Words Are My Matter

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  I found nothing really to correct—nothing I thought simply wrong, a misreading—in all these pages. I would point out that Hainish guilt is not unmotivated or mysterious; in other stories one finds that the Hainish, everybody’s ancestors, have a terribly long history which is, like all human histories, terrible. So Ketho, who comes in at the end, is indeed cautious in his search for hope. But whether he finds it or not the book does not say. And here I felt in a few of the essays a slight tendency to wishful thinking. The book doesn’t have a happy ending. It has an open ending. As pointed out in at least one of the essays, it’s quite possible that both Shevek and Ketho will be killed on arrival by an angry mob. And it’s only too likely that Shevek’s specific plans and hopes for his people will come to little or nothing. That would not surprise Ketho.

  In speaking of the end of the book I must once again thank its first reader and first critic, Darko Suvin, who brought to my anarchist manuscript the merciless eye of a Marxist and the merciful mind of a friend. It had twelve chapters then, and a neat full-circle ending. Twelve chapters? he cried, enraged. It should be an odd number! And what is this—closure? You are not allowed to close this text! Is the circle open or not?

  The circle is open. The doors are open.

  In order to have doors to open, you have to have a house.

  To those who helped me build my drafty and imaginary house, and to those who have brought to it their generous comment and keen perception, making its rooms come alive with resounding and unending arguments, I am grateful. Be welcome, ammari.

  The Beast in the Book

  A talk given at the Conference on Literature and Ecology in

  Eugene, Oregon, June 2005, revised in 2014.

  The oral literatures of hunter-gatherer peoples consist largely of myths, in many of which the protagonists are chiefly or solely animals.

  The general purpose of a myth is to tell us who we are—who we are as a people. Mythic narrative affirms our community and our responsibilities, and is told in the form of teaching-stories both to children and adults.

  For example, many Native North American myths concern a First People, called by animal species names, whose behavior is both human and animal; among them are creators, tricksters, heroes, and villains; and what they are doing, usually, is getting the world ready for the “people who are coming,” that is, us, us humans, us Yurok or Lakota or whomever. Out of context, the meaning of stories from these great mythologies may be obscure, and so they get trivialised into just-so stories—how the woodpecker got his red head, and so on. In the same way, the Jataka tales of India are retold as mere amusements, with no hint of their connection to the ideas of dharma, reincarnation, and the Buddha-nature. But a child who “gets” the story may “get” a sense of those deep connections without even knowing it.

  The oral and written literatures of preindustrial civilisations are, of course, about everything under the sun, but all those I know contain a powerful and permanent element of animal story, largely in the form of folktale, fairy tale, and fable, again told both to children and adults. In these, the humans and animals mingle, cheek by jowl.

  In postindustrial civilisation, where animals are held to be irrelevant to adult concerns except insofar as they are useful or edible, animal story is mostly perceived as being for children. Young children hear or read stories from the earlier eras, both animal myths and animal fables and tales, retold and illustrated for them, because animal stories are considered suitable for children, and surely also because many children want them, seek them, demand them. There is also a large modern literature of animal stories, written sometimes for children, sometimes not, though the kids usually get hold of it. Although non-satirical writing about animals is automatically dismissed by literary critics as trivial, authors continue to write animal stories. They are writing in response to a real and permanent demand.

  Why do most children and many adults respond both to real animals and to stories about them, fascinated by and identifying with creatures which our dominant religions and ethics consider mere objects for human use: no longer working with us, in industrial societies, but mere raw material for our food, subjects of scientific experiments to benefit us, entertaining curiosities of the zoo and the TV nature program, pets kept to improve our psychological health?

  Perhaps we give animal stories to children and encourage their interest in animals because we see children as inferior, mentally “primitive,” not yet fully human: so we see pets and zoos and animal stories as “natural” steps on the child’s way up to adult, exclusive humanity—rungs on the ladder from mindless, helpless babyhood to the full glory of intellectual maturity and mastery. Ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny in terms of the Great Chain of Being.

  But what is it the kid is after—the baby wild with excitement at the sight of a kitten, the six-year-old spelling out Peter Rabbit, the twelve-year-old weeping as she reads Black Beauty? What is it the child perceives that her whole culture denies?

  I will skip over a lot of discussion and example to a few books I want to talk about in this context. Three of the great works of children’s literature and animal literature are Hugh Lofting’s Doctor Dolittle, Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Books, and T. H. White’s The Sword in the Stone, the first book of The Once and Future King. (May I say here that I am talking about books, not about movies “based on” the books.) These books are about the relationship of human beings and animals. In each it is different, and each explores it in depth.

  Such language may sound a bit fancy in talking of Doctor Dolittle, but Hugh Lofting’s unpretentious fantasy deserves its classic status. As in The Wind in the Willows, animals and people interact without the slightest plausibility and without the slightest hesitation. This is because the animals act like people, mostly, but they act better than most people. None of them does anything cruel or immoral. Gub-Gub is very piggy, to be sure, and the Lion has to be scolded by his wife before he’ll help the other animals, but this is the Peaceable Kingdom, where the lion will truly lie down with the lamb. The Doctor helps animals by sheltering and healing them, they begin to help him in return, and that is the theme and the basis of almost everything in the story.

