Taking the trans-species nature of

Taking the trans-species nature of psyche seriously also has far-reaching implications for the study of nonhuman characters in environmental narratives and the ways they engage audiences. Herman has suggested that examining nonhuman experience from a narratological point of view might prompt us to rethink “prior accounts of narrativity itself—accounts suggesting that part of what makes a text or a discourse amenable to being interpreted as a narrative is its focus on human or human-like characters” (2011, 158). Narratives do need actors of some kind, and emotionally engaging narratives tend to feature relatable characters. However, as scores of ecocritics have argued, it is a fallacy to assume that these characters have to be human, or even like humans.10 Herman seems to agree, suggesting that narrativeaffords a bridge between the human and the nonhuman; stories provide this link not merely by allegorizing human concerns via nonhuman animals or engaging in anthropomorphic projections, but also by figuring the lived, phenomenal worlds— what the German-Estonian philosopher-biologist Jakob von Uexküll termed the Umwelten—of creatures whose organismic structure differs from our own Bymodeling the richness and complexity of “what it is like” for nonhuman others, stories can underscore what is at stake in the trivialization—or outright destruction—of their experiences. (2011, 159)