UKL: A function of myth in what we used to call “primitive” societies, real myth as told seriously by serious grown-ups to others, perhaps one of its main functions, is telling us who we are. For instance, “We are the Diné,” or “We are the Apache.” And a very large part of knowing who we are is knowing where we came from, where we live now, and if there is a further home to go to, what might it be? Placing yourself among your people within a certain context on the Earth. And it seems to take a lively effort of the imagination to accomplish this, so all myths in a sense are “unrealistic.” And yet they are trying to get to the heart of one’s reality as a human being who is a member of a community. Which is kind of an important job.
DN: Right after this investigation of the imagination in the book we come across a talk you gave at the Conference on Literature and Ecology in 2005 called “The Beast in the Book,” where you talk about imagination in relationship to nature and the non-human other. You talk about the coexistence of animal and human in story, in folktales, fairy tales, and fables, about how only in the postindustrial age are animal tales considered only for children. It makes me think about one of the taboos in literary fiction, one that you see explicitly prohibited in the guidelines of many literary magazines, that of stories that have talking animals, or that are told from the imagined perspective of an animal. Do you think this limiting of the animal to children is a postindustrial phenomenon or an American postindustrial phenomenon?
UKL: It’s not just American. It includes European literature too. The thing is we don’t live with animals as we did. The relationship has changed immensely in the last two hundred years. You didn’t used to be able to get away from the animals. They were part of your life, absolutely essential to your well-being as fellow workers in the field, as your food supply, your wool supply, and so on. Now we get all that at an enormous distance. Now there are people who can’t be in a room with an animal. What would they have done a hundred years ago? I really don’t know. They would have to like it or lump it, I guess. Children grow up never touching any living being except another human being. No wonder we are alienated. We can live in the cities as if there were no other living beings on Earth. No wonder people get indifferent and think it doesn’t matter if you extinguish a species. You have to be in touch and we are not. I think that kids’ stories and animal stories are an imaginative way at least of being in touch. Therefore they are very important. But my opinion is not shared by a lot of literary people. Literary people tend to assume if it is about animals, it is probably sentimental. And sentimentality is the worst possible sin.
Why do most children and many adults respond both to real animals and to stories about them, fascinated by and identifying with creatures which our dominant religions and ethics consider more objects for human use: no longer working with us, in industrial societies, but mere raw material for our food, subjects of scientific experiments to benefit us, entertaining curiosities of the zoo and the TV nature program, pets kept to improve our psychological health?
Perhaps we give animal stories to children and encourage their interest in animals because we see children as inferior, mentally “primitive,” not yet fully human: so we see pets and zoos and animal stories as “natural” steps on the child’s way up to adult, exclusive humanity—rungs on the ladder from mindless, helpless babyhood to the full glory of intellectual maturity and mastery. Ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny in terms of the Great Chain of Being.
But what is it the kid is after—the baby wild with excitement at the sight of a kitten, the six-year-old spelling out Peter Rabbit, the twelve-year-old weeping as she reads Black Beauty? What is it the child perceives that her whole culture denies?
DN: Well, here at your house, during this conversation, another author has been coming in and out of the room. Your cat Pard has a new book out himself. Tell us a little bit about Pard’s nonfiction.
UKL: [Laughs.] I shamelessly—and really there’s a shamelessness to it—pretended I was Pard and wrote his autobiography. I say shameless because what I think and feel is immensely different than what Pard thinks and feels. I humanized him completely. But I hope it’s not what is called colonialism. I hope I am not just co-opting Pard. I have a great deal of respect for him. I attempted to share with others what I do understand, or can guess, about his feelings. And no more than that. This whole thing about writing about the other—animals are just the tip of the iceberg.
DN: Speaking of that, you bring up a book, T. H. White’s The Sword in the Stone, as an important book, and it was one that was hugely important to me growing up. Mainly because of the different animals Merlin turns the future King Arthur into as part of his education.
UKL: Arthur gets to be all kinds of creatures—a hawk, a hedgehog—even a rock. It is absolutely wonderful. It had a deep, permanent effect on me, too. Unfortunately, when White incorporated The Sword in the Stone into The Once and Future King, he left out some of the very best of it—cut marvelous, mystical things, added political rants. Most people who know both think it was a mistake, and you should get the old book if you can find it.
DN: Later you say, “We human beings have made a world reduced to ourselves and our artifacts but we aren’t made for it.” This feels kind of like a tragic horror story of sorts, that we’ve created a world and then a literature about that world that we are ill-suited to, one that references only ourselves.
UKL: We are suited to live in it, but it is such a small part of the world we could be living in. Let’s put it that way. It makes it less of a horror story and more of an existential mistake.
DN: Taking that a step further, I wonder if the resistance to considering fantasy or science fiction as literature is partly because of the elevation of the non-human in it, of the decentralization of humanity with regard to intelligence or otherwise.
UKL: You are right on it there. There is real resistance to this. And this is behind a lot of the resistance to science. Because science—not just Copernicus, most science—moves us away from the center of things. Because we aren’t. You find out how unimaginably old the Earth is and you feel sort of dethroned. Many people can’t bear it. They hate it. It makes them feel alienated. That’s the pity of it. If they could get into it, science could give them a much deeper sense of identification with all these marvelous processes that are going on all around us all the time, that we are part of. All of us.
DN: You write a lot about gender, sexism, feminism, and gendered literature in this collection and there is a talk you gave at the Winter Fishtrap, the gathering in Joseph, Oregon, called: “What Women Know,” where you resist making a cult of women’s knowledge, of associating women with the instinctual, with nature, with the dark, because it reinforces the masculinist idea of women as more primitive. Reading this I felt a subtextual conversation going on between “What Women Know” and “The Beast in the Book.” Together they seem like a call both to bring the nonhuman other, to bring nature and animals back into literature but also to decouple the idea that the realm of nature is the realm of women. Instead you imagine a world where men spend some time in the darkness that they avoid and women up in the light, that women claim their rightful place in the world of reason and ideas and action too. I’d love for you to unpack this a little more for us, your interrogation of the gendered nature of nature.