I recently re-read my favourite book in the whole world: Watership Down. Years ago I fell in love with Richard Adam’s story of a perilous journey made by a band of rabbits set in the very real landscapes of Hampshire. My penguin books edition tells me it was originally a story he told his daughters while on a long car journey to Stratford-on-Avon.
Watership Down never fails to bring me to tears and I’m surprised by the depth of feeling it conjures every time I read it. I find both comfort in re-experiencing familiar parts of the story and new reflections that illuminate my mental landscape in fascinating ways.
Place
This time round I’ve been reflecting on the importance of place and physical landscapes. I remembered attending a writing workshop in Dungeness last summer led by crime writer William Shaw. It was an inspired location for a workshop, presided over by the nuclear power station and formed by the unique landscape. Shaw made the point that writing about an existing place literally grounds your story. As we sat, having ceased to hear the ever-present hum of the power station, this made a lot of sense to me. Being able to write about the details of being in a place (the sounds you hear while walking, the smells on the air at certain times of day or year) lets other people into a world that your story inhabits.
I’ve always loved that Watership Down is based in familiar, English landscapes and is set somewhere I could visit. I was more aware on this reading that Adams narrates landscapes that I feel part of. The world he creates is coherent on a physical and emotional level, not just an intellectual one. This is a necessary condition for the most wonderful thing about the book: it gives the gift of stepping outside my usual human frame of reference. It imagines the world from a different perspective. I’m not saying the book isn’t about human concerns, human experiences and isn’t anthropomorphism. It is! Despite this, it gives me a feeling of encountering the world through different senses. From expansive tracts of scrub & woodland to the confines of the burrows, the coherent physicality of the landscapes creates space for the rabbits to navigate.
Thinking about how a book can create a new world, familiar enough to enter at all but different enough to enlarge my own experience reminded me of heady days (!) of MA research.
‘Beyond my situation as reader, beyond the author’s situation, I offer myself to the possible ways of being-in-the-world which the text opens up and discovers for me.” This is what Gadamer calls “fusion of horizons” (Horizontverschmelzung) in historical knowledge.’ (Gadamer, quoted by Ricoeur, 1974: 107)
Ricoeur introduced me to an enduring metaphor for the act of making meaning while reading: the idea that the written text opens up a horizon of meaning to the reader. I’m not at all sure I’ve respected their (Ricoeur’s & Gadamer’s) original intentions, but I love the spatial metaphor and it filters, usefully, into my thinking all the time.
While Watership Down may not be high-art, it is compelling and emotionally involving. It discovers a horizon for me, a slightly different one each time I read it, and I gladly explore it. As an example, the BFI published a fascinating article on how the film Watership Down challenged romanticised portrayals of Britain’s rural landscapes – that’s a different possible way of being-in-the-world right there. Or another example, I find reading the book gives me respite from being too much in my head and in my thoughts. I idealise through thinking and rationalising and tend to neglect my intuition and emotional experience. Watership Down gives me permission and space for some respite.
Reference: Ricoeur, P. 1974. Metaphor and the Main Problem of Hermeneutics. (Find the article at this link).
Journeys
Another thing I have always loved about Watership Down is the very real sense of threat created by mere words. Or as Adams describes them.
“… sharp, hard letters that cut straight as black knives”.
(as carried by a sign post erected by men announcing the intended development of the Sandleford Warren area.)
It’s a journey in more senses than one and the rabbits court risk, encounter threat and overcome it. They negotiate things that are difficult, they learn and they change as they journey on.
As the rabbits journey together, each character becomes recognised by the group for their particular strength. Dandelion is the storyteller, offering the group comfort and certainty by reaffirming identity and community. Blackberry is a problem solver, able to make connections and join disparate ideas. Fiver, the quintessential outlier, is the shaman of the group. At first, Fiver’s visions must be sponsored by more forceful personalities, but his counsel eventually becomes the most trusted of all.
I love the way they learn to rely on each other and celebrate their different strengths. And celebrate they do: the story is built up by telling the contribution each rabbit makes to progress towards their shared goal. Stories within the main story tell of a rabbit hero, El-ahrairah, with an explicit nod towards the end of the story about how the boundaries between stories of El-ahrairah and of their own adventures have blurred.
And I realised that’s it’s okay to be the hero of my own story.
I’ve always loved believable stories about heroes. Heroes whose adventures I want to go on, heroes I can learn from. And as I grew older, heroes that were flawed, heroes I could relate to. Heroes who had to make difficult choices and who weren’t always confident and heroes who didn’t always win. I’ve always wanted to be a hero, which shows up a thing about myself. I find it hard to give myself permission to celebrate those times when I use my strengths.
And the idea of being the hero of one’s own story and that sometimes going unnoticed reminds me of this fabulous track from The Divine Comedy.
“All the people pushing by
As the sun dips in the sky
All the songs that go unsung
When the working day is done”
A reluctant rebel 