Richard Adams

Watership Down

(Full name Richard George Adams) English novelist, autobiographer, editor, nonfiction writer, and author of fairy tales, young adult novels, nonfiction, and short stories.

The following entry presents criticism on Adams's young adult novel Watership Down (1972) through 2005. For further information on Adams's life and works, see CLR, Volume 20.

INTRODUCTION

A textual collage of myth, fantasy, allegory, and fable, Richard Adams's Watership Down (1972) imagines a warren of rabbits, complete with their own mythological structure, recreating the classic heroic epic as a work of children's literature. In writing Watership Down, Adams imagined an entire universe centered upon a unique culture of anthropomorphic rabbits who have their own clearly defined language, religion, history, and societal rules. Portrayed as similar in many regards to humans, Adams's rabbits retain their animalism, eschewing technology, clothes, or walking upright. Nevertheless, the story is a fantasy epic, wherein the story of its primary lapine protagonist, Hazel, follows many of the traditional tenets of classical myth. Popular with both adults and children, Watership Down has been retold in a variety of forms, including as a radio telecast, a 1978 film, a television series, a musical, play, and picture book. Adams revisited his world of rabbits in Tales of Watership Down (1996), which was composed of a series of short stories featuring many of the characters from the original book.

BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

Adams was born in Newbury, Berkshire, England, on May 9, 1920, to Evelyn George Beadon Adams, a surgeon, and his wife, Lilian Rosa. Being separated by nine years from his older siblings, Adams amused himself by inventing imaginary friends with whom he played in the countryside surrounding his family home, Oakdene. Oakdene was situated in the country, near the Downs, including an area known as Watership Down. In 1929 Adams was sent to primary school at Horris Hill and, in 1933, transferred to Bradfield College for his secondary education. Upon graduation, he enrolled at Worcester College, Oxford, as a history student. At the advent of World War II, Adams left college to enlist in the Royal Army Service Corps. He served in an airborne unit from 1940 to 1946, returning to finish his degree in 1948. He found employment with The British Home Higher Civil Service and held various positions until 1974, when he retired to pursue a full-time career as a writer. In 1949 he married Barbara Elizabeth Acland. They enjoyed a happy marriage, yet remained childless for nine years. Finally, a daughter was born in 1958, and a second daughter followed two years later. The inspiration for Watership Down came to Adams in 1966, while he was on a long automobile journey with his family. He stared to concoct a story about a group of rabbits in the English countryside to keep his daughters entertained on the trip. The girls loved the story so much that they begged him to write it down. He eventually took their advice and, after two years of writing and revision, he had finished the manuscript for Watership Down. Adams had difficulty finding a publisher, but eventually signed with Rex Collings, a small English publishing house. When the book was first released in 1972, it was marketed as a children's novel, but it was later republished by Macmillan as an adult novel in 1974. After the eventual success of Watership Down, Adams wrote six more novels, including Shardik (1974) and The Girl in a Swing (1980), numerous poems and tales for children, and a variety of nature essays. In 1996 Adams published Tales from Watership Down, a collection of short stories, which returns to the warren of rabbits after the conclusion of Watership Down and presents additional folk tales from the warren's past. A strong advocate of environmental causes, particularly animal rights, Adams served as the president of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals from 1980 to 1982 and campaigned as a parliamentary candidate for the Spelthorne constituency on a platform based upon his opposition to fox hunting. He lived on the Isle of Man for a period to avoid the harsh British tax system, but has since moved back to his native Hampshire. He remains an avid activist for animals and founded Camp Fiver—named after the smallest rabbit of Watership Down—for underprivileged children in New York City.

PLOT AND MAJOR CHARACTERS

Watership Down offers readers an entry into the world of rabbits—a civilization complete with its own history, language, mythology, government, and religion. Drawing from folklore, animal fables, ancient epics, and picturesque novels, Adams describes how Hazel, an inventive and determined young rabbit, takes a small band of refugee bucks on a hazardous quest through the English countryside to find a new home after his brother, the visionary seer Fiver, senses the destruction of their home, Sandleford, by human development. After a series of adventures, including the near death of Bigwig—the largest and strongest of Hazel's group—at Cowslip's warren and their befriending of a seagull named Kehaar, Hazel's rabbits finally find a safe place to make their new home called Watership Down. Their happiness is short lived when they realize that without does—female rabbits—the warren will die out in a few years time. Besides a small farm with pet rabbits, the best location for finding does is Efrafa, a nearby warren that is overcrowded. When a scouting party visits Efrafa to request does, they are captured and forced to assimilate into Efrafa's militaristic society run by General Woundwort. The rabbits escape, and Hazel orchestrates a daring plan to rescue does from the oppressive Efrafa warren. After the rabbits' dangerous but successful raiding, General Woundwort follows Hazel, his warriors, and the liberated does back to Watership Down, and a bloody battle commences. The Watership Down rabbits are victorious and henceforth, with the disappearance of Woundwort, begin new relations with Efrafa, guaranteeing the health of their new warren. Adams occasionally breaks his narrative to introduce tales about El-Ahrairah, a mythical rabbit folk hero, and Frith, the rabbits' supreme being. These tales outline the origins, characteristics, and religious beliefs influencing Hazel and his rabbits, which provide the inspiration for the daunting trials the rabbits face.

MAJOR THEMES

Relying heavily on the classical epics of Virgil and Homer, Adams wrote Watership Down to introduce his two daughters to literature by presenting them with the rules and principles of the adult novel. Underscoring the novel is Adams's criticism of humanity as contrasted against rabbit society as well as his charge that nature is being destroyed by human development and technology. By using rabbits to examine social organizations and responsibility, Adams outlines the elements necessary for creating a successful society, such as honor, courage, respect, cooperation, inherited culture, and religious faith. Hazel's original warren, Cowslip's warren, and Efrafa underscore how societies can become unhealthy for its citizens. Sandleford had spent numerous years without danger; therefore, when Fiver shares his vision of impending destruction, the leader does not believe him and chides Hazel for believing Fiver's tales. The leader's complacent refusal to investigate a possible threat dooms the warren, and Hazel and his bucks are able to escape just before its destruction. On their journey, they come across Cowslip's warren, a warren of artists and thinkers. Cowslip's warren has begun to use written language and create art, but does not remember Frith or El-Ahrairah. They have become disassociated from their past and view their new cultured civilization as superior. The warren has evolved in this manner because they are kept rabbits—they are living in a warren built by man and are fed by the hand of man. In return, man will occasionally snare and kill a member of the warren. Fiver is repulsed by the warren's disassociation with their rabbit history and their oblivious existence as prey. Through Cowslip's warren, Adams warns of a society that becomes obsessed with culture and forgets its connection with nature. Alternately, Efrafa provides commentary on totalitarian societies. General Woundwort rules Efrafa through fear and intimidation. The rabbits in his warren are told when to eat, give birth, and even when to pass waste. Every motion of the warren is rigidly controlled and regulated. Individual rabbits are easily and thoughtlessly sacrificed for the good of the warren, and resistance is thoroughly squelched. Adams utilizes these other cultures to illustrate the goodness of Hazel's democratic and cooperative governing style. Hazel respects the ideas and views of his constituents and values individual accomplishments. They work together toward a common goal. The rabbits of Watership Down are also exemplary because of their strong belief in Frith and El-Ahrairah. Cowslip's warren has outgrown the need for such seemingly frivolous tales, and Efrafa has no room for such worship. Because of their connection with gods and heroes, Hazel's bucks are depicted as more natural rabbits, closer to the ideal. Adams infuses Watership Down with a reverence for natural existence—not only highlighting the ruination of nature by humankind, but also by illustrating the basic wrongness of artificial societal behaviors.

CRITICAL RECEPTION

When Watership Down was released, it was met with popular success and critical acclaim, yet many reviewers have disagreed on how to classify the novel. Some have argued that, as a children's novel, Watership Down is too difficult, violent, and mature, while others have asserted that it is hard to label a novel with rabbit protagonists as "adult." These questions of genre classification have dominated much of the recent critical debate surrounding Watership Down, with several commentators applauding Adams's groundbreaking blending of literary genres. In discussing Adams's career and the problems with classifying Watership Down, Phillip Vine has noted that, "Probably no other contemporary novelist suffers from so much condescension or critical dismissal from so many literary intellectuals." Kathryn Hume has criticized the novel, stating that "the plot degenerates into the adventures of animals with human brains … The novelty and strangeness which entering a rabbit's mind should entail quickly disappears. The fantasy of this story is literally only skin deep; the minds of these furry humans are but little touched by newness or originality." Conversely, David Pringle has argued that, "[i]t is easy to mock Watership Down for being an over-inflated children's novel … Nevertheless it is a novel which has pleased millions of readers, and it is not difficult to see why. It is a very accomplished quest narrative (and war story) combined with a moving tract on behalf of nature conservation."

PRINCIPAL WORKS

Juvenile Works

Watership Down (young adult novel) 1972

Shardik (young adult novel) 1974

Nature through the Seasons [with Max Hooper; illustrations by David A. Goddard and Adrian Williams] (juvenile nonfiction) 1975

The Tyger Voyage [illustrations by Nicola Bayley] (children's poetry) 1976

The Adventures and Brave Deeds of the Ship's Cat on the Spanish Maine: Together with the Most Lamentable Losse of the Alcestis and Triumphant Firing of the Port of Chagres [illustrations by Alan Aldridge and Harry Willock] (children's poetry) 1977

The Plague Dogs [illustrations by A. Wainwright] (young adult novel) 1977

Nature Day and Night [with Max Hooper; illustrations by David A. Goddard and Stephen Lee] (juvenile nonfiction) 1978

The Iron Wolf and Other Stories (fairy tales and young adult short stories) 1980; published in the United States as The Unbroken Web: Stories and Fables

The Bureaucats [illustrations by Robin Jacques] (young adult novel) 1985

Traveller (young adult novel) 1988

Tales from Watership Down [illustrations by John Lawrence] (young adult short stories) 1996

The Outlandish Knight (young adult novel) 2000

Adult Works

Kingdoms of Sorcery [contributor; edited by Lin Carter] (short stories) 1976

The Girl in a Swing (novel) 1980

The Legend of Te Tuna (poetry) 1982

Voyage through the Antarctic [with Ronald Lockley] (nonfiction) 1982

Maia (novel) 1984

A Nature Diary (nonfiction) 1985

The Day Gone By: An Autobiography (autobiography) 1990

AUTHOR COMMENTARY

Richard Adams (essay date 1989)

SOURCE: Adams, Richard. "To the Order of Two Little Girls: The Oral and Written Versions of Watership Down." In The Voice of the Narrator in Children's Literature: Insights from Writers and Critics, edited by Charlotte F. Otten and Gary D. Schmidt, pp. 115-22. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1989.

[In the following essay, Adams discusses the transition of Watership Down from an oral tale created for his daughters to a work of young adult literature, particularly emphasizing the literary influences that inspired aspects of the novel.]

The golden rule for parenthood is to keep the child's company—not necessarily to be always teaching the child or instructing the child, but just to keep the child's company. Children should realize unconsciously that there's no one's company that a parent seeks or wants more than theirs and that the parent enjoys spending time in their company. I think this is of great importance in building up confidence and trust between parents and children.

One very pleasant way in which an adult can spend time in a child's company is by telling stories. In our family, whenever there was anything tedious that had to be done, like waiting around, or a car journey or anything like that, it was my practice to tell stories. Sometimes I would improvise the stories off the top of my head, or sometimes they would be the great stories of the world, like "Jack the Giant-Killer," or sometimes I would tell them part of the Odyssey, like the encounter with Polyphemus in the cave. Anything that would hold their attention and broaden their minds and imaginations. When the children were still quite small, we began going to Stratford on Avon every summer, sometimes twice, to see the Shakespeare plays. It's quite easy to interest young children in Shakespeare. They used to love it; there was no compulsion about it.

I think it was one day in the 1960s when we were driving up to Stratford in the afternoon—we always went to evening performances to help the children think they were more grown up; they would have dinner in a hotel and go to the evening performance and they'd have the next day off from school—and while we were driving they asked for a good long story to while away the car journey, one that they'd never heard before. I began improvising the story of the rabbits off the top of my head. I had to think of something at once. This is why Watership Down (1972) begins with Fiver's vision of blood. The first thing that came into my head is the terrible scene in the Agamemnon of Aeschylus when Cassandra is left outside the palace; Agamemnon has gone in, ostensibly to have a bath and actually to be murdered by Clytemnestra. Cassandra left alone with the chorus suddenly has this terrible vision of the whole palace running with blood and her own terrible danger, her death, and the disaster of the whole house of Atreus; she tries in vain to get this across to the chorus. Cassandra has been cursed by Phoebus Apollo. (She swore an oath to Phoebus Apollo; it was a lie, and she was cursed.) The curse was that she should always prophesy the truth and always be disbelieved. These are, in fact, the lines that are quoted in Greek in the beginning of Watership Down. This was the first thing that came into my head, and I thought that I could transfer it to a bunch of rabbits. I went on telling it as we went along, about how they left the warren and the journey across country. In fact, many of the incidents in Watership Down can be traced to episodes and happenings in other books and stories.

The story lengthened as it went on. It became quite a long journey story, and it wasn't finished by the time we got to Stratford. It was continued on morning trips to school. (I drove the children to school every morning. This used to take about fifteen to twenty minutes.) About a fortnight later the story was finished. The children said, "That's too good to waste, Daddy, you ought to write it down." I resisted this for some time. I said, "Well it takes a long, long time to write a book. You would have forgotten all about it long before it was finished. Anyway, it's very arduous writing a book. I have a job to do; I'm working in the Civil Service all day, and I don't know when I'd write the book." But they were very, very persistent; they kept on about this for a month or two. Then one night I was reading a book to them at bedtime that wasn't very good. Finally I threw the book across the room and said, "I can write better than this myself." So nine-year-old Juliet in a very acid voice said, "I wish you would, Daddy, instead of keep on talking about it."

Thus stimulated, I went and got some legal paper and set about writing in the evenings. I would come home and have the evening meal and have a look at the news on television, and then I'd settle down and write for a couple of hours before going to bed. I never thought twice about it. It wasn't particularly arduous. There never was a book written less self-consciously, I think, or with less trouble. I was just writing for my little girls. I had no ambition for the book, except to get a modest hardback edition published. I would be able to put a copy into their hands and say, "There is the story you asked me to write."

The written story was, of course, very different from the oral story, although the narrator's voice did not change. Also, all the principal features remained—that is to say Fiver's vision of blood, the leaving of the Sandleford Warren, the journey across country, the arrival on the downs, the realization that there were no females and that they had to get females somehow or other, the journey to the strange warren, the final attack, and Hazel's desperate venture when he went to the farm to loose the dog—all those were part of the original story. Nevertheless, other things were added as I moved from the oral to the written text, and these enriched the narrative. I read a book about rabbits—R. M. Lockley's The Private Life of the Rabbit (1964), to add a certain amount of authenticity—all this stuff about reabsorbing embryos and chewing pellets and so on that came in later as a result of my study of rabbits. General Woundwort was also an addition.

There are also rather self-conscious lengthy descriptions of the natural world. I put into the book a great deal of my own passionate love of the Berkshire countryside where I was born and grew up. And sometimes this was quite deliberate, like the sunset on Watership Down that opens part two of the book, or the rabbits coming to the River Test, or the swallows gathering for their autumn migration. This is self-indulgent in a way; it was expressing my own love of nature round here where I've always lived. I think my favorite passage is the description of approaching autumn in the last chapter of the book.

It was a fine, clear evening in mid-October … Although leaves remained on the beeches and the sunshine was warm, there was a sense of growing emptiness over the wide space of the down. The flowers were sparser. Here and there a yellow tormentil showed in the grass, a late harebell or a few shreds of purple bloom on a brown, crisping tuft of self-heal. But most of the plants still to be seen were in seed … The songs of the insects were fewer and intermittent. Great stretches of the long grass, once the teeming jungle of summer, were almost deserted, with only a hurrying beetle or a torpid spider left out of all the myriads of August. The gnats still danced in the bright air, but the swifts that had swooped for them were gone and instead of their screaming cries in the sky, the twittering of a robin sounded from the top of a spindle tree … The sky, too, was void, with a thin clarity like that of water. In July the still blue, thick as cream, had seemed close above the green trees, but now the blue was high and rare, the sun slipped sooner to the west and, once there, foretold a touch of frost, sinking slow and big and drowsy, crimson as the rose hips that covered the briar. As the wind freshened from the south, the red and yellow beech leaves rasped together with a brittle sound, harsher than the fluid rustle of earlier days. It was a time of quiet departures, of the sifting away of all that was not staunch against winter.

(464-65)

This isn't the kind of thing you do when you're telling a story, but a written story is quite different. I call this one of the set piece fireworks.

In writing the book I deliberately wanted to make big demands on the child reader. I take the view that the books an adult reads aloud to children ought to be something just a little bit more demanding, not much more demanding, but a little bit more demanding than what children read for themselves. An adult ought to be stretching children a bit and helping children to reach out.

In writing Watership Down I set out to write a book that a parent like myself might enjoy reading to children like my own. Watership Down was intended to be a real novel, readable with enjoyment by someone age nine or ten; I have even had fan mail from six-year-olds. I think this is because it is a real novel and has the two essential characteristics of the novel, which have been the two essential characteristics of the novel since the eighteenth century. First, the story grows naturally out of the characters of the protagonists. Second, and even more important, the novel deals with some fundamentals of the human situation here on earth.

Watership Down is a real novel because it has both of these qualities. It's about a small tenacious band of comrades discovering how to settle down and live together. At the beginning of the book Hazel is not accepted as a leader; he can't keep Bigwig in order. He gradually gains ascendancy, moral ascendancy. The big payoff point of the book is the bit when Bigwig says to Woundwort, "My Chief Rabbit has told me to defend this run, and until he says otherwise, I shall stay here." The Efrafans think that the chief rabbit must be a bigger rabbit than Bigwig. It's impossible for them to grasp that Bigwig might respect Hazel as his chief rabbit, even though Hazel is not physically stronger. That to me is the point of the book. Watership Down is about leadership, a fundamental of human existence. Leadership is gained by people who can acquire moral ascendancy by example and ability. During the first half of the book the good leader gradually establishes his moral ascendancy, and then during the second half of the book, the bad leader, the bully, comes up against him. The good leader wins out against the bad leader by his readiness to sacrifice everything if necessary. In writing my book I had very much in mind these two ideas: One, that it wouldn't talk down to the child reader. (That's why I say there's no such thing as a children's book.) Two, that it would be a real novel.

Of course, all of this is filtered through the storyteller, who has himself been influenced by many other tales. Greek drama influenced the telling of the story in more than one way. It gave me the narrator's voice. I heard the voice of the Greek chorus when I went to Bradfield school. In one respect Bradfield is entirely unique: in the late nineteenth century the then headmaster, a rather enterprising man called Dr. Gray, had the idea that he and his senior pupils should convert a disused chalk pit that belonged to the school into a Greek amphitheater. And this they did; they actually dug it with their own hands, then had the stone for the tiered seats imported. For a hundred years now Bradfield has had a Greek amphitheater, a miniature of the great ones in Epidaurus and places like that. It's three parts of a circle with what is known as the orchestra, the central space at the bottom, and then the skene, which is the equivalent of our modern stage. There they performed the Greek tragedies—Aeschylus' Agamemnon, Sophocles' Oedipus and Antigone, Euripides' Oresteia trilogy, all in the original Greek. This has become a tradition at Bradfield; the Greek play is performed every third year.

Greek drama, half a religious liturgical service beginning with an invocation to Apollo or to Dionysos, is conducted on a tripartite basis: You have the protagonists who are up in the skene, which is, as it were, behind the proscenium arch. Then you have the chorus in the orchestra, the central space. The chorus would be continually sprinkling incense throughout the action on the altar to Dionysos. When I was at Bradfield, the way they did this they had the altar in the center of the orchestra and inside it was a cylinder, and a little way down there was a biscuit tin lid, and under the biscuit tin lid there was a Primus stove, which was kept going throughout the action; you couldn't hear it. So when the chorus put the incense onto the altar, it automatically went up in smoke. And then you have the audience, which participates in the action as it is mediated by the chorus.

In writing Watership Down I had very much the concept in my mind that I was the chorus, talking to the reader and commenting upon the action. The job of the chorus, that never leaves the stage from the beginning of the play to the end, is to mediate the action, to tell the audience what it should be thinking, to pray to the gods, to ask them perhaps to intervene or put their blessing on the protagonist or in some way to help. The leader of the chorus will have dialogues with the protagonist, with the principal characters, and tell them what the audience is thinking. You're never free, if you're seeing a Greek drama, from the intervention of the chorus, commenting on the action, talking to the protagonists, telling the audience how it ought to be feeling, speaking on behalf of the audience, or even praying. And I in writing, and in any creative work I do, constantly have this in mind.

The chorus in Greek drama invoked the gods in recognition of the metaphysical dimensions of human life; I felt that Watership Down would be richer if the rabbits had some kind of metaphysical dimension to their lives. Of course this would have to be kept very simple. For example, the rabbits have respect for what seems a creator or at least some type of providential, protecting care. At moments of exhilaration or rescue, they say, "Oh, Frith," with an awareness of something beyond themselves. There are prayers of gratitude to Frith: "Oh Frith on the hills," cried Dandelion, when they arrive at Watership Down for the first time, "he must have made it for us." Frith is the sun, and they acknowledge the sun as the source of all life. They also show sympathy for the intuitive, the visionary, and the prophetic. It is Fiver's original vision of blood and his continuing prophecies that cause much of the action of the story. And at the end, when young Threar predicts the coming of a man on a horse, Hazel says, "Fiver's blood? As long as we've got some of that I dare say we'll be all right."

