The Skinny on Anthropomorphism

The clock is ticking on my chance to post a blog in February, so here it is: something weighing on my animal brain. What am I talking about? Animals acting like people. How? Why? Why not?

My last novel YEAR OF THE TIGER and my forthcoming novel THE MASTERS' RIDDLE both make use of that ten-dollar A-word writing gimmick we learned back in 5th grade: Anthropomorphism. 

Don't be afraid. We have all experienced anthropomorphism since our earliest days of toddlerhood. We grew up on cartoons. We had to read books full of animals that talked like people. It's all around us. Some of us speak to our pets as though they were our children. Others speak to children as though they were animals - probably. Sometimes we assign human qualities to inanimate objects, too, but that is more likely personification. 

Think of such famous works as Animal Farm by George Orwell, a description of the Russian revolution - which wouldn't have been nearly as understandable if it had not involved farm animals. Think of Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll and the talking animals in that book. Think of the movie The Lion King - essentially Shakespeare's Hamlet reset in Africa. Or Pinocchio, in which an inanimate doll comes to life! Read more here.

Why do it? I never understood the tendency to make children's books and movies feature animals or objects acting and speaking as people. Who first thought that children could relate to those substitutes for people better than to people themselves? There must be some twisted psychology behind that decision. But it stuck and we grew up on Saturday morning cartoons: Bugs Bunny, Donald Duck, and other Looney Tunes, up to the introduction of anime - about the time I turned off the TV. (I also grew up watching the original Flintstones but they were humans not animals.) My guess is that animals (soft-focused, cheery hued, dull-toothed) are kinder, gentler for children to relate to - unlike the evil human adults in their lives.

How? The process of anthropomorphism requires that we imagine how a certain animal would think if it could think as a human. Of course, the variety of ways a human could think is myriad anyway, given the wide ranging cultures we have in the world, so...well, uh, anyway.... Let's take a dog. What fills a dog's average day? What might you think about throughout the day, following your usual activities, if you were a human? Try to think of yourself in the four-legged, long-snouted body of a dog. What would that be like? Talk about your life as a dog. There are movies and books where that happens. 

I think the purpose, in many cases, is to try to engage some kind of empathy in the reader or viewer. We get to understand another "person" who is even more different than us acting in our normal situation because that "person" is not even a person but an animal with all of the animal characteristics zoologists have enumerated for that animal. Introducing a character who is an animal adds a special new angle on the events of the story. That angle can be merely metaphorical, as in the case of most animated tales, or can be realistic and sincere - as I have done with my two novels.

Obviously a novel involving a tiger can go only two ways: let the tiger be a tiger or have the tiger be confused by some human characteristics. You can read about the origin of this novel here, but I will add that back in those early days I was reading a lot of Roger Zelazny and also books about Hinduism and reincarnation so it's entirely possible my idea came from that mix: an animal who had somehow gotten a bit of human when born into his next body. Then the age-old mantra takes over: What would that be like? 

YEAR OF THE TIGER has parallel story lines which eventually merge. In the tiger's arc, he acts like a tiger should act (I did lots of research on tiger behavior!). Then I gradually introduced anomalies which the tiger doesn't understand - not until it is too late. This allows readers to follow the tiger's journey, empathize with the tiger, and get a sense of what it is like to be a tiger, especially once it decides to hunt men. It was never intended as a trick or gimmick but, rather, me incorporating a cast member on equal billing as the human characters. How do I know how a tiger would act if it had human-like thoughts? Well, there's a Disneyland ride where you get to pretend you're a tiger and.... (Kidding!) I'm a writer, a professional imaginer, that's how!

Then, just to make life even more of a challenge, I had to go full-anthropomorphism by writing a character who is not human at all, also not exactly an animal. That required a kind of deep-imagining in a deliberately uncomfortable way. THE MASTERS' RIDDLE involves an intelligent being, living on another planet with a different civilization and different ways of being and thinking, who is captured and must fight to escape and find his way home. The difference is that with a tiger, I have recorded tiger traits I could use and I had human traits to employ with the tiger. Here, however, I have an alien who must, by definition, be very different from our everyday human. It is a kind of anthropomorphism although we have the equivalent of a human being, hence not an animal. Our alien hero encounters other captured aliens, many of whom are not the typical two-legged upright humanoid beings often considered to be the intelligent ones. We have been trying to address diversity, after all. The entire novel is a study in what it's like to not be human.

Probably my next novel, if I should have the strength to write one, will return to having ordinary people living in an ordinary neighborhood somewhere in an ordinary pandemic-free preserve far from any crumbling cities. What would that be like?

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