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I am reading Garth Stein’s novel Racing in the Rain. I am drawn in by the narrator, a dog named Enzo. As I read, I remember two other works in which dogs narrate–Billy Collins’ poem “The Revenant” and Eugene O’Neill’s essay, “The Last Will and Testament of Silverdene Emblem O’Neill.” In all of these writings, what is it I am responding to?

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I begin to wonder about this particular use of persona. I type the words “animal persona in literature” into my web browser. For a reason I probably won’t ever figure out, Google’s list of links leads to a blog by the short story literary theorist Charles E. May. He has a passion for teaching the short story as “a language-structured examination of life” that people read to “understand the complexity of what is human.” We find this out best, he says, when we understand “how an author uses language to create what is human in a story.”

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How does writing in a canine persona, I start to muse, help the three authors I am thinking about tell stories of human complexity?

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I read from another link: persona in literature:

The voice “through which the author speaks…with a sense of knowledge and emotion only one with a firsthand view of the action could depict.”

— Stephanie White, University of North Carolina at Pembroke Student

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I find copies of Collins’ poem and O’Neill’s essay and thumb through the pages I’ve read in Stein’s book. I begin to examine the dog narrators’ words in light of how they serve a reader’s understanding of humanity.

Stein’s dog Enzo had been with his master Denny, a race car driver, a long time, when Denny  married Eve and later had a daughter Zoe:

…My nose–yes, my little black nose that is leathery and cute–could smell the disease in Eve’s brain long before even she knew it was there.

 But I hadn’t a facile tongue. So all I could do was watch and feel empty inside; Eve had assigned me to protect Zoe no matter what, but no one had been assigned to protect Eve. And there was nothing I could do to help her

O’Neill’s dog Silverdene is aged but before he dies he wants his humans to know he loved them and that if they loved him they would have such good memories; they would certainly want another dog to build on those memories, a Dalmatian like himself being best, of course:

One last word of farewell, Dear Master and Mistress. Whenever you visit my grave, say to yourselves with regret but also with happiness in your hearts at the remembrance of my long happy life with you: “Here lies one who loved us and whom we loved.” No matter how deep my sleep I shall hear you, and not all the power of death can keep my spirit from wagging a grateful tail.

Collins’ dog is a ghost with no name, returning to let his master know “I never liked you–not one little bit”:

I would have run away,
but I was too weak, a trick you taught me
while I was learning to sit and heel,
and–greatest of insults–shake hands without a hand

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Enzo tells us about love and observation, about loyalty, connection and service, about tragedy approaching. Silverdene describes holding loving memory and gratitude. Collin’s reverent lets us know that the human viewpoint and ideas might be misrepresentations of what is true.

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A story is not only the narrator’s thoughts and feelings; it is also what that narrator does and what he observes being done.

I think about the dogs’ actions as well as their language to appreciate the way they serve a reader’s understanding of what is human.

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Enzo pays attention when Denny speaks to him like a treasured son:

When we watch videos together–which we’ve done every since the very first day I met him–he explains these things to me. (To me!) Balance, anticipation, patience. These are all vital. Peripheral vision, seeing things you’ve never seen before. Kinesthetic sensation, driving by the seat of our pants. But what I’ve always liked best is when he talks about having no memory. No memory of things he’d done jut a second before. Good or bad. Because memory is time folding back on itself. To remember is to disengage from the present. In order to reach any kind of success in automobile racing, a driver must never remember.

Which is why drivers compulsively record their every move, their every race, with cockpit cameras, in-car video, data mapping; a driver cannot be a witness to his own greatness. This is what Denny says. He says racing is doing. It is being a part of a moment and being aware of nothing else but that moment. Reflection must come at a later time. The great champion Julian SabellaRosa has said, “When I am racing, my mind and my body are working so quickly and so well together, I must be sure not to think, or else I will definitely make a mistake.”

A dog would get this about racing, I think; a dog would resonate with this idea of putting one’s whole self into the racing, one’s whole self without that self getting in one’s way.

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Silverdene compares dogs and humans, their differences and ultimately their similar spirits:

…Dogs are wiser than men. They do not set great store upon things. They do not waste their days hoarding property. They do not ruin their sleep worrying about how to keep the objects they have, and to obtain the objects they have not. There is nothing of value I have to bequeath except my love and my faith. These I leave to all those who have loved me, to my Master and Mistress, who I know will mourn me the most, to Freeman who has been so good to me, to Cyn and Roy and Willie and Naomi and — But if I should list all those who have loved me, it would force my Master to write a book. Perhaps it is vain of me to boast when I am so near death, which returns all beasts and vanities to dust, but I have always been an extremely lovable dog.