Of course, there is also the presence of death—the chorus in Greek tragedy is honest about death, as is the narrator of Watership Down. Death enters as that faint silver light, in sharp contrast to that opening quotation from Aeschylus, the Agamemnon, "the house reeks of death" and the narrator's comment, "the primroses were over." El-ahrairah's ears shone with a faint silver light because Frith gave him a new pair of ears when he got back from the Black Rabbit. He says, "I have something for you, some new whiskers and some new ears." Then he says, "I put a little starlight into them, but you needn't worry; it's not nearly enough to give away a clever thief like you. It's only very faint." And so one of the attributes of El-ahrairah, as a result of this adventure, is that his ears shone with a faint silver light. This was how Hazel recognized him when he turned up. In this way, the narrator makes death a friendly person who ushers Hazel into a new life, "where the first primroses were beginning to bloom" (475).

The end of the book came about quite naturally in my relationship with my own daughters. They said, "What happened to Hazel in the end?" and I said, "Well, I've never told you a lie in my life. We've all got to die sometime, but I tell you what we'll do. We'll give him what Pallas Athene promised Odysseus; she promised him the gentlest death that may be, she says in the Odyssey. And that's what we'll give him." So he was meant to have as easy and perfect a death as possible to please my little girls.

As I told and wrote the story, I never forgot my listeners and readers. At least two characters entered the story because of my daughters. I came home one evening from work and found young Rosamond in tears over her violin practice. I said, "What's the matter?" and she said, "That horrid Rowsby Woof, I can't play it." Rowsby Woof was a celebrated teacher of violin who wrote a lot of exercises and pieces for children. She was struggling with a piece by Rowsby Woof. I said, "I'll fix it for you; I'll put him in the story." And there, the immediate world of the children entered the world of the story in the shape of Rowsby Woof.

Because the children were commenting all the time on the writing of the book and making suggestions as we went along, Bluebell comes into the story when he does. When I got as far as Holly turning up on Watership Down, Juliet said, "But Daddy, you've forgotten about Bluebell." I said, "I can't remember Bluebell." She said, "Yes, Daddy, he was the comic rabbit who was always making jokes. You can't have forgotten, we've got to have him." And this is why Bluebell turns up halfway through the story with Captain Holly because I was ordered to put him in. The oral form of the story entered the written form because the children remembered what I had forgotten.

In a way, my daughters were also the arbiters of the choice of quotations at the beginning of each chapter. I asked Juliet about those epigraphs. "Look," I said, "do you want them in or not?" And she said, "I like them, Daddy, because when you read the quotation, you can't imagine how it's going to fit in with what's going to happen. And then as you read on, you see how it does, and I like that. I think that's fun." I tried to get in all my favorite authors; but I couldn't get in a bit of Proust and I couldn't get in a bit of Tolstoy. I did manage to get in a bit of Dostoevsky and a bit of Jane Austen, and even a bit of Cosi fan Tutte. I placed their distinct voices in the context of Watership Down.

The voices of the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer, important parts of my education both at home and at Bradfield, also came to be part of the narrative voice. I've always been grateful to my father and Bradfield for grounding me in the narrative parts of the Old Testament, the Gospels, and the Acts. This has remained with me all of my life, and I think it resonates in the narrator's voice. It appears consciously in the epigraph from Psalm 59, where the psalmist's enemies "grin like a dog." And Charlotte F. Otten has suggested that it appears unconsciously in phrases like "in the fullness of time."

The seagull comes out of my experience in World War II. Kehaar's character, even his voice, is based on a Norwegian Resistance man whom I knew in the war, a splendid chap, Johansen. For some reason I don't quite understand, Johansen had been in World War I. Norway was not involved, but he had been anyway. We met on a troop ship, and one night Johansen got very drunk, and finally the purser of the ship semiforcibly conducted Johansen downstairs to his cabin. And I cherish the memory of Johansen being led away shouting, "You say you in the last war? I was there too! I never see you!" Johansen was very Kehaar-like.

Of course, the storyteller, the narrator, is not merely a product of home and reading and education and personal experience. Storytelling is a timeless and universal occupation. People have been doing it since time immemorial. And it is a wonderful thing to have people hanging on your every word. When I was a boy at school, I used to tell stories in the dormitory before lights out, and it was terrific. They'd say, "Go on, Adams, what happened then?" Then the master comes round and says: "Time for lights out." "Oh sir, just another three minutes, sir, while Adams finishes the story. What happened then, Adams, what happened to him?" You feel the power in your fingertips as you build up the tension.

I didn't imagine that anybody else would go for this particular private story told to my own two little girls, told for their pleasure as we drove to Stratford, and written at their insistence. Yet naturally it's intensely gratifying that this rather private and personal idea of mine, which started as nothing but that, has sold itself all over the world. But like Lewis Carroll's Alice, which was improvised by Charles Dodgson in a boat on the Isis on a summer afternoon, Watership Down was entirely spontaneous and unself-conscious, and written to the order of two little girls.

Note

Based on an interview with Charlotte F. Otten, June 17, 1987, in Whitchurch, Hants, U.K.

References

Adams, Richard. Watership Down. London: Rex Collings, 1972.

Lockley, R. M. The Private Life of the Rabbit. London: André Deutsch, 1964.

CRITICISM

Booklist (review date 1 April 1974)

SOURCE: Review of Watership Down, by Richard Adams. Booklist 70, no. 15 (1 April 1974): 852.

It is not often that the opportunity to learn Lapin (rabbit language) arises, but Adams fills the knowledge gap in [Watership Down, ] a saga about a warren of rabbits that encounters every conceivable crisis during and after a long enforced trek to a new home in England's Watership Down. These animals who talk endlessly and have an elaborate mythology and social structure carry their anthropomorphism with grace: their world becomes real and that of man's is seen in a new perspective. The delightful nature descriptions combine a sense of the poetic with an intimate knowledge of plant and animal life.

Francisco Collado Rodríguez (essay date winter 1985)

SOURCE: Rodríguez, Francisco Collado. "Watership Down: Tale and Myth." International Fiction Review 12, no. 1 (winter 1985): 39-42.

[In the following essay, Rodríguez explores the reasons behind "the public's positive response" to Watership Down, noting Adams's reliance on the mythic theories of Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell.]

By the end of 1972, Rex Collings, a small British publisher, took the risk of publishing Richard Adams's first literary attempt, a novel about talking rabbits called Watership Down. Despite the fact that the book had been rejected by several agents and publishers before Collings, Watership Down became an enormous success, a film was made and Adams, now rich and famous, decided to give up his job in the civil service to become a full-time writer.

However, what are the reasons for the public's positive response? A few answers have been given by critics over the last few years (see, for instance, James S. Stone, "The Rabbitness of Watership Down, " The English Quarterly, 13, 1980, 37-46). Nevertheless, the key to the understanding of the novel's success has never been pointed out; to a large extent the success of Adams's book is due to the fact that it subjects the reader to a two-sided defamiliarization. In order to explain this process it is necessary to examine the relationship between a number of technical devices used by Adams, and the nature of the adventure itself.

Watership Down began as an oral narrative; Adams told his two small daughters the rabbits' tale to entertain them during several journeys to Stratford-upon-Avon. Later on he decided to write his tale down. This explains to a certain extent the existence of some links which connect the novel to the folktale. The involvement of the readers—of the audience—is all-important, and the storyteller does not hesitate in addressing his public now and then in order to draw them closer to the plot: "And 'what happened in the end?' asks the reader, who has followed Hazel and his comrades in all their adventures and returned with them at last to the warren where Fiver brought them from the fields of Sandleford."¹ Together with this device two other techniques work successfully to force the reader to become more involved in the rabbits' story. The first one is the traditional indirect free style, by means of which the characters' doubts and worries are scattered all throughout the book, as in the case of Hazel, the rabbit leader who, through the narrator's voice, asks himself, "What was in the bracken? What lay around the further bend? And what would happen to a rabbit who left the shelter of the holly tree and ran down the path? He turned to Dandelion beside him" (p. 35). The second technical device to attract the reader's attention is not, however, as traditional as the indirect free style. It consists of the effect provoked in the reader when he is made to perceive external reality from a rabbit's point of view. All our senses must be continuously alert to follow the small animals in their quest: "The rabbits had gone only a short distance through the wood when they sensed that they were already near the river. The ground became soft and damp. They could smell sedge and water. Suddenly, the harsh, vibrating cry of a moorhen echoed through the trees, followed by a flapping of wings and a watery scuttering. The rustling of the leaves seemed also to echo, as though reflected distantly from hard ground. A little further on, they could distinctly hear the water itself—the low, continuous pouring of a shallow fall" (p. 298).

Furthermore, Hazel and his friends are talking rabbits but they do not wear clothes, smoke cigars, or do things which real rabbits could not physically do. Adams's intention is not only to draw a picture of the landscape in which the small animals live, he also wants us to identify with them, to perceive what rabbits perceive. The natural scenery in which the novel takes place—a landscape which the reader knows or thinks he knows—opens now from a new viewpoint, producing an effect of defamiliarization once we stop to think who the characters are and how they perceive the countryside of this part of twentieth-century England.

However, as previously mentioned, the defamiliarization in Watership Down has another side: the nature of the adventure itself. Adams is deeply influenced by Jung's works. He even underwent a full-scale Jungian psychoanalysis in the early 1950s which lasted for three years. Furthermore, he is also influenced by Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces². Both authors—Jung and Campbell—pay considerable attention to myth in their works, pointing out that some cultural activities such as esoteric teaching, rites of passage, legends and tales are nothing less than external manifestations of man's psychic struggle to attain the ultimate meaning of life (or what Jung exactly terms "the integration of the personality"). According to Campbell (The Hero, p. 75) these expressions of the human inner struggle flow a pattern which he denominates "monomyth" and which develops in the form of a journey in which the protagonist—the hero—must overcome several or all the possible stages in which the adventure may be divided and which eventually lead him to achieve the final answer or magic elixir of the quest; many human heroes have followed these stages throughout history and literature, and a careful analysis shows that Watership Down, a previous oral tale, is also closely related to the monomyth: In Adams's tale there is a small buck, Fiver, who is characterized by a strange power; he is a seer, a prophet, and that which Campbell names "Call to Adventure" (The Hero, p. 49)—the first stage in the monomyth—takes place when the small rabbit warns his brother Hazel that they should leave Sandleford warren because he perceives a danger, a "bad thing." "'It hasn't gone away,'" he says to Hazel. "'It's here—all round us. Don't tell me to forget about it and go to sleep. We've got to go away before it's too late'" (p. 21). The rabbit-seer represents here the first manifestation of what Campbell calls the "Supernatural Aid" (The Hero, p. 69), which comes to the hero in the form of a mysterious figure offering him advice or amulets to fulfill his quest.

The call is answered by Hazel and a small group of young bucks who depart from their warren, experiencing in that way the process of separation which characterizes the first stages of the monomyth. Once in motion, Hazel's band has to undergo "The Crossing of the First Threshold" (The Hero, p. 77), manifest in their swimming the little stream Enborne and coming into the wood, the unknown mysterious land where the hero's adventure must unfold. From this point onwards they have to overcome a number of dangers—Campbell's "Road of Trials" (The Hero, p. 97)—such as the fights with a crow and some rats and their fears of badgers and foxes. In this way, Hazel's band becomes integrated little by little into a compact unity, the real hero who shall achieve his main aim in the book's second part. Even the narrator makes this idea clear when he affirms that since "leaving the warren of the snares [the rabbits] had become warier, shrewder, a tenacious band who understood each other and worked together" (p. 130). The second essential period of the monomyth, the process of initiation, ends when the rabbits obtain the "magic elixir" represented by the does, the female principle without which life cannot continue. The reaching of this stage is what Campbell calls the "Meeting with the Goddess" (The Hero, p. 109) but, once the elixir has been acquired, its former guardian may want it back and pursues the adventurer in a "Magic Flight" (The Hero, p. 196) which is also registered in Adams's novel when General Woundwort—the leader of the warren from which the does were stolen—tracks down Hazel's band and besieges Watership warren. However, the hero is bound to become the winner, and Hazel's brains and Bigwig's strength achieve the final victory defeating Woundwort and granting, in this way, the survival of the new warren.

The final stage of the monomyth comes when the hero—the psychic struggler—experiences the vision of the cosmogonic cycle; he perceives life (material forms) running into death and the void but he also witnesses the ceaseless action of the Imperishable, the source of existence which gives birth to life again from the void. Watership Down is certainly not a metaphysical work of the kind other novels by Adams were to become (mainly The Plague Dogs, 1977) a few years later. But the novelist also wants to suggest the hero's final vision of the cosmogonic cycle and so he starts and concludes his first book in a symbolic way. He begins with "The primroses were over" and he finishes by closing the circle—the cycle: "and together [Hazel and El-ahrairah] slipped away, running easily down through the wood, where the first primroses were beginning to bloom" (emphasis added).

Defamiliarization was made possible, therefore, by a number of closely interrelated factors. Watership Down 's characters are a group of twentieth-century English rabbits who physically behave almost as real rabbits do. The narrator brings us closer to them by very often focusing the story from these small animals' viewpoint. Finally, the story itself proves to be an adaptation of the monomyth; the rabbits walk along the same path which many a great human hero—real or fictitious—has followed from the beginning of time. Furthermore, this path has been understood by many—Adams among them—as the external expression of man's inner struggle to search for the meaning of life; therefore, we can also speak of a conscious psychological appeal on the part of the author. But, after all, the truth which remains is that the mythical hero who fights almost to the death to fulfill his quest is a simple small rabbit—or, to be more precise, a group of rabbits. Defamiliarization arose because the storyteller, coming again from the past, has chosen to tell us the old adventure of a new mythical rabbit-hero.

Notes

1. Richard Adams, Watership Down (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1974), p. 476. Subsequent references are to this edition.
2. Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Bolingen Series 17 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1949; 2nd. ed. 1968). Subsequently referred to as The Hero.

Kenneth F. Kitchell, Jr. (essay date fall 1986)

SOURCE: Kitchell, Jr., Kenneth F. "The Shrinking of the Epic Hero: From Homer to Richard Adams's Watership Down." Classical and Modern Literature 7, no. 1 (fall 1986): 13-30.

[In the following essay, Kitchell characterizes Watership Down as an epic fantasy, drawing parallels between the text and such works of classic literature as The Aeneid and The Odyssey.]

Is Richard Adams's Watership Down an epic? This is exactly what a veritable army of reviewers¹ have called it, and it is so proclaimed on its own dust jacket. Yet certainly more traditional scholars would hold the term "epic" in careful reserve. It is the purpose of this paper to investigate this question and to consider what such an investigation might tell us of the existence the epic and the epic hero hold in today's world and in the heroic literature it reads. A brief summary of the work will facilitate its discussion.

Watership Down was published in 1972 and was Adams's first work. It was conceived as a tale to be told to his daughters as he drove them the long distance from his home to Stratford-on-Avon to view Shakespearean performances. Perhaps for this reason the book was at first promoted as children's literature, a choice contrary to Adams's tastes.² To summarize the plot, it is the story of a band of rabbits which travels from its doomed warren to found a new home on safer ground at Watership Down. The original warren, Sandleford, is proclaimed doomed by Fiver, a prophetic rabbit who is the brother of Hazel, the hero of the piece. No one will heed the warnings of Fiver and Hazel, least of all the doddering head rabbit of the warren. Hazel decides to leave anyway and that evening leads forth a band of ten bucks. They make their way south, bravely crossing a small river on an improvised raft, an idea thought up by Blackberry, the thinker rabbit of the group.

They then come to Cowslip's warren, whose strange inhabitants are sleek and cultured (they even sing, dance, and produce works of art). These unnatural lapines open their warren to the travelers and offer to share their greatest prize with them, a mysterious supply of lettuce which is left for them each day. Fiver, however, senses danger and danger there is, for with the lettuce come snares. These unusual rabbits are, in fact, being kept by humans for eating purposes. When Bigwig (the strongest of Hazel's rabbits, named for a tuft of hair on his head) is almost killed in a snare, the frightened band escapes, taking along one member of the warren.

The wanderers quickly reach Watership Down, where they establish a warren and embark on Hazel's policy of befriending local animals, especially an injured gull which they nurse back to health. Soon two members of Sandleford join Hazel's group and relate in graphic detail the gassing of the rabbits to make way for a housing project.³ The past is gone now and only the future remains. But what future can there be without females? There is not a single doe in the new warren, and without them Watership Down will again be deserted in two or three years, the life span of a rabbit in the wild.⁴

Hazel decides to seek does locally, and the gull, named Kehaar, is sent out to reconnoiter. He spots a few domesticated rabbits at a local farm and large numbers at a badly overcrowded warren named Efrafa. Hazel sends a small group to Efrafa to negotiate peacefully for females. In their absence Hazel pursues his own glory by attempting to raid the nearby farm himself. He frees some does but is shot in the attempt. Meanwhile the scouting party returns with a tale of horror. Efrafa is headed by a militaristic rabbit named General Woundwort and is run in a most unnatural, regimented way. Hazel's rabbits had been branded and imprisoned and had just barely escaped as they fled across railroad tracks seconds before a train which fortuitously cut down their pursuers.

Led by a now recovered Hazel, a second party heads for Efrafa. A combination of cleverness, boldness, and kindness allows many does to be led out. Under Kehaar's aerial protection, the group reaches a river where it leaps into a boat and escapes by gnawing the rope and floating away. All seems well until Woundwort, raging in defeat, attacks Watership Down with superior numbers. His fierceness almost wins out, but is thwarted by the strength and cunning of Bigwig and by a stratagem of Hazel in which he lures a dog from a nearby farm into the midst of the attackers. In the process, however, he is captured by a cat, but is rescued by a kindly human doctor who delivers him back to the wilds in a car.⁵

As the story ends, Efrafa and Watership Down are peaceful and are interbreeding. Hazel is an old rabbit and, in the final chapter, is taken up into heaven to join the council of the archetypical rabbit hero, Elahrairah, the trickster idol of all lapines. In fact, mythical tales of the wily deeds and exploits of Elahrairah punctuate the entire story line of Watership Down and often parallel what is happening in the story itself. As he rises to his place in the heavenly council, Hazel hears tales being sung already about his deeds. He is now a perfect, deified hero.

All stories suffer in outline, of course, and this is especially true for this novel. For Adams has created more than merely an exciting plot. The entire rabbit world is shot through with devices designed to flesh it out. The rabbits have their own myths, including one of the origin of the world, a version of the great flood, and aeteological myths to explain the weakness of the tribe of rabbits. They have their own folk tales and folk heroes, bards who sing of these wonders, and a created lapine language. And beneath it all lies a solid foundation of accurate lore about rabbit life, all taken from the book of R. M. Lockley, Adams's friend and later collaborator.⁶

Before beginning to analyze this work, it would be well to be sure we are not proceeding too far. For although there has not been much by way of serious scholarly study on Watership Down, it has often been subjected to some quite fanciful interpretations, including criticism of its supposed sexism,⁷ an interpretation of the piece as a political tract describing Britain and the Second World War, a description of it as "a scientific novel, a work that embraces the two cultures [literary and scientific]," and even a statement that the work is "about the survival of intuitive and imaginative man in his conflict with modern technology and industrial civilization, those ruled by the right side of the brain as opposed to those ruled by the left side of the brain."⁸ Adams has repeatedly denied any deep meaning in the book, saying in clearest language, "Any idea of its being a mighty parable is frightful tripe."⁹

But we must not always trust the comments of authors on their own works. Hemingway reportedly told us that his Old Man and the Sea was simply about an old man who caught a fish, and Mark Twain attached the following notice to his most deeply studied work, Huckleberry Finn: "Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot."

What is needed, then, is a careful evaluation of the evidence which neither stretches that evidence too far nor chooses totally to accept the traditional reticence of authors to analyze their own works. We will begin with a careful study of the literary roots and assumptions which lay behind Adams's casting of his lowly heroes in a decidedly epic-like environment. If it can be shown that there are epic parallels in the work and that Adams knew they were there and deliberately chose to call them to his readers' attention, then it is a fair assumption to conclude that matters concerning the epic were on his mind.

With all this as background, then, the question remains as to what extent, if any, the promoters and reviewers of this immensely popular and award-winning book are justified in applying to it the term "epic." While all definitions vary somewhat, most agree with The Random House Dictionary (1976 edition), in defining epic as "Noting or pertaining to a poetic composition, usually centered upon a hero, in which a series of great achievements or events is narrated … in elevated style."¹⁰ A scholar of English epic poetry expands: "heroic poetry, … wherever created, will be a narrative poem, organic in structure, dealing with great actions and great characters, in a style commensurate with the lordliness of its theme."¹¹ To round off the series of definitions, there is little to quibble with in Wordsworth's words, "Epic poetry, of the highest class, requires in the first place an action eminently influential, an action with a grand or sublime train of consequences; it next requires the intervention and guidance of beings superior to man, what the critics, I believe, call machinery."¹²

Watership Down is a narrative, to be sure, but it is certainly not in poetry. We do have a hero, but he is a rabbit and the scope of the journey and the deeds is less than lordly. For example, the entire action of this "odyssey" lasts but from May to October of a single summer and covers some five or six miles only. The great deeds of the "heroes" are, to human eyes, rather limited, being confined to such things as crossing a small stream on a bit of driftwood, helping a sea gull, and outwitting a fairly stupid farmyard dog. Neither are the heroes of the piece born of great houses or of divinities. At first glance, therefore, the reader acquainted with "real" epic will refuse to call this an epic and will fall back on the Random House's second definition: "resembling or suggesting such poetry, an epic novel."¹³ But can the issue lie there? It is an important one for classicists and all students of the epic, for it is of some moment to decide whether the great genre is in fact dead or can still be recognized in contemporary works, albeit in changed form.

