Sherry Chandler

“What about talking animals, anyhow?”

That’s the question Ursula K. Le Guin asks in the introduction to her collection Buffalo Gals and Other Animal Presences (Roc, 1987), for which she won a Hugo Award and an International Fantasy Award. (Hear her read “She Unnames Them,” the final fable from that collection here.)

She answers it, in part, like this:

People to whom sophistication is a positive intellectual value shun anything “written for children”; if you want to clear the room of derrideans, mention Beatrix Potter without sneering. … In literature as in “real life,” women, children, and animals are the obscure matter upon which Civilization erects itself, phallologically. That they are Other is … the foundation of language, the Father tongue. If Man vs. Nature is the name of the game, no wonder the team players kick out all those non-men who won’t learn the rules and run around the cricket pitch squeaking and barking and chattering!

…

Why do animals in kids’ books talk? Why do animals in myths talk? …Why does the tortoise say, “I’ll race you,” to the hare, and how does Coyote tell Death, “I’ll do exactly what you tell me!” Animals don’t talk—everybody knows that. Everybody, including quite small children, and the men and women who told and tell talking-animal stories, knows that animals are dumb: have no words of their own. So why do we keep putting words in their mouths?

We who? We the dumb: the others.”

All this by way of announcing that you can find the first three chapters of Morgan S. Williams’s anthropomorphic first novel Oseille at this link, downloadable for free as a rich-text file.

Morgan S. Williams is my son. He’s looking for a publisher.
________

Note: In a degrees-of-separation kind of connection, Ursula K. Le Guin has a small chapbook of poems, I Am My Inheritance, in volume 28 of The Other Voices International Project and I have a small selection, October Grass, in volume 19.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.