From Aesop to Disney, human beings have made up stories about animals who can talk. Our childhoods' imaginations are "peopled" with a menagerie of verbal vertebrates, including Mickey Mouse, Br'er Rabbit, Peter Rabbit, Winnie-the- Pooh, Toad and Mole, not to mention C.S. Lewis's Aslan. Although as a child the question never occurred to me, adult critics often speculate about what attracts us to talking animals. Is it a vestigial animism surviving in the primitive souls of children? Or simply cultural sentimentality? Those who ask the question seldom find positive answers to the question. (One writer I know even questions whether talking animal stories can be adequately orthodox--this despite the fact that the Bible includes at least two--the wily Serpent and Balaam's ass.)
Another theory says the attraction of talking animals lies in our self-disgust, that we prefer animals because they are more "natural." Walt Whitman, for instance, declared he might like to become an animal since "they are so placid and self-contained." Also, they do not "sweat and whine about their condition." Despite certain zoological inaccuracies in Whitman's observations, many of us retain a similar admiration for some quality in animals that we find difficult to define. Robinson Jeffers, a poet even more respectful of animals than Whitman, claimed, "I'd sooner, except the penalties, kill a man than a hawk."
Others have surmised that we use talking animals as alter egos of ourselves, or at least of some identifiable aspect of human character. This, they say, accounts for bears being dressed in cunning little rain slickers or mice in lederhosen and skirts, though clothed talking animals are a relatively late nineteenth-century invention. At any rate, it's easy enough to see how animals--dressed or undressed--are sometimes used to mirror human behavior. From Aesop's patient tortoise to Beatrix Potter's curious Peter, beasts have served as exemplars of human conduct, either to command or to caution.
Walter Wangerin's first venture into the Kingdom Animalia followed this path. In 1978 Wangerin added more characters to our stable of talking animals with his award-winning work, The Book of the Dun Cow. Borrowing types used by Chaucer in the Middle Ages, he gave us Chauntecleer the rooster and his faithful hen-wife Pertelote, though he shaped them to fit the complex form of extended prose narrative we now call the novel. His protagonist, Chauntecleer, is, as a proud, high- hearted rooster-ruler, as solicitous of his barnyard creatures as King Arthur was for the citizens of Camelot. And, like Chaucer's fowl of the same name, Chauntecleer's besetting sin is vanity. Mundo Cani, a mournful-looking doormat of a dog whose nose is a particular offense to Chauntecleer, is the actual hero of the piece and the epitome, the living embodiment, of humanity.
But more than Aesop's animals, who only represent morals for us (and are consequently limited in either character or appeal), Wangerin's beasts of the field are full embodiments. Their animal society is just foreign enough to capture our human attention--and thus to catch it off guard. Since it does not immediately confront us with our own image in the mirror, this story about sacrifice is able to sneak past our defenses. Whereas it might prove fruitless to ask us to believe in a story about a shambling doormat of a human being successfully taking on a Juggernaut of cosmic evil, it is nevertheless the story we most want to hear. And the one we most want to be true. Our starveling imagination, its guard against disappointment momentarily let down, can believe in Mundo Cani and Chauntecleer even when it hasn't the strength to believe in Adam and Jesus.
However, Wangerin's latest work for children, Branta and the Golden Stone, takes a new and unusual turn in the genre of talking-animal stories. And the reversal is a very interesting one indeed. This book, shorter and thus more properly a "tale" than a novel, has for its heroine a girl who lives alone "on the northernmost island in all the world." How she came to be there is told using the rather sophisticated narrative technique of flashback. The audience is gently repositioned in time in order to view the deathbed scene where Branta's father reveals the story of her mother's death at her birth and--sinking to an even earlier stratum of the past--his own part in that death.
Branta's father, it emerges, was the wiseman who came to Christ's cradle bearing not spices but gold. A crucial difference, since his fellow Magi found it easy to lay their gifts on the ground at the Baby King's feet while he never let go of his gold nugget but only lifted it up to the child who reached and touched it, leaving on the stone a deep baby's fingerprint. At that moment, the Magus felt the stone beginning to glow with heat as power poured into it.
