Introduction

Animal autobiography thrived as an ethics-changing genre in the late nineteenth century, especially with the publication of Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty (1877/1922), in which the equine autobiographer recounts his life of being sold and resold to a series of owners from a peaceful paddock to the harsh streets of London. Sewell’s landmark work, with affective descriptions of how the working animal is subject to the bearing rein and the cruel treatment it occasions, propelled the animal rights movement (Pearson, 2020, p. 124). Influenced mainly by the culture of sensibility and the literary trend of sentimentalism, the animal autobiography assimilates the sensory experiences that were valued as foundations for moral values and behaviours during the Victorian period (Menely, 2014). Sensing the world from an animal vantage point through visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory and gustatory perceptions, to a great extent, defines the genre. Through the trope of anthropomorphism, the ascription of human traits to nonhuman animals, authors of animal autobiographies aim to position readers within the subjective experience of nonhuman animals, and gives vicarious access to how animals purportedly perceive and navigate the world through their senses and instincts.

Given the employment of anthropomorphism, animal autobiography is inevitably a genre of ethological and epistemological entanglements, oscillating between the authenticity of nonhuman life and the animistic imagination it evokes. Accordingly, scholarship on animal autobiography often revolves around the thematic child–animal analogy and the structural suppression of women, enslaved people and other marginalised groups implied in the focal animal characters (Cosslett, 2006; Ratelle, 2014). It continuously draws attention to social and environmental injustices, and whether the assumption of animal perspectives for ethical or pedagogical purposes will legitimise the languaged animal as a real-life subject (DeMello, 2013; Nyman, 2016; Spencer, 2020). Paradoxically, our dependence on language for reasoning about the world makes anthropomorphism necessary, revealing what Kari Weil (2012, p. 9) calls “the tragedy of language”, which ensues “when we acknowledge that there is another consciousness there, a consciousness we desperately desire to know through language, but that may remain impenetrable”. To come to grips with the possibility of literary representation, however, anthropomorphic writing, such as animal autobiography, can also advance“the efforts of animal compassion agendas” and awaken “an affection for nature and the desire to care for it” (Gilmour, 2020, p. 2).

The balance between animal agency and human authorship has posed challenges for animal autobiography, but it has persevered through evolution and adaptation, evidenced by the iconic pieces such as Leo Tolstoy’s “Strider: The Story of a Horse” (1886/2002), Franz Kafka’s “Report for an Academy” (1917/1983), Michael Morpurgo’s War Horse (1982/2012), and Yoko Tawada’s Memoirs of a Polar Bear (2016). A notable addition to the genre is Katherine Applegate’s The One and Only Ivan (2012), a Newbery Award-winning novel retelling the life of a real silverback gorilla who was released to Zoo Atlanta after enduring captivity in a shopping mall for 9855 days (27 years). In view of the shifting contexts from the late-eighteenth century onwards, how has the animal autobiography genre been conventionalised? What provides narrative motivation for the renewal of its genre conventions? To what extent is the autobiographical self, as the locus of scholarly discussion, understood in a way that transcends the factual/fictional polarity? Noting the generic tradition and renewal, as well as the ethical ramifications, in animal autobiography, this study examines how various aspects of animal selfhood are constructed and enacted to render varieties of autobiographical experiences. At the intersection of autobiography/autofiction studies and literary animal studies, this article first traces the genre’s tradition and representational strategies through the representative works The Life and Perambulations of a Mouse (1784/1846) by Dorothy Kilner and Black Beauty by Anna Sewell. Based on a “self”-oriented analysis, the article then discusses the genre’s potential for ethical renewal, as in Applegate’s The One and Only Ivan. The readings of these past and present animal autobiographies lead to my proposition of the poetics of the multicentric self to better understand the entanglement of narrative pleasures and the increasingly prominent ethical stakes that the genre entails.

Narrative strategies of animal autobiographers

Not all animals can find their voice in animal autobiographies. Wild animals, for instance, do not frequent the genre if we recall Ernest Thompson Seton’s (1898, p. 120) claim that “no wild animal dies of old age. Its life has soon or late a tragic end. It is only a question of how long it can hold out against its foes.” Although stories can embellish and add intrigue, wild animals, especially those who meet their untimely ends in the jungle, are unable to provide a full account of their existence as humans can in an autobiography, which typically involves a progression from birth, growth, and maturity to old age. Simultaneously, even though wild animals have their emotions and events to recount, a wild animal autobiography, for credibility issues, may unravel in a seemingly trite routine: hunting, prey–predator relationship, survival, courting and mating. Animals who work or serve as companions in human society, in comparison, may give a relatively creditable representation due to their observable living conditions and behaviours. Examples are found in Kilner’s The Life and Perambulations of a Mouse, which takes to the rat autobiographer’s everyday adventures in domestic households, with each little incident having its appropriate moral for children, and in Sewell’s Black Beauty, which features the eponymous animal returning to its sympathetic owner for peaceful retirement after an arduous journey.

