The primacy acquired by nature in our culture has given way to several issues not strictly connected with an immediate and purely ecological interest: rather there is the need to question how we conceive the animal with a focus on the possibility to transcend the Western cultural heritage.
When trying to give a literary representation of the animal, it is particularly important to adopt some measures which, following the trajectory of a genuine, positive “becoming-animal,” will safeguard its independence and avoid reducing it to metaphorically antropomorphic representations.
This paper intends to underline how, from this viewpoint, some novels coming from the postcolonial world—where animal tales often show how interwoven humans and animals are and how they are constructed in relation to each other—supply interesting case studies. My interest focuses particularly on the Canadian Marian Engel’s Bear, where the writer tries to deal with areas of unspeakableness between a woman and a bear: through an act of radical approach to its physical reality, the former has come first to recognize the latter, and then to accept its Otherness. On its side, the bear seemingly “shows” a postcolonial attitude subversively resisting a typically Western anthropomorphic allegorization. Holding fast to itself and its animality, choosing in a way to “stay mute,” the bear keeps the role of a “perceptive catalyzer,” thought-producing and thus world-changing, according to an aesthetics of perception suggesting that the animal gaze might be the best perspective from which to observe not only our world, but especially our own selves.