  The Doctor says, “So long as the birds and the beasts and the fishes are my friends, I do not have to be afraid.” This sentence has been spoken in many, many languages over many thousands of years. Every people in the world understood this theme of mutual aid, of the Animal Helper, until we drove the animals out of our streets and skyscrapers. I think every child in the world still understands it. To be friends with the animals is to be a friend and a child of the world, connected to it, nourished by it, belonging to it.

  Lofting’s morality is entirely sweet and sunny. In Kipling’s Mowgli stories, the connections between human and animal are complex and ultimately tragic. Mowgli is a link between his village people and the people of the jungle, and like all go-betweens, all liminal figures, he is torn between the two sides, torn apart. There is no common ground between the village and the jungle; they have turned their back on each other. In every language of the animals Mowgli can say, “We be of one blood, ye and I!”—but can he truly say it in Hindi? And yet that is his mother’s tongue, his mother’s blood. Whom must he betray?

  The wolf child, the wild boy, both in rare and painful reality and in Kipling’s dream-story, can never, in the end, be at home. The ache of exile from Eden is there even in the first story, “Mowgli’s Brothers,” ever stronger in “Letting in the Jungle” and “The Spring Running.” Those are heartbreaking stories. Yet from the Jungle Books we may also carry with us all our lives the blessing of those lazy hours and breathless adventures when boy and wolf, bear, black panther, python, speak and think and act in joyous community: the mystery and beauty of belonging, totally belonging to the wildness of the world.

  T. H. White’s The Sword in the Stone, though about King Arthur, is crowded with animals. In the first chapter King Arthur-to-be, currently known as the Wart, takes out a g
oshawk, loses him, and meets Merlyn’s owl Archimedes:

  “Oh, what a lovely owl!” cried the Wart.

  But when he went up to it and held out his hand, the owl grew half as tall again, stood up as stiff as a poker, closed its eyes so that there was only the smallest slit to peep through . . . and said in a doubtful voice:

  “There is no owl.”

  Then it shut its eyes entirely and looked the other way.

  “It’s only a boy,” said Merlyn.

  “There is no boy,” said the owl hopefully, without turning round.

  Merlyn undertakes Arthur’s education, which consists mostly of being turned into animals. Here we meet the great mythic theme of Transformation, which is a central act of shamanism, though Merlyn doesn’t make any fuss about it. The boy becomes a fish, a hawk, a snake, an owl, and a badger. He participates, at thirty years per minute, in the sentience of trees, and then, at two million years per second, in the sentience of stones. All these scenes of participation in nonhuman being are funny, vivid, startling, and wise.

  When a witch puts Wart into a cage to fatten him up, the goat in the next cage plays Animal Helper and rescues them all. All animals rightly trust Wart, which is proof of his true kingship. That he goes along on a boar hunt does not vitiate this trust: to White, true hunting is a genuine relationship between hunter and hunted, with implacable moral rules and a high degree of honor and respect for the prey. The emotions aroused by hunting are powerful, and White draws them all together in the scene of the death of the hound Beaumont, killed by the boar, a passage I have never yet read without crying.

  At the climax of the book, Wart can’t draw the sword of kingship from the stone anvil by himself. He calls to Merlyn for help, and the animals come.

  There were otters and nightingales and vulgar crows and hares, and serpents and falcons and fishes and goats and dogs and dainty unicorns and newts and solitary wasps and goat-moth caterpillars and corkindrills and volcanoes and mighty trees and patient stones . . . all, down to the smallest shrew mouse, had come to help on account of love. Wart felt his power grow.

  Each creature calls its special wisdom to the boy who has been one of them, one with them. The pike says, “Put your back into it,” a stone says, “Cohere,” a snake says, “Fold your powers together with the spirit of your mind”—and: “The Wart walked up to the great sword for the third time. He put out his right hand softly and drew it out as gently as from a scabbard.”

  T. H. White was a man to whom animals were very important, perhaps because his human relationships were so tormented. But his sense of connection with nonhuman lives goes far beyond mere compensation; it is a passionate vision of a moral universe, a world of terrible pain and cruelty from which trust and love spring like the autumn crocus, vulnerable and unconquerable. The Sword in the Stone, which I first read at thirteen or so, influenced my mind and heart in ways which must be quite clear in the course of this talk, convincing me that trust cannot be limited to mankind, that love cannot be specified. It’s all or nothing at all. If, called to reign, you distrust and scorn your subjects, your only kingdom will be that of greed and hate. Love and trust and be a king, and your kingdom will be the whole world. And to your coronation, among all the wondrous gifts, an “anonymous hedgehog will send four or five dirty leaves with some fleas on them.”

  To end with, I will talk about two fables or fantasies, a new one and an old one.

  Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy is a long, richly imagined, and deeply incoherent work, in which I’ll try only to trace the part animals play. Despite appearances, it is a small part. The two cats in the story, who have a minor but important role, do what cats have often done in myth and fable: they cross between worlds. Otherwise they’re just cats, realistically drawn. Animals are otherwise absent from the books, except for a tribe of polar bears who talk and build forts and use weapons, as humans do, but who don’t have daemons, as humans do.