Among a diverse range of animal species featured in animal autobiographies, companion animals have emerged as a prominent subject, as seen in works such as Marshall Saunders’s Beautiful Joe: An Autobiography (1896) and Ann M. Martin’s A Dog’s Life: The Autobiography of a Stray (2005). Companion or working animals are more relatable and credible than wild animals when it comes to self-creation or self-accounting. This is largely due to the inherent difficulties in incorporating the violent conflicts and mortal dangers that are commonplace in the jungle into a story that appeals to a broad audience. Moreover, describing animal spaces, without mentioning intensive human surveillance and control in the wildlife–livestock ecosystem, engenders a sense of unreality. In so saying, I would like to clarify that classifying animals as wild or companion is not intended to relay the domestic/wild binarism. This dichotomy-based perspective fails to acknowledge the complexity of domesticated animals and the interdependence between humans and wild animals. Additionally, it erases a third category of animals, “liminal animals” that reside in the in-between areas connecting “domesticated” and “wild” spaces. Notwithstanding the potential problematics of these sweeping classifications, my use of these terms here serves to emphasise the vital role of human-animal co-presence in diverse ways in representing animal narrators. Without the inclusion of human witnesses or interactions, animal autobiographies may run the risk of being viewed as purely fictional, lacking in authenticity and relevance.

In unfolding the story as it continually hovers between self-invention and the observation of animal others, creativeness and nonfiction, is “animal autobiography” a quasi-concept? According to Philippe Lejeune’s (1975/1989, p. 4) “autobiographical pact”, autobiography is a “retrospective prose narrative written by a real person concerning his existence, where the focus is his individual life, in particular, the story of his personality”. With the author and the reader agreeing upon this pact, Lejeune (1975/1989, p. 5) further defines that in an autobiography, “the author, the narrator, and the protagonist must be identical”. Animal autobiography, albeit sometimes with a real animal referent in mind, is essentially authored by a human observer. The genre is thus contextual with the poetics of animal representation, spanning across fiction and facts, and the representation of animality and humanity. In this sense, Serge Doubrovsky’s (1977) concept of autofiction is highly relevant to the discussion of animal autobiography. Doubrovsky considers autobiography as autofiction, partly due to the linguistic nature of every autobiographical report and the problematic search for truth in memory. He claims that “the autofictional author was allowed some flights of imagination…because this is what the real self is about” (cited in Schmitt, 2010, p. 126). Although Doubrovsky’s definition applies to human autobiography, it touches upon the nebulous qualities of the self that are integral to animal autobiography. The animal autobiographer purposefully constructs an alternative life, leading readers to a place where humanity lays down its hubris and listens to the myriad voices of our fellow creatures on Earth. Of course, none of the exploratory findings is possible without subjective repositioning and paying due attention to animal subjectivity. Simone Weil (1951, p. 115) conjoins attention and the care of suffering others, proposing attention as a means of grace, a kind of “unselfing” in school education. This quality of attention is pertinent to animal autobiography writing that needs perspectival “re-orientation”, as the Latin root of the word attention implies “to stretch toward”. Stretching from what the “eye” can see to what “I” can think and feel with, the “I” focuses on particular beings, and the mind stretches towards them with (un)conscious acts of observing, analysing, dissecting, empathising or evaluating.

It is noteworthy that “speaking animals today are much more than simply allegorical devices”, having ushered in “a new awareness of animal subjectivity, and a desire” (DeMello, 2013, p. 4). David Herman (2016) interprets the animal autobiography genre from a semantic-linguistic perspective and considers it a “narration beyond the Human”. Oscillating between the two poles of representation—facts and fiction, science and sentiments—animal autobiography is, without doubt, mediated by anthropomorphism. To explicate the genre’s fictionality, Frederike Middelhoff (2017) calls animal autobiography “literary autozoography”. She notes the productive tension between fictional status and the author’s insistence, asserting that factuality “implicitly challenges and questions the generic ideal of an ‘autobiographical truth’, while it may also illuminate the inherent anthropocentrism (in the history) of auto/biography” (Middelhoff, 2017, p. 3). Middelhoff’s definition reiterates the long-standing issue that animal autobiography is automatised as anthropomorphic modelling, a quasi-autobiography excluded from autobiography studies (Boldrini and Novak, 2017).

While most scholarship is focused on the factuality and fictionality of the animal self, my study tends to bring animal autobiography within the pale of autobiography studies in a way that foregrounds the dynamic interplay of the different selves that underlie the genre. This initiative, above all, duly notes the authorial process of willing the human mind to the animal self in representation, whereby perception becomes multi-scaled. Kilner’s The Life and Perambulations of a Mouse best illustrates the basics of the animal autobiography genre, in particular the multi-scaled dimensions of an anthropomorphic animal. Purposed to evoke the benevolence of young children, this story is peppered with didactic messages as Nimble, the mouse autobiographer, and his cohort, Longtail, Softdown and Brighteyes, scurry from one home to another for food. The message of treating inferior creatures as worthy of moral regard is particularly explicit. On the anthropomorphic level, Nimble, like a naughty boy, never fails to remember his mother’s advice of not being “tempted by cakes and other dainties” or “frequently return[ing] to the same dangerous place” (Kilner, 1784/1846, p. 77). The autobiographical mouse is imagined as a real mouse, “one of the most timorous things in the world; every noise alarms it: and though it chiefly lives by plunder, it appears as if punished by its fears for the mischiefs which it commits” (Kilner, 1784/1846, pp. 18–19). Experimenting with a nonhuman point of view, the story makes a subtle point about the omnipresence of human mastery and the randomness of a rodent’s fate. In addition, subject to the compromise between animal life and its imaginative properties, the autobiographical narrator can be viewed as a “crossover animal” whose human/animal hybridity is made possible within the textual and imaginative situation. Haunting the boundary which separates and joins animals and humans, the narrator enables the exchanges of identity from one kind to another.

