Entanglement and Immersion in Brian Doyle’s Mink River

Introduction

This essay studies how four of Doyle’s inventive techniques create a language of animacy and entanglement: stories of ancestors impart timeless wisdom; character points of view alternate sentence by sentence; everyone in town is joined by the humble act of kneeling; and a bear and a crow share their unique perspectives. This study focuses on Part I, chapters 43 through 47 (68 – 73).

In the essay, “Politics and the English Language,” George Orwell observes that good writing requires deep inner attention and wordless imagination, but that “If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.” (Orwell) While Orwell warns about the ways that language can be used not only to reflect but also to control our worldview, writer Paul Kingsnorth goes further to assert that the abstraction of the written word is itself the problem—a stunning confession for a writer:

That language itself—or at least the kind of language we use, abstracted, boiled down into these ink marks—is part of the process by which we desacralize the world. That writing, especially, is a tool of ecocide. (Kingsnorth, “The Language of the Master”)

Kingsnorth points to the elevation of rational, analytical thought over intuition and other ways of knowing. The English language typically serves a mechanized, transactional worldview and prevents us from experiencing ourselves as interconnected with the living earth.

Scientist and writer Robin Wall Kimmerer’s diagnosis includes a speculation that English was coopted as a tool of commerce, removing it from “an ancient Anglo-Saxon intimacy with the land and her beings.” She writes, “It is said that we are known by the company we keep, and I wonder if English sharpened its verbal ax and lost the companionship of oaks and primroses when it began to keep company with capitalism.” (Kimmerer, “Speaking of Nature”)

In his essay, “Against Nature Writing,” lawyer and author Charles Foster advises writers to “try to use language in a way that subverts its colonial tendencies.” (Foster) In defense of anthropomorphism, he invokes the “vast amount of physiology and evolutionary history we share with nonhumans,” as well as acknowledging that consciousness is everywhere. “We can reasonably infer personhood where there is consciousness, and it is morally mandatory to do so.” (Foster)

Foster’s essay would make a fine roadmap to a close read of Mink River. Many of Foster’s suggestions can be found in Doyle’s prose. For example, the sensory immersion of non-human beings favors sound and smell and avoids metaphor. Readers can trust the world he creates, a world of empathy and respect, because we can trust his words, no matter how unadorned, and his language, no matter how strange. In fact, the stranger the better.

Immersive Engagement of Omniscient Narration

These chapters in Part 1 take place in the aftermath of twelve-year-old Daniel’s bicycle accident. Chapter 35, p.59 sets it up: Daniel rushes home late for dinner. He is fond of speed and risk-taking. The chapter tumbles to a breathless end with a fourteen-line, 181-word sentence of twelve strong-verbed clauses joined by buts and ands and even a few commas to narrate Daniel flying over a cliff. We are left gasping and hanging and wondering how he could survive such a terrible fall.

This event is an example of external causation, which author Matthew Salesses identifies as one way to challenge Western literature’s “project of the individual.” He writes that using human agency to drive plot conveys the idea that the world can be controlled and that the world belongs to us. (Salesses 56-57) Accidents remind us that anything can happen at any time.

The omniscient narration means the reader alone has seen Daniel’s accident. Seven of Doyle’s short chapters follow over eight pages. The others in town go about their lives, an attenuation of action that intensifies the lonely burden of responsibility.

Fortunately, chapter 43 relieves the tension by challenging our assumption of singularity: “One living being saw Daniel fly over the edge,” and that is “a young female bear on her early evening rounds.” (Mink River 68) Shared witness draws the reader and the bear into a relationship that reminds us we are not alone after all. Since we’re here, Doyle seems to say, let’s peek into this bear’s consciousness and see what we find. Doyle employs language to introduce us to the strangeness of bears: “Her name in the dark tongue of bears means eats salt, for her habit of scouring the beach for food.” (68)

The verbs in the first half of this short, one-paragraph chapter characterize this bear (emphasis mine): the bear saw Daniel; she read the New York Times (oh, really?); she is three years old; she scours the beach for food; she sharpens her claws on cedar trees; the walks miles to find the right tree; and she will mate soon for the first time. Most of the content is about eating, not unexpected for a wild animal. Her meals past and future scroll as elaborate lists of wildly diverse beings:

Today she has eaten six young ground squirrels, their mother, several dozen beetles, several hundred salmonberries, and a dead jay. The young squirrels were delicious. Later this evening she will eat two fledgling murres on the beach. . . . She has eaten shark, skate, ray, halibut, perch, cod, cormorant, pelican, gull, duck, heron, salmon, steelhead, tern, sea lion, seal, and gray whale. She has eaten bat, beaver, bullfrog, deer, dove, rabbit, raccoon, and robin. (68)

The second half of the chapter shifts consciousness following the sentence, “She will mate for the first time in about a month, with a bear whose name means only one.” Doyle bridges from third person plural to single sentences of alternating perspectives (emphasis mine):

They will be together for three nights and four days. She will give birth to female twins. He will never see the twins. She and the cubs will leave him in the pearly dawn while he is sleeping. He has never walked on the beach because he believes the roaring ocean is a bear of incomprehensible size. (68)

Finally, the male bear gets three of his own sentences about his birth, his mother’s untimely death, and his subsequent near-starvation. The paragraph ends with another shift of consciousness: “He grew so thin the year after his mother died that two loggers who saw him on a ridge one day thought he was a dog.” (69)

In the book, Building Fiction, Jesse Lee Kercheval distinguishes point of view as more than “a mere technicality, but the choice of who tells the story.” (Kercheval 22) Who tells the story in Mink River? It could be God or Mother Earth or even the river of the book’s title. Or maybe it’s the author Brian Doyle, imagined as an ebullient hiking companion in a Pacific Northwest rainforest.

Though admitting that an “effective authorial voice . . . can help unify a tale, creating a clearer sense of connectedness,” (24) Kercheval cautions against the distancing effect that omniscient narration can have, particularly with modern readers. (25-26)

Craft advice about omniscient narration leans heavily on keeping perspectives neatly sorted. Doyle ignores this with gusto. He cloaks the authorial voice in sensory engagement and action by attaching to his many characters with charming humor, irony, self-effacement, and tenderness—often all at once.

He begins Mink River with an omniscient, cinematic, aerial pan of the town, but within a page and a half, he attaches to an eagle swooping low to pick up—a piece of cardboard. He imagines the eagle as pompous and bombastic: “I am one bad-ass flying machine, this weird flat brown bird didn’t get away from me, no sir, nothing can elude my lightning deftness in the air…” (Mink River 12)

Townspeople are introduced as the eagle flies over. On the third page, the narrator lets us know that there are “so many stories, all changing by the minute, all swirling and braiding and weaving and spinning and stitching themselves to one another and to the stories of the creatures in that place, both the quick sharp-eyed ones and the rooted green ones and the ones underground and the ones too small to see. . .” (13) The sentence goes on for thirteen lines, nearly one whole paragraph, which ends with this question: “But you sure can try to catch a few, yes?”

Thus the reader is on notice that there are many tellers in this story and many listeners, not all human. Doyle’s is a many-voiced, many-eared world, a world of full immersive engagement. His omniscient narration flows from character to character as fluidly as the river at the heart of town.

The Indigenous Mind as Lens

Tyson Yunkaporta’s 2020 book Sand Talk introduces the modern reader to the nuances of the Aboriginal mind, which is rooted in relationships via oral storytelling. He proposes a way for two systems, oral and written, to act as backups for each other. “The only sustainable way to store data long term is within relationships—deep connections between generations of people in custodial relation to a sentient landscape, all grounded in a vibrant oral tradition.” (Yunkaporta 148) He describes five distinct lenses, or minds, that characterize indigenous relationships: ancestor-mind, kinship-mind, pattern-mind, dreaming-mind, and story-mind.

Ancestor-mind “is all about deep engagement, connecting with a timeless state of mind or ‘alpha wave state,’ an optimal neural state for learning,” in which one loses track of linear time and can access cellular memory. (151-152) Kinship-mind emphasizes connectedness: “In our world, nothing can be known or even exist unless it is in relation to other things. . . . We exist to form these relationships, which make up the energy that holds creation together.” (149-150)

Pattern-mind sees systems holistically and to understand complex problems. “It is about truly holistic, contextual reasoning.” (152) Dreaming-mind connects the physical and non-physical worlds through metaphors, connecting abstract and tangible knowledge through the arts and practical action. Story-mind maps knowledge to place, transmits it via narrative, and challenges “grand narratives and histories.” (151)

Together, these five minds guide thought and action from the understanding that everything is interconnected. The following five sections will demonstrate how Mink River applies indigenous minds to modern, written storytelling.

