A series in which I retell from memory the plot of some film, novel, or other narrative sequence.
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(Last week's part 1). As I said, the rabbits have adventures. They are fleeing, and searching for a new warren. At a certain point they find shelter in a warren populated by sleek, healthy rabbits. These rabbits behave profoundly unnaturally.

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It occurs to me, thanks to a typo, that Watership Down would be a very different novel if it were about rabbis.

But it is a novel about rabbits, and, I had forgotten this, it is full of the mythology of rabbits, of stories about the rabbit-prince, whose embodiment of rabbitness — trickery, speed, cleverness, features vaguely connected I think to Brer Rabbit, but without the American racial subtext — constitutes the moral guide of the species, and gives the book much of its anthropological pleasure.

(A good deal of contemporary science fiction and fantasy literature could be thought of as “anthropological” literature, in the sense that much of its pleasure comes from its imagination and filling in of a cultural world different than our own.)

Anyway. The rabbits on the run (lie quiet, Updike) arrive at this warren. The rabbits there do not behave in accordance with the laws of rabbithood laid down by the Mythic Prince (who has a name, but I cannot remember it; one of the rules of “Spoiler Alert” is that I can't look anything up). Two of the most disturbing features of their difference are: (1) They push colored stones into the warren walls to make pictures; (2) They engage in ritual dance and chanting. Also (important clue): every once in a while fresh lettuce and carrots simply appear in a spot near their warren — the natural rabbits ask where it comes from, and the unnatural rabbits do not reply. (In rabbit mythology, rabbits are supposed to risk their lives to steal these items from farmers, or obtain them through trickery; they do not just appear.)

The strangeness of these is so profound to the natural rabbits that they cannot discern what the images on the walls are, even once it has been explained to them that these are images (and not, which would make sense to them, some kind of anti-fox, wall-reinforcing strategy).

Why are these rabbits so strange, one wonders? And then: Bigger gets caught in a snare near where the lettuce and carrots appear. His friends rush into the warren and ask for help getting him out of the snare, but the unnatural rabbits ignore them, pretend not to hear them. It is revealed that the price of living this life, full of wealth and free of predators, is that the farmer, who lays out the fresh vegetables, occasionally culls a member or two of the group.

The good rabbits free Bigger, and they leave. As they leave one of the other rabbits comes after them, and begs them to take him with them. They may or may not allow this; I have a memory of Bigger driving him away, but I also have a memory of him being taken along and then dying later (partly because he does not have the kinds of skills and instincts he would need to survive in the wild).

In any case, this is the main thing I remember about this novel. And it seems so rich, so full of mystery and significance, so close to Freud on sublimation, or to Althusser on ideology, so tied to notions of nature and culture, that it opens up all sorts of thinking space. But it does so, also, through the trauma of my memory; I remember, even then, finding the anthropological sphere coordinated by these strange rabbits to be horrifying, extraordinary, and in many ways terribly moving; even then I knew that I was not “against” art, and that a simple reading of the story led down a road I did not want to travel. The complexities of that emotion and that knowledge are with me still, locked up in that kernel, as I tell this story to people for whom it cannot, since they are hearing it for the first time, mean nearly so much.
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As for the rest of the novel: the rabbits reach General Wigglewort's warren. They live there, Bigger becomes a lieutenant. Then they escape (it is the model of a totalitarian state, as I said last time; some particular outrage surely prompts their going). They found their own warren. Wigglewort, raveled by rage, tracks them down and attacks with his lieutenants. He and Bigger meet in a final fight; Bigger wins. The liberal idealist who is the major focalizer of the novel remembers Wigglewort with respect, despite all he has done, noting that the general's drive to exceed rabbitness, to stand on equal grounds with the lynx or the fox, has in it a touch of greatness. Wigglewort must die, however, to secure the future of the liberal state, which is embodied in the final warren established by our heroes at novel's end. As I recall, the novel ends with the death of Fiver; the Mythic Prince, who had had no room in his mythology for shamanistc future-telling, accepts him into his heaven, and the rabbit myth adjusts, like Eliot's tradition, to accept him there. The nature of rabbits is thereby simultaneously retained and transformed.

-- The End --