If We Could Talk to the Animals

Andrew Koenig considers Elisha Cohn’s “Milieu: A Creaturely Theory of the Contemporary Novel.”

By Andrew KoenigJune 6, 2025

• Literary Criticism

• Environment

ANIMALS ARE EVERYWHERE in contemporary fiction. Why are novelists today so invested in the relationship of human beings to nonhuman animals, whether wild, caged, or domesticated? What might this tell us about shifts in how humans perceive themselves—from autonomous individuals to participants in a larger network of sentient creatures? These questions propel Elisha Cohn’s fascinating new book, Milieu: A Creaturely Theory of the Contemporary Novel.

“As contemporary fiction grapples with humans as emergent organisms that participate socially in a biotic context with other living creatures,” Cohn’s thesis runs, “it centers the creatureliness of literary style.” Cohn argues that contemporary novels furnish us with new, less hierarchical ways by which we might relate to animals, as members of a shared “milieu”—Cohn’s favored term and the linchpin of her study. Cohn’s theory owes a considerable debt to Jakob Johann von Uexküll’s theory of “Umwelt” (roughly, “environment”). The concept of milieu “expresses how multiple Umwelten relate: animals do not share an Umwelt with other species […] but we do share a milieu.” Milieu, in other words, is more relational. “There is nothing inherently liberatory about milieu,” Cohn clarifies, “even as it redistributes world-making sentience.” Indeed, “the concept of milieu […] can be as constraining and normative as it can be liberating.” Milieu can loosen up certain rigid hierarchies and ideas about difference, but it is no cure-all.

Cohn’s book is moderate in its ambitions: she hopes for readers to “reframe” their relationship to nonhuman life forms, even if that does little to mitigate larger issues of environmental injustice. Reframing is the first step toward appreciating other sentient beings in all their fullness. “As milieus in themselves,” novels “refram[e] readers’ awareness of their own environmental embeddedness—redirecting attention and perhaps also […] raising awareness.” If the goal of the 19th-century novel was to expand the faculty of sympathy—to get us to think about the lives of other human beings unlike ourselves—then perhaps the goal of the 21st-century novel is to extend the range of our sympathies to the rest of the animal kingdom. Contemporary novels shake us out of rote ways of thinking about animals, showing us how we are mutually implicated in a shared milieu.

Why has contemporary fiction moved in this direction? Cohn attributes the “the anti-allegorical, anti-conceptual turn in recent novels” to “two cultural shifts since the 1990s: the evolution of pet culture and the widespread awareness of ecological catastrophe.” The transition also reflects a newfound emphasis on embodied experience and social networks over individuals. In Cohn’s telling, “global fiction […] becomes multispecies in order to promote capacious […] accounts of lived, embodied experience.” Books like Yann Martel’s Life of Pi (2001) and Lucy Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport (2019) have the power to “mak[e] the perceptual worlds of animals appear without appropriating them.”

For Cohn, contemporary novelists ought to register the full range of sentience in the animal kingdom. This is a laudable goal, but what does that look like in practice? For starters, it means opting for language that is fine-grained instead of abstract. Cohn points to the “difficulty of maintaining a lateral rather than hierarchic understanding of shared vulnerability and bodily finitude.” Hierarchy, after all, governs traditional models of the animal kingdom. One of the goals of Milieu, then, is to reattune us both to the differences between humans and animals and to the shared milieu of human and nonhuman species.

To that end, Cohn offers animal-centered interpretations of global bestsellers. Milieu bundles aesthetics and ethics—it is more just to treat humans and animals as members of a shared milieu, and it grants us greater “pleasure” as readers. Cohn views “the novel as a site for imagining the interspecies possibilities of the milieu.” Haruki Murakami’s novel The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1994–95), for example, declines to “overinvest in characters as sites of distinctive moral capacities or agential centers.” Cohn finds, in Murakami’s text, an interest in pleasure, care, and sensual receptivity, over and above character and plot development. “With vulnerability and nescience come ample and specifically rendered pleasures,” writes Cohn. Of course, one might counter that a different sort of pleasure is to be had by diving into the refined consciousness of a complex main (human) character. But I take her point—that animal-centered books afford us different kinds of pleasures from the ones we are used to.