Ancestor Mind’s Collapse of Linear Time

In Chapter 44, Daniel’s father, Owen Cooney, records his narration of family history, a modern nod to oral storytelling. The sound of his father’s voice will have meaning to Daniel. Formally, Doyle’s prose evokes oral storytelling. The chapter is framed by two, single-sentence paragraphs at both beginning and end. The old story itself opens with two Irish phrases spoken by Owen’s great-grandfather Timmy Cooney and closes with another.

The two sentences making up the third paragraph act as an in-breath to prepare for the horrors narrated in the single breathless sentence of the fourth. Owen translates his ancestor’s Irish into soft, poetic phrases: “sailed on the sea of youth” and “shaggy cloak of age” and “remember those who vanished and . . . sing them.” (69)

The fourth paragraph is a single-sentence, relentless panorama of victims named only as familial subjects and objects: brothers, an old man, children, a mother and her daughter, a father, a wife, children again. Common nouns pile up with the corpses: town, shoulders, lives, coffins, painting, food, hands, cauldron, broth, scraps, meat, soup, doctor, months. “The Hunger” and “potatoes” each are used twice, subliminally highlighting the tragedy of starvation. The seven adjectives are limited to the first half: strong young, bent, old, mad, little, boiling, desperate. To balance, the first half has but three verbs: tell, carrying, and ate. The second half evokes unadorned desperation: ram, killed, save, died, opened, found, eaten, giving. (69)

The fifth paragraph is a symphony of repetition: “There were a thousand thousand thousand stories like those stories, he said.” (69) The incantation is prayerlike.

The sixth paragraph uses fifteen short sentences to tell a more detailed story of a man named Scanlon. The first three set the scene: “One time” and “when” and “where” and “It was late in the afternoon.” The specificity of details and economy of language befit a story about a real man in a dire situation. Timmy Cooney “was cutting wheat.” The man “was carrying a load on his back.” “The larks were whistling.” “It was his dead wife he was carrying.” He carried her “in a sugan on his shoulders, a carrying-chair made of rope and knotted tightly to his back. Their little son was walking with him. The wife was wearing a blue cloak and hood. . . .” Timmy Cooney offered Scanlon a glass of milk, which declined. The scarcity of adjectives, dead and blue, and one adverb, tightly, define the harsh reality of the scene. (68-69)

Verb tense is more complicated. Here, we have simple past, past progressive, pluperfect, and even future tense, as the storyteller tells another storyteller’s story of events that happened before the time of the story itself or that had not yet happened. This effect of layering time emphasizes its fluidity: “his wife had been a girl” and “she had died” and “the man had not eaten,” but “would overcome” and “could bury.” (69-70)

The chapter closes with its frame of two, one-sentence paragraphs. In the first, the boy drinks the milk and he and his father continue their journey. In the second, Owen quotes his great-grandfather’s Irish assessment of Scanlon: “his love did not waver.” (70) There are several ancestral lessons in this chapter—the importance of bearing witness, of honoring those who suffered through remembrance, and of offering kindness and generosity to strangers. Above all, the love of family as conveyed through story transcends time itself.

Kinship Mind and Belonging

Chapter 45 opens with a single-sentence paragraph: “Everyone is kneeling.” The construction of present continuous tense indicates a state of being. The second paragraph emphasizes the singularity of this moment with two invocations of time: “For an instant, for a split second. . . .” (69) The third paragraph details twenty-four people from thirteen families in sixteen unique places taking seventeen variations of kneeling on seven different surfaces. The form of a single paragraph collects them all in kinship, unified within a single community.

This kneeling has fantastic variety. Only three people kneel to pray. Daniel’s mother kneels beside his injured body. Several people are on their knees looking for something: boots or rope or a broiling pan. Two couples kneel in intimacy: one in love, the other transactional. Several are cleaning: washing hair, mopping vomit, scrubbing a kitchen floor. A son sorts and folds his and his abusive father’s clothes. Two other sons taunt and mock their own cruel father. Another father plays with his daughters, pretending to be first a bear, then a whale. The varied phrases “on her knees” or “on his knees” alternate with repetitions of “kneeling” and “knees,” in an incantatory sweep through town.

Proximity in the paragraph illuminates relationships. After the father plays with his daughters, “His wife Sara is kneeling in the bathtub washing her hair under the faucet. The child inside her is kneeling on her bladder.” (70) Repetition of other elements further links different people—via blankets or bent heads, prayer or beds.

