Animals’ Mobilities in Popular Fiction: Time, Duration, and Desire in Sheila Burnford’s The Incredible Journey

Abstract

In Sheila Burnford’s 1961 novel The Incredible Journey, three domestic animals undertake an arduous trek through the forests of northern Ontario to be reunited with their owners and family. As an example of “homing instinct” stories, The Incredible Journey has been influential, notably as a result of the 1963 Disney film. The genre is easily dismissed as sentimentally anthropomorphic, but this paper treats Burnford’s novel as a sophisticated treatment of animals’ mobilities in terms of literary animal studies. Drawing on the philosophy of Henri Bergson, The Incredible Journey is presented as an adventure in time rather than in space, contrasting the human perspective of maps and miles with the Bergsonian concept of duration, the real experience of the passage of time, and with related themes of free will, instinct, and desire. This paper concludes that Burnford offers a less anthropocentric perspective on animals’ mobility.