Adventure and animals

[altivo]

How many of the older adventure stories involved animals, either as companions or characters of a sort? I'm referring here to natural animals, not fantasy animals who wear clothing and live in houses, but animals whose forms we would recognize as perfectly normal, yet they reasoned and in many cases spoke as if they were human to some degree.

Here are a few authors that came to mind today after I started thinking about the first of them:

James Oliver Curwood

wrote several novels in which various animals were primary characters whose thoughts and feelings were revealed, including Kazan, Baree, and The Grizzly King. The last was made into a film called The Bear just a few years ago.

Jack London

was author of The Call of the Wild and White Fang.

Anna Sewell

wrote Black Beauty to promote more humane attitudes toward working horses.

Marshall Saunders

was the author of Beautiful Joe, which sought to do for dogs that Sewell did for horses.

Mark Twain

published two short stories later in his life, "A Dog's Tale" and "A Horse's Tale," that highlighted issues similar to those discussed by Sewell and Saunders.

Edgar Rice Burroughs

in his Tarzan series presented thinking rational animals, some of whom had their own languages.

Rudyard Kipling

The Jungle Book and Just So Stories.

Felix Salten

was the author of Bambi and Perri, both of which were eventually made famous by Disney adaptations.

Albert Payson Terhune

wrote many dog stories, most of them about collies. Lad: a Dog is probably the best known of them.

I'm cutting off my list somewhere around World War II, though there are many later authors who created remarkable animal characters. What other authors can you add, who wrote prior to about 1940? I contend that these authors are the fathers and mothers of modern furry fiction, and all of them are worthy of study and emulation to some degree. None of these authors were writing for children, though most of the works mentioned here are today shrugged off as children's stories.

Comments

[chibiabos.livejournal.com]

Rutherford George Montgomery - "Yellow Eyes" (first published 1937) about a cougar.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Good one. I've heard of that before but haven't read it.

[chibiabos.livejournal.com]

It was one of the first books I read as a kid (passed down in the family, along with Jacob Abott's Rollo series (also passed down), Johann Rudolf Wyss' Swiss Family Robinson (also passed down) and Hardy Boys (okay, not passed down :P).

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Yellow Eyes is not in my library system, but a couple of horse stories by the same author are available. I'll take a look. The cougar one will take a little longer to get.

[chibiabos.livejournal.com]

My edition I grew up with was from the 7th printing, which was in 1949. Its my understanding its been reprinted as recently as 2001. It can be had from amazon.com for $16.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

And the 1964 paperback is available for a dollar through abebooks.com. I can probably borrow it from a library outside our system but inside Illinois, though. There are a few copies around.

[shiningriver.livejournal.com]

This is a tough question for me. About the best I can offer is Herman Melville's "Moby Dick" and Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven". I acknowledge that both are closer to being fantasy creatures than real ones, and in the case of Moby Dick, the whale is more of a symbol and metaphor. Just please don't ask me to expound on that, it's been a looong time since I read Melville's work!

[shiningriver.livejournal.com]

I just looked at the Wikipedia on Poe (because I know little about him) and I find that his short story "The Black Cat" is another story involving an animal as a key figure.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I considered Moby Dick but I don't think it ever gets inside the mind of the whale to tell us what he thinks or feels. Likewise, Poe's Raven, though it speaks a single word repeatedly, never actually communicates or thinks in an obvious way. Both are elegant symbols, but I'm looking for anthropomorphism in a more visible form, as in Aesop where the animals have (and indeed are helped and hindered by) their natural bodies yet they speak and think as humans.

[hgryphon.livejournal.com]

No Watership Down?

[avon-deer.livejournal.com]

Was written after WWII. But it does support the assertation that these stories are not for kids. That book is VERY traumatic for young children to read.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Much too late for the pre-1940 requirement.

I'm seeing World War II as a watershed after which most people seemed to consider "animal stories" to be kid stuff. Not that we haven't had very adult animal stories since then, and Watership Down or Animal Farm would be prime examples, but general readers don't even give them a thought.

In the 1930s and earlier, such books were promoted to adult readers without question. Part of this seems to be the development of the concept of "children's literature" which arrived mid-century. There were kids' books before that, but they weren't pigeon-holed in the same way. School kids were expected to read Julius Caesar and The Song of Hiawatha well before eighth grade, and adults read Alice in Wonderland and Little Women as often as children did.

