What Is It Like to Be a Swan?

This essay brings biosemiotics into conversation with Indigenous epistemologies, particularly what Robin Wall Kimmerer calls “grammars of animacy,” to examine how storytelling can unsettle the anthropocentric vantage point by reconfiguring relations between human and more-than-human worlds. To do so, I offer a reading of Alexis Wright’s novel The Swan Book as a literary example of imagining a multispecies ethics that resists the reduction of the more-than-human to human symbolic schemas. I first venture into the field of biosemiotics to show how the recognition of the phenomenal worlds of plants and animals—of their Umwelten—has been an epistemic shift necessary to mitigate the instrumentalization of other species in the name of so-called human “progress.” I then turn to Kimmerer’s grammars of animacy and Marisol de la Cadena’s “cosmopolitics” to show how Indigenous narratives that acknowledge the agency of both biotic and abiotic beings have already had tangible effects in the form of conservation laws or constitutional changes. Lastly, I focus on The Swan Book’s formal strategies and its representation of the protagonist’s relationship to swans to demonstrate how intimate bonds can emerge through moments of semiotic overlap and shared vulnerability without requiring full translatability. I conclude that Wright’s novel opens a space for imagining a multispecies ethics grounded in the recognition that more-than-human beings inhabit phenomenal worlds to which humans may never have full access.