A careful reading of Watership Down shows that Richard Adams had the epic in mind when he wrote his book. This is shown first by actual parallels between his book and the ancient epics, parallels which range from conscious borrowings and parallels to similarities in atmosphere and tone. Secondly, and more importantly perhaps, it can be demonstrated that these are more than mere literary cribs. They are present to challenge the reader to rethink the role of epic in general and, most especially, the epic hero, in today's world.

Certain scenes in Watership Down are undeniably based upon earlier epic and heroic literature. Indeed, the entire work opens with such a scene. Fiver, Hazel's brother, falls into a trance and predicts ruin for the home warren of Sandleford:

Two piles of earth lay on the grass. Heavy posts, reeking of creosote and paint, towered up as high as the holly trees….

The two rabbits went up … wrinkling their noses at the smell of a dead cigarette end somewhere in the grass. Suddenly Fiver shivered and cowered down….

"Oh Hazel!… Some terrible thing—coming closer and closer."…

"I don't know what it is…. But it's coming—it's coming. Oh, Hazel, look! The field! It's covered with blood!"

(WD [Watership Down ], 6-7/14-15)¹⁴

No one in the warren except Hazel will believe Fiver, however. Least impressed of all is the old Threarah (Chief Rabbit), a leader well into the staid skepticism of senescence and as such, an apt image of the Priam before whom Cassandra must have chanted in vain. Adams obviously wants his readers to make this connection, for he heads this his very first chapter with the following quote:

CHORUS: Why do you cry out thus, unless at some vision of horror?

CASSANDRA: The house reeks of death and dripping blood.

CHORUS: How so? 'Tis but the odor of the altar sacrifice.

CASSANDRA: The stench is like a breath from the tomb.

(Aesch. Ag. 1308-1311)

The vision, the prophecy, and even the olfactory sense employed to obtain it are all the same. Adams is making his ancient parallel quite clear and does so elsewhere as well.

When Hazel's band of hlessil (wandering, homeless rabbits) reaches Cowslip's warren, they at first seem to have found a perfect home. The place is but sparsely populated with large, albeit passive, rabbits who invite the wanderers to stay on in this strangely underpopulated warren. The benefits seem great. The leisure which results from a daily dole of lettuce has led to time for cultural, though un-lapine, pursuits.¹⁵ They have mosaic art depicting mythological scenes, have dance and song, and have even employed a form of architecture to give them a large central meeting room. But they have also developed dangerous habits, such as lack of concern for those rabbits which are snared (the price for the lettuce), atheism, and even an uncontrollable, eerie laughter which always seems to presage doom.¹⁶ At one level this scene could be read simply as a facet of Adams's view of the natural life, untainted by man's intrusion.¹⁷ But once again the author tells us clearly that more than a literal meaning is presented, for he heads this crucial chapter 13, with lines from Tennyson's The Lotus-Eaters. So we have it. Cowslip and his warren are (and here we must forgive Adams his pun) the "lettuce eaters." The ecstasy of lettuce on rabbits is every bit as strong as that of lotus on Greeks, and Hazel must drag his crew away just as did Odysseus before him. These scenes are carefully constructed to call the ancient scenes to mind.

Thus, within the first sixty-three pages of his 426 page novel, Adams has carefully warned his reader to look below the surface, to seek out the classical parallels. It will be best to defer until later a discussion of what Adams meant by all this, and first to note scenes and characters which seem also to have their roots in works written long before.

In general, of course, the plot is close to that of the Aeneid, though it owes much to the Odyssey as well.¹⁸ An old, established "city" is threatened from without. A local seer is ignored and a small band escapes at night. Their first act is a journey over water during which they try a series of homes but find them false and are at their destined home early in the work. The rest of the tale parallels the last half of the Aeneid as the newcomers fight to keep their place and to solidify intermarriages and alliances. The plot, then, is quite familiar from antiquity, but individual scenes are equally revealing of borrowings from major works of epic and heroism from many sources.

The plight, for example, of an all male band of rabbit fugitives who desperately need females to insure the survival of their exiled race is evocative of Livy's tale of the Sabine Women. From another sector, it has been noted that a train which cuts down soldiers as they flee their imprisonment in exile is surely modeled on the famous Red Sea episode from Exodus.¹⁹ A reader, alerted by Adams at the start to be aware of ancient echoes, will easily recognize Odysseus' raft in the tiny bit of wood which the rabbits first employ to escape the warren. If the scale is different, the terror and helplessness at the mercy of the elements are identical.

A similar parallel can be seen when the punt in which the rabbits flee Woundwort becomes stuck on a bridge. Kehaar, the gull the rabbits have nursed back to health, flies down in the storm and convinces the despairing troop to jump overboard and ride the current to shore where Hazel

lay panting for several moments and then wiped his face and opened his eyes….

… Hazel crawled over to Pipkin and together they slipped into the undergrowth….

… After searching for a time they found a fallen tree trunk…. They crept beneath the twigs and leaves, settled themselves in the smooth, curved trough … and slept at once.

(WD, 338-339, 342/378, 381)

This scene is close indeed to that of Odysseus as he loses his raft and floats toward Phaeacia. He is saved by Ino/Leucothea who, αἰθυίῃ δ' ἐϊκυῖα ποτἀνεδύςευο λίμνης, / ζεδ' ἐπὶ ςχεδίης καί μΉν πρὸςμῦθον ἔειπε(Od. 5.337-338). Encouraged by this sea bird/goddess, Odysseus entrusts himself to the waves and floats to shore where ὁ δ' ἐκ ποταμοῖολιαςθεὶς / ςχοίνῳ ὑπεκλίνθη, κύςεδ ζείδωρονἄρουραν (Od. 5.462-463) until he decided to enter the nearby undergrowth where he

δοιοὺς δ' ἄρ' ὑπήλυθεθάμνους…..οὓς ὑπ' Ὀδυςςεὺς δύςετ'. ἄфαρ δ' εὐνὴν ἐπαμήςατο χερςὶ фίλῃςιν εὐρεῖαν· фύλλων γὰρ ἔην χύςις ἤλιθα πολλή,…..

ὣς Ὀδυρεὺς фύλλοιςι καλύψατο· τ δ'ἄρ' ' Aθήνη ὕπνον ἑπ' ὄμμαςι χεῦ', ἵνα μιν παύςειετάχιςτα δυςπονος καμάτοιο, фίλα βλфαρ' ἀμфικαλύΨας.

(Od. 5.476, 481-483, 491-493)

The parallels in these crucial scenes are too close to ignore. The divine agent in each is a diving bird, the situation is exactly the same in that a ship must be abandoned and its passenger(s) must swim. Finally, the similarities of tone and actual wording of the final scene of peace, coupled with the fact that each author chose to end his chapter or book with this scene, secure the link between the two.

Later, when reading the account in which Bigwig single-handedly blocks a burrow and holds off the entire opposing force of Woundwort, anyone who has read his high school Livy will have Horatius Cocles in mind, standing alone on the Sublician bridge, facing the forces of Porsenna. Bigwig, with his large build, brusque manner and simple emotions, is also reminiscent of Ajax the Great and the tuft of hair on his head which gives him his name is quite tempting as a nodding crest.

Chapter 31 contains an equally clear borrowing. In this tale, sung by the bard Dandelion, El-Ahrairah visits the Black Rabbit of Inle, the god of the dead in Adams's lapine mythology. El-Ahrairah is the trickster figure of folktale and myth and Adams specifically tells us that "Odysseus himself might have borrowed a trick or two from the rabbit hero, for he is very old and was never at a loss for a trick to deceive his enemies" (WD, 22/32). His aim is to free his people from a dreaded disease and he first tries, unsuccessfully, to defeat Death at a game of bobstones, a theme that ranges from Heracles to Bergman. His ultimate victory over Death and the release of his people parallel the ultimate tasks of heroes such as Gilgamesh, Odysseus, Aeneas, Dante, and Milton's Christ. Again, Adams calls up the oldest tales in having his hero be very careful not to eat anything in the underworld, a motif best known from the tale of Persephone and Hades. Other minor characters in the piece also have their ancient parallels. Dandelion, the bard of the group who is often called upon to ease tension among the rabbits with a tale of El-ahrairah, is highly reminiscent of Demodocus in the Odyssey. Finally, Adams has added stylistic clues of the debt Watership Down owes the ancient epics. We are offered, for example, fairly obvious Homeric similes, a device he used, (perhaps to excess) in his second novel, Shardik. ²⁰ One example from Watership Down will suffice for present needs.

As a bull, with a slight but irresistible movement, tosses its head from the grasp of a man who is leaning over the stall and idly holding its horn, so the sun entered the world in smooth, gigantic power.

(WD, 160/185)²¹

He also treats the reader to an occasional Homeric epithet, the most notable being "Bigwig Pfeffa-rah" that is, "Bigwig, King of Cats," a tribute to the latter's dauntless courage. Adams's chapter 20 is headed with a quote from The Epic of Gilgamesh, and chapter 25, in which Hazel leads the raid for does at the nearby farm, is prefaced with a quote from Renault's The King Must Die dealing with the heroic selfsacrifice of Theseus. Likewise, in a passage explaining the rabbits' ability to forget past evils and to press on into the future we read:

Would that the dead were not dead! But there is grass that must be eaten, pellets that must be chewed, hraka that must be passed, holes that must be dug, sleep that must be slept. Odysseus brings not one man to shore with him. Yet he sleeps sound beside Calypso and when he wakes thinks only of Penelope.

(WD, 145-146/168)

All the facts listed above are, when taken as a unit, extremely telling. One or two such incidents may be accidental, but the sheer weight of them in this case makes it clear that Adams had the ancient examples of epic and heroic literature before his mind as he wrote his own work and that he has consciously set forth clues in his work which are to remind us of that fact. "All is not simply rabbity," he says, "look deeper."

But what does this prove? Does it in fact make Watership Down an epic? Adams has stated clearly that "I decided I would write a novel [for the children], the best novel I could possibly write. An epic."²² By the standard criteria, of course, this is impossible, due mostly to the lack of the dactylic hexameter as the vehicle of narration and to the lack of normal, that is noble, heroes. But seen from another perspective, this may be too narrow a criterion. Do we deny that Shakespeare is a tragedian because he lacks a formal chorus or do we deny that title to Tennessee Williams or Arthur Miller because they do not write in verse or because their characters are "low men?" It is clear that the genres founded by the ancients change and that the true core, the heart of a truly great genre, lies beyond its mere externals. The matter is too large and too complex to be dealt with from the point of view of a single article on a single novel. But I think that it is possible, from carefully studying what Adams is about in this work, to come to some significant conclusions concerning one aspect of epic literature, namely, that of the hero and his role in today's "epic" literature.

Hazel is far from the normal epic hero. He is, after all, a rabbit and even as such is lowborn, not one of the elite. Adams specifically describes him as one of those rabbits "who, lacking either aristocratic parentage or unusual size and strength, get sat on by their elders and live as best they can" (WD, 4/12). Further, we are constantly informed throughout the book that Hazel does not begin the journey as the group's chief rabbit. It is a post into which he must grow and it is not until some distance into the book that he is given the title Hazel-rah, that is "King Hazel." This hero must earn his status and, ultimately, after patterning his life of sacrifice for the group upon that of El-Ahrairah, is rewarded with apotheosis, a reward reserved for few even of the ancient Greek heroes.²³

This is not the normal epic hero of antiquity. Bowra has studied the epic hero carefully and concludes that "A hero differs from other men in the degree of his powers…. He is a marked man from the start, and it is only natural to connect his superiority with unusual birth and breeding…. (H)e is recognized from the start as an extraordinary being whose physical development and characteristics are not those of other men."²⁴ Thus the heroes of ancient epics are commonly of divine and/or noble blood and all live in what has come to be called a "heroic age."²⁵ All perform truly heroic deeds on a grand scale which include the defeating of monsters such as Humbaba or Polyphemus, grand voyages and quests, acts of war, or even the actual harrowing of hell. In short, epic heroes are "men of superior gifts, who are presented and accepted as being greater than other men…. The fate of Achilles or Sigurth or Roland is the fate not of an abstract Everyman but of an individual who is both an example of pre-eminent manhood and emphatically himself.²⁶

Hazel, on the other hand, is exactly a sort of Everyman. He is weak and timid, more prone to flight than to fight. At the start he is not even the smartest, strongest, or bravest of his own crew, but by the tale's end he is clearly beyond the measure of most rabbits. He was not born into his leadership, he has grown into it, has come to a heroic stature that did not seem his at the start.

Of course, growth alone does not keep him from true heroic stature. Aeneas surely grows in a certain way, for example, and Telemachus, though a minor hero, is quite a different fellow in the carnage of book 22 of the Odyssey than he was as he wept in books 1 and 2. But each of these is a born hero. Aeneas never loses his strength or courage and all know that Telemachus merely needs confidence to bring out what is there by birth.²⁷ But Hazel's growth is from the average and pedestrian to the level of semi-divine heroism and such lowly beginnings are quite out of the epic tradition. Yet, as demonstrated above, Adams clearly wishes the perceptive reader to view this plainest of heroes as a worthy successor to his grander forebears. In so doing, he is grappling with a major need of the modern world, the ever present need for epic heroes and literature and the seeming impossibility of either.

The problem lies simply with the fact that a traditional heroic age is no longer possible. Many factors have contributed to its demise, but technology and rationalism are the greatest villains. If heroes generally possess divine or noble blood, how can we have them in an age that can hardly be called theistic or in which the royal families have dwindled as much in prestige as in number? If heroes should excel in military fortitude or prowess, what personal glory can exist in an age of long distance nuclear slaughter? Neither are there great journeys or returns for heroes to endure because there simply are no frontiers left. All our continents are fully recorded by satellites and even the great frontier of space has been reduced to a monthly routine. We have, in short, long since sailed through the Pillars of Hercules and have replaced the Gardens of the Hesperides with oil wells in the North Sea.

Even the gods of the ancient epics are not left us, as each of their powers is rationally explained away. Every child knows that it is not a deep-browed god who causes thunder, and who of us does not recognize a microbe and not Apollo as the source of the dreadful plague in book 1 of the Iliad? We have lost the monsters and dragons of epic for heroes to slay. Such promising candidates as the coelocanth are calmly explained away as enduring fossils, and radar and sonar are at this minute tracking down Nessie. The world, in short, has been demystified. There is no room in it for traditional epic heroes or a heroic age. Thus, a poll taken of students or friends will result in an embarrassing list of contemporary "heroes," mostly confined to media or sports stars with a rare inclusion of a political or humanitarian figure. And yet, in this vacuum, a certain human need seems to remain for heroes of epic proportion.

An author who wishes to portray heroic deeds, has, it seems to me, but two basic options. Using the first, he can break the rules of our demystified, "normal" reality and create a heroic realm for his protagonist, what Levy calls the "landscape of adventure."²⁸ This most commonly yields fantasy literature and science fiction which are, as a critic well notes, "the debased survivals of epic tradition."²⁹ Much of this is, of course, second rate literature, but certain authors and works still manage to capture some of the atmosphere of ancient heroism. Heinlein has done just this in Glory Road. In this novel the hero—Oscar Gordon, a disillusioned Vietnam veteran—is taken to a series of universes in which he contends with cannibalistic monsters, hordes of carnivorous harpy-like creatures, actual fire-breathing dragons, a beautiful heroine-princess, and much more. Pointedly, he does all this not with ray guns and lasers, but with swords and wits alone, quite in the ancient tradition and quite in keeping with a personal desire for a true "heroic age":³⁰

What did I want?

I wanted a Roc's egg….

I wanted the hurtling moons of Barsoom….

I wanted Prester John, and Excalibur held by a moon-white arm out of a silent lake. I wanted to sail with Ulysses and with Tros of Samothrace and eat the lotus in a land that seemed always afternoon. I wanted the feeling of romance and the sense of wonder I had known as a kid. I wanted the world to be what they had promised me it was going to be—instead of the tawdry, lousy, fouled-up mess it is.

Heinlein obviously misses the monumental hero and has therefore moved the backdrop to a set of worlds where this old form of heroism can still flourish. In these worlds chivalry is not dead, heroic challenges such as giants and dragons still exist, and they can still be overcome by swords and wits alone. It is the perfect refuge for a hero born out of his time, tailormade to ignore all that has happened since the days of former heroes, a world where one can still tread the "glory road."

It is well to note that in the passage quoted above Heinlein alludes to Edgar Rice Burroughs's John Carter on Mars (alias Barsoom) series. Burroughs already felt the demystification of the world and in 1912 moved his heroes to appropriate canvases. The same year saw the invention of Burroughs's naturalman hero—Tarzan who fights only with a knife, bow and noose in a world soon to be torn by mustard gas. Note that in one case the backdrop is Africa, the last unknown frontier of the day, while John Carter is pushed out even farther, to Mars. Carter, like Heinlein's Oscar Gordon, is a warrior at heart (recently of the American Civil War) who fights only with sword, brawn, and notable chivalry on Mars.

Burroughs in turn was greatly influenced by H. Rider Haggard, who earlier (King Solomon's Mines, 1885, She, 1886), saw that the world was closing in on heroic deeds and moved his novels to a then darkest Africa. Adams too has admitted his love of this author, referring to his Shardik as "a Rider Haggard story" and proudly displaying his first edition of King Solomon's Mines.³¹

Indeed, in this second novel, Adams has chosen the first of the two choices mentioned above, the choice of Haggard, Burroughs, Heinlein, and countless others. He has moved his tale to his totally invented world of Bekla.³² Paul Zweig came close to the truth when he wrote of Shardik, "Adams believes that epic events require a world created to their measure … a world constructed from mythic elements, where mythic events can unfold their energies. It is an old tradition, only recently fallen on bad days, into pulp literature … in Shardik, Adams attempts to restore its high seriousness…. Yet he does not succeed."³³

This is true, but only of this, Adams's second attempt at finding the appropriate backdrop for modern epic heroic activity. And it is fair to say that the earlier attempt was the more successful, for critics universally preferred Adams's first novel to his second. This could be due to the fact that in Watership Down Adams looked to the second choice of authors who wish to recreate the epic hero in today's world. Watership Down is not set in a separate, greater world. Adams has instead looked deeper into the existing world by shrinking his hero and his "landscape of adventure." A cannibalistic giant is, after all, a matter of scale. For Odysseus it is a cyclops; for Hazel, a fox. And one man's small stream is another creature's ocean. The size of the raft each needs for the crossing may differ, but the courage required does not.

The first thought is that such an approach, exacerbated by the use of animal protagonists, could trivialize the action, rendering the piece little more than a violent Wind in the Willows or a depoliticized Animal Farm,³⁴ but Adams sees to it, through his constant comparison with ancient epics and heroes, that we view this as an acceptable, alternative sort of heroism. In many ways this is the more challenging and intellectual option, for anyone can portray heroism in a totally made-up world replete with dragons and humans of greater than average powers. But shrinking the hero makes us consider the true meaning of such things as courage and leadership, the latter being the one subject Adams consistently agrees that his book is about.³⁵ This is especially so when we see that Hazel is reduced not only in size, but also that he has no noble or divine blood, no noble traditions of honor to rely on, and no heroic age within which he may take a more or less preordained role.

Yet it is exactly this seemingly insignificant struggle—of the conquest of the relatively small over the relatively huge and of a spirit not bred for heroism over itself—that elevates Hazel to the epic stature Adams keeps before his reader. Why is this so? In Adams's own words, "Human beings don't feel epics any more. Rabbits do—they are down on the ground." Rabbits, in short, are much like the primitive, awe struck cultures within which a heroic age can occur.³⁶

One must hasten to add that merely shrinking the hero and his enemies does not always produce a hero of epic grandeur. Just reducing the size can bring about a pallid version of the first choice, that of creating an optional reality for the hero. Perfect examples of this can be found in many areas of science fiction and fantasy literature ranging from films such as The Incredible Shrinking Man to The Fantastic Voyage in which an entire submarine is shrunk and enters a blood stream to do battle with antibodies and amoebas. In these stories there is no inward growth of the hero, no ennobling sacrifice for an entire people. Adams who kept his tale in the real world as we know it, and then chose a small hero, has gone farther. He has made his work a study of how heroism can exist today and can still be considered epic in proportion, if not in scale.

Adams himself has identified one major aspect of this new, microcosmic heroism for he has often admitted that Hazel is modeled on the real character of John Gifford, Adams's Airborne Forces commander in World War II. Adams describes him as quiet and unassuming, a quiet person one would ordinarily not look to for leadership, and yet he was one whom people naturally followed because it felt right to do so.³⁷ Hazel, like Gifford, is a leader by nature, not by status or birth. Thus, when the "odyssey" begins, there is some doubt as to who is chief rabbit, Bigwig or Hazel. It is some time before the natural leader emerges and until Hazel is officially called "Hazelrah," "King (or Lord) Hazel." Thus, we are told, leadership is a natural thing, innate in certain people and brought forth by unusual events.