How does Cohn suggest we write about animals? First, through “lyrical description,” which helps “reframe our understanding of belonging in a time of exigency.” Novelists may be catching up to what poets have long known: that lyric, as a less anthropocentric mode, might hold capacities that traditional narration lacks. Lyric, with its vividness, concreteness, and immanence, dodges the usual pitfalls of writing about animals and gets us out of the unfortunate maze of individualism. Cohn’s emphasis on lyric made me wonder why the novel, as opposed to the lyric poem, forms her main case study. After all, poets have made good-faith attempts to depict animals in all their animality, without turning them into mere props for human experience. Life of Pi may be more popular than the animal poems of Ted Hughes, Sharon Olds, and D. H. Lawrence, yet lyric poets like them have long known how to pay attention to nonhuman forms of life and modes of perception.

Cohn’s next point is that we should avoid allegory—some of the time, anyway. By Cohn’s lights, allegory “captures” animals as mere figures for human experience and emotion. It is a reductive way of treating animals: the fairy tale, the fable, the nursery rhyme, all fall prey to it. Cohn cautions us against using allegory to equate humans with livestock and beasts of burden, which tends to degrade humans and animals alike. As she comments, “to take animals as figures for Blackness is violence.” This point is, I think, indisputable—likening humans to animals is usually a way of demeaning them.

“[W]e must insist on the lived reality of the animals we encounter,” writes Cohn, “and thus resist turning them into figures, abstractions, or concepts.” Yet I did wonder about this “must.” Is nothing to be gained by treating animals as figures? Is allegory merely a “conceptual reduction”? After all, allegory can do things that realist narrative can’t. There is a difference, for example, between saying “bad company corrupts good morals” and “if you lie down with dogs, you’ll get up with fleas.”

Complicating matters, Cohn adds that allegory can undergird a logic of “capture” but can also—sometimes—undermine it. In chapter two, “Speaking Otherwise,” Cohn argues that “allegorical novels centering animal voice demonstrate ambivalence toward character itself.” In certain cases, “allegory unexpectedly leads away from merely reinforcing or reinventing human interiority.” Books like Yoko Tawada’s Memoirs of a Polar Bear (2011) and NoViolet Bulawayo’s Glory (2022) “reimagin[e] a transnational public sphere as a shared milieu, rather than a site of individual validation.” I appreciate Cohn’s willingness to defend allegory’s usefulness in some cases, but it gives her study a case-by-case quality. Is allegory good, bad, indifferent? Does it simply depend on how well it is used by a given author? In that case, it doesn’t seem appreciably different from any aesthetic technique. And if allegory is value-neutral, then there’s no normative claim to be made.

Be that as it may, Cohn cites Memoirs of a Polar Bear and Glory as examples of how we might skirt the usual dangers of allegory. These two novels “propose that communicativity unites all living creatures.” Cohn views “the communicative gesture as a more inclusive criterion of world-making.” Communication serves as a kind of universal solvent—a way of bringing animals, humans and other sentient beings together within the space of a single narrative. “[N]arrative voice itself [is] a milieu that coordinates multispecies existence,” Cohn writes: the novel form enables connectivity. It helps us communicate. But then what is communication?

Like “milieu,” and such buzzwords in literary studies as “queerness” and “fugitivity,” “communication” functions as an all-purpose ideal. But is a novel that “evenly distributes sapience” better than a novel that does not? Is Henry James, who focuses exclusively on the consciousness of upper-class people, inferior to Thomas Hardy, who views human life as part of a larger ecological whole? I’m hesitant to say so, since they are after different things—a novel that dwells primarily on a human mind is not trying to do the same thing as a novel about a zoo animal, such as Memoirs of a Polar Bear or Life of Pi.

I must confess that I didn’t enjoy many of the texts discussed in this book. The question of “pleasure” seems to me, anyway, an open one: it’s not clear that a book with no centralized consciousness or discernible voice, but instead a weak, impersonal, “multispecies” orientation, is more enjoyable than a book like Jane Eyre (1847), which centers on a single person’s thoughts and feelings. This may explain why Cohn appends various qualifications to the aesthetic criteria proposed here. Her reluctance to make strong assertions aligns Milieu with a larger move towards “weak theory” in literary criticism: rather than assertive interpretations, we get weak networks of connectivity and provisional readings.

In chapter three, “Dog Friends,” Cohn specifically discusses books that “focus on how dogs and humans inhabit the shared milieu of the home” and “refuse to allegorize the dog’s death.” Think less Wilson Rawls’s Where the Red Fern Grows (1961) and more Sigrid Nunez’s The Friend (2018), now a Hollywood movie, and Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones (2011). As Cohn writes, “the intimacies in these books are not […] friendly assertions of power but, rather, reflect divestments from self-assertion at all”; in them, “animal friendship becomes a cautious alternative to human social life riven with sexual violence.” The human-pet relationship, much like the “found family” of queer theory, is supposed to transcend the inequalities that otherwise afflict human relations. Cohn even coins a phrase—“interspecies chosen family”—to synthesize parallel strands of queer theory and animal studies—a thought-provoking idea that could be expanded upon.

