This is from the first chapter of horse and his boya seven-part volume The Chronicles of Narnia By CS Lewis. It was first published in 1954, but talking horses have been published in literature for over 3,000 years.
in a bloody power struggle iliad, Achilles has two immortal horses, Xanthos and Balius. After the death of Achilles’ best friend Patroclus, Xanthos is given the gift of speech by the goddess Hera, he addresses Achilles – but his words are not the delicious surprise experienced by Shasta and the readers of The Horse and His Boy .
“We will surely save you now, mighty Achilles.
But the day of your destruction is near…”
It wouldn’t even be the horses’ fault: a god would be responsible. The prophetic horse is silenced by the Furies, and Achilles says that there was no great need to speak to Xanthos. He knows he will die in this war – but not before the Trojans pay the price.
The introduction to the talking animals makes a quick statement: this story has a fictional agenda. The horse’s first speech in the Narnia story immediately sets the tone for newcomers and confirms it for those who have read the other books. Animals Talk: Don’t expect uncompromising realism.
Xanthos does not speak until the 19th book of 24, by which time we have become well accustomed to the gods’ capricious interventions in human lives. Xanthos’ speech is of no great detail: and it prepares us for the terrible events that lead to the hero’s death, but before other horrors have already unfolded.
Animal speech changes everything. If Moby Dick had spoken to Captain Ahab in good English, or if the cat in Ulysses had said “Maccagnao!” Had it said “Thanks for the milk, Poldy” instead, it would have been a different book. But the talking animal doesn’t trivialize the narrative; Only the writer – and the reader – can do that. When animals talk, they ask us to forget naturalism. Talking animals can be hilarious, they can be terrifying, they can be nauseatingly cute and they can be truly terrifying.
They appear in millions of stories for children, such as those written and illustrated by Beatrix Potter. They can also be found in coming-of-age stories, in books that a child cannot easily understand. There are also many stories that exist in the halfway world between childhood and adulthood.
Such books operate in a liminal state, in which children hope to become adults by reading a little beyond their age, and in those same pages, adults willingly return to certain aspects of childhood in a way that enriches rather than degrades. The Narnia books become an adult delight for some, thanks to the books’ subtle willingness to excite by embracing big themes.
Talking animals can also be terrifying. Take the morning on which Gregor Samsa wakes “from troubled dreams” and finds himself “transformed into a huge insect.” He answers his family’s call through the door, “Vaguely he had his own voice, it was true, but behind it was a constant terrible twittering scream”.
Of course this is the beginning TransformA novel by Franz Kafka. It tells of Gregor’s life as an insect, the kindness of his sister Grete, the violence of his father, the suffering and despair of his existence, and his eventual death.
There are many interpretations of this parable, if it is a parable at all, and the reader cannot choose one or all or none. What comes across without any ambiguity is the fear of feeling cut off from the rest of humanity – and this is something everyone has experienced.
Kafka’s work is full of creatures who are half human but not human at all: half-and-half, neither one thing nor another. In a report for an academy, the Academy is addressed by an ape who has made himself human by an effort of will: “No, freedom was not what I wanted. There is only one way…”
It also contains an essay by a philosophical dog and a description of a pack of talking jackals who believe the narrator to be their messiah. All of these highly articulate animals make the big topics they discuss both funny and horrifying, full of meaning and absurd at the same time.
Behemoth falls into the terrifying-but-ludicrous category. He is a demonic cat – “as big as a pig” – who is part of Satan’s retinue when he visits Moscow during the atheist and Stalinist years. master and margarita By Mikhail Bulgakov.
Behemoth is a wildly inventive novel’s greatest invention. In the opening chapter he boards a tram: “Both the conductor and the passengers seemed completely oblivious of the most extraordinary thing: not that a cat had got into the tramcar – that was quite possible – but the fact that the animal Pay the rent for what I was offering him!”
Behemoth has a passion for chess, vodka, and the occasional shootout; He takes special pleasure in arson. When he speaks – he is rather a terse cat – he is sneered at: “I protest… Dostoyevsky is immortal!” he says as he enters the writers’ club.
Once again it appears that we are in some kind of allegory, but it is never clear what allegory is being applied. Rather we must deal with chaos and disorder, irresponsible love of power, and how the world works when it lacks trust about anything.
As soon as an animal opens its mouth or beak, metaphor and myth take a front seat. We are led to the homely truths told by the exalted fables of Aesop and his foxes, crows, and lions, which are not much later than the time of the Iliad.