There is, of course, a second aspect to Hazel—indeed to all our heroes—which is quite unusual. For we must never lose sight of the fact that the protagonists are rabbits. If small epic is different, animal epic is unthinkable. Adams, quoted just above, has said that rabbits "feel epic" since they are "down on the ground." On one level this refers solely to the smallness of the heroes and as such is valid. But by showing us events through a rabbit's eyes, Adams exhibits a fine example of what the Russian critic Shlokovsky called ostranenie, often translated "making it strange" or "defamiliarization."³⁸ Briefly put, this theory notes well that man's surroundings become so familiar to him that he ceases to notice them. It is by making them strange, through figurative language or excessive description that they can be seen anew. In the case of Watership Down, Adams defamiliarizes our everyday world. We are, after all, quite used to the bridges, rafts, gulls, highways, and streams which so baffle the rabbits. But by letting us experience them through the eyes of a rabbit on an adventure, and for whom this is all new, we are shown the inherent adventure that still exists in the world for those the size of a rabbit. Adams's choice of rabbits is quite clever. Their limited experience and their timid, cowering nature allow him to make the everyday world strange and exciting for us, the reader. On the other hand, their size allows them to dwell in a world of epic proportion. It is the combination which makes rabbits the perfect choice. An epic world through the eyes of a horse or a bear would hardly have done at all. It would have been strange, but far from exciting.

Amid all this rises Hazel, an epic hero of new stamp, one who achieves his heroism not by fulfilling his heroic nature, but by overcoming an unprepossessing one. Now there is no doubt that Hazel is a full-fledged hero. His deification, his presence in heroic songs in which he is referred to as El-ahrairah involved in tales of heroic grandeur (422-423/470-471), raise him to this status. And a close look at the text shows that Hazel's special power, shared in lesser degree by his followers, is the ability to step, temporarily, outside of or beyond his nature. The power to lead may be natural, as it was in John Gifford, but that of being a true hero in the epic tradition demands overcoming nature.

The evidence for this is everywhere throughout the book, but it will be best to go to its end first, to the final chapters wherein the rabbits are at peace, have begun breeding, and have reverted to normal lapine life. There are few traces of heroism now. Small rabbits are played with by the now aged heroes, tales are told of olden days, and there are no threats from without. In short, this is the sort of life that existed in the beginning of the tale, a normal, unexciting, safe, lapine existence. This, in fact, has been the goal of the group from the start, and it is perfectly in place when Hazel ascends to his heavenly reward. In short, this is living according to their natures. But, ironically, this state has been achieved through a series of unnatural, super-normal actions.

In a conversation between two of the minor characters at the end of the adventures, just as normal life is beginning, we hear the following exchange:

"Three litters born in autumn—have you ever heard of such a thing before? Frith didn't mean rabbits to mate in the high summer."…

"Frith never meant us to go out fighting in the high summer, either, if that comes to that," said Silver. "Everything that's happened is unnatural—the fighting, the breeding—and all on account of Woundwort. If he wasn't unnatural, who was?"

(WD, 419/467)

This thread of things done contrary to nature runs throughout the entire piece, and it is seen in both good and bad light. As early as the first night of their escape, Adams tells us that the rabbits' survival is based on their ability to overcome, to surpass their nature when in danger (WD, 22/33).³⁹ It was difficult, but it had saved them. This is the case in their next adventure with the raft and its later, larger, parallel in the escape from Woundwort by boat. When Hazel hears Bigwig shriek from the snare at the "lettuce eaters," his instinct is to run, but "by an effort of courage against all instinct" (WD, 98/117), he rushes in and saves his friend. Later, when the rabbits befriend the mouse and feed the wounded Kehaar worms they have grubbed out of the earth, they are specifically depicted as doing things they naturally would have no part of (WD, 163/188). There are too many such examples to list, but such actions as raiding a farm, riding in an automobile, luring on a dog, or swimming in a river at spate, are all things which no rabbit naturally does, and which these specific rabbits cease doing once they have attained their goals. This sort of temporary stepping beyond one's nature, then, is a large part of epic heroism as depicted in the book.

Contrasted to this are examples of stepping outside one's nature permanently, of losing one's nature. This is seen as an evil and is shown in three groups of rabbits, each guilty of different manifestations of the same problem. The first group we meet is the "lettuce eaters." Their cultural accomplishments have been bought at a fierce price and we are told pointedly that "They forgot the ways of wild rabbits. They forgot El-ahrairah, for what use had they for tricks and cunning, living in the enemy's warren and paying his price? … They had no Chief Rabbit … for a Chief Rabbit must be El-ahrairah to his warren and keep them from death" (WD, 104/123). In similar fashion, the tame rabbits of Nuthanger Farm, whom Hazel leads out to freedom, have been imprisoned and kept from the natural life of a rabbit. They only fulfill themselves when they are released and begin to breed and live in the wild. The last example, of course, is Efrafa. Under Woundwort the rabbits are organized into groups and are branded to indicate their "mark." They may only come out to eat at preordained times, pass their droppings underground and are forced to bury them, are forbidden to dig without permission, and, due to overcrowding, the does reabsorb their embryos into their bodies.⁴⁰

This, then, is the final clue to the role of the epic hero of today's world. The demystification of the world has eliminated heroic canvases for modern man to work against in this world. For those authors who do not wish to invent totally unreal worlds for their heroes and who recognize the un-heroic coloration of everyday life, the option remains of shrinking their heroes so that the scale of their deeds is proportionally great. These same authors realize that there is no longer a heroic caste (the Greeks knew this as well of course, but compensated by writing of their ancestors) and have slightly changed the criteria as a result. By the end of Watership Down, Hazel is an old rabbit somewhat on the feeble side⁴¹ living the contented life described above. How much this return to normalcy contrasts with traditional epic heroes! Achilles dies young, we know, having chosen to do so. Odysseus is to wander far with winnowing fan on shoulder, never, it seems, to quench his need to travel. Even Aeneas will have adventures to the end as a result of his station in life.

If the hero is no longer born to the job with preternatural gifts he must temporarily assume greater than normal powers in response to the challenges and monsters which befit his size and station. In so doing he may reach abnormal heights of cleverness or courage, and may choose to perform acts normally beyond his nature. But the reason for so doing is a return to normalcy and a better life for those he led.

Such a formula works well, we should add, for other heroes as well. A most notable example of this shrunken, temporarily heroic figure would be Tolkien's heroes Bilbo and Frodo. These too leave quiet lives, accomplish great things despite their size and lack of proper powers, and return to the quiet they left.⁴² Of course, in the Tolkien novels we also have a large does of the first option, for wizards, eerie worlds, talking trees, and elves abound. It is to Adams's credit that he has taken the most common and timid of animals and, without resorting to alternate realities, has placed one of their heroes squarely in the tradition of epic heroism.

True, that is to say, ancient epic can probably never be resurrected. It is a product of unique circumstances which are generally the result of a lesser amount of civilization than we possess in most of today's world. But Adams has, I feel, surely shown us that much of epic is of the internal spirit and not of the externals such as meter and mode of recitation. To the extent that Hazel stands in the tradition of Odysseus, Aeneas, and others, epic is still alive.⁴³

Notes

1. A few examples will have to suffice. Eliot Fremont-Smith, New York Magazine, 4 Mar. 1974, 60 ("a suspenseful epic"); Kenneth Graham, "Bear Garden," Listener, 2 Jan. 1975, 30 ("No world for rabbits, this: it is the world of epic"); Peter S. Prescott, "Rabbit, Read," Newsweek, 18 Mar. 1974, 114 ("an adventure story of an epic scope…. Like Ulysses' shipmates or the Argonauts"); and perhaps most fulsomely, Edmund Fuller, "A Gripping Tale of Rabbit Life," Wall Street Journal, 9 Apr. 1974, 20 ("this rabbit Aeneid" and later, "the rabbits have found their Homer"). Even those who disliked the piece noted its epic format, most noticeably D. Keith Mano, who in a biting, but humorous piece, called it "Richard Adams' lapine odyssey" and "Athos, Porthos, and D'Artagnan on a diet of grass," "Banal Bunnies," National Review, 26 Apr. 1974, 486.
2. See his comments in Jean Fritz, "An Evening with Richard Adams," Child Lit Educ 9 (1978): 64.
3. Adams has said that this scene is based on the destruction of a warren which was in the garden of his childhood home near the real Watership Down. Justin Wintle and Emma Fisher, The Pied Pipers: Interviews with the Influential Creators of Children's Literature (New York: Paddington, 1974), 137.
4. See Timothy Green, "Richard Adams' Long Journey from Watership Down," Smithsonian, July 1974, 79, quoting Adams.
5. The doctor is named Dr. Adams, and, significantly, Richard Adams's father was a country doctor.
6. R. M. Lockley, The Private Life of the Rabbit: An Account of the Life History and Social Behavior of the Wild Rabbit (New York: Macmillan, 1964). This is the American Edition with preface by Adams. Adams conceived the idea of his book before reading Lockley, (Wintle and Fisher [above, note 3] 137), but his work owes much to it. Each romanticizes the creatures (Lockley ends his book with the statement, "Rabbits are so human. Or is it the other way round—humans are so rabbit?" [144]) and each heads his chapter with quotes. It is hard to be totally sure that Lockley's brawling head rabbit, "Big Boss," was the inspiration of Adams's name for Bigwig, but Lockley's description of Big Boss's underground battle (48f.) seems to have given much to Adams's description of Bigwig's similar battle with Woundwort, chapter 46.
7. See Jane Resh Thomas, "Old Worlds and New: Anti-Feminism in Watership Down," Horn Book 50 (1974): 405-408. In addition to misrepresenting many facts and situations in the book, as deftly pointed out in a rebuttal written by M. Jean Jordan (Horn Bk 51 [1975]: 3-4, 93), Thomas has neglected to consider the fact that rabbits are not bound by human rules of behavior. Lapine life is indeed sexually stereotyped as is that of most of the lower animals. It is in fact to Adams's credit that some of his does, such as Hyzenthlay, are portrayed as heroines.
8. On political interpretations, see citations and insightful comments of Jessica Kemball-Cook in Twentieth-Century Children's Writers, ed. D. L. Kirkpatrick (New York: St Martin, 1978), 9-10. For the "two cultures," Dennis Flanagan, "To Each Generation Its Own Rabbits," WLB 49 (1974): 153. The last quote is from Edgar L. Chapman, "The Shaman as Hero and Spiritual Leader: Richard Adams' Mythmaking in Watership Down and Shardik," Mythlore 5 (1978): 7.
9. Wintle and Fisher (above, note 3) 143. Again, "A lot of people have said this is a political fable or even a religious fable or a social comment…. I promise you it is not a fable or an allegory or a parable of any kind." Interview with Sylvia Sachs, Pittsburgh Press, 20 March 1974, reprinted in Authors in the News (Detroit: Gale, 1976), 1:2. "I should be very sorry if people tried to read deeper meanings into [the book]." Quoted without citation in Contemporary Authors (Detroit: Gale, 1975), 49-52: 13. This trend was prophesied by Janet Adam Smith who says with equal parts wit and foresight, "I foresee an outbreak of symbol hunting in the burrows; mythic explications will drop like hraka in the grass" ("Exodus," NYRB, 18 Apr. 1974, 8).
10. Atsuchiko Yoshido in the Encyclopedia Britannica (15th ed., s.v. "Literature, Art of: Epic") offers "a long narrative poem recounting heroic deeds."
11. W. Macneile Dixon, English Epic and Heroic Poetry (London: J. M. Dent, 1912), 24.
12. Quoted in Brian Wilkie, "The Way of the Hero," in Parnassus Revisited: Modern Critical Essays on the Epic Tradition (Chicago: ALA, 1973), 186. Wordsworth himself ascribes the original thought to Lucien Bonaparte who, he says, was himself quoting an unnamed critic.
13. This is exactly what Aidan Chambers called the piece in his "Letter from England: Great Leaping Lapins!" Horn Bk 49 (1973): 253 as did Flanagan (above, note 8) 152. Paul Zweig, in a review of Shardik, is more specific and calls it a "novel, presented with affectionate irony as an epic." New York Times Book Review, 4 May 1975, 1. Yet these authors give no more reasons for their choice of words than do those who call the piece an outright epic.
14. For the convenience of the reader, references to the text will be by page number to the American hard back edition (New York: Macmillan, 1972) followed by a slash and the page number to the paperback edition (New York: Avon, 1975), thus: (WD, 6-7/14-15).
15. The connection between leisure and culture has long been known, but few have stated it better than Jacob Bronowski, writing on the life of a nomad which "is too narrow to have time or skill for specialisation. There is no room for innovation, because there is not time, on the move, … to develop a new device or a new thought—not even a new tune," The Ascent of Man (Boston: Little, 1973), 62.
16. The laughter is striking and reminiscent of the strange, eruptive and doomed laughter of the suitors in the Odyssey 20.345-347. On this see D. Levine, "Homeric Laughter and the Unsmiling Suitors," CJ 78 (1982): 97-104.
17. Adams did not write until late in life and worked for years in a governmental air pollution control bureau. Environmental concerns remain close to his heart. See Green (above, note 4) 76-79.
18. In fact, Adams has reluctantly admitted to an influence from his school boy studies in the classics in Wintle and Fisher (above, note 3) 135, where he also claims strong preference for Greek over Roman literature. He is also rather fond of quoting the classics in interviews. Cf. Sachs (above, note 9) and Al Burt, in the Miami Herald, 20 Apr. 1975, reprinted in Biography News 2 (1975): 476.
19. Smith, above, note 9. It is well to add that in the relating of the story, Holly says that "Lord Frith [the lapine sun god] sent one of his great Messengers to save us from the Efrafan Owsla" (WD, 215/246).
20. By one count the similes at times arise at almost one per page with one extending for seventeen lines. Kenneth Graham (above, note 1) 30.
21. Cf. pages 173-174/199 and a longer example at 192/220.
22. Fritz, above, note 2, 70.
23. In older Greek times, before Alexander the Great, apotheosis was reserved for relatively few heroes of the dim past. A useful list appears in Hiller von Gaertringen, "Apotheosis," RE 2.185-186. After Alexander, the practice increased markedly.
24. C. M. Bowra, Heroic Poetry (London: Macmillan, 1952), 91, 94, 95. Bowra's entire third chapter, "The Hero" (91-131) is well worth reading. Compare the strange criteria assembled by Lord Raglan, The Hero (1956; rept., New York: NAL, 1979). Cf. especially his list of 22 criteria, p. 174-175. One might also care to compare the rather rambling and vaguer discussions in Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces, 2d ed. (Princeton: Princeton U Pr, 1968), esp. 30-40.
25. C. M. Bowra (above, note 24) 25-27 and in "The Meaning of a Heroic Age," in The Language and Background of Homer: Some Recent Studies and Controversies, ed. G. S. Kirk (Cambridge: W. Heffer & Sons, 1964) originally the Earl Grey Memorial Lecture, delivered at Newcastle in 1957.
26. Bowra (above, note 24) 91.
27. Athena herself tells him this at Od. 2.270-271.
28. G. R. Levy, The Sword from the Rock: An Investigation into the Origins of Epic Literature and the Development of the Hero (New York: Grove, 1953), 143. L. Sprague de Camp, Literary Swordsmen and Sorcerers: The Makers of Heroic Fantasy (Sauk City, Wisc.: Arkham, 1976), offers an excellent survey of this sort of literature in his first chapter, 7-23. This survey includes Burroughs, discussed below.
29. C. T. Samuels, "Call of the Wild," New Republic, 23 Mar. 1974, 28.
30. Robert A. Heinlein, Glory Road (1964; rept., New York: Berkeley, 1970), 35-36.
31. Cf. quote reported in Current Biography Yearbook: 1978 (New York: Wilson, 1979), s.v. "Adams," 3. First edition, cf. Green (above, note 4) 82.
32. The world is well described by Bruce Allen, "Epic in Wonderland," Saturday Review, 31 May 1975, 26-27.
33. Zweig (above, note 13) 1-2. Samuels (above, note 29) makes the same judgment with reference to detective and spy novels. Cf. Webster Schott in a blistering review entitled "Grin and Bear It," in "Book World," Washington Post, 25 May 1975, 2.
34. Cf. the comments along this line of Smith (above, note 9) and Adams's own analysis in Wintle and Fisher (above, note 3) 138-140. Chambers (above, note 13) 255, says it "is what one might expect had Wind in the Willows been written after two World Wars, various marks of nuclear bomb, the Korean and Vietnam obscenities, and half-a-dozen other hells created by the inexhaustibly evil powers of Man." Here he shows an intuitive understanding of the reason we need new settings for heroes but at the same time he overlooks the obvious heroic overtones Adams wants us to find.
35. Sachs, above, note 9; Pamela Marsh, "What Children Need: Books as Rich as Plum Puddings," Christian Science Monitor, 7 Nov. 1973, Z1; Wintle and Fisher (above, note 3) 140-141.
36. The quote is from Fritz (above, note 2) 70. On both the heroes and the readers as versions of primitive cultures who can still act in and enjoy hearing epic tales, cf. Jan Gordon, Commonweal 100 (1974): 529, "having just about done away with the spontaneous simultaneity of primitive man, our myths now belong to perhaps the only primitives that remain—our children at bedtime." The sentiment is correct, but the application is wrong. The very success of the book among adult readers proves that all of us have this desire. Adams, just before he compares the rabbits to Odysseus in the quote given above, compares them with primitive humans in their ability to feel vividly the tale of the destruction of Sandleford (WD, 145/167-168).
37. Cf. note 35.
38. For a brief discussion of this see Victor Erlich, Russian Formalism: History-Doctrine, 3rd ed. (New Haven: Yale U Pr, 1981), 176-178. The best description is in Viktor Shklovsky, "Art as Technique," in Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis, trans. and ed., Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays (Lincoln: U of Nebr Pr, 1965), 3-24. My thanks to Pierre Hart who first pointed out this line of inquiry to me.
39. "Hazel and his companions had spent the night doing everything that came unnaturally to them, and this for the first time."
40. Efrafa's rules are described in chapter 27. On resorption see Lockley (above, note 6) 80, 84, 111.
41. It is interesting that Hazel's inability to remember names of younger members of the warren at p. 425/475 is exactly the form of feebleness shown by the Threarah, the Chief Rabbit of Sandleford who refused to listen to Fiver and Hazel (WD, 10/19).
42. Well studied by Charles W. Moorman, "Heroism in The Lord of the Rings," SoQ 11 (1972): 29-39. Cf. C. N. Manlove, Modern Fantasy: Five Studies (London: Cambridge U Pr, 1975), 174-180.
43. Preliminary versions of this paper were presented to the Southern Section of the Classical Association of the Middle West and South (November 1984) and to the Sixth Annual Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts (March 1985). My thanks to Pierre Hart and Mary Sirridge whose reading of and comments on this paper were most helpful.

Dieter Petzold (essay date spring 1987)

SOURCE: Petzold, Dieter. "Fantasy Out of Myth and Fable: Animal Stories in Rudyard Kipling and Richard Adams." Children's Literature Association Quarterly 12, no. 1 (spring 1987): 15-19.

[In the following essay, Petzold compares Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories and Jungle Books with Richard Adams's Watership Down to explore the use of classic mythic archetypes in literary works featuring anthropomorphized animals as the primary protagonists.]

I

Next to human beings, animals are probably the most common protagonists in children's stories, far more common than fairies, giants, or dragons (Haas 335). Considering the interest children take in all living creatures around them, this is hardly surprising. Slightly more surprising, perhaps, is the fact that in almost all cases animals in children's stories are to a greater or lesser degree anthropomorphized. Even in "realistic" stories animals usually enter into such a close emotional relationship with human beings that they will invariably be described in metaphors suggesting human thought and behavior.

In this essay, my concern is not with borderline cases of this kind, but with some specific texts (all very popular) in which the protagonists are animals which are humanized to such a degree that they can talk and reason like human beings. In a broad sense, texts like these are obviously fantasy fiction in that they create a secondary world which is (at least in this important aspect) radically different from empirical reality, even if many features of that reality, including some observable animal behavior, are faithfully copied. (It may be noted in passing that a higher degree of anthropomorphization—as when animals wear clothes and go to school—need not necessarily create an impression of even greater "fantasy"; on the contrary, I suspect that our sense of the fantastic is soon blunted when we perceive animals merely as humans in disguise, like, for instance, Donald Duck or Mickey Mouse, and our interest then shifts to other aspects of the story.)

The books I propose to deal with are the Just So Stories and the Jungle Books by Rudyard Kipling, and Watership Down by Richard Adams. They have been chosen because they are sufficiently similar to afford some insight into the specific character of this particular kind of fantasy literature, and sufficiently dissimilar to illustrate the variety of possibilities even a very narrow sub-genre can offer. All three works have been extremely successful. To a large extent, the profound impact they have on the adult as well as on the child reader results, I shall argue, from the fact that they have deep roots in myth and folklore.

II

In contrast to many of Kipling's texts which hover between adult and juvenile fiction, the Just So Stories were clearly intended for children. Some of them were written, and even published, several years before they appeared in book form in 1902, and we have the word of Kipling's cousin, Angela Mackail, and of his daughter Elsie, that he used to read them, with considerable histrionics, to his children and their friends (Avery 117; Carrington 283, 511; Green 169-178). One wonders if this is the reason why there has been relatively little critical comment on these stories, even though Avery, for one, has no doubt that they constitute by far the most successful of Kipling's books for children (114, 117), and Meyer considers them "perhaps the most perfect tales that Kipling ever wrote" (31).