The wiseman found then that he could not turn loose of the gold, could not actually give it up to the Baby King, a fact he justified to himself and to his wife when he returned home by claiming, as Judas did when he had protested against the holy waste of perfume on Jesus's feet, that it could be sold to "do good for many people." And indeed, he discovered that the stone now had the power to change people--to change them into whatever they wanted to be, including healthy, wealthy, famous, avenged, and, finally, in the case of his accusing wife, silent.
It had taken her death to shock her husband into repentance and exiled him to this northernmost island. Now his daughter must suffer this inherited exile in loneliness, the one possession bequeathed to her, the golden stone still glowing among the flames in her fireplace.
It is at this point, a year after her father's death when the spring thaw began, that a pair of geese appear-- Canada geese--judging by their description in the text. And it is here that the reversal in the usual talking-animal motif occurs. The geese, being only geese, can only speak Goose. Although it is clear to Branta that they are communicating between themselves, laughing at the jokes they tell one another, to her their noises are only gabbling. "' Gaba-gaba-gaba,' they said--no language Branta could understand, no joke that she could laugh at. For geese are geese and people are people."
Thus, though elements of the supernatural have already entered the story, when it comes to this matter-- the gulf between animals and people--the world remains as we experience it every day. Animals, the sentient creatures closest to ourselves on this planet, are an earlier Babel for us, calling out, often in beautiful burbles and wonderful whistles, but always in a language beyond our boundaries of understanding.
Still, Branta makes the most of her visitors to the island, eavesdropping on the goose-talk, observing the hatching of their six handsome goslings, watching them as they grow. Then, at the point when the geese must leave and fly south again, a crisis occurs in the form of a storm. Branta tries desperately to herd the eight geese into her cottage to keep them from freezing. She only succeeds in frightening them. After repeated failures, it becomes clear that the only way she can save them is by speaking their language. And the only way she can do that is to become one of them. Thus, the stone is used one final time.
The truth of Wangerin's tale lies in the fact that Branta's change is not modeled on that of the Greek gods who took on mortal bodies for certain ends and then assumed their divine forms again at their convenience. Branta's change will be permanent, and she knows it. The choice is not-a matter of whimsy or curiosity then, but a true sacrifice. And though I have explicated in my summary a number of points left embedded and implicit in the narrative, this is the one message frankly spelled out at the end of the story: "the length of love and the fullness of sacrifice." Branta's story then is a way of refracting that mystery central to human identity--the baffling link between gain and loss, end and means, in our lives.
Even the jewel-like illustrations of artist Deborah Healy, who also provided visual depictions of Wangerin's earlier Elizabeth and the Water Troll, underscores this mixture. The Fauve-like color reproductions use vivid colors that pulse along the dark outlines of contoured shapes, making the contrast of the story's paradoxes visibly urgent.
In this last story of Wangerin's, unlike The Book of the Dun Cow and its sequel The Book of Sorrows, the animals do not talk a language we can understand, but the human Branta must do whatever is necessary to talk animal-language. This change makes me wonder if Wangerin has not mapped out in his head a topography of the mythological world with which he so faithfully works. In revisiting The Dun Cow for this review, for instance, I noticed that the action is set "when the sun still travelled around the moored earth, so that days and nights belonged to the earth and to the creatures thereon, not to a ball of silent fire." No mention is made of human beings, only the many tens of thousands of animals who "were there for a purpose"--though at that point they are ignorant of their mission as Keepers of the evil Wyrm, the one creature God had damned. Despite their mighty mission, God "did not choose to force knowledge upon the animals." And indeed, it is in that story, set "in those days when the animals could both speak and understand speech," that their purpose is revealed to them.
In placing Branta in a later age-- let's not be too precise but simply point out the brief appearance of the Baby King as a chronological reference--does Wangerin posit a reverse necessity, that of humans descending the ladder of creation to rescue animals? And will speech somehow play a major role in that sacrificial descent? If the Holy Spirit interprets our own sighs too deep for words, will we someday be asked to speak for an inarticulate, groaning creation as it awaits its deliverance? These are questions I would like to ask the author, knowing both his predilection for whirling words to headlong heights and his spacious skill in achieving such elevated language-- a feat few even attempt in this day of minimalist prose.
For the time being, however, as a mockingbird sings me awake every morning, I can only intuit on some wordless level the joy pouring from her throat. But I can believe, like Branta, that there are things worth becoming a mockingbird for. |
