic presence of native mongrels.

Monotheistic creation is a separation of animals and humans in literature and nature; the common unions since then have been both domestic and aesthetic. Literal simile is a familiar disseverance of authored animals on a human horizon. The more obscure tropes in literature must be closer to nature and animal consciousness than a literal simile. The authors are animals, the readers are animals, the animals are humans, and the authored hunters bond with animals in their own novels.

Meanwhile, those dogs who move behind the wheel as drivers when their masters park the car are very close to the real tropes of consciousness; those dogs waiting behind the wheel are certain to be seen as human. The dogs are either ready to be seen as humans or to drive automobiles into our consciousness and prove that punctuated equilibrium is not hindered by prosaic similes, domestic loyalties, or learned critiques of anthropomorphism.

Notes

(1) Kennedy wrote that "we are directly aware of these things only in ourselves, through introspection." The "intentional stance" is what he calls "mock anthropomorphism" that "can be valuable for the hypotheses it generates about the functions of the animal's behavior . . . " (Kennedy, 1992). (2) "Whenever I try to become sensible of my thinking activity as such, what I catch is some bodily fact, an impression coming from my brow, or head, or throat, or nose," wrote James. "It seems as if consciousness as an inner activity were rather a postulate than a sensibly given fact, the postulate, namely, of a knower as correlative to all this known; and as if 'sciousness' might be a better word to describe it" (James, 1992). (3) "Some animals have senses humans do not possess, capacities only recently discovered," wrote Masson. "Other animal senses may remain to be discovered. By extension, could there be feelings animals have that humans do not, and if so, how would we know? It will take scientific humility and philosophical creativity to provide even the beginning of an answer" (Masson and McCarthy, 1995). (4) Barthes wrote that language "is not so much a stock of materials as a horizon, which implies both a boundary and a perspective; in short, it is the comforting area of an ordered space. The writer literally takes nothing from it; a language is for him rather a frontier, to overstep which alone might lead to the linguistically supernatural; it is a field of action, the definition of, and hope for, a possibility" (Barthes, 1968). (5) "What most dramatically sets London apart from the mainstream of naturalism in his Klondike stories," wrote Allen, "is that he makes Darwinism literal and presents the animal characters themselves" (Allen, 1983). (6) Lakoff wrote that many scholars "take it for granted. . . that conceptual categories are defined solely by the shared essential properties of their members, that thought is the disembodied manipulation of abstract symbols, and that those symbols get their meaning solely by virtue of correspondences to things in the world. The view of reason as abstract, disembodied, and literal is well-established" (Lakoff, 1987). (7) Shepard (1973) wrote that the "ways of the hunters are beginning to show us how we are failing as human beings and as organisms in a world beset by a 'success' that hunters never wanted." The failures of nature show in the success of commercial literature, failures that some authors and hunters anticipated but never wanted. (8) "Fortunately, our knowledge of hunting behavior is not restricted to speculations; there is a considerable body of information about still existing primitive hunters and food gatherers to demonstrate that hunting is not conducive to destructiveness and cruelty, and that primitive hunters are relatively unaggressive when compared to their civilized brothers," wrote Fromm (1973). (9) "The language of everyday life has thousands of figures of speech, phrases, colloquialisms, and neologisms that not only employ animal imagery but which assume a profound and fundamental habit of thought, relating consciousness of language" (Shepard, 1978). (10) "The realism that superseded romanticism focused for the most part on social man, an increasingly urban man, a context in which animals play little part. While realism follows no particular style, the tendency is away from symbolism, in some cases away from metaphor altogether; thus the figurative animal occurs less frequently. . . . " The "realistic animals are wild, terrestrial beings. Many are big and violent, though their spirit is more important than their force. They are usually disciplined, clean, and utilitarian. They are celibate males, free or fighting to be free. And they are markedly independent" (Allen, 1983). (11) "The question, 'How do metaphors work?' is a bit like the question, 'How does one thing remind us of another thing?' there is no single answer to either question, though similarity obviously plays a major role in answering both. Two important differences between them are that metaphors are both restricted and systematic; restricted in the sense that not every way that one thing can remind us of something else will provide a basis for metaphor, and systematic in the sense that metaphors must be communicable from speaker to hearer in virtue of a shared system of principles" (Searle, 1979). (12) "The primitive thinker, unlike ourselves, did not start from a known world of inanimate things and then pretend they were otherwise. He started with a world that was not clearly animate or inanimate but hovered between the two conditions, sometimes partaking more of the one and sometimes more of the other" (Wheelwright, 1962). The author is the animal who hovers between imagination and the other environment of animals twice real; once, unnamed in nature, and the second real is in the tropes of language. (13) "In the light of similarities between metaphor and simile, should we not dispense with the distinctions between the two and, for instance, call them both metaphor if the difference is only one of superficial grammar? Apart from a natural reluctance to abandon a distinction commonly made in our speech, there is a good reason why the distinction should be kept; it is that while metaphor and simile differ primarily in grammatical form, there is one important role which, by virtue of grammatical form, metaphor performs and simile cannot. . . . Simile cannot, for reasons of syntactic form, be used in catachresis. A gap in a lexicon is filled by a term, such as 'leaf' of a book, or by a phrase such as 'dead end,' but not by an 'is likes clause" (Soskice, 1985). (14) "Primarily on the basis of linguistic evidence, we have found that most of our ordinary conceptual system is metaphorical in nature" (Lakoff end Johnson, 1980). (15) "Identity is acquired through an act of self-imagination, Momaday has explained: 'We are what we imagine. Our very existence consists in our imagination of ourselves. Our best destiny is to imagine, at least, completely, who and what, and that we are. The greatest tragedy that can befall us is to go unimagined.' Finally, Momaday has told critical biographer Mathias Schubnell, 'I believe that I fashion my own life out of words and images, and that's how I get by,'" wrote Louis Owens (1992a). (16) In the bestiaries "bears are perceived as particularly sexual, for 'they do not make love like other quadrupeds, but, being joined in mutual embraces, they copulate in the human way" (Shepard and Sanders, 1985). (17) "Peter Beidler in his article 'Animals and Human Development in the Contemporary American Indian Novel' comments about these scenes: 'Her identification of Abel with bear is, of course, part sexual fantasy. . . . her association of Abel with bear triggers in Abel much later an awareness of his own bear nature" (Scarberry-Garcia, 1990). Beidler is reductive, and his representations of myth and metaphor are more anthropological than literary. (18) "The desire to provide a narrative with full motivation is not unrelated to the arbitrariness of the sign. Signs are arbitrary; names are not inscribed in things. But any used of a sign system tends to naturalize it, to present it as though it were self-evident. the tension resulting from the opposition gives rise to one of the dominant currents in literary history" (Ducrot and Todorov, 1979).

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