We even glimpse Daniel’s “shattered knees wet with blood and mud,” and, mid-paragraph, the deceased nun’s knees that the priest has just touched with oil to bless her. These two are the only people in town in that moment unable to kneel, but they and their knees still belong. Everyone is family.

Paragraph three ends with a lovely exchange of care between the disturbed Anna Christie, who is “on her knees in the shallow water at the edge of the river,” and her daughter Cyra, who “has just knelt to wrap her mother in a blanket.” (71)

The chapter closes with two fretful single-sentence paragraphs. First, an incomplete sentence suggests that river’s whirl and song merges with Anna’s song through some deep hidden magic, to cause all the knees in town to “rise all at once from the mud the floors the beds the tubs all over,” then the narrator breaks from that stirring image to remind us with two words isolated into their own paragraph: “except Daniel’s.” (71)

The Interconnected Systems of Pattern Mind

Previous chapters (44 and 45) balanced the pace by alternating sentence and paragraph lengths from short to quite long, giving the effect of modulated breathing. In the single-paragraph chapter 46, the sentences devolve into the disconnected hyperventilation of confusion and panic, for example: “The doctor has a lantern. Daniel’s legs are blood and splintered bones.” (72)

Chapter 46 showcases Doyle’s gift for narrating multiple points of view both from above and within the action. Moses the crow is the de facto leader of Daniel’s rescue, given his privileged vantage of flight. Characters crowd into the salal and blackberry bushes on the steep hillside where Daniel has crash-landed. First, “Moses wheels sharply and drops like a stone when he is directly over Daniel’s body, to show No Horses the exact spot.” Then, No Horses “throws herself over the ledge of the path feetfirst and scrabbles wildly down the slope through salal and blackberry bushes.” In her desperation to find Daniel, “The bushes grab her angrily as she slams through them.” (71) So far, we have Moses the crow, No Horses the mother, and now some angry bushes. Next, family friend Cedar and the doctor join the action, and by the end, the young female bear from chapter 43 hauls Daniel up the slope.

The subjects of the first fifteen sentences of this paragraph are either Moses or No Horses, with one exception for the bushes. From sentence #16 to #32, the subjects alternate: doctor, Daniel’s legs, Moses, Cedar, No Horses, Moses, Cedar, doctor, Moses, No Horses, and so on until the odd sentence, #33: “The flashlight wobbles,” implying the flashlight has its own agency. The paragraph then ends in a ten-line rush of a single sentence whose phrases joined by ands and buts include all but Moses and the angry bushes: Cedar, doctor, Cedar, No Horses, Cedar, No Horses, Cedar, bear, doctor.

Strong, present-tense verbs emphasize urgency and characterize individuals. Moses the crow embodies upward energy and movement: he wheels, drops, shows, plummets, falls, lands, spins, shouts, sees. He shouts three different times; he leaps twice; he whirls thrice. Daniel’s mother No Horses’ downward, grounded energy stalls in stasis: she throws, scrabbles, aims, slams, stumbles, falls, sobs, runs, holds, shivers, crouches, does not know.

When the doctor and family friend Cedar appear, they take charge of the rescue. They find that “No Horses is curled over her boy her black hair a black tent in the black night.” (72) She is curled; she does not merely curl. This choice embodies her identity as mother-protector. Cedar’s take-charge verbs are flings, lands, skims, looks, peers, stands, turns. The doctor says, calculates, feels, finds, checks. Together, they brace, tape, and work to strap Daniel to a makeshift litter.

Some verbs are shared by multiple characters. Moses sees; Cedar looks, then peers. The doctor says; Moses says; Cedar says, multiple times. Nora feels (“Daniel’s heart hammering hammering hammering”) and the doctor feels (“in his jacket for his cigarettes”). Moses lands and Cedar lands. Though he alone can fly, Moses is included in the jumble of action, right along with the humans. All are part of the system, which by the end includes the bear. No Horses attempts to lift Daniel’s litter but it is the bear who picks him up and carries him to safety. (72)

