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I read this novel seven or eight times between the ages of 11 and 14. In my memory now it is condensed to two or three scenes, only one of which I ever think of regularly, and which has become a weirdly recurring part of my intellectual life.
The story begins with men gassing the rabbit warrens inhabited by the protagonists. Fiver, the last-born of five rabbits in his litter, who is physically weak but has shamanistic powers, has foreseen the disaster, and has not been believed. Cassandra's curse rests heavy upon him.
The men insert tubes into the warrens; gas exits. The descriptions make it clear what is happening, but the novel is focalized through a rabbit's perspective, and so the reader bears witness to a double horror: the horror of gas, and the horror of a failure to grasp horror. Even as a child I understood that this was somehow connected to the concentration camps; now I see perhaps that it is a more general metaphor for a pre-Zizekian theory of ideology.
In any case the novel is written in plain English, so it does not have quite the dislocating effect of A Clockwork Orange; nonetheless a Weltanschauung, a specialized vocabulary and an entire anthropology of the rabbit-world, slowly unfold over the first few chapters. I remember none of this vocabulary except for a word that was written vaguely like this — silflay — which meant to graze. Some of it will surely come back to me as I write.
Some rabbits escape, Fiver among them; also Fiver's older brother, who is the liberal idealist of the group, and a tough fighting rabbit, former member of the warren's guard, whose suspicions of Fiver will be worn down over time. His name is something like Bigger, but of course it is not Bigger because that is the first name of the protagonist of Native Son.
They are on the run. They cross railroad tracks; they call vehicles hrududu (rabbits have, yes, onomatopoeia). They have heard of a warren, run by a rabbit named General Wigglewort (or something). They are running towards it. Wigglewort has an unbending reputation; he is something of a rabbit Che Guevara or Marshall Tito, fiercely rabbit-proud, disdainful of humans, and willing to take on the traditional rabbit enemies — foxes, lynxes, what have you — in a fight. His rabbits do not cower. The price they pay for this strength is, we discover later, that they live in a totalitarian society.
Along the way there are adventures. All of these escape me but one, the one that became for me a figure or figment of mental life, and which I retell on occasion to my students. Because I am writing to procrastinate, but also because even I have limits, I will save it, and the conclusion to Watership Down, for another week.
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