Proximities and Cross-Species Empathies in Laura Jean McKay's The Animals in That Country

This essay asks: what is the value of cross-species empathy in a time of ecological crisis and how can contemporary fiction help along new thinking about human relationships with other animals? I make the case that empathy, in the dominant sense, fetishizes closeness. Empathy has become positive and valuable because it is said to narrow the distance between self and others. I develop the idea that the dominant view of empathy gives limited consideration to how degrees and kinds of difference complicate this view, while disregarding the enduring presence of other animals in scientific and philosophical treatments of empathy. In my close reading, I examine a concept routinely connected to empathy in existing scholarship: proximity. I investigate how different kinds of proximities manifest and complicate empathies between humans and other animals in Laura Jean's 2020 novel, The Animals in That Country. My methodology differs from traditional treatments of empathy in Literary Studies in two significant ways. First, I do not define cross-species empathy upfront, but look to McKay's text to produce new ways of thinking about empathy through the different kinds of proximities (spatial, linguistic, geographical, species) that unfold. And second, I do not examine how a reader's empathy for humans or other animals is encouraged or stifled by the text. Rather, I view McKay's text, as an art form and a critical tool, as David Herman instructs, "for reconsidering-for critiquing or reaffirming, dismantling, or reconstructing"what cross-species can be and do in the here and now.