Watership Down as a Double Journey

Watership Down as a Double Journey by Gillian Adams "Books always speak of other books, and every story tells a story that has already been told" Umberto Eco (20). Several years ago I was struck by a remark in the Times titerary Supplement about the sorry condition of a modern literature whose only successful epic is about rabbits. The reference was, of course, to Richard Adams' Watership Down. But is Watership Down an epic, and if it is, for what audience? Is it an epic for children? Or are there rather two readers implied by the text, the college-educated adult and the child, each of whom will respond to a different journey: the adult to the Virgilian epic journey which operates on a socio-political level, the child to the personal journey of a group of brave rabbits who form a composite hero with whom he can identify. A number of reviewers and critics have noted the correspondences between Watership Down and classical epic, particularly Virgilian epic; most recently Celia Anderson has itemized some of these correspondences, stressing the settings in a real geographical place which "serves to combine the actual and the allegorical in a manner reminiscent of the classical epics." In fact, Watership Down fulfills norms of classical epic other than the requisite setting, particularly secondary or literary epic: the narrative stance is objective, supernatural forces are operative, the context is cosmic and there is a sense of what C. S. tewis, quoting Shapespeare, calls "the abys of time" (64). In addition Hazel as epic hero is superior in a degree to others but not to his environment; he lacks immortality, but is willing to risk his own life for the sake of the community and to fulfill his duty to the gods and to the state; and what he does makes an important difference to his people. Adams' subject is for the microcosm of rabbits what Thomas Greene sees as the subject of all epic: "politics, but a politics not limited to society, a politics embracing the natural and the fabulous worlds, embracing even the moral or spiritual worlds they sometimes shadow forth, and involving ultimately the divine" (17). The only thing lacking in Watership Down is the epic opening couched in elevated language: Arma leporemque cano "I sing of arms and the rabbit." The function of such an opening invocation, nevertheless, is at least partially fulfilled by the quotation from Aeschylus' Agamemnon at the beginning of the first chapter, "The Journey." The quotation invites the reader to recognize the correspondences with classical epic: Cassandra (who has accompanied Agamemnon as his captive on his journey from Troy) speaks of his house as reeking of death and dripping blood, just as she had done before of devastated Troy; her prophecies are destined never to be taken seriously. The prophetic rabbit Fiver is clearly to be identified with her, as is Sandleford Warren and its rulers who will not listen to his warnings with Troy. It is inevitable that any reader familiar with the matter of Troy will see Hazel as a kind of pius Aeneas (who, like Hazel, does heed prophecies) leading his people on an epic journey into strange and dangerous territory to found a new Troy, that is a new rabbit society, far better than the old one. It is to this socio-political dimension of Watership Down as epic, to, in his terms, "the Utopian allegorical microcosm," that Roger Sell primarily responds (32-35). Given the overt invitation to the reader to put the work in the context of epic and the responses of those adults who see it in that context, it is curious that the only epic Adams quotes from in his chapter headings is The Epic of Gilqamesh, that he denies any socio-political agenda like that in the Aeneid (Hunt 234), and that in his piece, "Some Ingredients of Watership Down", he does not mention either Homer or Virgil, although, given the curriculum of British schools before the Second World War, he could scarcely have avoided a heavy dose of the latter, at least. Instead Adams discusses the Pooh books, Earnest Thompson Seton, Kipling (for his illusion formula for anthropomorphic...