Cohn explores the “creaturely allegiances” in Nunez’s and Ward’s novels, both of which concern “women’s roles in meeting creaturely needs and affirming multispecies intimacies in the home.” The patriarchal household, in other words, has the capacity to host covert interspecies intimacies. These books break with the usual dog plot, which focuses on a beloved dog who dies for its owner. “Dog plots usually are trauma plots,” writes Cohn; “they typically absorb relations of mutual care between humans and animals into an anthropocentrically therapeutic model of trauma recovery.” Translation: The animal sacrifice is bad aesthetics because it reinforces human supremacy and downplays the dog’s subjectivity.

By contrast, Nunez’s The Friend, whose protagonist inherits the dog of a friend who has died of cancer, “pivots from this model to emphasize an interspecies milieu.” In that book, “interspecies attention [is] a way for vulnerability to be fully recognized and valued.” Compared to an author like J. M. Coetzee, who is preoccupied with male characters and “anthropocentric abstractions like sacrifice and salvation,” Nunez’s autofictional “I” is more interested in “bodily vulnerability” and the mundane details of living with another creature. Cohn focuses on scenes where the narrator reads aloud to the dog: “Rather than present reading aloud as an unequal experience of language, in which the dog experiences its materiality and the narrator its semioticity, the importance of the differences is diminished.” Translation: Human and dog exist on the same plane of habitus. From this observation, Cohn concludes, The Friend’s “form itself models the horizontal modes of relation” that typify an aesthetics of milieu.

Cohn favorably terms Nunez’s prose style “anti-dominative.” “[W]hile the narrator explores what it would mean to transform this story into an allegory of human creativity in the face of mourning, in which the dog remains a conceptual stand-in,” she writes, “that move is rejected.” Nunez’s books tend to avoid large-scale dramas and focus on those that fit within the space of a Manhattan apartment, but I’m not sure that makes the book “anti-dominative.”

Meanwhile, Ward’s more conventionally constructed novel, Salvage the Bones, about a Black family living in a New Orleans that is about to be struck by Hurricane Katrina, “resists conceptual substitution and conceptual abstraction, through its use of a lyrical narrative voice.” “Lyrical” is hardly a word one would use to describe Nunez’s prose, yet Ward’s novel and Nunez’s have certain commonalities. “[T]he dogs at their centers cannot be read in either symbolic or sentimental terms. Readers are being encouraged […] to take dog friendships seriously.” In the case of Ward’s novel, the focus is on a family’s pit bull, rather than a dead friend’s Great Dane. In Salvage the Bones, an “interspecies household also allows for some flexibility, some queerness, within a rigid gender system.” Ward’s “similes emphasize environmental and fleshly embeddedness.” Like Nunez, Ward offers a “feminist care ethics” as an alternative to “the sacrificial narrative” and ends her book with “birthing as a basis for common practices of world-making and inhabitation.”

Throughout her study, Cohn favors the visceral: food, flesh, birth, hunger. It’s not clear if she is simply forecasting one direction the contemporary novel is going—away from abstraction and toward materiality—or if she is ratifying this newfound focus on embodiment as a more legitimate way of describing life. Additionally, and perhaps understandably, Cohn never broaches the problem of bestiality—a sexual relationship between human and nonhuman animals that cannot credibly claim a basis in consent, which poses a problem for any ethics of milieu. My mind jumps to the infamous mention, in Toni Morrison’s 1987 novel Beloved, of intercourse between slave men and cows. What are we to make of this taboo relationship, which defies the strictly regimented world of the slave plantation? Such questions might be worth exploring in another book building on Cohn’s work.

The fourth chapter, “Cat Kin,” is about yet another pair of books: Ducks, Newburyport, Lucy Ellmann’s novel told from the perspective of a middle-aged housewife and mother in Ohio (loosely modeled on James Joyce’s Ulysses), and Linda Hogan’s Power (1998), about the death of a panther in an Indigenous community. The guiding questions in this chapter are about the ethics of imagining animals. “What is it like for a human to commit to imagining an animal having its own world—even or especially if that animal is in peril?” asks Cohn, who wonders, in the same vein, “how a person might think and feel about an animal’s own, distinctive sentience.”

