Be dog: "Clementine, Carmelita, Dog" by David Means, Best American Short Stories 2021

Nothing turns me against a story as much as the feeling I'm being trifled with. The best example of this I can think of is Curtis Sittenfeld's "The Prairie Wife," the entire point of which seems to be to trick the reader into thinking a character is a heterosexual man instead of a lesbian female so it can revel in its moral superiority about not making assumptions even though we all know no human being can function for five seconds without making assumptions. 

The first time I read "Clementine, Carmelita, Dog," I felt a little bit irritated by it. Countless children's stories have used an animal's point of view. Normally, those stories opt to heavily anthropomorphize the dog, cat, etc., but with characteristics we tend to associate with animals. To use one example, the 2008 movie Bolt features a dog who is trusting and genuine enough to be tricked into believing he has super powers and needs to get back to his pre-teen crime-fighting partner. It also has a scheming cat who tries to take advantage of the dog's naivete. Nobody thinks dogs and cats actually think like this, but we accept it, because it's cute and because we know it's just anthropomorphism. This is what dogs and cats seem like to us. There are variations on this, too. The TV show Wilbur features a dog who operates much more on dog terms and thinks like a dog rather than an anthropomorphized animal (even though it's obviously a human in a dog suit). The human who interacts with Wilbur is doing so either because of drugs or a mental breakdown or powerful forces we cannot understand. Then there's Bojack Horseman, which features of world of animals, half-human/half-animals, and full humans all interacting more or less like humans, except that the half-animals tend to exhibit fairly strong behaviors associated with their animals sides. Mr. Peanutbutter (dog) is faithful, kind, and impetuous. Bojack (horse) is headstrong, lusty, and gluttonous. And so on.

What "Clementine" does is try to write the story, as close as human language will allow, from the perspective in which a dog would really see it. Which, the first time I read it, felt like a gimmick and something in which the reader was being asked to tag along while the writer showed off. Sure, Jack London did it, but for a serious contemporary writer trying to do it, it's a risk. (Also, when's the last time you read Call of the Wild? I read it when it was assigned to my son about five years ago, and it blew me away how terrible it is. It's like Ayn Rand reading Nietzsche put into the mouth of a dog.) So it seemed to me like I was reading something notable only for a single-dimensional trick. The second time I read it, I saw something deeper in it, but let's put that aside for a moment.

Audiences and readers will forgive almost any schlock if there's a dog in it. 

The rules

The story is about 90 percent passages from the point of view of the "protagonist," a dog named both Clementine and Carmelita, because she passes through two human families who give her two names. There are also, however, occasional intrusions that explain the narrative approach or apologize for its limitations. There's an "I" narrative voice creeping in here and there, and it's not an "I" first-person narrator. It's a genuine authorial intrusion of the "gentle reader" variety. One example:

Here I should stress that dog memory is not at all like human memory, and that human memory, from a dog’s point of view, would seem strange, clunky, unnatural and deceptive. Dog memory isn’t constructed along temporal lines, gridded out along a distorted timeline, but rather in an overlapping and, of course, deeply olfactory manner, like a fanned-out deck of cards, perhaps, except that the overlapping areas aren’t hidden but are instead more intense, so that the quick flash of a squirrel in the corner of the yard, or the crisp sound of a bag of kibble being shaken, can overlap with the single recognizable bark of a schnauzer from a few blocks away on a moonlit night. In this account, as much as possible, dog has been translated into human, and like any such translation, the human version is a thin, feeble approximation of what transpired in Clementine’s mind as she stood in the woods crying and hungry, old sensations overlapping with new ones, the different sounds that Norman’s steps had made that morning, the odd sway of his gait, and the beautiful smell of a clump of onion grass – her favorite thing in the world! – as she’d deliriously sniffed and sneezed, storing the smell in the chambers of her nose for later examination while Norman waited with unusual patience.

Or, in another place, another apology of sorts: "Again, this is only a translation, as close as one can get in human terms to her thinking at this moment..." 

These authorial intrusions allow the narrative to tell the human side of the story as our hero dachshund moves from one family to the next and then back again. There is one point that feels like cheating a bit, a parenthetical that goes into the mind of Steve, the father in the second family Clementine/Carmelita lives with. "...he didn't want to give her up. He had made a halfhearted attempt to locate her owner...But then one day at the Stop & Shop...he saw her photo." None of this is the dog, and it's not even a translation of the dog's point of view. For the most part, though, the narrative follows its own rules: I'm going to tell this as close as I can to how a dog would really experience it, not anthropomorphizing any more than needed to make this story readable by a human. 

Not anthropomorphism, but affinity

Although the story tries very hard to stick to its own rules and show us the world as Clem/Carm sees it, without making the dog think like a human (as in a children's story), there are, we are told, certain affinities between the human world and the dog world. "It is a fact that there is just as much nonsense in the dog world as there is in the human world," we learn when a mixed-breed mutt launches into a tail-chasing routine in the middle of the walking path. 

This affinity is especially strong when it comes to suffering. While dogs and humans do not process suffering in the same way, they do both experience it. When Carmelita is adopted into a new family after getting lost from Norman, she is happy. However, she still experiences "a form of grief particular to her species. There are fifty-seven varieties of dog grief, just as there are--from a dog's point of view--110 distinct varieties of human grief." (These "facts" seem to be another form of authorial intrusion, one in which we learn that while the author probably did some research into dog cognition, we are not getting a highly accurate version of that cognition. In another place, we are told that a dog's sense of smell is a million times stronger than ours. A dog's sense of smell is very strong, of course, but a million times is an overstatement by at least one factor of ten. Karen Carlson, in her reading of the story, also picked up on how the dog facts in this story are not terribly rigorous.) 

