The Book of the Dun Cow: A Fable for Disillusioned Times
If you search today for Walter Wangerin Jr.’s novel The Book of the Dun Cow, you will find it classified as “fantasy”, the category in which we tend to put everything that we cannot fit neatly into a box. In 1980, to Wangerin’s own surprise, it won the National Book Award for Science Fiction. But anyone who has read fiction outside of his own century will recognize the story as some form of a beast fable. The beast fable is nearly as old as storytelling, but in the twentieth century it began to shed the strict allegory which had been its form for time out of mind, and to offer a story that not only presented a moral, but was good for its own sake. So, Watership Down is a condemnation of the destruction of all things beautiful and wild, but it is also a tale of high adventure and friendship. Animal Farm is an attack on Communism, but, because of Boxer the gentle horse, it is also a tragedy, in a way that 1984 is not. Though Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH is really a celebration of science and technological progress, it still offers enough excitement and heroism to be worth a second reading. All of these stories are comprehensible to the modern reader. But when Wangerin entered the scene, an inner-city Lutheran pastor with a deep love of God and a deep love of words, no one quite knew what to do with him. The Book of the Dun Cow was his first work; it was applauded in its time, and has largely been forgotten. The evangelicals remember him still, because his works were more to them than mere words on a page. They were candles in the darkness, signifying hope. But the literary world, already being flooded by a tide of hyper-realism, melodrama, and cheaply constructed dross that has continued to overwhelm it to this day, applauded briefly and passed by. Human kind cannot bear very much reality.
And yet an uninformed reader, opening The Book of the Dun Cow to the first page, might wonder what reality there could possibly be in such a story, which has for its subjects Chauntecleer the rooster, his coop of hens, and one disconsolate dog; in which the only apparent conflict, initially, is the rooster’s inability to sleep for the dog’s moaning. And he is not even moaning about a real tragedy, but only about the undignified size of his nose. It is no wonder, then, that many readers shut the book in disgust, assuming that it is not “serious.” But read further, and you will find something you do not expect. You will find Western Civilization and the whole Christian tradition. Here, among a group of animals living at the edge of a river, you will find Chaucer and Homer, the Norse Sagas and The Book of Common Prayer, the Ethics embodied in two rulers, one of whom will fall, and one who will not. You will find nobility and cowardice; love, hate, hope, and despair. In short, you will find, not an allegory pointing to a moral, but a fable about human life on earth. Consider only this passage from the fourth chapter, entitled “A cosmography,” in which the reader is given to understand something which none of the animals in the story understand until it is nearly too late, and some never understand at all.
Many tens of thousands of creatures lived in this still, unmoving earth . . . And the glory of it was that they were there for a purpose. To be sure, very few of them recognized the full importance of their being , and of their being there; and that ignorance endangered terribly the good fulfillment of their purpose. But so God let it be; he did not choose to force knowledge upon the animals. What purpose? Simply, the animals . . . were the last protection against an almighty evil which, should it pass them, would burst bloody into the universe and smash into chaos and sorrow everything that had been made both orderly and good . . . Dumb feathers made watchers over Wyrm in chains! It was a wonder. But that’s the way it was, because God had chosen it to be that way. A Rooster stood in the middle – and on one particular day, he was irritated by the fact that he couldn’t finish his sunbath. But that’s the way it was.
This is not a fairy tale. It is the world in which we live; poor defenseless creatures standing up against the mystery of iniquity. The Book of the Dun Cow considers in what manner we shall stand up against it, so that, though we be destroyed, we may yet prevail. And the answer is meekness. Wangerin’s tale might take as an epigram the Beatitude which says, “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.” The animals are meek because they are innocent; they die, when the fighting comes, with little understanding, yet they die in hope. Chauntecleer, who is not innocent, must tread the hard and tortuous road by which the proud learn to become meek. Only Mundo Cani dog, the most absurd of the animals and of no regard, has both meekness and understanding, and for him is reserved the greatest task of all. His name itself is a play on the Latin “mundo corde,” taken from another of the Beatitudes: “Beati mundo corde, quoniam ipsi Deum videbunt.” Blessed are the pure of heart, for they shall see God.
It can be difficult, at first, to enter into Wangerin’s prose, which seems to change keys between comedy and tragedy almost without warning. But this, too, is true to our experience. One moment we are happy and the world is good; then someone dies, or a war comes, and all is changed. Joy is replaced by grief, and grief by joy, all our life long, and we are never quite prepared. Wangerin, a gentle man who had suffered much adversity, knew this very well, and sought always, through his writing, to make this harsh reality a bit more bearable for his readers. There is a moment in Dun Cow when Chauntecleer must explain to the animals that a great evil is coming upon them, an evil against which they must fight unprepared, for the sake of their children and the preservation of the peaceful life that they have known. He makes an impassioned speech, calling them to valiant battle with the foe, but they only hear the words “murder” and “enemy,” and are paralyzed with fear. And Chauntecleer, who has poured his whole soul into the speech, does not know how else to rouse them. Then, out of the silence, his wife Pertelote begins to sing a song. She sings of the same things of which Chauntecleer has tried, and failed, to speak, and the animals listen, and understand. The beauty of the song makes them understand. It also gives them the courage to do what must be done. So it is with Wangerin’s prose: he clothes the griefs of a fallen world in lyrical beauty, and unbearable realities become comprehensible. Amidst present crippling griefs, he shows the reader eternal joys.
The Book of the Dun Cow is a hard story, but one that ends in hope; and hope, in our age, is sorely lacking. So whatever you may or may not believe, suspend your disbelief a while. Enter deeply into this story, and you will find a medicine, at once harsh and infinitely gentle, for disillusioned and stricken souls. It is a fable for our times.
* There is an excellent audio version of The Book of the Dun Cow, read by Paul Michael, which is both a delight to hear and a great help towards understanding the cadences of Wangerin’s writing style. Note that The Book of the Dun Cow, and its sequel, The Book of Sorrows, are very intense and often frightening stories which are not recommended for children. There is a third book, written much later, but Wangerin suffered a long illness in the interim, and the theme and style of this last book differ dramatically from that of the first two books as a result. The Book of Sorrows completes the arc of the story well enough on its own, and the series may profitably be ended there.