Along a creative flight, an animal autobiography furnishes a culturally anthropomorphic encounter. In effecting this, the crossover quality innate to the genre questions the homogenous sources of emotional and intellectual attachment to a singular human-oriented system of knowledge, meaning and values. It is also a justification of Middelhoff’s (2018, p. 59) point that “animal narrators are conscious, feeling, self-aware agents, regardless both of how often this agency might be discursively accompanied and, at times, ‘thwarted’ by inherent physiological needs or impeded by human interventions, and of how much these representations might be dismissed as (naïve) anthropomorphism”. Anthropomorphic representation, at the one end of the spectrum, could certainly reflect animals’ emotional, cognitive and relational agency, whereas, at the other end, it could be primarily naïve as a result of the categorical replacement of animal attributes with those of humans. Without reversing the effect of anthropocentrism, the portrayal of humanoid self-consciousness, in the case of a rat enjoying a cat’s company or a loyal horse working tirelessly and “happily” for his merciless masters, may mislead the readers to the excessive and feigned sensibility that never characterises the real animal.

One may continue to enquire: how is anthropomorphism in animal autobiography deployed as anti-anthropocentric, instead of naïve and sappy? To avoid moulding a fabulist anthropomorphic story in our image and for our interest, critical anthropomorphism, which involves carefully observing animals in their natural environments and describing their behaviours in an objective way, emerges as an alternative narrative approach. Drawing on Gordon M. Burghardt’s (1985, p. 905) earliest conception of the term, critical anthropomorphism is regarded as the ability to use human perception, intuition and feelings to forge testable hypotheses about other species and to respect animal individuality. In this vein, critical anthropomorphism works alongside an ethological understanding of animals. In Kilner’s The Life and Perambulations of a Mouse, for instance, Nimble not only mouths the prevalent moral tendency “to shun all those vices and follies, the practice of which renders children so contemptible and wicked” (1784/1846, p. 124) but also retains many of the behavioural traits befitting his species. To initiate a form of identification with animal subjects, critical anthropomorphism, per Kari Weil’s (2012, p. 20) conception, can be understood as a mode that grants access to animals’ “pain, pleasure, and need in anthropomorphic terms” without rigorously claiming accurate knowledge of their experiences. Either explored through facts or inferences, critical anthropomorphism does not shun unsettling animal subject matters, such as self-laceration after years of servitude and vivisection. These real-world injustices on animals are apt reminders against the anthropocentric framing in animal autobiography.

Through the lens of critical anthropomorphism, witnessing animal suffering serves as a catalyst for the ethical-aesthetic entanglement of the genre. “Witnessing in the sense of bearing witness to a truth about humanity and suffering that transcends those facts,” as Kelly Oliver (2004, p. 80) puts forward, is a “powerful alternative to recognition in reconceiving subjectivity and thereby ethical relations.” To witness suggests the opportunity to respond, to act. This “ethics of witness” in human-animal relations accounts for “both subjectivity and ethical responsibility that we respond to animals” (Oliver, 2009, p. 77). Noted for its metaphorical connection with slaves, women and children, Sewell’s Black Beauty is a novel of witness that “allows the reader to slide in and out of horse-consciousness, blurring the human/animal divide” (Cosslett, 2006, p. 69). Reading Black Beauty is an experience of bearing witness to how a horse regards his pains of breaking in, heavy riding and labour, as if “I” experienced it. In the Victorian ethos, such reading is expected to excite feelings into observation, sympathy, introspection and even rectification of moral character (Cosslett, 2006, pp. 63–64). As an illustration, Black Beauty recounts his harrowing experience of being trained for equestrianism, a process that involves the cruel breaking of his spirit:

Those who have never had a bit in their mouths, cannot think how bad it feels; a great piece of cold hard steel as thick as a man’s finger to be pushed into one’s mouth, between one’s teeth and over one’s tongue, with the ends coming out at the corner of your mouth and held fast there by straps over your head, under your throat, round your nose, and under your chin; so that no way in the world can you get rid of the nasty hard thing. (Sewell, 1877/1922, p. 18)