These stories are so much a part of Western culture – and other cultures too – that we accept them almost unconsciously. Whenever an animal speaks, we are waiting for it to dramatize some essential truth about human life. The trick, then, is to make tradition work for you, either by destroying it, as Bulgakov and Kafka do in their different ways, or by running with it.
George Orwell’s Animal Farm One of those liminal novels that reaches out to the child present in the adult and the adult present in the growing child. I remember my happiness in the first chapter; I think I was 13 or 14 years old. I was completely overwhelmed with the joy of the revolution and was convinced that everything would be good from now on. An ideal society was being built before my reading eyes.
The animal farmers drive out Mr. Jones, take over the farm and manage the place for themselves, far better than Jones, under the slogan “All animals are equal”. The story reflects the history of the revolution in Russia; Naturally, being the most intelligent animals, pigs are in charge, but they act gentle and everything is wonderful. the very first.
Napoleon then gained sole control. A noble worker, the horse boxer gives his all: “Napoleon is always right. I’ll work harder.” He becomes too old to work and is rewarded for his loyalty by being sold to a crooked man. It’s a heartbreaking betrayal, does every first-time reader cry?
The main slogan has been modified: “All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others”. The book moves towards its inevitable end: the pigs are in charge and Napoleon reigns supreme. They come to terms with the world of men, and then comes one of the most famous paid lines in all literature: “The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig again to man, but It was already impossible to say which one it was.
Perhaps the most famous talking animal of them all can be found in the third chapter of the first book of the Bible, when the serpent, inhabited by Satan and more subtle than any beast of the field, tells Eve that if she and Adam eat The forbidden fruit is “You will be like gods”.
Pick up any newspaper today and, at the center of almost every story, there will be someone about someone who wants to be like God. This theme – power for the simple love of power – was taken up by John Milton in Paradise Lost, as he retells the story of Adam and Eve, and how the serpent addresses Eve as “the worthiest imp of deceit”, Tells her that she is so beautiful that she should be seen as such:
“A goddess among the gods, worshiped and served by
By countless angels…”
She agrees, and all is lost.
HH Munro, who wrote under the pseudonym of Saki, loved puncturing Edwardian Edens and toying with their traditional hypocrisies. He also delighted in bringing wild creatures into the drawing room, especially at tea time.
A guest at a house party teaches his hosts’ cat to speak. Tobermory is a cat who is the first to tell his impatient owner that he will join them at the tea table “when he is very happy”. He was then asked his view of human intelligence, “mine for example”: “‘You put me in an embarrassing position’, said Tobermory, whose tone and attitude certainly gave no hint of embarrassment.”
He tells the assembled guests what they all really think of each other, and when someone tries to get the better of him he says: “Since you’re in the house, a little on your manners. With a little attention I think you will find it would be inconvenient if I shifted the conversation to your own petty matters.
The assembled company conspired to poison Tobermory: after all, society cannot function in the face of a cat that tells the truth. The story – titled Tobermory – is a six-page tour de force, definitively establishing the cat in the midst of polite society.
Mowgli, Rudyard Kipling’s Wild Boy the jungle Book And its sequel, is introduced into the polite society of the wolf-pack and begins to understand the beauty of the law of the jungle. He learns the languages of all the animals and they speak to him in phrases that echo king james bible,
But the wolves eventually turn against Mowgli because he is a man. While out, he asks his friend and protector Bagheera, the black panther, if he is dying. “No, younger brother. They are just such tears as men use. They are powerful stories, full of meaning. Animals speak and man in the forest is enriched and enriched by what he learns from them.
The Polynesian parrot teaches Dr. Dolittle the language of animals. The Cheshire Cat smiles mysteriously from the sky Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Winnie-the-Pooh is a foolish scholar; Ratty and Mole live on the river bank the wind in the Willows, Paddington Darkest arrives in England from Peru and is welcomed by the Brown family; Hazel and the other rabbits re-enact the Odyssey In Watership Down, Harry Potter is fluent in snake language or Parseltongue.
Talking animals have enriched our literature and our lives. But I’ll leave the last word to the cow that appears in Douglas Adams’ Fellow traveler series. At the restaurant at the End of the Universe, Arthur Dent is offered a piece of beef by the cow itself. “Good evening… I am the main dish of the day. “Can I show you some parts of my body that I am interested in?”
As a commentary on the relationship between humans and non-human animals, it is perhaps unremarkable.