I laugh at his pride in being affectionate, at how despite being different than a human, he says the human thing, the prideful thing about himself.

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Collins’ nameless reverent of a dog almost revels in his confession of having been misunderstood for a lifetime:

I admit the sight of the leash
would excite me
but only because it meant I was about
to smell things you had never touched.

You do not want to believe this,
but I have no reason to lie.
I hated the car, the rubber toys,
disliked your friends, and worse, your relatives.

He reveals his irritations:

The jingling of my tags drove me mad.
You always scratched me in the wrong place.
All I ever wanted from you
was food and fresh water in my metal bowls.

How many ways does one fool oneself, I must ask, after I laugh at the way this ghost of a dog turns beliefs into questions.

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Persona: The term derives from the Latin persona, meaning an actor’s mask…

— Encyclopedia Britannica

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I become curious about what scientists have to say about language and dogs.

From Scientific American, June 10, 2009, “Fact or Fiction: Dogs Can Talk”:

Some dogs learn to understand an impressive number of words, as well. A gifted border collie, Rico, mastered the names of more than 200 objects using a technique called fast-tracking that small children also employ, Juliane Kaminski, also of M.P.I. Evolutionary Anthropology and colleagues reported in 2004 in Science. The researchers introduced a novel item into Rico’s mix of toys then asked him to retrieve it. He did so by associating the unfamiliar name with the unfamiliar object. He even remembered the name of the toy a month later.

I am fast-tracking in a different way. I imbibe the familiar details the dogs share about how they experience domesticated life and connect the flavor to the bittersweet quality of what is human.

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If I were to create a persona that was not a human, I start to consider, who or what would that be?

• My small green turtle with red markings on his cheeks, who I wish had escaped from his hiding place behind my mother’s cook stove instead of dying there from the heat
• Judy, the toy panda bear my sister told me after we’d grown up had a little hole in her neck through which my sister had stuffed notes for years about the people who had upset her.
• The lapis lazuli earrings my mother gave me as a graduation present when I left college that were stolen by a baby sitter when my daughter was a toddler.
• My cat Joey who is in a grave in my backyard at the edge of a forested ravine.
• My keyboard that gracefully bears crumbs and dust and smudges on some keys, where letters and symbols used to be.
• The date due slip on the inside cover of the library book I checked out last week– June 1, 2008 and 29 more dates stamped on it, including the date I borrowed the book–30 adventures to image for this book.

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Even if I don’t name these personas as inanimate or animal and just write as if looking through their eyes, I will be listening to the world differently; I will be comparing their points of view to commonly accepted ones, and I will refresh my ability to appreciate the world and know the complexity of what is human. I will turn ideas and turn them again, sometimes on their heads.

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I look again through the links Google has supplied for me and come across this:

In Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess,” the persona is the Duke of Ferrara. In John Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale,” the persona is not identified, so it is up to the reader to infer whether it is the author himself or a speaker conceived by the poet for a particular effect.”

 — Philippine Literature

I step away from the screen and return to Stein’s novel where I left off on page 165. Enzo is in a dog park with Denny when Denny, who thinks he’ll be bringing Eve home soon, gets the call that his wife has died. Enzo describes his experience of that moment:

…and I found in the darkest part of my soul a hatred I had never felt before. I didn’t know where it came from but it was there and I charged that squirrel. It looked up too late. It noticed me long after it should have if it had wanted to live, and I was on it. I was on that squirrel and it had not chance. I was ruthless. My jaws slapped down on it, cracking its back, my teeth ripped into its fur, and I shook it to death after that, for good measure, I shook it until I heard its neck snap in two. And then I ate it. I ripped it open with my fangs, my incisors, tore into it, and blood was on me, all the blood, hot and rich, I drank its life and I ate its entrails and pulverized its bones and swallowed. I crushed its skull and ate its head. I devoured the squirrel. I had to do it. I missed Eve so much I couldn’t be a human anymore and feel the pain that humans feel. I had to be an animal again. I devoured, I gorged, I gulped, I did all the things I shouldn’t have done. My trying to live to human standards had done nothing for Eve; I ate the squirrel for Eve.

Could Stein have done any better describing Denny’s pain than to allow Enzo this scene? Can anyone describe raw pain better than through the persona of a dog who has up till this enormous loss been so very — no, better than — human in his compassion and joy and loyalty?

Enzo says in his dreams of crows that followed that night: “I chased them; I caught them; I killed them. I did it for Eve.”

Enzo has taught me about the complexity of what is human.