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Trust
and Attunement Between Thoroughbreds and Horsemen in Horse Heaven
WU Limin
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DOI:10.17265/2159-5836/2026.09.001
Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, Guangzhou, China
American Pulitzer winner Jane Smiley’s Horse Heaven portrays Thoroughbreds not as passive objects of human control but as intelligent, capable, and responsive subjects who actively participate in human-animal interactions. Although existing scholarship has examined the novel from perspectives including brain science and horse-racing culture, insufficient attention has been paid to the role of interspecies cooperation and the corporeal communication through which horses and humans coordinate their actions. This paper examines four cases of cooperation between Thoroughbreds and horsemen in racing and training to explore how trust and attunement facilitate successful interspecies collaboration. Drawing on theories of dialogical interspecies ethics, the paper argues that Smiley represents interspecies communication as a multimodal, embodied process that extends beyond verbal language. Through bodily rhythms, tactile sensations, gestures, movements, and kinaesthetic responses, horses and humans perceive and adjust to one another, gradually developing mutual trust and corporeal attunement. More importantly, the four cases demonstrate that horses frequently assume an active, even leading, role in cooperation by exercising intelligence, judgment, initiative, adaptability, and competence. Smiley thus challenges anthropocentric assumptions that privilege human cognition and agency while reducing animals to objects of command and control. By contrasting cooperative relationships based on mutual trust and adjustment with practices of force and domination, Horse Heaven advocates a dialogical model of human-animal interaction founded on respect for animal subjectivity and responsiveness to animals on their own terms. The novel ultimately suggests that interspecies trust and attunement can transform hierarchical human-animal relations into reciprocal and ethically meaningful forms of cooperation.
trust, attunement, interspecies cooperation, intercorporeal interaction, dialogical interspecies relationship
Journal of Literature and Art Studies, September 2026, Vol. 16, No. 9, 713-720
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