While the marginalised autobiographical subject brings his traumatic experiences to the forefront, the equine world becomes emotionally accessible through vivid rendering. What Black Beauty sees from his “mind’s eye” is often strung by poignant moments. He sees his knees ruined by a cruel master and hard riding, left with a stone in his foot for a good half-mile and still called a “lame beast” (Sewell, 1877/1922, p. 137). He also sees his friend Ginger maltreated as a leased cab horse:

The beautifully arched and glossy neck was now straight, and lank, and fallen in; the clean straight legs and delicate fetlocks were swelled; the joints were grown out of shape with hard work; the face, that was once so full of spirit and life, was now full of suffering, and I could tell by the heaving of her sides, and her frequent cough, how bad her breath was. (Sewell, 1877/1922, p. 201)

Not just animal witnesses but human characters are surrogates of the animal autobiographer who arrive on the scene to balance humanity’s capacity for both benevolence and malevolence. In Tess Cosslett’s (2006, p. 81, 83) equation of animal autobiography with “a testimonial genre” through the use of “testimony and witness”, human bystanders who witness cruelty to animals often “intervene, or report the perpetrators to the authorities”. In Black Beauty, a farmer sees the stone in Black Beauty’s front foot and intervenes politely: “If I might advise, sir, you had better drive him gently for awhile; the foot is a good deal hurt, and the lameness will not go off directly” (Sewell, 1877/1922, p. 138). “Give this horse a right good feed of bruised oats, and don’t stint him,” another bystander says at the sight of Black Beauty agonising over his foot (Sewell, 1877/1922, p. 149). When a carter raises his whip at the overburdened and much-slowed horse, a lady intervenes as well to take off the check-rein so that Black Beauty can go up a hill more steadily. The lady, presumably Sewell herself, speaks with compassion for the “mute” but sentient animal world that Black Beauty represents: “We have no right to distress any of God’s creatures without a very good reason; we call them dumb animals, and so they are, for they cannot tell us how they feel, but they do not suffer less because they have no words” (Sewell, 1877/1922, p. 234).

Vicarious experience is central to the animal autobiography to make the familiar unfamiliar and the old new, whereby the credibility of character development is reinforced. “The reader watches with the character’s eyes and will, in principle,” Mieke Bal (1985, p. 104) writes, “be inclined to accept the vision presented by that character.” Animal autobiography, as a thought experiment and a narrative-based practice, is not simply about dreaming animals’ vision and lending them magical speech capacity. The extent to which it can affect our sensibilities rests upon whether the depth and breadth of endowing the animal with an articulate voice, as Erica Fudge (2014, p. 50) remarks on Saunders’s Beautiful Joe (known as a canine version of Black Beauty), “elevates his status and reminds readers that animals also have selves: that there is something that it is like to be a dog”.

Taken together, animal autobiography builds upon various narrative strategies, including multi-scaled perceptions of an autofictional self, critical anthropomorphism and an ethics of witness. Nonetheless, in what ways can the genre reinvigorate itself by utilising its established conventions? Furthermore, can the contemporary context in the Anthropocene provide a fresh impetus for storytelling? It is noteworthy that numerous contemporary animal autobiographies have yet to address crucial topics such as the widespread extinction of species and the impact of declining biodiversity. This is what makes The One and Only Ivan a distinguishable novel. In the following analysis, I aim to demonstrate how this book employs these strategies to explore the autobiographical identity of an animal that transforms from being wild to a hybrid human–animal (or “liminal animal”). This unique subject allows for a fresh take on genre conventions that have remained largely static since the 1800s.

Writing “other” -wise in the Anthropocene

Katherine Applegate’s The One and Only Ivan recounts Ivan, a gorilla kept in an enclosed exhibit at a run-down department mall for the first three decades of his life while his childhood in the African jungle as a silverback has become a dim memory. Although labelled as “the One and Only Ivan” and “Mighty Silverback”, among others, Ivan has in the mall an eventless and even numb life, with the company of his friends Bob, a stray dog, and Stella, an ageing elephant. When the business worsens, the department owner, Mack, buys a baby elephant named Ruby to attract more spectators. Stella plays a maternal role in Ruby’s life, but she soon succumbs to a foot infection due to her long-term confinement. Prior to Stella’s passing, Ivan makes a solemn promise to care for Ruby and to secure her freedom from captivity. Assisted by Julia, the 13-year-old daughter of a mall maintenance worker, Ivan succeeds in freeing himself and his fellow captives. They are ultimately transported to a new home. Here, they are finally able to live among their own species and enjoy basking in the sunlight. Although what can be best described as a nature reserve can never truly replicate the wild, Ivan finds solace in the fact that it closely resembles his natural habitat. The story culminates in Ivan’s reconciliation with his selfhood, as he embraces his identity as the one and only Mighty Silverback.

