And therein, perhaps, we may locate the timeless narrative utility of the animal: possessed of a vitality pleasingly reminiscent of our own yet sufficiently alien to save us from something like self-incrimination. They become us so easily as to be somewhat unnerving-yet they remain forever apart, something once removed. We picture them in complicated, unraveling relationships they are harried by work and fate and mortality. We cast our voices and troubles onto frogs and fish and ferrets without a second thought. From Aesop’s menagerie of moralized critters to Thomas Mann’s enchanting Bashan, from the Bible’s slithering Satan to Kafka’s paranoiac burrower, animism has so permeated the literary imagination as to lose something of its original strangeness. It is a lovely irony that even a cursory glance at the history of literature illuminates how profoundly seductive, even essential, animality has been in this attempt to clarify the human condition.
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