The one feature that has most frequently been commented upon, and is indeed very prominent, is the extraordinarily intimate relationship between the narrator of these stories and his audience. Kipling continuously invites the reader to join in a game, and his success depends on the latter's willingness, and ability, to do so. The game involves a good deal of irony on the part of the narrator, which has to be perceived and accepted in the right spirit to be enjoyed. If Kipling succeeds with many (though certainly not with all) child readers as well as with adults, it is because he never talks down to the reader, whether he is introducing onomatopoetic nonsense words (like "ooshy-skooshy" 2), hyphenated set expressions ("infinite-resource-and-sagacity" 5), difficult and outlandish names and words ("cetacean," "indaba" 1, 19), childish mispronunciations ("'stute," "'scruciating" 15), or excessive repetition ("you must not forget the suspenders, Best Beloved" 5), to name just a few of his most prominent rhetorical devices. All these devices are employed with a wink, which is not condescending because the narrator does not "perform" in front of his audience but makes them participate in his delight at his own exuberance. Whether all of the jokes can be fully appreciated by the reader or not does not seem to matter as much as one might think, because the spirit of playfulness can be enjoyed even without such a full understanding.

The ironic use of rhetoric is, of course, only a part of the pervasive irony that informs the stories from beginning to end. These stories are obviously not meant to be believed as straight statements of fact, nor in the sense in which, say, a Puck of Pook's Hill story implicitly claims to be "essentially" true though it is obviously fictitious. It would be facile, though, to dismiss them as entertaining nonsense or as cynical tricks devised to satisfy the tiresome curiosity of youngsters. Even if they are not to be accepted literally, they do contain messages which call for serious analysis.

What the Just So Stories purport to teach, of course, is the origins of certain animal characteristics. Even those stories whose titles do not begin with "How …" are of this type, except the last, "The Butterfly that Stamped," which is indeed "a story quite different from the other stories" (199), being a parable in the oriental vein. Though it is certainly most interesting, I shall disregard it in this essay along with the Tegumai stories since they do not involve animals in a significant way.

As Chesterton remarked in one of the first reviews of the book, these stories are not fairy tales but legends (274), or, in J. I. M. Stewart's words, "aetiological myths" (114). Explanatory folktales of this kind exist in great numbers and have been popular all over the world. Stith Thompson's Motif-Index of Folk Literature lists several hundreds (A 2200-A 2599), deriving from all parts of the world and involving all kinds of animals. It seems likely that Kipling, whose interest in folklore pervades many of his writings, was familiar with a considerable number of such tales; indeed, Thompson lists three tales from India that imply the same questions (though they probably do not supply the same answers) as Kipling's stories ("How crab got its claws," A 2376.4; "Origin of dog's service," A2513.1; "How cat was domesticated," A2513.2).

Folktales of this kind are peculiar in that they are very close to myth, particularly creation myths (Thompson, Folktale 241-243). They are characteristically located "in illo tempore," in the mythical time of the beginning. According to Eliade, such myths in their original context represented "a sacred history, that is, a transhuman revelation which took place at the dawn of the Great Time" (23), and therefore were to be regarded as absolute truth. The function of etiological myths is not simply to satisfy some curiosity in a pre-scientific way, but rather (together with all the myths of a particular society) to establish an order which incorporates all nature in one coherent moral system. For instance, we find the empirical principle of heredity employed in most of these tales, together with an idea of reward and punishment. The satisfaction of etiological myths, I suppose, lies in the suggestion of such an intelligible and emotionally appealing order. Such a mechanism may well be effective even in those cases (by no means rare) where folktales treat the etiological theme lightly or even facetiously. Far from being destroyed by humor, the wisdom of the myth may even be enhanced by it.

In this respect there is no fundamental difference between explanatory folktales and Kipling's Just So Stories. The latter are by no means simple comic parodies of a basically serious genre of folk narratives; rather, they are sophisticated humorous recreations of the form. To call them fables can be misleading unless it is made clear that the term is used broadly, to mean not just the Aesopian type which sets out to teach general rules of human behavior. The Just So Stories do not claim to teach anything of that kind (which is not to say that they are not organized according to certain moral principles, as we shall see), but they are close to the classical fable in that in both cases the animal protagonists, though humanized, are not so much individuals as representatives of their particular species. That is why they are not normally regarded as fantasy stories, even though magic and other fantastic elements abound. The adventure element, another necessary ingredient of all true fantasy fiction, is weak, because the incidents are told so briskly and with so much ironical detachment that it is very difficult for the reader to identify sufficiently with the imperfectly individualized characters. However, degrees of individualization vary; for instance, the Elephant's Child is much more of a real character than the Rhinoceros, and his story (I suspect) is therefore much better loved than the latter's.

As can be seen by Kipling's peculiar use of generic names as proper names, he is playing brilliantly with the tendency of etiological myths to treat animals as individuals and generic archetypes simultaneously—a peculiar kind of pre-logical thinking which corresponds to the child's (and, quite likely, the primitive man's, if not everybody's) need to think in concrete terms about abstract concepts.

The true creation myth, of course, poses no logical problem because it relates unequivocally to "ille tempus" when only the first, archetypal animals existed and were endowed by their creator with certain unalienable characteristics which all the following generations have inherited. In some of the Just So Stories, most notably in "The Crab that Played with the Sea," but also in "How the Camel Got His Hump" and, to a certain degree, "The Sing-Song of Old Man Kangaroo," Kipling follows this pattern quite closely. The events in these stories take place in "the Time of the Very Beginnings" (153) when god-like "Magicians" imposed some order on the newly created world. However, other stories are placed in "the High and Far-Off Times" (59), which are definitely later (though still prehistorical), and in which the ruling principle is not creation but adaptation.

"How the Leopard got his Spots," "The Elephant's Child" and "The Beginning of the Armadilloes" clearly use ideas of Lamarckian (but not Darwinian) evolutionism. By simplifying and telescoping evolutionary processes they turn science into myth or, we might say, reveal the mythic substratum of science. The crux of Lamarckian theory, the question of how precisely physiological adaptations happen, and how acquired characteristics become hereditary, is eliminated through shortcuts: the adaptive process is crudely mechanized (Elephant, Armadilloes) or simply left in the dark (Leopard); heredity is taken for granted. Why what happened to one animal should affect all members of the same species remains blissfully unexplained, most outrageously so in "How the Whale got his Throat."

Thus we have stories that are constructed upon creation myths and stories built on what I should like to call "evolutionary myths." That the two are not mutually exclusive can be seen in "The Sing-Song of Old Man Kangaroo." Here we have a god who sets the action in motion, but the actual changes are brought about through a (telescoped) evolutionary process. Big God Nqong is a modern post-Darwinian deity who sits back and, with indifference if not cynicism, watches the world develop according to its internal rules.

In any case, Kipling's Just So Stories are informed by a common mythic background, which means that they imply their own set of rules to impose some kind of order on their own worlds. Incorporated into these rules are the principles of divine creation, of evolutionary adaptation, and of heredity. Inevitably also implied are certain moral principles and a certain view of history.

Like many genuine folktales, some of Kipling's Just So Stories tell us about physical changes inflicted as punishments, and we might expect that at least here the moral principles are clearly stated, but matters are not quite that simple. The idea of reward and punishment implies, of course, a judiciary agent, usually a god or a corresponding supernatural being. Such beings are the Eldest Magician in "The Crab" (clearly a god figure), Big God Nqong in "Old Man Kangaroo" and the Djinn of All Deserts in "How the Camel got his Hump." None of the three, however, is Justice Personified, exactly. Nqong seems to like grim practical jokes, and the other two appear rather lenient. The Crab's fierce independence of mind and the Camel's laziness are dealt with in a humorous and not very severe way. The preservation of a certain balance in nature seems more important to these gods than some abstract principle of justice.

Indeed, these tales contain some amazingly liberal, if not subversive, elements. Malefactors are usually of the mischievous rather than the vicious kind, and they often get away unpunished (e.g., the small 'Stute Fish, the Parsee, the Painted Jaguar, the Cat). What the Camel, the Elephant's Child, Old Man Kangaroo and the Cat are guilty of is, at bottom, just independence of mind; and though it has to be punished when its effects are anti-social (the Camel, the Crab) this is a quality viewed with a good deal of sympathy if not admiration by the narrator, especially in "The Elephant's Child" (and also in the Tegumai stories). Children, of course, will enjoy the narrator's taking sides for the curious and disrespectful, including the gleeful narration of the Elephant's Child giving tit for tat in the end. On a more serious level, the story makes it clear that it is wrong to spank a child for his "'satiable curiosity," because curiosity is the precondition of all progress.

Kipling's pro-evolution, pro-progress stance, however, is only one side of the coin. The story where both sides can be seen most clearly is "The Cat that Walked by Himself." Not only is the Cat's insistence on his independence presented with some ambiguity; the very idea of progress (which is what this story is very much about: domestication = civilization = progress) is continuously undercut by the author's persistent use of anachronism and irony.

Anachronism is, of course, a means for creating humorous effects; but it does not completely destroy the sense of history which the story had set out to establish. The members of this prehistoric family talk and behave very much according to modern patterns. The result is comic incongruity; but what is nevertheless suggested is that basically humans, like animals, will always be the same. Gender roles are clearly defined: while the man is a half-savage hunter it is the woman who takes up the task of domesticating and civilizing her environment.

Thus the story seems to say that, paradoxically, it is precisely because people are at bottom always the same that progress is possible. The importance of progress is not denied, but it is suggested that there are limits to man's development, that in a certain sense things are still the same and always will be. If all the changes occurred in the far-off past, what follows is that the world has since become static. By changing evolutionism into another myth, Kipling has managed to reconcile it playfully (i.e., in a humorous if precarious way) with his basic conservatism.

III

In contrast to Just So Stories, Kipling's Jungle Books have received a considerable amount of critical attention, possibly because they are not obviously written for children. The sheer number of the tales, and their complexity, prevent my discussing them in detail in this essay; I shall instead concentrate on just a few aspects of some of the tales which are particularly relevant to my subject.

When dealing with the Jungle Book stories, we are moving slightly backwards in time (the first Jungle Book was published in 1894), but in terms of our generic outlook we are moving one step forward, from fable to fantasy. In their depiction of animals they range from the nearly realistic ("Toomai of the Elephants") to the explicit fantasy of extensively humanized animals. Except for the imperialist parable of military discipline, "Her Majesty's Servants," we have full-fledged stories rather than mere legends, with individualized characters, intricate plots, and plenty of action and suspense. However, traces of the animal fable and of myth are still quite clearly discernible.

The Mowgli stories are probably the most complex in this respect. We may note, first of all, that the fable element is much weaker here than in the Just So Stories. Accordingly, the animals are, as a rule, much more individualized, although we do have conventional character stereotypes in the Bandar-log (here the typical simplifications of the fable are made to serve a satirical purpose) and in some side-characters like Tabaqui, the jackal. Most significantly, the relation between Mowgli's jungle world and the world of the reader's experience cannot be described as simply allegorical (which would be typical of the didactic fable); rather, the relation between the two worlds is complex and ambiguous, as is typical of fantasy literature. It is based on myth just as much as on accurate observation of reality, and it contains a good deal of wish-fulfillment.

Mowgli's peculiar upbringing is, of course, a widespread mythical motif. The parallel that comes immediately to mind is the story of Romulus and Remus, but similar tales can be found all over the world (see the B 535 section in Thompson's Motif-Index). But while in the classical myth the motif serves to underline the exceptional qualities of the hero (his extensive rapport with the forces of nature), here it is part of a pervasive dream of childhood innocence within a world whose order is both natural and rational. As has frequently been pointed out, Mowgli's jungle world incorporates the utopian dream of Eden, but we must not overlook the fact that this paradisical vision is precarious. It is threatened by man's encroachment from outside as well as by corruption from within.

What we have, then, is a political-utopian myth of a world in which the primitive laws of nature (eat and be eaten) are precariously reconciled with the complex artificiality of The Law (an elaborate code of civilized behavior). To make matters even more complex, this is overlaid by the motif of the passage from innocence to experience, which is essentially private in character. Seen from this angle, Mowgli is an Everyman (or rather Everybody), his story being the universal tragedy of growing up, of passing from the sheltered world of simplicity and innocence to the outside world of complexity and guilt.

There is no direct communication between humans and animals in "Rikki-Tikki-Tavi," but the story is hardly less fantastic because of this, since all animals are thoroughly humanized and individualized. The story is very simple in that there is not the slightest doubt as to who the hero is and who the villains are. Within the conventional moral framework of good and bad (derived, we may note in passing, from the humans' point of view), Rikki's deed is a personal triumph (as a mongoose, he is a natural enemy of the snakes) and at the same time an act of social significance. He is a hero because he is, like any knight, protector of the innocent and the weak (the child Teddy, Darzee the weaver bird). Essentially, this is a small-scale version of the dragonslayer myth, transposed into the animal kingdom and reduced in scale for the homely setting of an Anglo-Indian's bungalow backyard.

In contrast, the deed of Kotick, the White Seal, has a profound political significance. Kotick is the born leader whose outstanding qualities (stamina, will-power, charisma) enable him to guide his sluggish people to a Promised Land of security and plenty. This is an obvious (and, I should guess, deliberate) version of the biblical Exodus myth, which, we are reminded by Northrop Frye, is itself only a type of the apocalyptic Christian redemption myth (191). Unlike Christ, however, Kotick is not above bullying when it comes to persuading his obtuse people to accept new ideas. It is precisely through recognizing deep-structure similarities that the importance of such differences becomes manifest.

The transposition of these myths into a slightly humanized animal kingdom—in other words, the use of fantasy—enables Kipling to present them in a form that is comparatively little displaced and therefore fresh and emotionally satisfying, unencumbered by the complexities of real life. One might object to these stories because they celebrate rather a crude hero worship (with some concomitant simplified dichotomy of enlightened leader and stupid masses). On the other hand, it could be argued that they, after all, propagate social responsibility and give shape to dreams which are not only normal but probably necessary for the development of every child who is trying to define, not his position, but his goal in life.

IV

Despite the huge difference in length, Richard Adams' fantasy novel Watership Down is similar to Kipling's "The White Seal" in two important aspects: in the degree of humanization of its animal agents, and in the central motif of its action. It is a book about rabbits, and again they are presented faithfully in their natural habitat and with much of their natural behavior; but they are also endowed with speech, reason, and human emotions. Their story is another version of the Moses myth, the search for a Promised Land of plenty, security, and freedom.

Since that story is spread out over almost 500 pages, it is of course vastly more complex than Kipling's, which has only twenty. In this lapine Aeneid, the epic quality which is inherent in the Exodus theme, (suppressed in Kipling's shorter version), is given full range. Consequently, both the adventure element and the creation of a separate world outside our everyday experience are fully developed. Again, I can only hint at some aspects of the book which are particularly interesting in our context.

The myth of the Promised Land contains a strong element of wish-fulfillment, but it is not all irrational dream. Indeed, as soon as it is fleshed out in a concrete story, it touches some very real and practical questions, most significantly questions about the nature of good leadership and the organization of an ideal community. In Watership Down the two problems are shown to be closely connected, for it is the leader's personality that determines the character of the state he founds. As has been pointed out recently by Anne Swinfen, the young chief rabbit Hazel is presented as an ideal leader because of his "capacities for foresight and compassion" (39), to which we might add his common sense and unpretentiousness. Unlike Kotick, Hazel cannot—and need not—rely on his superior physical strength when it comes to persuading his people to follow him. Instead of bullying he uses arguments which are accepted because they are sensible. This is a thoroughly democratic leader, who is lucky enough to have a team of companions with complementary abilities (notably Bigwig the fighter and Fiver the seer) and wise enough to include them in his decision-making.

To underline the achievement of Hazel and his friends, Adams presents three alternative communities which are all deficient in one way or another. The first, Sandleford Warren from where the colonists originate, used to be sound and well-ordered but has now grown rigid and authoritarian. Strawberry's warren is, as Swinfen points out, a "community of lotus-eaters", seemingly a utopia but "built on a foundation of horror and sudden death" (223). While it exemplifies the result of placing luxury above security, the totalitarian police-state of Efrafa is shown as the outcome of excessive security measures which lead to the ossification of a power structure maintained for its own sake. The socio-political implications of the basic plot theme are taken seriously and treated with considerable circumspection and complexity.

Watership Down harks back to Kipling in yet another way. Incorporated in the main narrative is a series of short tales which the rabbits tell each other and which, taken together, form a kind of artificial serio-humorous mythology not quite unlike Kipling's in his Just So Stories. Within the context of the Book, these stories have a function analogous to myths and folktales in real-life primitive cultures, i.e. they help the rabbit people to define and maintain a sense of identity by providing a cosmogony and recounting the deeds of the lapine ancestor and trickster here Elahrairah. They are also used to boost morale before crises and to provide comic relief afterwards.

Although the style of presentation is straightforward and colloquial, the irony involved is no less complex than Kipling's. In some stories, like "The Story of the Blessing of El-ahrairah" or "The Story of Elahrairah and the Black Rabbit of Inle," we recognize well-known mythical motifs like the gift of certain attributes to the ancestor of an animal species, or the hero's descent to the underworld. Other stories we enjoy for the sheer inventiveness of the tricks the hero plays on his opponents. The fact that these myths are not real, but invented, and belong to totally fantastic, non-human beings, does not lessen our enjoyment nor our sense of their justness. They are, indeed, an integral part of the pervasive dream which lies at the core of the book: the dream of life in harmony with nature and within a community which provides a sense of security and identity.

It is a dream that we may know to be futile yet cannot—and perhaps should not—stop dreaming, because it helps to focus our consciousness on what we really want. There are a great many things that these animal stories of Kipling's and Adams's teach, albeit in an unobtrusive way: that every action has consequences; that true communication involves an acceptance of common nature, and respect for the otherness of one's partner; that being a hero means, first and foremost, serving the community selflessly; that true leadership requires qualities like humility, compassion, and self-denial. At the basis of our enjoyment of animal stories founded in myth, however, lies our deep if rarely conscious desire—whether in child or in adult—for a world which is intelligible because in it humans and animals are subject to the same simple order, so that there is no real distinction between our all-too-human cousins and our all-toobeastly selves.

References

Adams, Richard. Watership Down. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977.

Avery, Gillian. "The Children's Writer." Rudyard Kipling: The Man, His Work and His World. Ed. John Cross. London: Weidenfeld, 1972. 113-118.

Carrington, Charles. Rudyard Kipling: His Life and Work. London: Macmillan, 1955.

Chesterton, Gilbert Keith. Rev. of Just So Stories. Bookman Nov. 1902: 57-58. Rpr. in Kipling: The Critical Heritage. Ed. Roger Lancelyn Green. London: Routledge, 1971: 273-275.

Eliade, Mircea. Myths, Dreams, and Mysteries. London: Fontana, 1968.

Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1973.

Green, Roger Lancelyn. Kipling and the Children. London: Elek, 1965.

Haas, Gerhard. "Das Tierbuch." Kinderund Jugendliteratur. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1974.

Kipling, Rudyard. Just So Stories for Little Children. London: Macmillan, 1955.

——. The Jungle Book. London: Macmillan, 1952.

Meyer, Rosalind. "But Is It Art? An Appreciation of Just So Stories." Kipling Journal Dec. 1984: 10-33.

Stewart, J. I. M. Rudyard Kipling. London: Gollancz, 1966.

Swinfen, Ann. In Defence of Fantasy. London: Routledge, 1984.

Thompson, Stith. The Folktale. New York: Rinehart, 1946.

——. Motif-Index of Folk-Literature. Rev. and enlarged ed. 6 vols. Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1955. Vol. 1.

John Pennington (essay date 1993)

SOURCE: Pennington, John. "Shamanistic Mythmaking: From Civilization to Wilderness in Watership Down." Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 6, no. 1 (1993): 34-50.

[In the following essay, Pennington studies the critical reception of Watership Down and the novel's attempts to fashion a mythological bridge between the reader and the natural world.]

Richard Adams' Watership Down is a "hesitant" classic of fantasy literature. Readers love the book (it has sold in the millions and continues to sell well), and though critics recognize the primal aspects of the work, many seem reluctant to take it too seriously or fault it for its obvious conservative proselytizing that upholds traditional middle-class values. David Pringle, in Modern Fantasy: The Hundred Best Novels (1988), a popular survey of the "best" in modern fantasy literature, includes Watership Down in his list, but he feels the need to apologize for it: "It is easy to mock Watership Down for being an over-inflated children's novel…. Nevertheless it is a novel which has pleased millions of readers, and it is not difficult to see why. It is a very accomplished quest narrative (and war story), combined with a moving tract on behalf of nature conservation" (147). Watership Down seems reduced to a simple, didactic narrative.

More rigorous critics echo Pringle's assessment. Rosemary Jackson in Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion (1981) relegates Adams "to that realm of fantasy which is more properly defined as faery, or romance literature" (9) and places him in such company as Beatrix Potter, A. A. Milne, Walter de la Mare, and J. R. R. Tolkien for their "tradition of liberal humanism [which] spreads outwards, covering with its moral, social, and linguistic orthodoxies a world of bears, foxes, wolves, rabbits, ducks, hens, and hobbits" (155). Though Jackson does not directly state that these writers and their brand of fantasy are "inferior," she implies as much. In Fantasy and Mimesis (1984) Kathryn Hume categorizes Watership Down as an unsuccessful "character-based fantasy" which

starts with an attempt to enter rabbits' minds, but quickly lets the lapine vocabulary—owsla, silflay, hraka—substitute for real strangeness, while the plot degenerates into the adventures of animals with human brains…. The novelty and strange ness which entering a rabbit's mind should entail quickly disappears. The fantasy of this adventure is literally only skin deep; the minds and characters of these furry humans are but little touched by newness or originality.