With her literary ventriloquism, Applegate deftly weaves together the various strands of a traditional autobiography. For instance, this first-person account subscribes to a retrospective viewpoint, focusing on Ivan’s individualised development. More importantly, there is an immediate referent in real life: Ivan from Zoo Atlanta, the world’s oldest male silverback western lowland gorilla. Ivan’s death at age 50 in 2012 was immediately known to the American public. Originating from the jungles of Africa, Ivan was captured and sold by a wildlife trader to the B&I Department Store two years after his birth. His 30-year enclosure in a glass cage ended in 1994 when national outrage against confined animals broke out (New York Times, 1993). Spurred by zoological and animal welfare communities, Ivan was permanently loaned to Zoo Atlanta with the approval of the Gorilla Species Survival Plan. This giant silverback was eventually sent to Zoo Atlanta, a more natural sanctuary that fitted his physical, social and behavioural needs. Ivan’s transitional period in 1993 and 1994, featured in a New York Times report (New York Times, 1993), caught the attention of Applegate, who then spent almost a decade finishing an eponymous autobiographical fiction based on Ivan’s life experience.

Applegate mines Ivan’s real life for abundant writing material, such as his fingerprinting hobby and his experiences as a passive, enclosed trickster in a sloppy department mall. The perspective she lends to this book captures the tension between eyewitness testimony (in the evidentiary sense) and bearing witness (in the ethical sense). In fact, the book’s artistry is fostered under the gaze between the author and her realistic gorilla referent, as Applegate admits that “it’s the eyes that get me…that penetrating gaze, that intelligence… it’s hard not to be anthropomorphic when you’re looking at a great ape—at any primate—but especially with gorillas” (NPR, 2013). Applegate’s yearning to reciprocate an animal gaze is a desire to annihilate the self and merge with the observed world. This ambiguous desire to belong to the subject of observation, rather than remain an outsider, gives rise to Ivan’s manifold selves.

Ivan’s first self is autofictional, with a series of advertised names such as “Freeway Gorilla”, and “the Ape at Exit 8”. Ivan finds these names unsettling: “The names are mine, but they’re not me. I am Ivan, just Ivan” (Applegate, 2012, p. 2). A trace of muffled desire to find his identity arises at the very beginning of the novel. As the story progresses, Ivan is given other nicknames. Besides what is publicised, he is also known as an “Ape Artist” and “Primate Picasso”. Among these ostensibly fancy names he discreetly keeps his distance from, he only identifies with his name, Ivan. By the same token, he is not confident enough to admit his individuality as “the One and Only” Ivan. What merits attention is that Ivan constantly refuses to be identified as a silverback, which draws out the multiple conflicts of an animal autobiographic self: What is important about Ivan being a silverback and his rejection of this label? Is it perhaps a reflection of how he rejects aspects of himself that are undeniably part of him? We glimpse the possible answer in his second self, a human animal self, where cross-species ambiguity abounds.

The second self of Ivan endures the probing eyes of those who come to gawk: “My life is flashing lights and pointing fingers and uninvited visitors. Inches away, humans flatten their little hands against the wall of glass that separates us” (Applegate, 2012, p. 14). Paradoxically this surveillance has hindered Ivan’s ability to develop a singular sense of self. Instead, his identity is intertwined with a sense of mimicking and differentiating himself from humans at the same time. Ivan’s narrative voice, therefore, embodies a high degree of hybridity, blurring the line between human and quasi-human perspectives and inviting readers to explore the complex interplay between the two. Through Ivan’s recollection of his “new life as a human”, a time when he was entirely subordinate to the human experience, Ivan’s struggle for identity is amplified by the humanisation he experiences while in “comfortable” captivity. This stark contrast to his natural instincts, which are deeply rooted in his wild origins, only increases his sense of dissonance:

I was well tended. I ate lettuce leaves with Thousand Island dressing, and caramel apples, and popcorn with butter. My belly ballooned. However, hunger, like food, comes in many shapes and colours. At night, lying alone in my Pooh pyjamas, I felt hungry for the skilled touch of a grooming friend, for the cheerful grunts of a play fight, for the easy safety of my nearby troop, foraging through shadows…Am I a human? Am I a gorilla? (Applegate, 2012, pp. 133–143)

After Ivan is shipped to the zoo, his new glass cage is equipped with a TV. The zoo owner, Maya, turns on “a show about gorillas being gorillas…without human voices or ads” (Applegate, 2012, p. 267) for him, from which he sees his gorilla family. When an autobiographical gorilla can perform complex cognitive functions exactly as humans do, one cannot help noticing the making of Ivan within certain social norms—oscillating between a pure gorilla and a humanised, fabricated gorilla. Henceforth, we find mirror images of human virtues and vices in Ivan’s human–animal self and all the interspecies instabilities that pertain to it.

