Discerning the Animal of a Thousand Faces

In the marketplace of modern children's literature, children wait in well-behaved wonder for the coming of the latest unnatural hero, their imaginative world dominated by continental cats, tiresome intellectual bears, prankish monkeys, hysterical birds, priggish stuffed toys, and domesticated, slavering brutes, all wound up and talking cocktail morality with thick, ungifted tongues. What relief an older child must feel when he is finally able to cut through all the decadent silliness with a clean piece of naturalism by Jack London or Jean George or a skillfully integrated fantasy by Kipling. Then, at last, he can judge that while fiction is not true, good fiction should be, at least, equal in magnitude to the truth.

Heroes of all kinds are popular with children, who are indiscriminate as to the race, creed, or species of their candidates. Long before adults began to produce literature especially for them, children took their pleasure from folk narratives, whose special contribution to literature was the evolution of the hero. The animal hero, especially popular with younger children, appears frequently in folk tales, but the majority of his roles in the tales and in the myths are supporting ones. It is generally felt that the animal motif in religion and art of all times usually symbolizes man's primitive and instinctual nature (which could account for its popularity with younger children), and fables, folk tales and myths are full of supporting evidence.¹ Although the animal motif is now part of our literary tradition, we do not generally interpret identically its use in folklore and literature. It would be a troublesome task to prove, for instance, that the animal silliness in much current children's fiction is symbolic of our failure to integrate the instinctual psyche into our lives. The really troubling question is whether we may be pushing a traditional folk motif too far in modern children's fiction, and whether overuse of the motif reveals a basic weakness in our orientation toward the natural world. In other words, as a result of some preconscious and traditionally reinforced acceptance of the animal as a kind of anthropomorphic extension of ourselves, are we historically and finally unable to accept the animal as a separate and independently evolving species?

An enormous lore of half-truth and ignorance about nature and about animals and their behavior comes to us through folk tradition, which always minimized the differences between man and animal. In folktales, for instance, the two are never far apart: traditional tales date from the time when the world was not yet man-oriented and man and animal struggled together against uncontrollable natural forces. Animals are rarely the antagonists in these tales; enemies are usually undefined monsters, ogres, witches, giants, devils, demons, with only an occasional wolf. The tales are full of faithful and helpful animals, mostly in supporting roles. Of the tales current in western oral tradition in which the animal is the hero, most have their sources in literary fable collections from India, Aesop, and medieval cycles such as Reynard the Fox.² In these tales, the animal is permitted speech and is frequently dominated by some universally human moral trait which can be successfully integrated with animal behavior. The trickster fox or rabbit and the stupid bear are common, but the variety of animal actors in these tales is at least as great as that of the fables.

In the myths, of course, animals are not the heroes. They are allied with the gods in sharing the burden of natural and supernatural threat in an uncontrolled world. Although the differences between man and animal are minimal in myth, since both are subject to manipulation by the gods, their friendly relationship is less apparent than in the tales. The animal is given the role of pet or tool of the gods, who occasionally assume his shapes to carry out romantic or political intrigues. As if to further illustrate the easy come and go between the species, mortals are often punished with animal transformations. Animal nature balances delicately with man's in the ambiguous Pan, god of the natural world, who...