A pattern of repetition further weaves these characters together. The adjective, black, modifies not only No Horses’ hair cited above, but also Moses: “He is blacker than the black night.” (71) No Horses “throws herself over the edge of the path feetfirst,” (71) then later Cedar “flings himself over the edge of the path feetfirst.” (72) Daniel’s “braids askew red black brown,”(71) are a callback from four previous mentions of his braids, in chapters 1, 15, 27, and 35; “red black brown” also describes three blankets in the previous kneeling chapter. No Horses “runs her hands over [Daniel] tip to toe,” and later, Cedar “skims his hands over Daniel tip to toe.” (72) The kneeling itself spills over from the previous chapter: No Horses “falls to her knees by her son’s body,” (71) then “Cedar lands on his knees next to No Horses and Daniel.” (72)

Dreaming Mind Decenters Humans

Chapter 47 is a single paragraph that opens with, “The bear is confused and excited and angry,” signaling a slip back to wild animal consciousness. It continues:

“She cradles the boy in her huge dark arms and rumbles uphill right through the bushes. This animal is broken, she thinks. It smells bloody. The blood makes her hungry. She remembers the ground squirrels. The word for ground squirrel in the language of bears is meat in holes.” (72)

In those few, short, simple sentences, we feel the bear’s emotion, smell via her sharp senses, and add another word to our bear lexicon. In this chapter, we will learn that the bear word for human being is killer brother; dead is no longer eats; beaver is meat in water holes; “the word for pear in bear is the same as the word for apple;” dirt is mother below us; and salmonberry is eye of spring. (73) Doyle imagines the bear’s consciousness with a linguist’s attention to detail that renders the animal both strange and delightfully relatable.

Adjectives attributed to the bear are limited to the first part of the paragraph: confused, excited, angry, huge dark, uphill, broken, bloody, hungry, black, different, upright, dead. Adjectives illuminate, but also require adjustments of view. “Her thighs ache from walking upright. Once she smelled a dead killer brother on the beach.” (73) Such stream of consciousness makes the bear endearingly distractable. Seeing her on hind legs is integral to this scene, but pausing to note the dead body on the beach offers momentary relief from the drama.

Once the bear is awash in smells, the distractions and adjectives cease. She is immersed in the moment, focused by pure sensation. Nouns and verbs only, subjects and objects. No abstraction, no embellishment.

She smells things that humans can smell and many that we cannot: “the doctor’s cigarettes in his jacket pocket”; “the sweat and salt of his boots”; “smears of jelly in Daniel’s backpack”; “oil No Horses used to clean her chisels and gouges”; “oil Daniel used on his bicycle chain”; “bread Maple Head was baking when Cedar left the house”; “rage and fish and ice on Cedar”; “drowned beaver on Daniel”; “pear and iodine on the doctor’s hands.” (73) The only interruption in that stream is a sentence to translate the word for beaver in bear language.

At the end, adjectives return in a flood clinging to Daniel’s broken, barely conscious body: “Daniel slides awake but his face is pressed so firmly into the thick sour dirty dense black sweaty bear hair that he can neither see nor hear nor speak.” (emphasis mine) (73) Daniel’s loss of sense is rendered with negated verbs. Adjectives and sensation, then, are set in opposition to each other. Adjectives are a tool of human language. Use them sparingly or not at all to facilitate sensory engagement.

Story Mind: Brian Doyle’s Craft

In an essay following Doyle’s passing, James Chesbro quoted Doyle, who was teased for his style: “People are saying, wow, a sentence will start on Tuesday and it doesn’t end ’til Friday. But I want to write like people talk. I want to write like I’m speaking to you.” This squares with speculation earlier in this essay that the omniscient narrator is a Doyle persona, a hiking companion spinning yarns. Chesbro remarks:

“Some may find Doyle’s run-on sentences to be an irritation, but that’s also part of his genius. When we don’t land on the deep breath of a period and instead skip by on another comma, we are looking at a subject with Doyle’s sustained gaze, and eventually he takes us to a fresh metaphor, or an unexpected insight.” (Chesbro)

In the five pages of Mink River studied, there are few metaphors. Four can be considered modifiers that do not refer outside themselves: in the bear’s chapter 43, “pearly dawn” and “roaring ocean” (68) may just be how bears see and hear the world. In the preamble to the grisly stories of starvation and death in chapter 44, Owen Cooney quotes two of his great-grandfather’s flowery metaphors: “sailed on the sea of youth” and “shaggy cloak of age.” Both metaphors comment on mortality before the story brings death close.