For the animal autobiographer, opportunities exist in challenging human self-centrism and affirming new ethics in parallel with a positive contribution to the sustainable environment. Ivan’s third self is, therefore, a critical human caught between his suppressed subjectivity and ethical request to be witnessed. From his gorilla’s point of view, humans “waste words”, and “speak too much…crowding the world with their noise even when they have nothing to say” (Applegate, 2012, p. 3). They are ludicrous when they pound their “pathetic chests” to imitate the gorilla. Ivan even calls them “a race of ill-mannered clowns”, “slimy chimps”, and “lousy hunters”. Through critical anthropomorphism, this autobiography raises Ivan’s awareness as an environmentally conscious human who agrees with Ruby’s perception of zoos as places where “humans make amends” (Applegate, 2012, p. 166). Ivan gradually realises that his “domain”, “made of thick glass and rusty metal and rough cement”, is a suffocating cage (Applegate, 2012, p. 12). With his final retreat to Zoo Atlanta, the novel might defend the moral captivity of zoos, though Ivan later refers to the zoo as “a wild cage, not a perfect place…A perfect place would not need walls. But it’s the place I need” (Applegate, 2012, p. 186). This nuanced observation reflects a debatable viewpoint in the story: a good zoo is where “humans make amends”. In view of its positive aspects, this means that the zoo should provide optimal conditions for the animals based on the full knowledge of their needs, rather than use the term to rationalise captivity which could precisely be called “prison-like”. In speaking so, Ivan, as a critical human, is critically aware of the devastation wrought upon nature and speaks for those who are eager to make environmental remedies in the anthropocentric society. As Ivan explores his different identities, he finally finds himself in Zoo Atlanta, a secured environment where he develops romantic feelings for the female gorilla named Kinyani.

These selves interact closely with Ivan’s fourth self, a literary self. Language lies at the heart of the rhetorical epistemology of “translating” the mind of nonhuman animals to address new concerns about moral and aesthetic sensibility. The crux lies in the intersection of human selfhood and animal otherness within the realm of language. So the author’s language choices play a vital role in achieving the genre’s aim of authenticity. If the text is overly polished, it risks overshadowing the animal’s perspective and instead conjures up a discernibly rhetorical tone. Conversely, intentionally using ungrammatical sentences to portray animals as feeble-minded is a disservice to their lived experience. The language used in The One and Only Ivan is generally concise and marked by epigrammatic turns of phrase. “The circus trainers chained her (Ruby) to the floor…twenty-three hours a day…to break her spirit…so she could learn to balance on a pedestal”, as Ivan portrays the circus elephant with moral poignancy, “So she could stand on her hind legs. So a dog could jump on her back while she walked in mindless circles” (2012, p. 78). Monosyllabic words and minimalist subject–verb sentence construction create an image of a resigned, stoic gorilla whose mind gradually grows more defiant. His most liberating moment comes about in a chapter entitled “outside at last”, featuring just 14 nouns: “Sky. Grass. Tree. Ant. Stick. Dirt. Cloud. Wind. Flower. Rock. Rain. Mine. Mine. Mine” (Applegate, 2012, p. 277).

Ivan’s multi-faceted self, for its intersectionality, invites contemplation on the condition of animals in the human realm, as well as humanitity’s intricate interplay with nonhuman animals. Unlike animal biography, which is said to veer “sharply away from anthropomorphic interest toward imagining what an animal’s focalisation—both literally and psychologically—must be like” (Nelles, 2001, p. 191), animal autobiography cannot be materialised without triggering anthropomorphism. Navigating boundaries between what is real and fictional, human-centric or not, entails efforts to frequently adjust our “attention” to all creatures that share the one atmosphere we breathe on Planet Earth. This does not include rhetorical attempts to flatten out differences, strive for uniform harmony or foreclose a system of entrenched conflicts within the narrative of self-otherness. Navigating the elusive boundaries between human and animal is where anthropomorphism is directed as crude (without animating figurations of species differences), trivial (patronising) or critical (respecting animal interests). The human–animal ambivalence holds for Kilner’s and Sewell’s animal autobiographies, as it plays out on the fuzzy borders of human–animal distinctions and kinship. Through critical anthropomorphism, each animal’s autobiographical self is neither stable nor monolithic, nor a precise series of discrete selves, but rhizomatic. As Ivan proudly proclaims, “It’s hard to put into words. Gorillas are not complainers. We’re dreamers, poets, philosophers, nap takers” (Applegate, 2012, p. 51). The discussion of the autobiographical animal as real or imaginary, moral or philosophical, conscious or not, can never be attributed to a homogeneous mindset.

Animal autobiography’s association with the child–animal analogy further adds to this rhizomatic quality of the self. As Boel Westin (2005, p. 53) remarks, “The use of an autobiographical manner offers a feeling of intimacy and closeness which is linked to a process of identification, usually as an appeal for compassion and empathy”. Animal autobiography is widely acknowledged as a subgenre of children’s literature, as animal subjectivity has been conventionally associated with child-animal affinity and its ethical-aesthetic stakes. Cosslett (2006, p. 92) notes that a structured “narrative of development” in an animal autobiography corresponds to the “protected and pastoral way the ideal childhood was being constructed”. Drawn on an animal’s personality, individuality and mentality, as well as its purely physical characteristics, an animal story could be “raw materials out of which children construct a sense of self” (Melson, 2005, p. 198). In The One and Only Ivan, distinct periods of Ivan’s growth are interwoven into this autobiography, starting with his early initiation into human society as a pampered human–animal baby. Ivan’s coming-of-age is marked by a shift in his perception of his "domain" as a cage rather than home, and his resolution in helping Ruby out. His quest is complete with “boons” granted (his return to a wild habitat) and “bestowed upon his fellow men” (Ruby freed), according to the narrative patterns in Joseph Campbell’s (2004, p. 28) hero model. In this respect, the novel is a monomyth, a tale of Ivan’s rites of passage (separation–initiation–return) that adds narrative complexity to his self-knowledge. For this matter, the self is not dualistic—neither an elevated human self nor a curbed animal self.

