Magic & Anthropomorphism

115}BIRD BRAINS: WRITING
ANTHROPOMORPHICALLY

In writing stories with nonhuman animals as their protagonists, we follow a practice going back to ancient times. The Pompeians took mischievous delight in putting animals’ heads on human bodies, anticipating Bugs Bunny and Porky Pig by two thousand years.

More recent antecedents include Jack London’s The Call of the Wild, relating the adventure of a wolf, and reached a pinnacle thirty years ago in the novels of Richard Adams—especially Watership Down, his first and most famous, about a warren of supremely brave and noble rabbits. Adams’s bestseller spawned an epidemic of anthropomorphic fiction that ultimately initiated its own decline. Enough with the talking apes and bunnies. Anthropomorphic fiction today has been relegated to children’s books.

So my first question for the author of an anthropomorphic story about a parrot is this: Who are you writing for? What is your “target audience” (in the marketing cliché)? We want our work to be published and read. So the author should consider the ultimate form her story will take. A children’s book? For what age group? With or without illustrations?

As with all kinds of writing, Rule # 1 of anthropomorphic writing is consistency. This is true in writing for children:

The Mole had been working very hard all the morning, spring-cleaning his little home. First with brooms, then with dusters; then on ladders and steps and chairs, with a brush and a pail of whitewash; till he had dust in his throat and eyes, and splashes of whitewash all over his black fur, and an aching back and weary arms. …[H]e suddenly flung down his brush on the floor, said ‘Bother!’ and ‘O blow!’ and also ‘Hang spring-cleaning!’ and bolted out of the house without even waiting to put on his coat.⁵³

—or for adults:

My father was a St. Bernard, my mother was a collie, but I am a Presbyterian. This is what my mother told me, I do not know these nice distinctions myself. To me they are only fine large words meaning nothing. My mother had a fondness for such; she liked to say them, and see other dogs look surprised and envious, as wondering how she got so much education.⁵⁴

—or writing a satirical parable with a deeply serious social and political agenda:

The pigs had an even harder struggle to counteract the lies put about by Moses, the tame raven, who was Mr. Jones’s especial pet, was a spy and a tale-bearer, but he was also a clever talker.⁵⁵

The author of anthropomorphic fiction needs to arrive at a firm set of principles governing how her anthropomorphized creatures think, in what terms, and with what vocabulary. To what extent do they see things as humans do? Having established such guidelines, the author must stick to them fearlessly. The moment the code is broken—the moment the reader stumbles on inconsistencies— credibility is lost, the conceit crumbles, and the reader is no longer willing to suspend disbelief.

In the student story about parrots, the same parrot that calls human hair “feathers” refers to the “Amazon” rain forest. Wouldn’t a parrot have his own name for the forest? Would he call it, for example, the “Green World”? The chief interest of anthropomorphic fiction is imagining what it’s like to be a member of some other species (in this case, a parrot). If the writer hasn’t done that, what’s the point?

116}REQUIEM FOR A CLICHÉ:
MAGIC REALISM TO THE RESCUE?

From time to time, authors combine the tone (and clichés) of two disparate genres, as if two wrongs might make a right.

I’m presented with a tale set in the world of boxing. Within the first round, the story is K.O.’d by clichés. There’s the boxer’s grumpy trainer (a character seen before, played by Keenan Wynn/ Burgess Meredith) and his dutiful, horror-stricken, nice-girl wife (Angie/Adrian/Julie), who watches from a ringside seat as “gouges of Mickey’s bright red blood flew through the air.” When not clichéd and hyperbolic, the writing feels synoptic, like the sketch of a film treatment—fitting, since much of the story is lifted straight from movies (Rocky, Requiem for a Heavyweight, Somebody Up There Likes Me).

But then, halfway through the narrative, the story takes an abrupt turn into magic realism—as does Bernard Malamud’s The Natural, a baseball story that owes its rescue from cliché to an imported dose of this exotic genre.

Magic realism is a broad term that denotes a seamless blending of illogical and/or surreal events with “realistic” characters and settings. The genre is associated with Latin authors, especially Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel García Márquez, and Alejo Carpentier, and exemplified by the scene in García Márquez’s “A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings,” in which, at the story’s end, the title character (who may or may not be an angel) literally flies away. Barbara Kingsolver, Italo Calvino, and Salman Rushdie have been (respectively) North American, European, and Asian exponents of the genre.

In this case, when the author has Angie literally feel the blows as they are dealt to her husband’s face, the author has dipped into magic realism’s bag of tricks. Later, when Angie visits her priest, a dash of religion is added, like Tabasco, to the already heady mixture. This might have worked well, were religious symbols woven into the story from the start—with Angie (for instance) giving her husband a St. Christopher medallion to wear for good luck in the ring.

Near the end of the story, as a way to surmount her dread of the sport, Angie takes up boxing herself; she proves to be a “natural,” and in her white gym outfit she achieves angelic status among her fans (the lights of the arena creating a “golden halo” around her head). At this point, all realistic bets are off: We feel that the story has made a forced landing somewhere in Venezuela, where such things happen. The magic feels tacked on to the “realism”; it doesn’t arise organically from the materials because its seeds weren’t planted from the start (see Meditation # 80).

The magic in magic realism should feel inevitable and not convenient. Otherwise it’s just an excuse to take flight from your own stories.