Doyle’s selective use of metaphors works to enhance rather than distance. In chapter 45, “Cyra’s long thin hands like birds landing gently,” (71) emphasizes the tenderness of her care for her disturbed mother. Immediately following, in the opening to chapter 46, Moses the crow “drops like a stone.” A daring choice courting cliché, it captures both the weight of gravity and the heavy emotion of the scene.

Doyle’s “sustained gaze” leads by example to demonstrate how such direct engagement honors the world around us with our attention. In his words:

“And I am here to hear thrushes in late winter and to gape at osprey and to taste my way judiciously through excellent red wines from countries where the sun shines. And to shuffle humming through the rain, gentle and ancient and patient and persistent and holier than we ever admit. And to hear and foment laughter, the coolest sound there is. And to witness grace under duress; that more than anything.” (Doyle, “The Stories that Save Us”)

In Mink River, Doyle courts grace through the joys of noticing. He celebrates the delight of what is possible by intertwining form and content. This weaving provides insights into the ways humans perceive and describe their environment by assuming interdependence with everything and everyone. His craft creates a world that is incapable of using language as a hyper-rational tool of ecocide. His characters are far too enmeshed in the place, and in each other. The generosity of this stance, his love and hope for the world, comes through on every page. Doyle writes:

“By now I am absolutely sure what I am supposed to do: sense stories, catch some by their brilliant tails as they rocket by, carve and sculpt them into arrows and fire them into the hearts of as many people as I can reach on this bruised and blessed planet. That’s all. That’s enough.” (Doyle, “The Stories that Save Us”)

In his five-paragraph essay, “The Greatest Nature Essay Ever,” is pure Doyle, a paragraph-long sentence that amuses and rouses and end with the breathless thought, “man, this is why I read nature essays, to be startled and moved like that, wow.” He conjures the imagined story, the deep emotions, the delights of craft: “Probably the sentences get shorter, more staccato. Terser. Blunter. Shards of sentences.” His essay slips and slides, builds then subsides, through humor to mystery and sadness, or some other “dark thread in the fabric, and there’s also a shot of espresso hope, hope against all odds and sense, but rivetingly there’s no call to arms. . . .” (Doyle, Orion)

This “hope against all odds and sense” is at the core of Doyle’s craft. He deploys his trademark wit to encourage readers to acknowledge complicity and rewards us with a sweet fizz of wonder, a renewal of love for the world.

Conclusion: De-Centering Humans in an Animate World

Robin Wall Kimmerer writes of a student who recognized that “speaking English, thinking in English, somehow gives us permission to disrespect nature.” Kimmerer agrees that to deny animacy has serious ethical consequences. She suggests using pronouns other than “it,” but acknowledges the dilemma presented by “he” and “she,” which view other beings through a human lens. “The arrogance of English is that the only way to be animate, to be worthy of respect and moral concern, is to be a human.” She goes on to observe that “grammar is just the way we chart relationships in language. Maybe it also reflects our relationships with each other.” (Braiding Sweetgrass 57)

Brian Doyle’s grammar builds relationships based upon mutual respect, trust, and humility. He invites us to imagine other perspectives and see through other eyes, as does Kimmerer: “We don’t have to figure out everything by ourselves: there are intelligences other than our own, teachers all around us. Imagine how much less lonely the world would be.” (58) This teeming, animate world is Doyle’s gift to his readers.

David Abram writes that we must “renounce the claim that ‘language’ is an exclusively human property.” (The Spell of the Sensuous 80) This squares with Doyle’s bear lexicon, which is both wonderfully imaginative and utterly believable. Doyle’s story reminds us that humans have always had communion with the animate world and demonstrates a way back into rich relationship.

In Mink River, Doyle went to the trouble of giving Moses the crow’s scenes a different tone than those with the young female bear. Moses has a light, frenetic energy, while the bear is dark, heavy, plodding. One is a creature of the air, the other of the earth.

David Abram illuminates the distancing effect of committing spiritual wisdom to the page and points to the power of oral culture to connect human beings with the living earth in all its wonder. He identifies a problem: “writing greatly densified the verbal medium, rendering it more opaque to the many non-human shapes that dwell out beyond all our words.” (Becoming Animal 265)

The passages of animal interiority in Mink River bring the reader into a different sort of embodied speaking. The story, its characters, and the action are intensely local, place-based, elemental. Doyle honors the tradition of oral storytelling with chapters in which Daniel’s father and grandfather each record family stories for him.

