Bunny Hop

[The following is the first of a series of articles taken from the Winston Pooh lectures on Myth and Mystery in Modern American Prose delivered last year at Wheat Forest College in Illinois. Mr. Pooh was internationally recognized for his three volume treatise on The Totem-Pole in American Indian Culture.--ED.]

Cartoons range from Disney's Donald Duck to Her block's political satires. Thurber's cartoons lie very close in essence to the "pure cartoon"--the self sufficient line drawing to which words are contingent accidents. These unadulterated pictures resemble poetry in use of paradox and irony, subtle imagery and wit. They live through a juxtaposition of incongruities, an analogous inversion of the natural order of the universe, and dexterous development of symbolism.

The meaning of such a picture-poem is destroyed by literal description. Complete abstraction wreaks equal damage. The two questions--what it contains, and what it means--cannot be isolated. To discuss symbols is also to treat works of art. The goal should be to re-enter the picture via its images--to enhance and enrich the meaning of the work by carefully treating all facets of symbolical connotation.

The most obvious of Thurber's symbols is the dog. Dogs as symbols are not new, but Thurber's canines are novel in every respect. They are large and friendly, with sad eyes, huge ears, and long tails. They play the role of impersonal participants in the action of life, and are likened by many to the chorus in Greek tragedy. They represent normalcy in contrast to man. "My conclusions entirely support the theory that dogs have a saner family life than people," the author states. They do not mask their feelings and regiment their emotions. (For full treatment of this theme see Is Sex Necessary?)

As often as dogs appear, and it is quite often, they never convey meaning so effectively as when balanced by rabbits. Normally, rabbits are meek, small, soft and vegetarian, considered harmless by most (Australians to the contrary), and virtually unknown in literature. They have large ears which stick up--a help in finding a rabbit in a crowd--and small, happy tails. Through no fault of their own they bear the standard of sexual fertility--an aspect of prime importance in determining their role as symbol.

Thurber had this to say about "the enormous rabbit" in his Race of Life: "It can be an uncrossed bridge which seems at first glance to have burned behind somebody, or it can be chickens counted too soon, or a ringing phone, or a thought in the night, or a faint hissing sound." It can be all these things, and indeed is; but it is much more.

At this point, most critics appeal to sex alone. Rabbits are noted for fecundity. Thurber is an old man. He puts rabbits everywhere. Therefore, the argument runs, fertility has become a fixation with the author, sure evidence of the frustration of age. This line of thought not only does Thurber an injustice, but reflects rampant intellectual cowardice. One must face the rabbit squarely, meet him head-on. The issue cannot be casually side-stepped.

The essential feature of this rabbit lies in the inversion of its natural role. The rabbit in question is an obstacle. One woman (whose name I have withheld) observed that the "enormous rabbit" resembles a chocolate Easter-bunny, from which she inferred that the author had made a sly cut at American middle-aged women (and men) for whom overweight is such a problem. The inversion in size would denote their making mountains out of mole hills. Needless to say, this is naive.

A more likely solution takes off at a tangent from sex. The obstacle, in this view, signifies adolescence. The spontaneous sex life of the rabbit embodies all that men (especially Americans) fear of this period. Hence the obstacle takes the form of a rabbit--a large rabbit. In support of this position it has been pointed out that one trait of American women is to keep small stuffed animals--tigers, dogs, and rabbits--long after they cease to be children. These stuffed animals, it is felt, represent efforts to avoid the adult role. To cling to these animals is to deny all that the rabbit stands for--thus the irony of the situation and the rationale of the rabbit obstacle.

The horror of the "enormous rabbit" in Race of Life and the rabbits in The Last Flower stems from this inversion of the rabbit's traditional role in nature. In the first case, the rabbit is out of proportion, as is man's fear of sex. The denial of sex checks the emotions and inverts the flow of nature (as seen in rabbits and dogs), therefore creates an enormous (hence inverted) rabbit as symbol of this fear. Dogs could not serve the same symbolic purpose, for they are closely linked to man and have picked up some of man's vices. They are less a part of nature.

Also, Thurber needs them in The Last Flower to play off against the rabbits--now normal in size, but fierce, not meek. Note the sequence: war ends; the dogs, symbols of normalcy, abandon man; fierce rabbits descend; with time, natural conditions resume; children chase away the rabbits; the dogs return to man. Nature at the start was inverted both by war and the denial of sex. The rabbits can be viewed as the scourge of the gods (or of nature) after war, and one might add that the "enormous rabbit" itself could be America's fear of warfare.

A view of mystery shrouds the rabbit symbol. Men link rabbits with magic hats and lucky feet--the unknown and the unexpected. The cartoon of the lady and the rabbit-psychiatrist ("You said a moment ago that everybody you look at seems to be a rabbit. Now just what did you mean by that, Mrs. Sprague?" bears directly on this issue. The lady fears sex. She sees all men as potentially sexual creatures, and confuses this fear with the rabbits who so flagrantly violate her moral standards. The psychiatrist himself becomes a rabbit, for he shares with the beast the secret of sex. He speaks the dark words men hope to hear yet fear to utter. The fear of self-knowledge which inhibits Americans renders the successor of Freud a figure of subconscious sexual dislike--hence a rabbit.

The rabbit symbol plays a "deus ex machina" role similar to the oracles in Oedipus Rex and the Witches in Macbeth. And it is no injustice to mention Sophocles, Shakespeare, and Thurber in the same breath. They differ in modes of presentation, but not in depth of content.

Thurber chooses the comic motif, yet in this process presents to the reader's (perhaps subconscious) appetite a number of themes primary to our age. For Americans sex and war have replaced food and physical danger as cardinal concerns, and new symbols are needed to connote these fears. Thurber has answered with the rabbit myth.