A Writer Reading: Books I Read While Writing The Haunting of Modesto O'Brien
Animal Land: The Creatures of Children’s Fiction by Margaret Blount (1975)
How to write about animals – it’s a tricky question.
What is possible in the creation of fictional animals that allows them to be their animal selves, that does not objectify or marginalize them as being of interest only insofar as they are adjacent to human characters? It was troubling me as I wrote my novel, and I found it helpful to think about how other writers brought voice to creatures – I began to ponder everything from Beatrix Potter to Anna Sewell.
A great find was Margaret Blount’s study of animals in literature – a delightful and wide-ranging work that examines not just the classics (like Potter or C.S. Lewis) but also works I was not as familiar with, like The Animal’s Conference (Kastner) or the work of Rene Guillot. Though her study rarely veers from the Anglo-European tradition, and though it lacks a class, race or gender analysis, it invites the reader to re-visit those childhood stories that were so formative in our early imaginations.
Blount also makes interesting observations in passing. In a discussion of how the presentation of animals in literature changes, she writes:
“…the human attitudes to animals is always changing, from the earliest days when it was probably a mixture of greed and awe, through all the stages of amusement, guilt, objective interest, to concern and nostalgia. …Awe recognizes that animals are enemies and rivals and perhaps magic, and greed uses them”.
Still pondering animals and awe.
And in her discussion of Orwell’s Animal Farm she writes:
“Animal Farm has been called a satire on dictatorship, but it is a chronicle of the sad sameness of human nature and the ultimate absorption of every revolutionary movement”.
Her observations didn’t always ring true to me, but they were engaging and often thought-provoking. Her work covers fables, satires, nursery rhymes and fantasy; she sees all the charm and violence and wistfulness contained within these worlds of talking rabbits and badgers in waistcoats, and she reminds that sometimes our first books are among our oldest friends