(161-2)

Christopher Pawling, in the most sophisticated study of Watership Down to date, analyzes the novel from a Marxist perspective, finding it a "vein of nostalgia for 'traditional' patterns of life which has played an important part in the constitution of English culture over the last decade, and which shows no signs of disappearing in the near future" (233). Pawling contends that Watership Down reworks the traditions of pastoral war narrative and archetypal quest narrative to become "more than just a reworking of timeless myth"; it is, in fact, a novel that is "addressing a specific cultural milieu at a specific moment in time" (230). Thus, Pawling, influenced by the theories of Lucien Goldmann, Pierre Macherey, and Frederic Jameson, finds Watership Down a perplexing work that balances on paradox: 1) it mirrors Adams' conservative political and moral values; 2) it celebrates social hierarchies and elitism; and 3) it appeals to the 1960s student egalitarian movement (215). Pawling's sensitive and insightful reading, however, makes Watership Down into a political and moral manifesto, and there is implicit in Pawling's commentary a negative view towards Adams' literary work, as if Adams is some type of best-selling, conservative dinosaur.

So we are left with a popular classic which has charmed millions of readers—child and adult. But we are also left with a narrative that perplexes or irritates critics. Watership Down 's hesitant positioning in the critical canon of fantasy literature classics may explain the dearth of critical scholarship on it. In a sense, Watership Down has been retired from critical inquiry; it is much read but little discussed. Yet Adams is there, lurking in the field, his rabbit book an anomaly—a lucky four-leaf clover for a first-time writer. Though I may be overstating the case a bit, I do contend that critics have a difficult time dealing with a book which has sold millions but which hasn't the density of other high fantasies, (for example, The Lord of the Rings) or the lightness of a children's fantasy (for example, The Chronicles of Narnia, Thurber's The Thirteen Clocks, or The White Deer).

Alison Lurie in Don't Tell the Grown-ups: Subversive Children's Literature (1990) does not apologize for Watership Down. Like Jackson, she links Adams with Potter and Milne and contends that these authors portray "A society of actual or imaginary animals as an ironic or ideal version of reality" (xii), but unlike Jackson, she finds Watership Down 's narrative simplicity a strength. In fact, she argues that the fantasy "was attractive also because it put forward political ideas and celebrated qualities many serious novelists were then afraid or embarrassed to write about" (169). She finds the novel refreshing because the characters have "honor and courage and dignity," they "would risk their lives for others," and their "love for their families and friends and community was enduring and effective—even if they looked like Flopsy, Mopsy, and Benjamin Bunny" (170). Lurie argues that Adams published the novel during a radical time of uncertainty and change; his agenda included "a conservative ecological message" and "political fable" warning against "laid-back laissez-faire hedonism" and "planned-economy authoritarianism" (170). She targets the essential qualities of Adams's narrative: social (political) concerns wrapped in a fantasy package (myth). Thus we should consider Watership Down a deceptively simply narrative much as the narratives of Robert Frost's poems. I argue that in Adams's choice of literary mode—the fantasy-mythic mode—we can see the sophistication of Watership Down, for Adams is able to combine oldfashioned values of heroism and "correct" behavior and weave these into a mythic subtext that ironically transcends the commonplace thematic concerns. Watership Down, a novel about rabbits, universalizes our basic human desires.

In Dreamtime: Concerning the Boundary between Wilderness and Civilization (1985), Peter Duerr argues that "civilization, becoming increasingly complex, lost the knowledge of these events [cultic transcendence]. It encountered the things of the other by inhibiting, repressing and later by 'spiritualizing' and 'subjectivizing' them" (45). As Duerr so aptly states, "At times we will have to howl with wolves, and that means that we will have to forget some things that are familiar, especially those things that prevent us from understanding strange contexts" (129). To Duerr, "we ourselves should turn wild so as not to surrender to our own wildness, but rather to acquire in that way a consciousness of ourselves as tamed, cultural beings' (125). Fantasy literature, we can argue, is a mode that allows for this transcendent escape, this crossing over from civilization to wilderness; thus, the writing of fantasy can be construed as a deliberate and social—and oftentimes subversive—act. Fantasy has shamanic powers to lure readers across such boundaries. Adams in Watership Down, then, may be crossing such a boundary, returning the reader to the mythic while acknowledging that this mythic realm has been lost in our technological age. Watership Down may be construed as a novel in search of a contemporary myth, a novel in search of meaning; its mythic subtext—the interpolated rabbit myths and Fiver's shamanistic visions—looks forward to a mythic realm that has been lost to the modern world. In spite of its seemingly conservative ideology, Watership Down is a radical text: Adams attempts the remythologizing of the postmodern world. As shaman, Adams howls with the wolves—nay, screams with rabbits.

Edgar Chapman has identified the shaman's role in Watership Down : Fiver, who has second sight, plays the role of the communal shaman; Chapman concludes that "thus a culture led by an imaginative leader who listens to his shaman, and sustained by a vigorous myth is more likely to survive, Adams implies, than a culture of intellectual decadence and hopeless resignation to fate …" (7). Chapman relies on Mircea Eliade's definition of a shaman—"primitive religious leader and mystic who has mastered a 'technique of ecstasy'" (8). But Chapman is reluctant to take the shamanic connection further. What, however, of Adams the writer as a contemporary shaman? And what of the reader who is able to cross that boundary to the mythic? Eliade writes, "The shamanistic experience is equivalent to a restoration of that primordial time[,] and the shaman figures as a privileged being who individually returns to the fortunate condition of humanity at the dawn of time" (144). "Historical time is abolished and the mythical time regained" (103) claims Eliade about the shaman's journey, and the shaman's "ecstasy can be regarded as a recovery of the human condition before the'fall'; in other words, it reproduces a'primordial situation' accessible to the rest of mankind only through death …" (493).

In Watership Down, Adams achieves what Eliade suggests is the goal of the shamanistic enterprise: to re-establish "the situation that existed in illo tempore, in mythical time, when the divorce between man and the animal world had not yet occurred" (Eliade, 94). Adams as shaman returns the reader to a mythical time where rabbit and reader are wedded, while simultaneously contrasting this to the real time of the narrative (where rabbit and human are divorced). Part of the appeal of Watership Down is precisely that which makes it difficult to articulate: the novel touches us in the deep heart's core. The novel is shaman, bringing a timeless, mythic order to our chaotic world by crossing that boundary from civilization to wilderness.

An apt symbol for this tension between civilization and wilderness is found at the beginning of the novel. Fiver has a vision that "some terrible thing … [is] coming closer and closer … to the field! It's covered with blood!" (15). Fiver's second sight anticipates the destruction of the warren which happens as a result of society's encroachment, symbolized by "the sharp, hard letter" of the notice board:

This Ideally Situated Estate, Comprising Six Acres of Excellent Building Land, is to be Developed with High Class Modern Residences by Sutch and Martin, Limited, of Newbury, Berks

(16)

This sign is in a sense ironic: it mirrors Saussure's distinction that a sign is comprised of as signified/signifier, that there is an arbitrary or artificial relationship between the signifier and the signified. The rabbits, of course, cannot read language (and humans cannot understand lapine language) and thus the sign has no clear signified—the rabbits simply do not know what it means. The reader, however, understands the significance of this sign: for humans the sign represents progress, technological development, the success of the capitalistic system; for the rabbits the sign can only mean destruction. We realize as readers that our interpretation hovers somewhere between these two extremes; we are caught in the gap between signifier and signified. As Fiver experiences in this vision, "But when I looked down, I saw the board was all made of bones and wire; and I screamed …" (17). Thus the notice board becomes the sign or symbol for this division between wilderness and civilization and for the difficulty of interpretation. Fiver's shamanistic second sight is also symbolic for the difficulty of interpreting texts: as rabbits decipher the sign, they must decipher Fiver's vision; as readers we must be wary of the sliding meaning of the notice board. The notice board, then, creates a narrative gap of interpretation that reflects the gap between the natural and the technological world, between the mythic and the real.

This discrepancy between signifier and signified is integral to the meaning of Watership Down. Adams's story, the myth that is created, is an attempt to bridge the gap between the signifier and the signified; Adams creates myth to make meaning. In "The Shrinking of the Epic Hero," Kenneth Kitchell argues that in Watership Down Adams intends to make the epic have meaning for the modern world. He writes, "In so doing, he is grappling with a major need of the modern world, the ever present need for epic heroes and literature and the seeming impossibility of either. The problem lies simply with the fact that a traditional heroic age is no longer possible" (23). We can extend Kitchell's insightful thesis to Adams's notion of myth, for myth is meaning, similar to the shaman who crosses from the physical to the metaphysical plane to find meaning (or a cure) for an ailing culture. Watership Down becomes Adams's attempt to bring meaning through myth to the technological world.

William Doty contends "that myths provide essential frameworks for the language of society" and "provide systems or patterns for signifying meaning, especially meanings of the past …" (31). "In supplying the root metaphors, the ruling images, of a society," posits Doty, "mythological language provides a coding mechanism by means of which the apparent randomness of the cosmos is stabilized" (21). Thus myth embodies stability during instability and "may be emphasized strongly during periods when fragmentation or attenuation threaten social structures" (26). The shaman, then, can become the stabilizing agent, as seen by Fiver's ability to warn the warren of impending danger. As writer, too, Adams is shaman, providing strategies for living in a chaotic world. Eliade claims of the shaman, "It is consoling and comforting to know that a member of the community is able to see what is hidden and invisible to the rest and to bring back direct and reliable information from the supernatural worlds" (509).

But as we have seen, the interpretation of signs can be confusing and contradictory; thus, myth provides a strategy for interpreting and making sense of the world. The interpolated stories in Watership Down create the mythic realm of El-ahrairah (the trickster rabbit folk hero), Lord Frith (a type of rabbit sungod), Prince Rainbow (Lord Frith's helper), and the Black Rabbit of Inlé (the rabbit-god of death). Each story in the rabbit world needs interpretation, and the rabbits use these stories—and their myths—to provide stability and hope in their quest for a new beginning. They interpret their myth, and they create new ones as their struggle for survival becomes myth. In turn, Watership Down provides readers with a myth they can use to structure their armchair world.

An excellent study which suggests the magnitude of myth for the modern world is Eric Gould's Mythical Intentions in Modern Literature (1981). Gould's thesis positions myth in the modern—and postmodern—world. "The potentiality of myth must lie in the potentiality of language" (30) argues Gould, and since myth is attached to language, that slippery thing, myth has a double function: 1) to capture the play of signs, and 2) to allow for "the possibility of meaning, through our involvement in attempting to understand such play" (32). Consequently, "there can be no myth without an "ontological gap between event and meaning. A myth intends to be an adequate symbolic representation by closing that gap …" (6). In fact, argues Gould, "Myth is … if nothing else, the history of our inability to authenticate our knowledge of Being, and yet it is at the same time a history of our attempts to understand that inability" (10). Myth becomes, then, our desire for unity and meaning, and if the shaman is one who can howl with the wolves and return to society, myth (and fantasy as myth) can act as shaman and bridge the gap between our desire for meaning in the world and the impossibility of our ever finding meaning. Fantasy and myth work on paradox, are oxymoronic. As Gould claims, "Myth operates dialectically because it manages to account for and temporarily fill that gap where there is no end to the give and take between events and their transformations into meaning" (108-9). Watership Down can be seen as that bridge, as that intuitive ontological leap to meaning that temporarily fills in the gap with meaning. The interpolated myths in the story and the overall myth of Watership Down, consequently, provide needed meaning to a world that has lost its mythicity.

If Watership Down is Adams' gift of myth to our modern world, then Lord Frith, El-ahrairah, Rabscuttle, and the Black Rabbit of Inlé are the myths that bring hope to the rabbits. Woven throughout the novel are various interpolated stories that become strategies of living for Hazel and his questing warren. These stories as a whole create the mythic backdrop for the lapine culture: Adams creates the myth of the beginning (cosmology), myths of everyday survival, and the myth of death and escape (eschatology). "The story of the blessing of El-ahrairah" is an ironic blessing and cosmologic myth that justifies the ways of Lord Frith to the rabbits. In this myth the rabbits can close the ontological gap between their precarious positioning in the natural world—the "Prince with a Thousand Enemies" (37)—and their blessing of survival.

Adams writes that "to rabbits, everything unknown is dangerous" (31); thus, the blessing that makes Lord Frith known, a god similar to the Christian god of Genesis. Every-rabbit and Lord Frith have a personal relationship, for El-ahrairah as shaman is the vehicle for the communication between the commonplace world and the spiritual world. The rabbits' myth is also their religion. Lord Frith's commandment—"Be cunning and full of tricks and your people shall never be destroyed" (37)—both provides hope for the rabbits and warns them that their existence will be fraught with trouble and pain. As Joseph Campbell explains of the cosmogonic cycle:

[It] is to be understood as the passage of universal consciousness from the deep sleep zone of the unmanifest, through dream, to the full day of waking; then back again through dream to the timeless dark … in the abyss of sleep the energies are refreshed, in the work of the day they are exhausted; the life of the universe runs down and must be renewed.

(266)

Myth is religion and dream.

"The Blessing of El-ahrairah," in a sense, keeps renewing the rabbits, keeps reminding them of their place in the cosmos, keeps the communication open from the physical to the spiritual. The narrator explains the importance of such myths to the rabbits: "Pipkin forgot his weariness and danger and remembered instead the great indestructibility of the rabbits. Each one of them saw himself as El-ahrairah, who could be impudent to Frith and get away with it" (37). This cosmogony myth makes every rabbit a shaman in a sense, for each story contains mythic time, to which every rabbit is able to transcend. Elidae writes, "it is always in dream that historical time is abolished and the mythical time regained—which allows the future shaman to witness the beginnings of the world and hence to become contemporary not only with the cosmogony but with the primordial mythical revelations" (103).

Gould argues that "Myth is mythic as a symbolic order of our fear of Nothing at all. A myth is consciously produced as a kind of dialectic between appropriateness of language and the intentions a group has to relieve this ontological terror that finds form most clearly in the inadequacies of language itself" (109). Myth ironically uses language to escape language. We have seen how "The Blessing of Elahrairah" reduces this ontological terror by bridging the actual with the mythic; we can also see in the novel the ontological terror that permeates a culture that does not have myth. Cowslip's warren is unnatural: rabbits laugh, carry food like cats and dogs, and have no belief in El-ahrairah—all had the same rich, opulent smell as Cowslip" (80). Cowslip's warren is like the notice board, a signifier with a terrified signified. Their warren is made of the bricks of men, and they have instead of an oral tradition of storytelling a more artificial and advanced (?) form of art: they are not primitives but civilized artisans. Their Shape of Laburnum is "Poison Tree"; they coldly capture the essence of the myth of El-ahrairah on the brick wall. As Strawberry explains, "Haven't you seen one before? The stones make the shape of Elahrairah on the wall. Stealing the King's lettuce. You know?" (85). But Hazel's warren does not know, for they have a mythic belief in the natural; they believe in Lord Frith and in El-ahrairah as shaman between the physical and spiritual worlds. It is highly symbolic that Fiver—the warren's shaman—has a vision similar to the one earlier about the notice board. In his vision he interprets their art. "I know there's something unnatural and evil twisted all round this place…. The roof of that hall is made of bones" (96). Cowslip's warren has crossed the boundary, but they have moved from wilderness to civilization, and as a result they exist in a horrible gap, believing nothing.

Adams nicely captures this spiritual wasteland by balancing Dandelion's story—"The Story of the King's Lettuce" (inspiration of the drawing on the warren's wall)—with the poem Silverweed recites. Dandelion's story is inspired by the cosmogony myth which places El-ahrairah as shamanic hero, who through trickery and cunning can survive and flourish in Lord Frith's cosmos. This story takes place in "a time when El-ahrairah and his followers lost all their luck" (100), but El-ahrairah "saves" them and renews them. The myth, of course, is another tonic of renewal for Hazel's warren, and it bridges the gap between actuality and mythicity. They find meaning in myth: "And from that day to this, no power on earth can keep a rabbit out of a vegetable garden, for Elahrairah prompts them with a thousand tricks, the best in the world" (107).

But for Cowslip and his warren, the story is just that, an amusing story with little meaning or purpose. Cowslip says, "I always think these traditional stories retain a lot of charm … especially when they're told in the real, old-fashioned spirit" (108). Strawberry concurs, "Conviction, that's what it needs. You really have to believe in El-ahrairah and Prince Rainbow, don't you? Then all the rest follows" (108). Cowslip's warren has no myth, no belief in myth, but we realize that they have a great need for myth. They live in an ontological void of Nothingness: "Our stories and poems are mostly about our lives here. Of course, that shape of Laburnum that you saw—that's old-fashioned now. El-ahrairah doesn't really mean much to us. Not that your friend's story wasn't very charming" (108). It's art for art's sake in this warren, and one can imagine Silverweed writing that "all art is quite useless" in his Preface to The Picture of Dorian Rabbit. It is also to see in this exchange Adams' condemnation of modern and postmodern literature which often flaunt their own artifice in sterile experimentation because truth and meaning have little relevance.

In contrast to Dandelion's simple, uplifting moral tale, Silverweed's poem is highly sterile, its message one of passive acceptance, of resignation. The poem, in fact, mirrors their existence in the warren. Cowslip's dictum—"Rabbits need dignity and, above all, the will to accept their fate" (108)—is manifested in this poem and is contrary to Dandelion's story of trickery and survival. Art and literature in Cowslip's warren are mere posturing; they provide no strategy for living. That Fiver is horrified by the poem is significant for as shaman he can experience the utter desolation of such a world view: "Fiver, as he listened, had shown a mixture of intense absorption and incredulous horror. At one and the same time he seemed to accept every word and yet to be stricken with fear" (110).

After Bigwig's near death via the snare, Fiver explains what has happened to Cowslip's warren:

They forgot El-ahrairah, for what use had they for tricks and cunning, living in the enemy's warren and paying his price? They found out other marvelous arts to take the place of tricks and old stories. They danced in ceremonious greeting. They sang songs like the birds and made Shapes on the walls; and though these could help them not at all, yet they passed the time and enabled them to tell themselves that they were splendid fellows, the very flower of Rabbitry, cleverer than magpies.

(123)

"To the extent that myths provide essential frameworks for the language of society," contends Doty, "they provide systems or patterns for signifying meaning, especially meanings of the past …" (31). Hazel's warren has that myth, will have cosmic stability; Cowslip's warren has no myth, has no spiritual future.

Most of the interpolated stories in Watership Down concern themselves with everyday rabbit survival. We are given stories of practicality. El-ahrairah's encounter with the pike, "The Story of the King's Lettuce," "The Story of the Trial of El-ahrairah," and "The Story of Rowsby Woof and the Fairy Wogdog" are all designed primarily as strategies for living. Each myth finds El-ahrairah and Rabscuttle using trickery for survival; each myth is a response to the cosmogony myth that lies at the heart of Hazel's warren.

"The Story of the Trial of El-ahrairah" is a tale of treachery and comeuppance. Prince Rainbow keeps his eye on El-ahrairah so he will not trick others and plants the spy-rabbit Hufsa into the warren. He then tests the hero rabbit by prohibiting him from stealing the carrots. Of course, El-ahrairah and Rabscuttle steal the carrots, "prove" that Hufsa is an informer and liar, and challenge Lord Frith once again. The story of rabbit espionage foreshadows the trouble they will encounter with General Woundwort. Myth once again becomes a strategy for survival by fusing past mythicity with present and future action.

"The Story of Rowsby Woof and the Fairy Wogdog" is a comic tale told during "the dogs days" (395)—pun surely intended—of summer and concerns Elahrairah's successful attempt to steal some winter vegetables. They trick the guard dog, Rowsby Woof, by playing on his belief in the Fairy Wogdog (Adams suggests that every animal has its own mythic belief). And though El-ahrairah and Rabscuttle have hoodwinked dumb Rowsby Woof, Rowsby's belief in the supernatural fairy and his belief that he has saved his master from sickness and certain death give the dog something to remember and to guide his life: "For the rest of his life Rowsby Woof never forgot the night when he had waited for the great dog Queen. True, it was a disappointment, but this, he felt, was a small matter, compared with the recollection of his own noble conduct and of how he had saved both his master and the good Fairy Wogdog from the wicked rat spirit" (408). The narrator writes that "collectively, rabbits rest secure from Frith's promise to Elahrairah," and they find in their stories" as with primitive humans, the very strength and vividness of their sympathy [which] brought with it a true release" (167).

The final type of myth Adams employs in Watership Down can be labeled eschatological. In "The Story of El-ahrairah and the Black Rabbit of Inlé" Elahrairah seeks out the Black Rabbit—signifier for "fear and everlasting darkness" (274)—to "offer him his own life in return for the safety of his people" (275). This story is about the shaman's initiation into death. Eliade's threefold shamanic journey ("suffering, death, resurrection" [33] which entails dismemberment of the body) can be seen in this myth. By actively pursuing the Black Rabbit, El-ahrairah uses his shamanism; he is able to converse with the mythic realm of death; his return to the warren symbolizes their survival and renewal (he is even given new whiskers, ears, and tail by Lord Frith). El-ahrairah closes the gap between the known and the unknown, between the fear and the desire of death (eros and thanatos). As myth bridges the gap from known to unknown, so does El-ahrairah as rabbit hero: "When the snare is set in the gap, the Black Rabbit knows where the peg is driven; and when the weasel dances, the Black Rabbit is not far off" (274). The shaman El-ahrairah traverses the entire cosmic plane—sky, earth, and underworld (Eliade, 259)—and defends "the psychic integrity of the community [that] depends above all on this: men are sure that one of them is able to help them in critical circumstances produced by the inhabitants of the invisible world" (Eliade, 509). In this myth, then, language attempts to reduce the gap that may bring on the ontological horror of death and nothingness. As Eliade writes, the shaman brings "the knowledge of death" to the community and by doing so provides a "structure" that "becomes familiar and acceptable" (509-10). Death is personified in the Black Rabbit, and that rabbit is inserted into myth with El-ahrairah. Hazel's warren, then, inserts itself into that myth. "Little by little the world of the dead becomes knowable, and death itself is evaluated primarily as a rite of passage to a spiritual mode of being" (Eliade, 510).