Ivan’s manifold selves stimulate questions about layers of nonhuman subjectivities that parallel those of human province in the animal autobiography: Is it a readerly illusion if we find from the story a feral child whose life is wrought with finding his wildness tamed in human society to his enlightening maturation and, lastly, his ideal retirement? Does this allegorical interpretation inform the emergence of a fledgling subjectivity—which coincides with the bodily and psychological changes experienced by children during puberty and young adulthood? “A given text may, and very often does, work on more than one level”, as Jane Spencer (2020, p. 95) notes, “with animal characters both referring to extra-textual creatures and given an allegorical dimension”. Whereas Spencer (2020, p. 78) pays more attention to child-animal bonds and “third-person narratives focalised through an animal character”, the fluid openness of the animal autobiographer, despite its adequate reference to ethology, induces me to propose the “poetics of the multicentric self” within the life situation and social context of each individual human animal.

Constructing a poetics of the multicentric self

The multi-scaled interaction of the self, I argue, points to an animal autobiographic self that is multicentric rather than human- or animal-centric. This hypothesis of self-multicentricity echoes Jacques Derrida’s concept of “autobiographical animal” from when he reflects on his cat gazing at him naked. This moment prompts Derrida, whose shame is provoked, to contemplate the varied roles of cats in literature and philosophy while remembering the real cat in front of him. He realises his inability to decipher what is behind the enigmatic feline eyes. Believing the continuity between “I, the human” and “I, the animal”, Derrida (2008, p. 29) motivates the anti-anthropocentric thinking “not in effacing the [human–animal] limit, but in multiplying its figures, in complicating, thickening, delinearizing, folding, and dividing the line precisely by making it increase and multiply”. An animal autobiography is a venue for such a direct and mediated gaze into the animal world, facilitating an intense connection of the human self with the animal identity. Through the imagined exchange of “eye/I” and animal vision, the active “I” attempts to make sense of the animals encountered, striving to translate their experiences and actions into language. The autobiographical approach to the more-than-human world, therefore, fosters a built-in aesthetic conviction and ethical tolerance for different systems of thought and values.

Three core aspects constitute what I call the “poetics of the multicentric self” in the genre. First, animal autobiography relies on anthropomorphic imagination, through which a self-identity is created. As such, there is a noticeable anthropomorphising mechanism in animal autobiography due to a synergic rhetoric of empathy and defamiliarisation (Flynn, 1996, pp. 418–419; Bernaerts et al., 2014, p. 69). As Bernaerts et al. (2014, p. 89) explain, the cultural dynamics of empathy and defamiliarisation work once the audience “adopt the non-human narrator’s perspective via narrative empathy, thereby learning to see the world—and in particular their own, human world—through the narrator’s defamiliarizing eyes”. This conceptual integration induces a reading interest that expands the readerly understanding of the physical world, animal cognition and the text-reader interaction. By fusing empathy and defamiliarisation into nonhuman perspectives, animal autobiographical narratives tap into human cognitive limits and, more importantly, exercise an act of “attention” on animal alterity. Through the defamiliarisation–empathy dialectic, autobiographical animals are often accompanied by an empathic human friend as well. In The One and Only Ivan, Julia is a mediator between the captive animals and estranged human society, who can understand the objective reality that these speaking subjects go through. Such a child character embodies a common motif in children’s literature, where childhood is often portrayed as a time of keen sensitivity to the rhythm of nature and the animal mind. Julia, though not a realistic figure in real Ivan’s world, is his autofictional avatar to bridge the gap between the two seemingly irreconcilable worlds. Urging her father to put up a “HOME” sign for Ruby helps draw the attention of animal activists, ultimately leading to the rescue of Ivan and his fellow companions. This act of love and compassion brings about a mutual cross-species friendship that underscores the ethical message of the story.

Second, the genre blurs representational distinctions between the author’s autobiographical identity and that of the defamiliarised animal so that the “I” functions as both the writer and self-performer in an integrated persona. As nonhuman animals are endowed with human speech for their species-specific needs, there are several aspects of animal autobiography in which the objectives of humans and nonhumans converge. In Aaron Moe’s (2014, p. 11) proposition of zoopoetics, animal poetry is a human-animal co-authorship based on the assumption that animal sounds and vocalisations “emerge from a rhetorical body, a poetic body, or rather a body that is able to make” (emphasis in the original). Although Moe (2014, p. 11) expresses great optimism in animals as “makers” of texts, this assertion is founded on the power of analogy, through which, humans are able to draw connections between seeming disparate realms and interpret the experiences of animals in a way that reflects our own cultural production. While animals can inspire literary creation and provoke a response in humans, ultimately, humans are the ones who make texts. Along these lines, various identities can flourish in this human writing activity, depending on how the self-conscious writer “performs” the animal: the real, the imaginary, the metaphorical and the liminal. It is, for instance, an aspirational human self who starts to “mind” the animal, whose self is either associated with its known animal traits (as a real-life animal self) or allegorised as a critical human self (for which the animal character is a critic or commentator of humankind), or a hybrid self. Instead of treating fragments of animal identity as independent, this study reckons that the fictional self is a self-occasioned performance of experiences. Reading the original sub-title of Black Beauty—His Grooms and Companions. The Autobiography of a Horse. Translated from the Original Equine, by Anna Sewell, we find a telling example of how the animal autobiography affords the author’s performative act of the self to grow and enlarge in the light of experiencing proxy involvement with the animal subject.