  These daemons are animals in form, and the reason that the trilogy—particularly the first volume—seems to be full of animals is that every human being has one. Until you reach puberty your daemon may take any animal shape at any moment; with your sexual maturity your daemon settles into a permanent form, always of the other gender. Social class is a decisive influence: we are told that servants always have dog daemons, and we see that upper-class people’s daemons are rare and elegant creatures such as snow leopards. Your daemon accompanies you physically and closely at all times, everywhere; separation is unbearably painful. Though they do not eat or excrete, daemons are tangible, and you can pet and cuddle with your own daemon, though you must not touch anybody else’s. Daemons are rational creatures and speak fluently with their owners and with others. Wish-fulfillment is strong in this concept and gives it great charm: the ever-loyal, ever-present, dear companion, soulmate, comforter, guardian angel, and ultimately perfect pet. As with the beloved stuffed animal, you don’t even have to remember to feed it.

  But I think Pullman overloads the concept and then confuses it. He implies strongly that the daemon is a kind of visible soul, that to be severed from it is fatal, and his plot hinges on the cruelty and horror of this separation. But then he begins changing the rules: we find that witches can live apart from their daemons; in the second volume we are in our world, where nobody has visible or tangible daemons; back in her world, the heroine Lyra leaves her daemon on the wharves of hell, and though she misses him, she lives on perfectly competently, and in fact saves the universe, without him. Their reunion seems almost perfunctory.

  In a fantasy, to change or break your own rules is to make the story literally inconsequential. If the daemons are meant to show that we are part animal and must not be severed from our animality, they can’t do it, since the essence of animality is the body, the living body with all its brainless needs and embarrassing functions—exactly what the daemons do not have. They are spiritual beings, forms without substance. They are fragments or images of the human psyche, wholly contingent, having no independent being and therefore incapable of relationship. Lyra’s much-emphasized love for her daemon is self-love. In Pullman’s world human beings are dreadfully alone, since God has gone senile and there aren’t any real animals. Except those two cats. Let us place our hope in the cats.

  Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass begins with cats. Alice is talking to Dinah and the kittens, who can’t talk back, so Alice does it for them, and then she climbs up onto the mantelpiece with one of the kittens and goes through the mirror. . . . As noted before, cats cross between worlds.

  The looking-glass world, like the one down the rabbit hole, is a dream world, and therefore all the characters in them may be seen as aspects of Alice—fragments of psyche, but in a very different sense from Pullman’s daemons. Their independence is notable. As soon as Alice gets through the glass into the garden, the flowers not only talk but talk back; they are extremely rude and passionate flowers.

  As in folktale, all creatures are on an equal footing, mingling and arguing, even turning into each other—the baby becomes a piglet, the White Queen a sheep—transformation going both ways. Train passengers include humans, a goat, a beetle, a horse, and a gnat, which begins as a tiny voice in Alice’s ear but presently is “about the size of a chicken.” It asks if Alice dislikes insects, and she replies, with admirable aplomb, “I like them when they can talk. None of them ever talk, where I come from.” Alice is a nineteenth-century British middle-class child with a strict moral code of self-respect and respect for others. Her good manners are sorely tried by the behavior of the dream creatures, whom we can see, if we choose, as acting out Alice’s own impulses of rebellion, her passion, her wild willfulness. Violence is not permitted. We know that the Queen’s “Off with her head!” is a threat not to be executed. And yet nightmare is never far off. The creatures of Alice’s dreams come close to total uncontrol, to madness, and she must wake to know herself.

  The Alice books are not animal stories, but there is no
way I could leave them out of this talk; they are the purest modern literary instance of the animals of the mind, the dream beasts that every human society has known as ancestors, as spirit doubles, as omens, as monsters, and as guides. In them we have spiraled back round to the Dream Time, where human and animal are one.

  This is a sacred place. That we got back to it by following a little Victorian girl down a rabbit hole is absolutely crazy and appropriate.

  “People and animals are supposed to be together. We spent quite a long time evolving together, and we used to be partners,” writes Temple Grandin in Animals in Translation.

  We human beings have made a world reduced to ourselves and our artifacts, but we weren’t made for it, and we have to teach our children to live in it. Physically and mentally equipped to be at home in a richly various and unpredictable environment, competing and coexisting with creatures of all kinds, our children must learn poverty and exile: to live on concrete among endless human beings, seeing a beast now and then through bars.

  But our innate, acute interest in the animal as a fellow being, friend or enemy or food or playmate, can’t be instantly eradicated. It resists deprivation. And imagination and literature are there to fill the void and reaffirm the greater community.

  The Animal Helper motif of mutual aid across species, which we see clearly both in folktale and modern animal stories, tells that kindness and gratitude can’t be limited to your own species, that all creatures are kin.

  By the assimilation of animal to human and the mingling as equals that we see in folktale and in such books as The Wind in the Willows and Doctor Dolittle, the community of living creatures is shown as simple fact.