It's this shared grief between humans and dogs that gives the story that deeper something I mentioned earlier, the thing that made me forgive it for the way I thought it toyed with me on the first read-through. 

What a dog can teach us about surviving grief

Clem/Carm belongs to two families. The first is Norman and Claire, but Claire dies of (presumably) cancer or something like it. Norman is mourning Claire when Clementine gets lost. In fact, Norman was evidently planning to kill himself the morning Clementine got lost.

The second family is Steve and Luisa. They are mourning the loss of a child when Clementine (whom they rename Carmelita) shows up. 

The dog helps both human families to survive their grief. With Steve and Luisa, she is someone they can love and care of to take the place of their lost child. They eventually heal enough to become pregnant again, something the family couldn't help but credit to Carmelita: "...it seemed important--in some mystical way--that she had appeared in the woods before Luisa became pregnant." 

For Norman, it's not the dog's showing up that rescues him, but her disappearance. When she returns to him at the end of the story, he tells her, "I let you go and started missing you the second you were gone, and when you were gone I knew I had to go on." He likely felt he had to go on because he worried for the dog and thought he needed to locate her to know she was alright. She represented unfinished business for him, and the frantic search, the putting up posters and contacting authorities, likely gave him the time he needed to get over the loss of Claire. 

The dog herself is experiencing grief, too, although we are reminded she doesn't experience it in human terms. The "translation" of her grief we get is "a long stretched-out sense of displacement that would arrive suddenly, amid the hubbub of the house, the leather satchel fragrance, the thump in Luisa's skin--that heartbeat--and the memory of Claire. It spoke loudly of all the things that had gone into the past and all of the things that might, like a slice of meat, appear in the future..." 

The dog feels grief in the sense that it realizes something isn't right, but it is helped to overcome this grief by a memory that works not in a linear fashion but much more amorphously. This prevents the dog from making "should/should not" statements, something cognitive therapy teaches us causes us suffering. The dog doesn't think "X happened, and then Y happened, but if only Y hadn't happened, I wouldn't be in this mess now." It just thinks of X and Y as two things to add to its bank of data. 

The final authorial intrusion in the story comes as the dog is approaching Norman at their reunion. The author states that he wishes he could make words "be dog," or really get inside the dog's mind. If he could, then we, the readers, would all be able to experience a "world defined not by notions of power, or morality, or memory, or sentiment, but instead by pure instinct."  

It's this living by instinct that makes the dog so good at survival. So good, in fact, it passes on this knack for survival to the families that host her. 

It's similar to what Spender from Ray Bradbury's "And the Moon be Still as Bright" found that Martians had determined:

"The Martians discovered the secret of life among animals. The animal does not question life. It lives. Its very reason for living is life; it enjoys and relishes life. You see--the statuary, the animal symbols, again and again."

"It looks pagan."

"On the contrary, those are God symbols, symbols of life. Man had become too much man and not enough animal on Mars too. And the men of Mars realized that in order to survive they would have to forgo asking that one question any longer: Why live? Life was its own answer. Life was the propagation of more life and the living of as good a life is possible."

"Clementine" and "Escape from the Dysphesiac People"

Although the stories in BASS were not written to go together in any way, there's always a few in the anthology every year that seem to serendipitously respond to one another. This especially seems true of "Clementine" and "Escape from the Dysphesiac People," which I looked at here not too long ago. 

Both the dog and the unnamed human protagonist of "Dysphesiac" have ended up in new homes against their will and been given new names. The human resists both, but the dog is able to quickly remake her map of the world. These people are feeding me. These people are good to me. I guess I'm Carmelita now.

Of course, that can't work for the abductee of "Dysphesiac," just as it couldn't work for anyone who's been kidnapped. The rulers of the dog's second home are kind and loving. The ones who ran the Indian school were not. 

Both stories presented characters who adapted to survive hardships. One adapted by clinging desperately to the past and to the narrative that gave him identity. The other remade her identity and her conceptualization of the world. I don't think one is right and one is wrong; they're two options for coping with trauma that might work better or worse depending on the circumstances of the trauma. 

I was thinking I'd close by pointing to statistics that people with dogs are less likely to die by suicide than those without them. I didn't know this was true, but I suspected it was with such certainty, I figured I was one quick Google search away from proving the point. But it turns out that it may not be true at all. I know a lot of dog parents point to their dogs as the things that keep them sane, but there's no solid evidence to prove that dogs help their human families avoid suicides. Therapy dogs, which are not considered pets, might be different. That suggests to me that looking at a dog's way of thinking as being free from notions of power and morality and memory might be too simple, too much of another human imposition, as much as the author tried to avoid those. (Indeed, dogs in nature are very much interested in the power structure in their packs.) 

I think we can, in fact, learn something from animals, especially dogs, which are the animals many Americans know the most intimately, about how to push through and thrive in challenging circumstances. Having a short memory and not imposing "should/should not" thinking might be some things we at least think we see in dogs that could help us. But there's a limit to what we can adapt from dogs, partly because we are incapable of thinking like them and partly because as humans, we often face situations where surviving can only happen if we apply a human set of skills to the problem.