In myth as in the shaman's journey, argues Eliade, "everything seems possible" (511). El-ahrairah learns "that with creatures one loves, suffering is not the only thing for which one may pity them. A rabbit who does not know when a gift has made him safe is poorer than a slug, even though he may think otherwise himself" (285). Adams grafts a simple moral to El-ahrairah's adventures, but the moral is a practical, commonsensical lesson for survival.

The ending of Watership Down fuses the interpolated myths with the rabbits' real existence: Hazel's death is a transcendence into the spiritual realm, and the warren's quest to Watership Down is now such stuff that dreams are made of. The ending, then, is both cosmogony and eschatology, a complete mythic cycle. Earlier, Fiver describes that other world of death:

Well, there's another place—another country, isn't there? We go there when we sleep; at other times, too; and when we die. El-ahrairah comes and goes between the two as he wants, I suppose, but I could never quite make that out, from the tales. Some rabbits will tell you it's all easy there, compared with the waking dangers that they understand. But I think, that only shows they don't know much about it. It's a wild place, and very unsafe. And where are we really—there or here?

(253)

Fiver is talking about death, but he is also talking about something else. Fiver knows no boundaries, for he has second sight which makes him akin to a shaman. Thus, he exists in both worlds, caught in that ontological gap, yet not quite understanding what that other world will bring. But for the rest of the rabbits, the other world—the spiritual world—is hope for an afterlife that becomes a new beginning. In one of the most poignant endings in all fantasy literature, we see Hazel transcend the physical to the spiritual; we see his insertion into a new world and a new beginning, into the cosmologic myth. Adams writes, "He had been dreaming in a confused way—something about rain and elder bloom—when he awoke to realize that there was a rabbit lying quietly beside him—no doubt some buck who had come to ask his advice" (474). The rabbit is not of Hazel's world, however, but from the mythic world that guides and nourishes Hazel's warren. Death as renewal is captured nicely when Adams explains:

It seemed to Hazel that he would not be needing his body any more, so he left it lying on the edge of the ditch, but stopped for a moment to watch his rabbits and to try to get used to the extraordinary feeling that strength and speed were flowing inexhaustibly out of him into their sleek young bodies and healthy senses.

(475)

Hazel follows the rabbit of death who promises him, in a scene similar to El-ahrairah's blessing by Lord Frith, "You needn't worry about them. They'll be all right—and thousands like them. If you'll come along, I'll show you what I mean" (475). Hazel becomes mythologized, moving to the realm that Eliade describes as "the fortunate condition of humanity at the dawn of time" (144). Hazel's ecstasy at leaving his body for pure soul is, according to Eliade, "shamanic ecstasy [and] can be regarded as a recovery of the human condition before the 'fall'; in other words, it reproduces a primordial 'situation' accessible to the rest of mankind only through death" (493). Once again, the shamanic experience bridges the gap between myth and meaning in the modern world.

Shortly before dying, Hazel is listening to a story about the exploits of El-ahrairah and his defeat of a warren under an evil spell. El-ahrairah is Hazel, Hazel now a part of the rabbits' myth. "'I seemed to know this story,' whispered Hazel, 'but I can't remember where I've heard it'" (471). Hazel has not heard this tale before because he has lived it; real action is appropriated into myth, into language. As Gould suggests, "Since myth is language, it is a response to the conditions of the language itself" (39). "Language embodies the semiotic gap," continues Gould, "which determines all interpolations, and myth is that function of language which intentionally tries to close that gap" (42). Hazel's story put into language becomes myth, which is a way for the rabbits to interpret their world and existence. Even General Woundwort becomes mythic, another strategy for living. "And mother rabbits would tell their kittens that if they did not do as they were told, the General would get them—the General who was first cousin to the Black Rabbit himself" (474).

Thus we see in Watership Down the importance of myth to the modern world: Fiver as shaman, Hazel as shaman, Adams as shaman cross the boundary into myth. Our civilized world is transformed into the wilderness of myth. The reader finally becomes the ultimate shaman, able now to communicate with myth. Kenneth Burke argues that literature lends itself to sociological criticism which provides the reader with "the strategic naming of a situation" (515) or "strategies of strategies"—literature provides us with the "equipment for living" (516). We have seen how Adams in his choice of fantasy mode provides a mythic alternative to our mundane existence. Christopher Pawling assesses Watership Down as a reflection of Adams's conservative social and political philosophies which "is also a didactic tale in which the author intervenes to shape consciousness" (215); thus the novel "is more than just a reworking of timeless myth" (230). Yet he cannot quite account for the novel's continuing popularity, especially for those readers who would—and who should—react negatively to Adams's thematic agenda. Pawling writes:

To account for the production of Adams's conservative fantasy in terms of the "collective consciousness" of the traditional middle class is one thing; to explain the appeal of that text to those who did not necessarily share Adams' world-view is quite another…. [This] indicates that Ad ams' novel was open to a number of different readings which reflected aesthetic/ideological discourses existing independently of the text.

(232)

He concludes by quoting Tony Bennett, who finds that a literary text reenters history and is therefore historically redetermined during its reception, "figuring not as the source of an effect," but as a "site upon which plural and even contradictory effects may be produced during the course of its history as a received text" (232).

Another way to describe this phenomenon is to see myth, as Gould suggests, as a means of appropriating language to bridge the ontological gap between the signifier and the signified which creates meaning. Gould argues, "Its [myth's] meaning is perpetually open and universal only because once the absence of a final meaning is recognized, the gap itself demands interpretations which, in turn, must go on and on, for language is nothing if it is not a system of open meaning" (6). Thus the reader must complete the text, must insert himself or herself into the text to complete meaning. The reader as shaman enters another world and returns to the real with some equipment for living. Watership Down as myth creates a "marvelously suggestive potential space we can occupy in the world, the successful interrelationships of our inside and the world's outside; a careful unveiling of possible meaning in story-telling is itself natural and part of the history of discourse" (Gould, 127).

Myth works because of the reader's response to the text and within the text: "it is the combined event of reader-in-text, or text-in-reader which defines mythicity, and not the text alone" (Gould, 130). Seen in this light, Watership Down is a much more sophisticated narrative that confounds intellectual rigor because, like the rabbits in the novel, it continually escapes such analysis, tempting us to follow further into the myth for meaning; we find meaning in the novel according to our desire and needs. If this is true, we can anticipate that Watership Down will continue to speak to readers on various levels, with various meanings and interpretations. Watership Down is no longer a novel by Richard Adams; it has crossed that border to mythicity and is now under universal domain. Adams has created in Watership Down a myth for the modern, technological world, and he has in fact remythologized our world. The author, reader, and character as shamans have the ability to transcend to the universal and tap the primal desires of the spiritual wilderness so essential for survival in a disquieting world. When we enter Watership Down, we cross the boundary from civilization to wilderness and enter into time universal. We slip with Hazel "down through the wood, where the first primroses were beginning to bloom" (Adams, 475), into myth. We do indeed finally howl with the wolves—nay rabbits.

References

Adams, Richard. Watership Down. NY: Avon, 1975.

Burke, Kenneth. "Literature as Equipment for Living." The Critical Tradition. Ed. David H. Richter. NY: St. Martin's P, 1989; 512-7.

Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1973.

Chapman, Edgar L. "The Shaman as Hero and Spiritual Leader: Richard Adams' Mythmaking in Watership Down and Shardik." Mythlore 5 (August 1978): 7-11.

Doty, William G. Mythography: The Study of Myths and Rituals. Birmingham: U of Alabama P, 1986.

Duerr, Peter. Dreamtime: Concerning the Boundary between Wilderness and Civilization. Tran. Felicitas Goodman. NY: Basil Blackwell, 1987.

Eliade, Mircea. Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy. Tran. Willard R. Trask. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1974.

Gould, Eric. Mythical Intentions in Modern Literature. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1981.

Hume, Kathryn. Fantasy and Mimesis: Responses to Reality in Western Literature. NY: Methuen, 1984.

Jackson, Rosemary. Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion. NY: Methuen, 1981.

Kitchell, Kenneth F., Jr. "The Shrinking of the Epic Hero: From Homer to Richard Adams' Watership Down." Classical and Modern Literature: A Quarterly 7.1 (Fall 1986): 13-30.

Lurie, Alison. Don't Tell the Grown-ups: Subversive Children's Literature. Boston: Little, Brown, 1990.

Pawling, Christopher. "Watership Down: Rolling Back the 1960s." Popular Fiction and Social Change. Ed. Christopher Pawling. NY: St. Martin's, 1984.

Pringle, David. Modern Fantasy: The Hundred Best Novels. NY: Peter Bedrick, 1989.

Marc D. Baldwin (essay date 1994)

SOURCE: Baldwin, Marc D. "The Birth of Self and Society: The Language of the Unconscious in Richard Adams's Watership Down." International Fiction Review 21, nos. 1-2 (1994): 39-43.

[In the following essay, Baldwin depicts Watership Down as a psychic journey from repression to freedom and self-fulfillment.]

In Richard Adams's Watership Down, ¹ a "family" of rabbits, suddenly and traumatically displaced from their homes by the development of the land, must search the surrounding countryside for a new "warren." In order to survive their democratic pilgrimage from innocence to experience, their mythic search for a brave new world, their initiation into humanhood, so to speak, the rabbits have to learn the signs and signifiers of humanity's world, the discourse of humanity's dealings. As a dynamic organism, the little band of rabbits grows in size and savvy, ultimately surviving through a combination of their innate instincts and the emerging self-knowledge derived from their anthropomorphic authorization. Adams's rabbits symbolize the individuation of the self as it attains actualization through language.

This thrilling adventure story of rabbits fighting for their survival corresponds to the dual quest of conscious beings for social and psychic identity within the cosmological scheme of things. During a seemingly peaceful late afternoon silflay (feeding), a little psychic rabbit named Fiver, upon seeing a sign that a real estate developer posted in the field, envisions the ground soaked with blood and warns Hazel, his older and larger friend, that imminent doom approaches. Although the signpost of man and its attendant horrific visions for Fiver prompt their flight, all those who leave the Sandleford warren are displeased and displaced and ready to leave regardless. A totalitarian state, Sandleford imposes its order and meaning upon everyone there. While it may have been designed to protect them from the dangers of man and elil (predators), the cloistered warren denies them freedom, free will, and the opportunity for self-fulfillment and self-consciousness. Their individuality is compacted in conformity. The only outlet for their repressed desires is Fiver, the voice of the unconscious. From the moment of Fiver's premonition, their innocence is permanently and irrevocably shattered. As in Yeats's "Second Coming," Fiver predicts that "Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, / The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere / The ceremony of innocence is drowned."

Fiver signifies the id, the source of intuitive direction and psychic energy, Hazel the ego, and their union the symbolic representation of the emerging consciousness both of the individual and an organically natural, yet democratically free society. When Fiver tells him of the impending approach of man, Hazel overrules his own stubborn voice of reason, and listens to and believes his unconscious; nonetheless, his rational, egotistical Chief Rabbit has no faith in Fiver, in the unconscious, and perfunctorily dismisses them and their apocalyptic vision. They are not without support, however, for the massive and strong Bigwig completes this psychic triad as the superego, their conscience, enforcer, and externalizer of standards and attitudes.

"The Owsla's privileges didn't mean all that much to me. Lettuce-stealing isn't my idea of a jolly life," says Bigwig (23). The true Emersonian transcendentalist, Bigwig does not capitulate to badges and dead institutions, instead adhering to the principle of self-reliance, the view that "a strong rabbit could always do just as well by leaving the warren" (23). One's conscience, it would appear, must be heard and heeded. Nonetheless, while all individuals in the maturation process must recognize and learn to assimilate their conscience with their developing ego, most experience an extended period of adjustment to their superego. Hazel is not initially receptive to the emergence of his conscience in the person of Bigwig. "It crossed his mind that although Bigwig would certainly be a useful rabbit in a tight corner, he would also be a difficult one to get on with. He certainly would not want to do what he was told—or even asked—by an outskirter," thinks Hazel (23).

Three rabbits in one, the psychic trinity—along with some assorted friends-as-philosophies—leaves the womblike warren to be born into the unknown darkness on its quest for unity and completion, both individually and as a society. In this act of self-creation, the rabbits structure themselves and their strategy of action through language, through Bakhtin's "dialogic." Concerning the polemical theory of language and consciousness, Bakhtin wrote that dialogue "is not a means for revealing, for bringing to the surface the already extant character of a person; rather, in dialogue individuals not only show themselves outwardly, they become for the first time that which they are, not only for others but for themselves as well. To be means to communicate dialogically."² The instinctive voice of desire, the unconscious Fiver, urges: "We ought to go at once," and Hazel, the leader, the emerging ego defining himself, agrees: "Yes, the time's come now, all right" (30). Adams informs us that his rabbits are like "primitive people" who "before [they] can act together, a kind of telepathic feeling has to flow through them and ripen to the point when they all know that they are ready to begin" (25). They have expressed themselves through their dialogic and now, as in the Emersonian sense the "currents of the universal being" pass through them, they organize their flight and leave the warren. In fact, Adams credits their behavior to "the current that flows (among creatures who think of themselves primarily as part of a group and only secondarily, if at all, as individuals) to fuse them together and impel them into action without conscious thought or will" (26). This language of their instincts creates them, for they do not exist independently outside the linguistic, social operations of their emergent dialogue. Their every exchange is constitutively intersubjective and dependent upon the aspirations of the others. Hazel thinks of himself as "the one—as a Chief Rabbit ought to be—through whom a strong feeling, latent throughout the warren, had come to the surface" (194). They are a "we," not an "I." A "we" motivated, impelled, indeed, defined by the inevitable urgency of their psychic birth.

That psychic birth catalyzes in the moment of recognition that the powers of reason, as embodied by the Chief Rabbit, have proven inadequate to satisfy their dual sense of reality and self. As Morse Peckham notes in "Toward a Theory of Romanticism": "The truth can only be apprehended intuitively, imaginatively, spontaneously, with the whole personality, from the deep sources of the fountains that are within."³ The wellspring of that truth, the vehicle for their transportation toward it, and their epistemological orientation all find their adaptation in a philosophic transcendentalism with its organic roots in Romanticism. Having begun their night journey, the rabbits represent the cosmological shift from the Augustan/Newtonian configuration of world-as-machine to the Romantic/Darwinian configuration of world-as-organism. The drive toward self-creation becomes their will-to-power and generates their escape from inside the Sandleford warren, where law and reason reign, to outside, where the creative imagination will be their primary tool of survival. Their departure is, in fact, inevitable, for, as Michel Foucault has shown, the will to power is indelibly superimposed upon the will to knowledge. Posits Foucault, "if it is true that at the heart of power relations and as a permanent condition of their existence there is an insubordination and a certain essential obstinancy on the part of the principles of freedom, then there is no relationship of power without the means of escape or possible flight. Every power relationship implies, at least in potential, a strategy of struggle."⁴ That struggle achieves a physical actualization at the moment of psychic birth when Bigwig attacks Holly. A clash of superegos, each represents his own group's conscience, each in charge of rewards and punishments, but Holly as the deterministic watchdog over the repressed unconscious and Bigwig as the emancipating force of free will to power.

Now, thrust into the unknown, they travel in the Imaginary state, through a landscape of objects and sounds for which they have no names, "doing everything that came unnaturally to them" (33). This forced adaptation actually parallels the same impersonal and invariable force of nature that dictates life's terms to all living organisms. As rabbits, their actions may be unnatural, but as emblems of an emerging consciousness and a developing society, their withdrawal and search, their journey from certainty to doubt, their necessary quicksilver shifts from evasiveness to inquisitiveness, the condensation of their time and the displacement of their space, mirror the process toward self-actualization that any individual psyche or group of human beings experience in questing for a harmonic gestalt.

After their birth into the unknown world of humankind, this psychic group of rabbits survives—just as every individual personality thrives or perishes—on the strength of their gestalt, on how cohesive their individual parts become. Their process of becoming is, as Gestalt theory teaches, phenomenological in that what they "see" is what appears to the seer rather than what may actually be there. For example, when they arrive at the river (that universal symbol of the unconscious), Adams tells us that "to the rabbits it seemed immense," though in reality it was only twelve to fifteen feet wide (39). Fiver desires and demands that they cross it. Bigwig, as the guiding conscience, scouts out the other side. But Hazel cannot make sense of what they have to do, for neither Fiver nor Pipkin can swim. At this point, when the psyche is lost and groping for direction, philosophy comes to its aid in the person of Blackberry. He sees, lying on the bank of the river, "a piece of flat wood." Empirically, he perceives the wood to be an object, something physical. Phenomenologically, he sees it not simply as an object by itself but in terms of what it could become. Rationally and pragmatically, he reasons what use it could be put to. Through his philosophic powers, Blackberry conceives a plan for the wood in terms of its possibilities, even though "Hazel had no idea what he meant" (45). Thus, we have the tripartite division of personality at a loss without the final piece necessary to actualize the will to knowledge, to philosophy. Only through knowledge can the intelligent organism orient itself in time and space. For, as Morse Peckham notes, "The disparity between the orientation and the experience lies in the fact of our ignorance—a notion easily demonstrated—not in the fact that we are faced with a corrupt world. Man is naturally part of that order; the moral task is to restore his originally perfect adaptation by exploiting his civilization and knowledge. Since the natural order grants perfect adaptation, what has been lost through ignorance can be regained through knowledge."⁵

In the rabbits' case, as in man's case, life's journey becomes self-fulfilling. Throughout the entire novel, the rabbits as emerging psyche and society grow at once, paradoxically, more self-reliant and interrelated. They learn to identify the signs of man and to beware his hrududil (cars and trucks). They learn to trust their intuition—as Fiver's visions prove correct time and again. They learn to moderate the careless urges of their egos, as Hazel's stunt to single-handedly free the hutch rabbits teaches him not to be, as Fiver calls him, a "show-off" (212). They learn to trust and abide by their superego, as Bigwig's courage, integrity, and strength consistently emerge triumphant.

Perhaps the ultimate bridge to meaning between this rabbit tale and humanity's present position on earth rests in its symbolism. In Egyptian mythology, The Great Hare was considered the animal artificer of the world. In the Egyptian hieroglyphs, the hare is a determinative sign which defines the very concept of being. And in Chinese myth, the hare is symbolic of the Ying force in life.⁶ On this humandominant earth, the Yang humans need the Ying animals to effect a balance or harmony. At the story's conclusion it is, after all, a female human, young Lucy, who rescues Hazel and returns him to the Down, thus completing the four-quarter structure of the novel which is so aptly represented by the sign of the compass rose on the dust jacket. That compass rose, with the four directions of NSEW intersecting at a shared center within its enclosing circle, "is symbolic of the final stage in the process of individuation … [when] all earthly desires (represented by … monsters and wild beasts) [such as the dog and Woundwort] have been eliminated for the sake of concentrating upon the achievement of Oneness and a vision of Paradise."⁷

Toward an appreciation of the role that language plays in the achievement of psychic oneness, let us recall Jacques Lacan's famous formulation that "the unconscious is structured like a language."⁸ Like a language, the unconscious is unstable, organic, always in the process of becoming. The formation is never complete, for each individual psyche instinctively desires to reproduce the process just as the rabbits' instinctive desire is for self-reproduction. Meaning, then, like psyches and societies, is endlessly displaced and continuously represented along the continuums of time and space.

Adams concludes his tale with these words: "Underground, the story continued" (472). The story always continues, for language is structured to forever represent the objectification and actualization of desire. Hazel has successfully assimilated his unconscious and his superego and thus has attained his fullest potential on Watership Down. Watership. A boat, a vehicle which carries its passengers across the river of unconsciousness to the safe shore of understanding.

Notes

1. Richard Adams (b. 1920) has written numerous novels including Shardik (1974), The Plague Dogs (1977), and The Girl in a Swing (1980); Watership Down (New York: MacMillan, 1972) was his first novel.
2. Bakhtin, Mikhail, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, trans. R. W. Rotsel (Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1973) 47.
3. Morse Peckham, "Toward a Theory of Romanticism," PMLA 66 (1951): 240.
4. Michel Foucault, "The Subject and Power," in his Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, ed., H. L. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1982) 225.
5. Peckham 252.
6. J. F. Cirlot, A Dictionary of Symbolism, trans. Jack Sage (New York: Philosophical Library, 1971) 139.
7. Cirlot 128.
8. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979) 20.

Joan Bridgman (essay date August 2000)

SOURCE: Bridgman, Joan. "Richard Adams at Eighty." Contemporary Review 277, no. 1615 (August 2000): 108-12.

[In the following essay, Bridgman reflects upon Watership Down and Richard Adams's literary legacy on the occasion of Adams's eightieth birthday.]

Richard Adams, who has just celebrated his eightieth birthday, can look back on a remarkable life where fame arrived unexpectedly at the age of 52. There had been little to forecast this during the anonymous years of public school, wartime service and 25 years in the Civil Service—all powerful influences towards conformity and convention. But, irritated by sentimental rabbit tales and enraged by the permissive society of the 1960s, he stepped into another life in writing Watership Down, a book about rabbits intended for his children. Although only published in a first edition of 2,500 in 1972, it was initially hailed as a children's classic and progressed to large sales when it was selected by Kaye Webb for Puffin because she was delighted by the way the rabbits talked to each other 'Like civil servants'.