Third, drawn from the two postulates above, it can be inferred that when the human self intersects with the animal subject, multiple perceptual dimensions come into play, resulting in a multicentric self, where each identifiable self both follows and leads to the other, without anyone being the sole centre of attention. The extent of this multicentricity may vary, as seen in Kilner’s The Life and Perambulations of A Mouse, where the autobiographical mouse exhibits aspirational and critical human qualities in his reflection on falsehood, and urges “human creatures, who are blest with understanding and faculties so superior to any species” to “make better use of them; and learn, from daily experience, to grow wiser and better for the future” (1784/1846, p. 121). The life-narrating animal finally ends his story with an evident plea for more human mercy to treat his species better: “Condescend, therefore, to preserve that life you have so lengthened, and take me under your protection” (Kilner, 1784/1846, p. 124). Laid upon these didactic, entertaining and ethical functions, the autobiographical authenticity, however tenuous it may be, is embedded to establish the reality of the animal subject and dispel any notion that the referent is merely an illusion or a literary device. This claim of realism is voiced in Charlotte Tucker’s The Rambles of a Rat (1864, p. v), an autobiography recounting a British rat’s series of adventures upon voyaging to Russia, in which the author insists that “facts are enclosed in my fiction” as “the courage, presence of mind, fidelity, and kindness, which I have attributed to my heroes, have been shown by real rats. Such adventures as I have described have actually happened to them”.

The animal autobiographical self, I argue, can be multicentric and performatively produced by the subject who takes part. The intensive authorial gaze at animals throughout animal autobiography leads readers to the dialogic interaction of the autofiction of an autobiographical self, the literary authority of the first-person animal voice, with the authenticity of animal status. Following Derrida’s contemplation, Kelly Oliver (2009, p. 6) writes that the “I can” of “I can train the others/animals” or of the “I can love the others/animals” amounts to the same thing “if love is a matter of knowing, understanding, sovereignty, individuality, autonomy, possession, mastery, law—those values at the centre of the Cartesian subject, not to mention Western ideals of citizenship, rights, morality, and politics”. From this perspective, the concept of love is problematised as conventionally anthropocentric, which prompts us to reconsier whether love can be reformulated in animal autobiography and flows across animal autobiographers/narrators and human readers. In this ideal sense, animal autobiographers from Anna Sewell to Katherine Applegate, alternatively, from Black Beauty to Ivan the Silverback, enable us to rethink our deep-seated value system and behaviours. The genre of animal autobiography can not only offer a vicarious aesthetic thrill but also promote a sense of multicentric selfhood. Following Lejeune’s autobiographical pact, if we expect the genre to render some truth about animals in the Anthropocene era, this should create a moral imperative for both authors and readers alike to approach the narrative with a sense of responsibility and care for the inner lives of other sentient animals. The call to ethical reassessment comes not just from examining “selves” as mere “others”, but more often, it seems, from engaging readers in moving toward “others”, whose stories pave the way to revise “selfhood”. Suppose an ethical pact between readers and authors is reached, the genre can be ethically coded without sacrificing narrative enjoyment.

Conclusion

The review of animal autobiographies reveals that the narrative strategies that assign physical, psychological and perceptibly social attributes to nonhuman animals shape the genre to this day. These strategies, including multi-scaled perceptions of an autofictional self, critical anthropomorphism and an ethics of witness, allow individual animals to be depicted as fully realised characters with relatable experiences. As animals are portrayed as beings with an ontological and moral status comparable to humans, these narrative voices are also voices of a particular time, place and position in human society. Together these strategies contribute to a literary scene of when “I” was born, in which many selves converge to express the animal autobiographer’s voices. A complex blend of reality and fiction, human and animal, self and other, the portrayal of an autobiographical animal reflects both the generic conventions and the potential for ethical innovation in response to changing social contexts, resulting in a multicentric animal self. Such multicentric selfhood highlights the interplay between the performative nature of the autofictional self and the authenticity and literary authority of the first-person perspective, which, in turn, could energise the reading of the genre. By invoking Derrida’s concept of “the animal that therefore I am”, animal autobiography, when viewed through the lens of the multicentric self, encourages a deep engagement with the act of writing and reading in Anthropocene, leading to the fundamental question: Whom am I (following)?