Cohn points to the modest ambitions of these novels, which “represent no achievement of social power beyond the work of reframing.” There’s value in imagining what, in the famed words of Thomas Nagel, it is like to be a bat, whatever the success or failure of that exercise. As Cohn comments in her analysis of Ducks, Newburyport, “there is nothing inherently powerful about inhabiting a stance—or a never-ending flow of stances.” The mom-narrator’s imagination of an escaped lioness’s journey—a fleeting news story—may not accomplish anything at all, but Cohn sees power in the powerlessness of the hapless news viewer. Similarly, the preponderance of lists in that book “intimat[es] a flat ontology, in which humans are just one of the many kinds of things in an interdependent material collectivity.” This is a hopeful reading of Ellmann’s book, which I find to be quite depressing—Ducks, Newburyport, after all, is about feeling stupefied and powerless in the face of bad news.

With its very title, Linda Hogan’s Power picks up on these same questions of power and powerlessness. Power is about the importance of a panther to an Indigenous community in Florida, where it is ceremonially killed in violation of federal protections of endangered species. Like Ward, Hogan “work[s] with rather than resisting novelistic conventions.” Like Ellmann, she “subordinate[s] the drama of crisis to narrating the dual but kindred textures of human and other-than-human sapience. In their present-tense redistribution of the rhythms of attention,” Cohn writes, these two novels “offer a reduced commitment to plot that may reflect the logic of impasse.” In the face of incomprehensible species loss, the best we can do may be to come up short, to feel blocked, to attend to the rhythms of anxiety that pervade daily life in an age of catastrophe. No cure is to be found in these books, which look to “rumination” as one possible “way of mapping a world.” In short, “the novel’s creation of another, creaturely milieu makes attention matter without overinvesting in exclusionary models of human thought or action.”

Cohn’s book implies, at first, that third-person narration works better than first-person in “decentering” consciousness and capturing multiplicity: “Collective narration,” writes Cohn, “implies the possibility of synthesis through the unification of multiple voices.” For Cohn, “impersonal—and nonhuman—voices […] generate, moment to moment, distinctive and robustly literary stylistic practices.” In other words, books with provisional, weak, and collective forms of narration—which often shift voices and occupy an ambient, nonspecific “middle” perspective—may better elude “capture.”

Although the “impersonal” voice of third-person narration is initially posited as an ideal way of exploring nonhuman minds, Cohn contends that “first-person novels are exceptionally well suited to evoking the experience of thinking […] about other animals’ worlds.” In Cohn’s interpretation, “each text turns to free indirect discourse from within first-person narration to represent a big cat’s sentience,” thus “calling attentions to the limits of the first person and the possibilities of the third.” So perhaps the first person isn’t as effective as the third in conveying a sense of milieu.

Cohn’s expertise is Victorian literature, and these specific claims call to mind the novels of George Eliot, who views society as a kind of ecosystem, and whose third-person narrator dips in and out of the lives of many, many characters to capture its complexity. As Cohn puts it, “the mutual calibration of inward perception to outward environment that is a hallmark of free indirect discourse is also […] legible as the logic of milieu.” And, as it turns out, “realism too depends on the logic of the milieu.” What doesn’t fall into the category of the milieu? It might be helpful to have a list since so much seems to.

All of which points to a larger difficulty: it’s hard to pin down what form would be best suited to an aesthetics of milieu. Just when allegory seems irredeemably bad, Cohn adds that certain allegorical novels capture milieu effectively; just when it seems that third-person narration may be the solution, she adds that first-person storytelling can work just as well. It seems that virtually any novelistic form, first or third person, allegorical or literal, can equally capture an aesthetics of milieu—which leads me to wonder why these two axes, often presented as antithetical, are so central to Cohn’s argument.

Closing this book, I wasn’t sure whether to feel reassured or dismayed. For Cohn, “[i]nsisting on non-companionate attention to animals positions thinking itself as [an] environmentally consequential site of repair.” Maybe so. But does thinking in less anthropocentric terms about an escaped lioness “repair” anything? If there’s repair to be had, it is inextricably tied up with a prevailing mood of despair over the death of animals on a mass scale. Contemporary animal novels may not hold answers to our ecological crisis, anyway, but perhaps they represent an effort—however faltering and imperfect—to better account for nonhuman forms of life. To the extent that Cohn’s study helps describe that trend, and shows how we might reframe our relationship to animals, I find it to be a useful—if not exactly comforting—work of literary theory.