I can’t shake the feeling that even if children don’t cognitively grasp the miraculous tragedy of consciousness, they nevertheless feel the aftershocks of the journey they’ve made. Animals inhabit the world of raw experience we’ve left behind; animals are the people of our lost homeland. To a child, an animal seems like a compatriot. The attachments that I had to the animals I knew were every bit as powerful as my feelings toward, say, my siblings (and less ambivalent, too, since I wasn’t competing with the family cats for my parents’ attention or a bigger share of the french fries). It’s true that some adults still feel this way about their pets, and if you ask them why, the explanation often has to do with the transparency of animals’ affection, their sincerity, which also turns out to be connected to their lack of language. Animals can’t speak, ergo, they can’t lie.
Yet the most cherished creatures in children’s fantasy are talking animals. If we have mixed feelings about the gifts of language and consciousness, we have no intention of surrendering them. Instead, we want to bring animals along with us, into the solitude of self-knowledge, perhaps hoping that they’ll make it a less lonely place for us. Children are more likely than adults to fantasize about talking beasts because kids don’t have the logical faculties to see that giving animals the power of speech would surely spoil everything we like about them. Children still think they can finesse the difference, that the breach between the one animal who speaks and all the others who cannot will at last be closed, or at least bridged.
Talking animals were one of the things I loved most about the Chronicles as a child, but over the years that aspect of the books has lost its old allure. Once I would have given anything to join the Pevensie siblings at the round dinner table in Mr. and Mrs. Beaver’s snug little house, trading stories about Aslan and eating potatoes and freshly caught trout. What I now like about animals — their lack of self-consciousness — I know to be intimately bound up in their speechlessness. As a little girl, I suspected them of having inner lives much like my own, if only they could (or would) tell me about it; now, I recognize that their charm lies in their lack of such secret thoughts. If my neighbor’s cat, my friend’s dog, the squirrel who sometimes treks along my fire escape, peering in on me while I’m reading on my sofa, could speak, would they really have anything to say that they can’t already communicate well enough in their usual way: by purring, snuffling, wagging, chittering?
The denizens of Narnia were not the first talking beasts C. S. Lewis invented. As a little boy, growing up in Belfast at the beginning of the twentieth century, he dreamed up an imaginary kingdom he called “Animal-Land,” where he could “combine my two chief literary pleasures — ‘dressed animals’ and ‘knights in armor.’” His older brother, Warren (nicknamed Warnie), wanted to join in but preferred such modern paraphernalia as trains and steamships. So Animal-Land grew to encompass both a semilegendary past full of contests between armored mice and ferocious cats, and a present linked to Warnie’s own fantasyland, called “India,” in which the same sorts of creatures — frogs and rabbits — stood around in waistcoats, puffing on pipes and discussing parliamentary politics. Warnie and Jack (as Clive Staples Lewis was nicknamed) called this amalgamation “Boxen.” Jack immediately set about writing a history of the place to cover the years intervening between his stories and Warnie’s, and this in turn entailed drawing up maps of trade routes and railway lines, as well as sketching pictures of all the principal characters.
Lewis regarded the elaboration of Boxen to be his earliest training as a novelist. However, in Surprised by Joy, he warned readers that these boyhood writings were “astonishingly prosaic.” Animal-Land, he wrote, had no similarities to Narnia “except for the anthropomorphic beasts.” It was a place, he insisted, entirely lacking in “wonder.” The publication in 1986 of Boxen: The Imaginary World of the Young C. S. Lewis, a collection of these maps, drawings, histories, and stories, shows this to be an accurate assessment; the book is deadly dull. Its characters — irresponsible kings and concerned prime ministers — behave much like Lewis’s father, Albert, a prominent solicitor, and his politically active friends, the only adults Jack and Warnie had had a chance to observe. There’s something absurd about inventing an elaborate fantasy world in which you merely replicate the tedium of the world around you, but Boxen stands as a case in point: it’s a lot harder than it looks to tap into the enchantments of childhood. Even an actual child, it seems, isn’t necessarily up to the job.
Stories about talking animals are not, of course, solely the province of children’s literature. Folklore — which is made by and for adults — has its share of them, too, but it always uses talking beasts didactically, to personify a particular principle or trait: the wily fox, the fearsome wolf, the methodical tortoise. The animals of fable and fairy tale are used to signify an identity that is simple and unchanging. Take the scorpion who breaks his promise by stinging the frog who has agreed to carry him across a river; when asked how he could betray his rescuer, he replies, “It’s my nature.” People repeat this parable as a way of asserting that a thief is always a thief, and a liar is always a liar, so it’s best not to trust either one. A leopard never changes his spots, goes the saying, but it’s meant as a knock on a certain kind of human being, not on leopards themselves. (Why should they change their spots?) When it comes to people who behave badly, who indulge their lowest impulses, character is animalistic: inborn, inherent, and fixed.
Adults rarely tell each other real stories (as opposed to fables and parables) about animal characters because the adult notion of a good story — especially now, a few hundred years into the history of the novel — demands psychological change, enlightenment, growth. When a contemporary novel with animal characters appears — Richard Adams’s Watership Down, for example — even if in most ways it meets the criteria of adult fiction, its moorings there are never secure. Chances are it will drift, sooner or later, to the children’s bookshelves. Stories that expect us to invest ourselves in the thoughts and fates and personalities of animals, stories like The Wind in the Willows, are obviously for kids.
Children freely and delightedly identify with the characters in animal stories, often more easily than they identify with child characters. Children’s authors know that what insults an adult reader — being likened to an animal — delights a young one. Robert McCloskey’s celebrated picture book Blueberries for Sal, for example, is simply an extended conceit on the similarities between the small child Sal and Little Bear — to the degree that at one point the two youngsters accidentally swap mothers. Curious George is ostensibly a mischievous monkey, but his most devoted readers recognize that he is also a wayward three-year-old.
And in Narnia, even God is an animal. Although as a girl I adored Aslan, he is another part of the Chronicles that no longer moves me as it once did. This is only partly because I now see, all too clearly, the theological strings and levers behind Lewis’s stagecraft; the great lion seems less a character than a creaking device. I also stopped loving Aslan because I have since grown into the autonomy I was only tentatively experimenting with at seven. The kind of story in which a distant, parental presence hovers behind the scenes, ready to step in and save the day at the moment when hope seems lost — a narrative safety net of sorts — now annoys rather than comforts me. I no longer need this device in the same way that I no longer need to hold someone’s hand while crossing the street.