[cabcat.livejournal.com]

Ack Horsey I don't know many authors before 1940...I declare this question ageist :)

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Nope, it's not ageist at all. I wasn't around back then either, but I've read all those and a lot more. That's why we have libraries and keep older books around, and it's why authors write--so their words and ideas will live after them. Oddly enough, I don't know any of those old authors who created anthropomorphic house cats, though. Someone must have done it, but offhand I don't know who.

In any case, Jack London is very much worthy of still being read. Some of the others are getting old enough to need a lot of explanatory notes about how things were done in 19th century England.

[zenicurean.livejournal.com]

I suppose Eric Knight's Lassie Come-Home is a borderline case, since it was expanded out of a 1938 short story. (And I couldn't say precisely how much human intelligence the iconic dog would've had in the original.)

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Knight just might qualify. I can't remember whether he tells events through the eyes of the dog or not, though. That would be my requirement in his particular story. I know I've read some Rin Tin Tin stories that did take the viewpoint of the dog, though in third person, but I'm not sure they were before the war or intended for adult readers.

[dogteam.livejournal.com]

Swift?

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Good call. You're right, Swift's Houyhnhm race would qualify. I didn't think of Swift because I wasn't casting back farther than the 19th century, but that would be a very good example.

Unfortunately, most modern editions of Swift are Bowdlerized and abridged, with the Houyhnhms left right out. The average person only thinks of Liliput when Gulliver's Travels is mentioned. I suspect most, having only seen movie versions, don't even know there were other races and countries in the book.

Getting today's readers, at least in the US, to plow through all of Swift to get to the last section is going to be a very tough job. I just listened to an unedited version of the book in audio format a couple of months ago, and was reminded of how extensive an 18th century author's vocabulary and classical knowledge was when compared to today's readers. It's not a happy thought.

I'm afraid that today's teens and twenties would think it was a foreign language. ;p

[zenicurean.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately, most modern editions of Swift are Bowdlerized and abridged, with the Houyhnhms left right out.

And it's such a waste of good satire when they just make it a fantasy bit about tiny little men! The specific genre Swift was mocking has, of course, more or less gone the way of the dodo, but there's still so much good stuff there.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Boy, is there ever a lot of good stuff in there. Coming from a recent re-reading, I'm very much aware of that. I first read Swift (unabridged) when I was less than ten years old and most of that was wasted on me, though I did appreciate the Houyhnhms. Swift's barbs against society, fashion, political behavior and convention, universities, and the military are all just too good. And the really sad part? Nothing has changed in the last 250 years.

[dogteam.livejournal.com]

I was just logging back in to say "Sorry", that I suppose the Houyhnhms would be classified as "fantasy" animals...it's borderline, I suppose.
I had no idea that chapter had been "abridged" into oblivion. Shame, it was the best part of the book. I'll always be grateful that they made us read the whole thing in school, it really opened my eyes to how "dumbed down" a lot of modern popular literature is...

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Yes, I think your first impulse was right. The Houynhms looked just like ordinary horses, and had the same physical limitations we would expect related to that. Yet they had language and a culture, history, and politics. That's precisely the sort of thing I was thinking about. Even better, Lemuel Gulliver having learned their language found that he could carry on intelligent conversation with the ordinary horses of England. The implication of that little bit dropped at the very end of the book, and of course its congruence with the expression "horse sense" which was in use even then...

As for abridgement, alas, yes. Gulliver is largely left in the hands of children today and trimmed back to only the first adventure. Even that is expurgated to remove the sexual remarks and alter the part of the story in which he was subject to trial and execution for "making water" in the palace precincts when he extinguished that fire by pissing on it. He saved the lives of the queen and her ladies, but the crime was considered to outweigh the benefit of his action. How very typical of human behavior and attitudes.

[mondhasen.livejournal.com]

"I'm afraid that today's teens and twenties would think it was a foreign language."

“The language of this country being always upon the flux, the
struldbrugs of one age do not understand those of another"

Foreign indeed ;o)

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Oh, but struldbrug was defined in the book itself. That isn't meant to be an English word, it's a word in the language of the nation he was describing. In the country of Luggnagg, there were a small number of persons born in every generation who were unable to die. They lived on for hundreds of years, growing old and feeble but still living and breathing. These hapless individuals are the struldbrugs, who are not much appreciated in their society. Imagine Chaucer alive today and trying to speak his form of English to today's Americans. ;D

Alas, though, Swift's ordinary English is probably about grade 16 to 18 on today's reading difficulty scales. It's perfectly good English, and not particularly archaic, but he uses a very large vocabulary and doesn't hesitate at complex sentences.

