Viewing the world through Lucy Corin’s “Eyes of Dogs”

Abstract Marie-Laure Ryan, Kenneth Foote, and Maoz Azaryahu pave the way, in Narrating Space/Spatializing Narrative (2016), to think of space in narrative as well as narrative in space. I steer their approach through nonhuman space by examining a narrative traversal of “the mesh,” which is Timothy Morton’s spatial metaphor for human and nonhuman interconnection. “A narrative traversal of the mesh” indicates two distinct aspects of narrative motion, which can be thought of as the motion that occurs within a narrative’s fictional spaces (internal), and as the movement of a narrative through the non-fictional spaces of the mesh (external). A narrative’s internal and external motions suggest that a narrative text is itself an enmeshed pocket of nonhuman space that emulates the meshiness of the space that envelops it. The outcome of each “narrative traversal” is that the text purports to become the mesh, but this outcome registers on two scales – that of the storyworld containing a fictional mesh (the internal scale), and that of the actual, non-fictional mesh containing the storyworld (the external scale). Remarkably, each type of traversal relies on and influences the other, so that the tandem dynamism that obtains between them emerges as my object of inquiry more so than either of them individually. Since a narrative’s spatial situation is precisely that of one nonhuman space within the larger mesh, my reading of Lucy Corin’s short story, “Eyes of Dogs,” engages ultimately with the scalar discrepancy between text and world and concludes that narrative may serve as an extramental shelter from correlationism.