In the essay, “Singing to the Forest,” Paul Kingsnorth speculates about the ability of the novel to tell the kind of stories most needed now. As he writes, “most in the Western canon are examinations of the human psyche . . . They are studies of the individual human mind. But what about the mind of the world itself and how that manifests?” (Confessions 228) These chapters of Mink River give a glimpse into this world-mind, how strangely other it is, and yet how familiar.

Kingsnorth wonders whether it’s even possible for us to “unhumanize our views,” then strikes a hopeful note recalling that story writing is an act of projection into another’s consciousness. Why not “make the same imaginative leap and take ourselves out of our humanity? Is it harder to imagine a sensate landscape, or the worldview of another living being, than it is to imagine life on a Martian colony or in a fifteenth-century village?” (232-233) Throughout Mink River, Doyle has projected his imagination into other consciousnesses, drawing us into his animate, many-voiced world.

In Craft in the Real World, Matthew Salesses asserts, “Craft tells us how to see the world.” (Salesses 26) One might argue that the world Doyle wants us to see is a world that:

does not depend on conflict to drive plot: external causation decenters humans and reminds us that we are but one small part of the vast web of life;
revels oneness and connects characters to each other and to the reader through multiple narrators and contrasting points of view;
invokes the open-endedness and episodic continuity of cyclical time via looping, nesting, and intersecting stories within stories;
demonstrates the magic of the real with characters who accept animism as part of the everyday world;
modulates pace like breathing through the variability of sentence and paragraph lengths: long, multi-phrase sentences create breathlessness and speed up time, short sentences focus and linger, and digressive passages stretch out time;
questions the tyranny of commas;
represents simultaneity with many characters making the same gesture;
celebrates the incantatory, prayerful power of repeating words and phrases; and
uses metaphor sparingly. Some characters, bears for example, are usually too hungry to bother with metaphor. Crows may tend toward cliché, but that’s just how they are.

Salesses writes that novelist Milan Kundera “wants to decenter internal causation (character-driven plot) and (re)center external causation (such as an earthquake or fascism or God).” He writes also that author Julio Cortázar “categorizes his own and other ‘fantastic’ stories as simply more inclusive realities.” (Salesses 25) The inclusive reality of Mink River allows Brian Doyle to de-center human agency in favor of coincidence, randomness, and other-than-human actors. This humble stance re-centers all of life: crows, bears, salmon, bushes, flashlights, the river, and many more. Mink River immerses readers in an interconnected web of life, with human beings not at the top or in the center, but one among many in a world of wonder.

Sources

Abram, David. Becoming Animal: an Earthly Cosmology. Vintage Books, 2011.

Abram, David. The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World. Vintage Books, a Division of Penguin Random House LLC., 2017.

Chesbro, James M. “Brian Doyle once write, ‘stories are prayers.’ He has left us with many.” America, the Jesuit Review, 2 June 2017, https://www.americamagazine.org/arts-culture/2017/06/02/brian-doyle-once-wrote-stories-are-prayers-he-has-left-us-many.

Doyle, Brian. Mink River: a Novel. Oregon State University Press, 2012.

Doyle, Brian. “The Greatest Nature Essay Ever.” Orion Magazine, 30 Oct. 2008, orionmagazine.org/article/the-greatest-nature-essay-ever/.

Doyle, Brian. “The Stories That Save Us.” Notre Dame Magazine, Spring 2007, magazine.nd.edu/stories/the-stories-that-save-us/.

Foster, Charles. “Against Nature Writing.” Emergence Magazine, 21 July 2021, emergencemagazine.org/essay/against-nature-writing/.

Kercheval, Jesse Lee. Building Fiction: How to Develop Plot and Structure. The University of Wisconsin Press, 1997.

“Learning the Grammar of Animacy” Braiding Sweetgrass, by Robin Wall Kimmerer, Milkweed Editions, 2013, pp.46-59.

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“Singing to the Forest.” Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist and Other Essays, by Paul Kingsnorth, Graywolf Press, 2017, pp. 225–233.

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Julie Gabrielli pours her restless imagination into fiction, architecture and grad students. Her architecture, writing and painting explore living in the threshold time of societal unraveling, environmental reconciliation and climate collapse. Julie lives in Baltimore with her heroically supportive husband, sharp-witted son and goofy singing dog Brody. When not teaching or writing, she obsessively listens to politics podcasts, works out, runs and sails. She is a graduate of the Twitter Academy of Snark.