[mondhasen.livejournal.com]

(moonhare nods) Exactly so. I used to think of this situation when in chat with those 20 or more years younger than I and we'd reach an impasse on some phrase or wording.

I once had Gulliver's Travels linked, in text form, from my webpages, from this quote:
"...as I was going to prostrate myself to kiss his hoof, he did me the honour to raise it gently to my mouth."
Excerpt from Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels

Only the quote remains, along with ones from "Leaves of Grass" and "The Door in the Wall."

[altivo.livejournal.com]

That's a great quote, especially when taken out of context like that.

I've used various horsey quotes in the past, from the Koran, John Trotwood Moore, and currently, W.C. Fields: "Horse sense is the thing a horse has that keeps it from betting on people."

[zenicurean.livejournal.com]

Swift is less compulsively obscure than a lot of his colleagues, and despite all the editing that must've gone into it over the decades, he does strike me as better organised. Laurence Sterne, despite writing later, can be just... well, unreadably messy.

(It strikes me that aside from the intentionally Chaphamesque sentence structure, most people should only have real difficulty with Pope's The Rape of the Lock because of the obscurity of the scope of reference required to make it work. I mean... "Termagant?" Really, Alex?)

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Nah, "termagant" is a perfectly good word that has just fallen out of use. In medieval times, it was a proper noun used to refer to the god of Islam, who was considered to be blustering, warlike, and intolerant. It gradually came to be an adjective to refer to a person with the same attitudes, and finally to a woman who behaved aggressively. ;p

[zenicurean.livejournal.com]

Ahh, I didn't even know that's where it went. Explains a lot, actually!

[equusmaximus.livejournal.com]

I'm fortunate enough to own a copy of "The Complete and Unabridged Gulliver's Travels." I got it when I was quite young, and it wasn't until I was a young adult that I was truly able to appreciate it. I re-read it a few years ago, and got a lot more meaning and enjoyment out of it.

(well, phoot... This was supposed to be a reply to the little sub-thread about Gulliver's Travels, ah well... onward!)

All of my books are currently in storage, and names and faces have never been my speciality, so you'll have to forgive my forgetting the authors. Still two classic Animal Stories that immediately came to mind were "Where the Red Fern Grows" and "The Yearling". Although it's much too recent (in the 1980's) for your pre-WWII requirement, Robert Adam's "The Horse Clans" series was a favourite of mine. What about "Old Yeller"?

[altivo.livejournal.com]

My recollections of The Yearling and Old Yeller do not include any presentation of the animals' point of view, thoughts, emotions, etc. so I think they fall outside my target here. I've never read Where the Red Fern Grows so I don't know about that and will check.

[cetasdolphin.livejournal.com]

Speaking on the front of one who only saw a movie version of Gulliver's Travels I will say that particular version of it was not unabridged (it was the one that NBC did with Sam Neil I think as Gulliver). Granted it was also a miniseries and not an actual movie but it at least didn't skip or take out the main parts of the book or focus on any one thing. I rather actually enjoyed the whole thing even if I had to watch 3 hours before they got to the hour involving the Houyhnhm race. I also managed to get most of the whole point of the story that Swift was trying to get across.

As for suggestions though, I really don't think I can add anything I mean you already mentioned Jack London and Kipling. I am also not sure that Wells or Verne could be considered either but those are the only authors that come to mind.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I'm not familiar with that version, but if you haven't read the book, how can you be sure they didn't alter it or leave parts out?

As I've mentioned, one incident that is frequently altered or left out involves Gulliver extinguishing a dangerous fire by pissing on it, and being given a death sentence as a consequence.

The visits that take place between Brobdingnag and the country of the Houyhnhnms are also frequently omitted or truncated. Laputa contains a lot of social and political satire with sharp barbs pointed at the universities and schools, as well as some speculative fiction, including the first recorded suggestion of aerial warfare. Balnibarbi is also interesting, but hardly any film version has ever even mentioned it. Most omit Laputa as well.

Laputa

[mondhasen.livejournal.com]

This is straying off topic just a bit, but I found it interesting when Studio Ghibli used the Laputa reference for the movie Tenkuu no Shiro Rapyuta, or Laputa: Castle in the Sky.

Re: Laputa

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Everything I've ever seen from Ghibli, including that one, has been so incomprehensible and bizarre that I can't figure out why people bother with them.

I've always thought it interesting that "la puta" in Spanish would mean "the whore" and I assume Swift intended it that way though it's rarely mentioned in commentaries.