With American publication it became an adult and world-wide bestseller, selling over a million copies in record time. In 1985 Penguin Books declared it second in their list of all time bestsellers with sales figures of 5 million, second only to Animal Farm, but ahead of The Canterbury Tales and The Odyssey. It transformed the public perception of rabbits from that of cuddly bunnies into heroic warriors who fought savagely for dominance, and who were described with a degree of biological realism unheard of in children's fiction. The animals defecated (passed hraka), sought mates and conceived young. Even the rabbit equivalent of a miscarriage, the reabsorption of young, is described. Although The Times's recent obituary of the naturalist, Robin Lockley, described the naturalist's book, The Private Life of the Rabbit, as the inspiration for Watership Down this was not the case. Adams did not discover Lockley's book until he was about halfway through his first version. It did help to add biological exactitude and the holograph shows his subsequent revisions to credit female rabbits with the leading role played in digging warrens. Indeed, Lockley has been heard to say that the major storyline of a band of bucks going off in search of a new warren was impossible. They would have left more sensibly as mated pairs—but this would have destroyed the plot.

The world of children's publishing was not prepared for a book of such stunning originality and the typescript was rejected several times. 'It was seven times a lemon' says Adams, who has carefully preserved the rejection letters. He wrote the novel unaware of the conventions of length, age range, level of difficulty and acceptable subject matter in the genre of juvenile publishing at that time. It was first published by the small publishing firm of Rex Collings, who admired the typescript precisely because it did not fit the formula, a judgment vindicated when the book became a critical and commercial success. Sales have been given continuing impetus by BBC radio readings, an animated film, a musical version, a dramatic performance in Regent's Park and currently a children's television series. It has never dropped out of the public consciousness for long. The title has become synonymous with rabbits. London cabbies say of the garrulous 'He's got more rabbit than Watership Down'. Enterprising butchers advertised 'You've read the book, you've seen the film, now eat the cast'.

Richard Adams celebrated his eightieth birthday in May of this year, surrounded by his family which now includes his daughters and sons-in-law and six grandchildren. He must have looked around the festive tables with some satisfaction since earlier in his marriage he longed for children. This early frustration is one of the ingredients of Watership Down, where a questing band of buck rabbits search for a new warren and then realise that without mates and progeny to populate it their trials were worthless. Like Hazel, the hero of his novel. Adams felt the primitive delight in the continuation of his blood as he looked at his descendants: '… the extraordinary feeling that strength and speed were flowing inexhaustibly out of him into their sleek young bodies and healthy senses'. One granddaughter is already a published author.

Adams can also look back on a career of contradictions, half spent anonymously as a civil servant and the rest in the public eye as the author of a worldwide bestselling novel. With the huge and continuing commercial success of this novel his life changed irrevocably. The civil service post was resigned and the family removed to the Isle of Man to avoid the punitive tax system of the time. All was changed and changed utterly. Huge sales in the United States guaranteed his financial future. He became a campus cult there because of the book's environmental concerns and sympathy for animal rights and the result of this was that he was in demand as a writer-in-residence. A year of tax exile and several stints at American universities entailed separation from his family which was effectively blown apart by the novel's success.

It took American marketing to place the book in the adult publishing list where the greatest sales are made. 'This isn't about a bunny. It's about life and death', declared Connie Clausen at Macmillan in promoting the novel's appeal across the age ranges. Like J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter books, Watership Down has what is now termed 'crossover appeal'. Adams enchanted his publicity team by taking to the 'shocking hucksterism' of book promotion like a duck to water and taking the repeated question 'Why rabbits?' in his stride. He was the epitome of the American idea of an Englishman, willingly posing for photographs hailing a taxi on Fifth Avenue with a rolled umbrella, dressed in waistcoat, old school tie and bowler hat. He travelled with English marmalade, an egg cup and insisted on English mustard. Although he fitted the stereotype, his readiness to talk without reserve was untypical. Interviewers were surprised, too, by his personality. They expected this author to be 'a gentle soul, rather misty-eyed about Nature, probably someone shy and retiring', but, 'He is in fact feisty, rather pugnacious … extraordinarily talkative and utterly unsentimental—though at the same time subject to swift tears … all these aspects of this remarkable personality were on view in rapid succession'.

This remarkable personality did not go down so well with English critics when they interviewed Adams. Reviews for Watership Down were lyrical—Edward Blishen spoke of his 'trembling pleasure' on reading the book, but reviews and promotional interviews for subsequent novels were far less enthusiastic. Adams became so disappointed with critical reactions to his later novels that he was reluctant to be interviewed. Shardik, The Plague Dogs, The Girl in a Swing, Maia and Traveller have been major bestsellers in spite of hostile critics. A. N. Wilson reported that he could not admire the later work as much as he genuinely revered Watership Down. The Times critic said of Maia that it was a book not to be tossed aside lightly but to be thrown with great force—an unattributed quotation from Dorothy Parker. The mixed reception for later novels may be due to envy at the windfall fortune earnt by the first novel. A Lake District sheep farmer explained the hostility of critics in the pithy statement: 'Well, you did in your spare time, Richard, what they have been trying to do all their bloody lives'.

Surely the time has come for a fairer appraisal of an author who has tackled so many different subjects and won bestselling sales with at least six novels? Adams is far from being confined to the category of animal and nature writer. Shardik is concerned with a religious cult focused on a bear (not anthropomorphised) and is set in the primitive past of a fantasy empire where the author invents a new world with its own geography, religion, customs, language and fauna. It is a sustained exercise of the imagination, as distanced from the reader as science fiction. It owes much to Adams's Jungian analysis in its depiction of deep mythic levels originating in the unconscious mind. This is an undertow in all Adams's work.

Joseph Campbell's study of comparative myth The Hero with a Thousand Faces, also based on Jung's view of the collective unconscious, is a continuing influence. Campbell's theory of the basic pattern common to all myth, that of the hero's journey into a realm of terrors to bring back some boon to save himself and his people is a powerful ingredient in the best tales. The theory of this monomyth made Adams realise that 'all the stories in the world are really one story'. (George Lucas, the producer of Star Wars, based his film on Campbell's theory and the huge success of the film impressed other filmmakers to follow the pattern of the monomyth in their choice of 'high concept' plots.) The Girl in a Swing represents another departure. It is set in the contemporary world and is an erotic ghost story. There is a mythical dimension to the novel in that the heroine is possessed intermittently by the goddess Aphrodite. This novel has tremendous narrative grip and has commanded a readership second only to Watership Down in the public lending right figures. The Plague Dogs is a polemic against animal experimentation and is set in the modern world with human and animal characters. Maia is a return to Bekla, telling the progress of 15-year-old bedslave from prostitution to respectable marriage. An actual historical period is the setting for Adams's novel Traveller, which has a solidly researched background in the American Civil War. It tells the story of Confederate General Robert E. Lee's horse, Traveller. The narrative is composed of a series of equine monologues addressed to Tom, the stable cat. The horse's behaviour is backed by research into The Mind of the Horse by Lucy Rees. As with many of his novels, the ending is genuinely moving, with a sure touch on scenes of death.

Adams has not lost his inventive energy in spite of advancing years. Last year he returned to the characters of his first success with the publication of Tales from Watership Down and has enjoyed renewed success with his rabbit adventures. This year has seen the publication of a novel where the protagonist is, unusually, a folksong. The song, also the title, is The Outlandish Knight (Severn House Publishers Ltd.). Adams has long had an interest in folksong which he both sings and plays on a recorder. The narrative follows the song and one family through three generations from 1485 until the execution of the Babington plotters. The narrative imposes difficulties for both author and reader in that although the song remains a constant the characters change with each generation, making heavy demands on the ingenuity of the author and the reader's attention. The England of six centuries ago is vividly realised, with its savagery, sights and smells. The conception of folksong as a linking technique in the action and the numerous other songs with musical notation in the text is an original idea.

Our author's life has now come full circle with his return some years ago to his native Hampshire. He lives in a charming eighteenth-century house, hardly a stone's throw from the river Test and deep in the English countryside he describes so lovingly in his first and most magical novel. Indeed it is not far from the actual territory which is the setting for the rabbits of Watership Down. The house reflects the interests of its inhabitants—a large well-stocked cellar, an impressive library, some wonderful porcelain on which Mrs Elizabeth Adams is an authority and it is set in a garden ablaze with roses and dahlias. Sadly the last of the border collies is no more. He was called Tetter after a quotation from the Ghost in Hamlet, 'With a most instant tetter barked about'. He had his moment of fame when called to demonstrate his obedience at an industrial tribunal against an enraged gamekeeper. 'Author's Collie Takes Stand on Grumpy Gamekeeper' screamed the headline the next day. Tetter performed impeccably and the case was won. In spite of three hip replacements, Adams manages to visit his local pub to play piquet most evenings and continues to write. He has recently returned from a trip to America to help launch Camp Fiver, a recreational camp for underprivileged children in New York State. This is a philanthropic project organised by a rich admirer of Watership Down who named the camp after his favourite rabbit in the story—an instance of the continuing influence of the tale, which like Fiver's blood in the novel is passed on through generations.

They say that the great secret of success in this country is longevity. Only live to be eighty and you will be a hero or a guru. This must be true because I read it in The Mail on Sunday on 30 April. In this case Richard Adams is a literary giant. Why in his eightieth year has this man of letters not been honoured? He has produced six major novels, one at least an enduring classic, together with several collections of short stories, travel writing, poetry and works on natural history. He has been president of the R.S.P.C.A., an animal rights campaigner and active in the campaign to restore the land of Greenfield Common to the people. In his time as a civil servant he put in train the Clean Air Act and the Thames Barrage—London may be grateful for no more choking smog or fear of inundation. He travels widely to give lectures and readings. Although Adams is a worldwide bestselling author the literary establishment of Britain has been dismissive. 'Probably no other contemporary novelist suffers from so much condescension or critical dismissal from so many literary intellectuals' commented Phillip Vine in 1985. It seems that popularity and large sales cannot command literary merit. But maybe the time has come for a reappraisal. There has been some recognition. He has been made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and had the social accolade of lunch with the Queen. In any case, Adams's large and faithful readership ignore the literati and the critics. They buy his books in huge numbers, because they enjoy them. The hackneyed phrase of the blurb writer 'a master storyteller' happens, in Adams's case, to be true.

Jim Hergan (essay date July 2005)

SOURCE: Hergan, Jim. "Journey to Watership Down." British Heritage 26, no. 3 (July 2005): 18-24.

[In the following essay, Hergan examines the real-life locations on the English countryside that inspired the setting of Adams's Watership Down.]

A ragtag band sets out across an alien, hostile landscape, pursued by enemies, its individuals' lives threatened at every moment. They could be hobbits in Middle Earth, or Allied soldiers behind enemy lines in Normandy. But they're not—these are bunnies. In order to avoid certain death they must hop across seven miles of English countryside, to the remote shelter of a low chalk hill—an epic journey that sweeps across 475 pages of Richard Adams' 1972 novel, Watership Down.

Adams' fable for adults is about a lot of things, and one of them is the English countryside. This is no fictional landscape, idealized and manipulated. Every place in the book is real; Watership Down is a real hill, Nuthanger Farm is a real farm, the footbridges over the River Test are precisely as the rabbits find them. You can visit these places. In fact, it's a good idea; the rabbits' journey deep into the English countryside reveals some strange and beautiful things.

Adams brings us into a very special landscape from a unique perspective—about six inches off the ground. At this level, you have to stretch up high on your legs to see over the grass. You don't walk through the grass—you hop, your eyes bouncing from dirt level to grass top and back down. This makes it very difficult to hold a straight line, so you have to stop every once in a while to see where you are. While you can't see much, however, there are plenty of animals that can see you, particularly when you stand up to look around. Most of them will kill you when they see you; your enemies are The Thousand. Crossing a field becomes an exhausting trek requiring great skill and courage. On the other hand, you won't have to find a gate—hedgerows are a welcome refuge, not a barrier.

Time, as well as space, is different. Rabbits only live for two or three years. They experience life as an ever-changing sequence that, remarkably, cycles back as the seasons come around. The backdrop to their lives, the English countryside, remains constant and unchanging through a single generation, or even two or three. It may be constant, but it is by no means natural; humans have profoundly altered every square inch of England, and the rabbits must fit themselves into these utterly human landscapes. The rabbits prefer landscapes that are mature, with many species and a wide variety of places to hide, as well as a scarcity of people (prominent among The Thousand). Raw, new landscapes, with people nearby, are deeply hostile.

When we visit this same countryside, we see things very differently. In our decades of experience, the seasons flash past and landscapes change before our eyes. Taxes change, and meadows are plowed up for newly profitable crops. Roads improve, and rich people build weekend estates. The human population becomes larger and wealthier, and deserted ridges become popular picnic sites. In the years since civil servant Richard Adams walked these hills in the 1950s, and chief rabbit Hazel-Rah led his comrades up Watership Down, 16 generations of rabbits have grown and died. Their descendants probably have not noticed this half-century of change, but you will.

The Meadows

In all of Adams' large and sprawling epic, there is only one fictionalized piece of landscape: the housing subdivision that destroys the rabbits' original home. The real subdivisions have certainly come close; you can see the goal posts of Newbury's new rugby field from the site of the rabbits' warren, on a hillside just south of this bustling West Berkshire town. However, the warren itself remains well-protected by England's draconian planning laws, prohibiting all new home construction in conservation areas such as this. Homes (and most recently a superstore) crowd up to the edge of the forbidden zone and stop.

Visiting is easy enough and worth the while of anyone who loves beautiful countryside. An old lane, long closed to vehicles but open to walkers, starts across from the former Sandleford Manor—now a boys' school—and heads east into what was once the manor's park—now farmland and the site of the bunnies' original home. After crossing the stile, you can walk through pristine fields and forests seldom seen by outsiders. The land rolls down to the River Enbourne, past a strip of trees and up across fields, to rich, deep forests that hide Newbury and smother its noise. Peas seem to be the thing now; great fields of English peas, covered in their lovely little flowers, line much of the path, yielding their heavy, sweet smell in the spring. When the lane crosses a rivulet, the warren was just up the hill from this spot.

Should you stray from the footpath uphill to where the warren was lodged beneath the fine old copse, you won't find any rabbits. It's a hunt club now. Shotgun shells litter the ground, and blinds perch in the great oak trees, like treehouses for grownups. The rabbits are long gone. However, keep your eyes open for deer.

The Commons

When Adams' rabbits encounter a strange and frightening place, alien to their experience, they are at "Newtown Common—a country of peat, gorse, and silver birch." They push through thick heather covered in dew, which quickly soaks their fur; they claw over ground made up of soaked peat and sharp, white stones. There is nothing fit to eat and nowhere fit to dig—no food and no cover. Their quest goes on all night, until the bravest are exhausted from fear.

Most marvelously, it's still there and still a common. That is, Newtown Common remains in shared ownership by the villagers of Newtown, who possess certain rights to use its resources but cannot fence or farm it. In medieval times they would cut firewood and peat, coppice trees for pollards (that is, cut large trees for the poles that would grow from their stumps), graze their goats and sheep in the summer and "mast" their pigs during winter, letting them survive semiwild off the autumn nut and acorn crop.

From our towering viewpoint, easily looking aver the inedible heather, it's a wonderful place. Newtown Common is lush with vegetation of all sorts and flush with wildlife. Beech, oak, pine and birch fight for footholds in the poor soil; underneath, the trees open into large expanses of heather, gorse and tough bog grass. Brilliant yellow gorse flowers succeed to the delicate lavender of heather blooms. A maze of paths crosses over hard, white stones and deep, black peat. Walk softly and watch for a startled grouse or red deer.

The River Test

In its daring raid on the Efrafa warren, the band of rabbits hides out on the far side of a small river, believing correctly that the enemy rabbits would not patrol there. Rabbits do not like wet places, and the River Test is positively soggy. Also rabbits do not like to cross weird human structures such as bridges—something the story's heroes face with a great deal of trepidation. Most intriguing is the rabbits' escape plan, floating in a punt down the middle of the 30-foot-wide Test, a plan formed by the cleverest of the rabbits, Blackberry.

"On almost any other river, Blackberry's plan would not have worked," Adams tells us. But the Test is a special river. First, it's a chalk river, spring-fed from the water seeping from underneath Watership Down. Its flow is constant and fast, its waters are crystalline and its bed made of sand, gravel and bits of flint. Second, the Test is renowned as one of England's premier trout fisheries. As such, it is groomed as carefully as any cottage garden, its center kept free of obstructions, its flow carefully managed. When you look at the Test from any of its many bridges, you see straight through the fast, clear water to the few strands of waterweeds waving from the gravel downstream.

Unfortunately the rabbits' exceptional hide-out is now strictly off-limits inside a private estate, Laverstoke House. You can see virtually identical scenery, however, a few hundred yards downstream at Freefolk. Here, a short lane crosses the Test on an arched brick bridge, to deadend in a hundred yards at the village church. This is a good place to walk the riverbank, enjoying the riot of wildflowers, the clear, cold water and the waterweeds bending in the fast current. The brick bridge is almost exactly like the one upon which the rabbits come a cropper—three arches, each with a scant foot's clearance at the high point. Downstream is an old concrete weir, still in use to regulate flow. Farther downstream still, public footpaths cross and recross the Test, weaving their way to and from the river, along with fishermen's paths that line the banks.

Watership Down

From the top of Watership Down, the steep north face of the Hampshire Downs stretches left and right in an endless crescent that reaches to the horizon. Immediately below, the intensely private manor house named Sydmonton Court stands surrounded by its parks and fields, an intact relict of former glories. Most of this long stretch of remote hillside remains exactly as Hazel-Rah and his band first found it.

But not Watership Down.

Not even conservation laws seem to be able to protect countryside once people of wealth and connection covet it. The entire crest of Watership Down, almost two miles in length, has been bulldozed for a horse gallop. Built by a local stud farm to train racehorses, it's a long, fenced stretch of graveled racetrack, carefully contoured and surrounded by turf. Altogether, it has about as much biodiversity as a parking lot, and no room at all for burrowing animals that might cause a valuable racehorse to stumble and break a leg. It separates the public footpath that follows the crest from the actual edge of the down and from any views. You can go around it at its western end (the easiest approach from the nearest paved road) or cross it on a set of stiles about a half-mile up. Sheep were scarce in Hazel-Rah's day, an anomaly brought about by low wool and mutton prices throughout most of the 20th century. Lamb prices are high now, and the sheep are back, grazing the steep north face of Watership Down as closely as a golf course.

Enjoy the view, which is spectacular. Then return to the end of the gallop, where a large lump marks the remains of a Bronze Age tomb. The lane that extends southward is the one followed by the bunnies in their raid on Efrafa, its hedges recently replanted. A quarter-mile down this path is a small surviving meadow of downland grass, alive with wildflowers in the spring, crossed by a public path that leads back to the lane. Walk quietly and look closely here and in the hedges that survive across the lane. The rabbits remain, as they always will.

FURTHER READING

Criticism

Baker, Margaret P. "The Rabbit as Trickster." Journal of Popular Culture 28, no. 2 (fall 1994): 149-58.

Explores the role of the trickster in Brer Rabbit tales, Bugs Bunny cartoons, and Watership Down.

Bridgman, Joan. "The Significance of Myth in Watership Down." Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 6, no. 1 (1993): 7-23.

Investigates the presence of mythic patterns within Watership Down.

Gose, Elliott. "Epic Integration: Watership Down." In Mere Creatures: A Study of Modern Fantasy Tales for Children, pp. 122-34. Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press, 1988.

Portrays Watership Down as an epic fantasy that parallels the stories of Ernest Thompson Seton.

Meyer, Charles A. "The Power of Myth and Rabbit Survival in Richard Adams' Watership Down." Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 3, nos. 3-4 (1990): 139-50.

Discusses the influence of R. M. Lockley's nonfiction treatise on rabbits, The Private Life of the Rabbit, on Watership Down.

——. "The Efrafan Hunt for Immortality in Watership Down." Journal for the Fantastic in the Arts 6, no. 1 (1993): 71-88.

Studies the behaviors of the rabbit protagonists in Watership Down while considering psychological theorists' views on death and self-preservation.

Milner, Robert. "Watership Down: A Genre Study." Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 6, no. 1 (1993): 63-70.

Offers various genre classifications for Watership Down.

Nelson, Marie. "Non-Human Speech in the Fantasy of C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Richard Adams." Mythlore 5, no. 1 (May 1978): 38-9.

Probes the various applications and meanings of speech in animals in the novels of C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Richard Adams.

Additional coverage of Adams's life and career is contained in the following sources published by Thomson Gale: Authors and Artists for Young Adults, Vol. 16; Authors in the News, Vols. 1, 2; Beacham's Encyclopedia of Popular Fiction: Biography & Resources, Vol. 1; Beacham's Guide to Literature for Young Adults, Vol. 5; Children's Literature Review, Vol. 20; Contemporary Authors, Vols. 49-52; Contemporary Authors New Revision Series, Vols. 3, 35, 128; Contemporary Literary Criticism, Vols. 4, 5, 18; Contemporary Novelists, Eds. 4, 5, 6, 7; Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 261; DISCovering Authors Modules: Novelists; Junior DISCovering Authors; Literature and Its Times, Vol. 5; Literature Resource Center; Major Authors and Illustrators for Children and Young Adults, Eds. 1, 2; Major 20th-Century Writers, Eds. 1, 2; Novels for Students, Vol. 11; St. James Guide to Fantasy Writers; St. James Guide to Young Adult Writers; Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror Writers; and Something about the Author, Vols. 7, 69.