David Rudd ‘Deus ex Natura or Non-Stick Pan?Competing Discourses in Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows’
In: Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows: Children’s Classics at 100 edited by Jackie Horne and Donna R. White. Oxford: Scarecrow Press, 2010, pp. 3-21
Introduction
Since its initial publication, when The Times described it as “negligible as a contribution to natural history” (qtd. in Green 257), The Wind in theWillows has been regarded as one of the most contradictory texts in children's literature. It has, in fact, often been the subject of debates as to whether it is a children’s book at all (e.g. Gilead; Robson 143). As is well-known, the novel arose from stories about Toad told to Grahame’s son, Alastair. But this child’s story was then wedded (some would say as uneasily as was Grahame himself) to what is seen as more adult material. The pull between the two can clearly be seen in Grahame’s vacillation over titles, ranging from “Mr. Mole and his Mates” to “The Wind in the Reeds.”
This tension, along with other contestatory elements, helps give the book a hybrid vigor that is personified in Pan, a hybrid figure himself, who manages to hold the book together. My notion of “hybrid vigor” is pursued in slightly different terms by Sarah Gilead, who envisages the book as an excellent case study of what is at the heart of “canonical works of children’s literature”: a “dynamic tension” between an idyllic, childhood realm and the adult world that subverts it. For Gilead, the river symbolizes the “child-kingdom” (151), while the undoing of the childhood idyll occurs in chapter 9 (“Wayfarers All”), where the impossibility of realizing one’s “self-indulgent wishfulness” (155) becomes clear. According to Gilead, “Pan … seems redundant” as the river “has already demonstrated Grahame’s mythopoeia” (155). But it is problematic to see how Pan can epitomize this childish, pleasurable realm while also standing for its opposite, “denigrating adventure in favor of prudence” (153). It is perhaps for this reason that Pan hardly features in Gilead’s analysis,[1] whereas I am arguing that his “hybrid vigor,” expressing the tensions of the book, is central.
Grahame was quite aware of many of these tensions, seeming to delight in his book’s intertextual allusiveness almost in a modernist fashion, as this comment on his own style of composition suggests:
[A] theme …is in most cases little more than a sort of clothes-line on which one pegs a string of ideas, quotations, allusions, and so on, one’s mental under-garments of all shapes and sizes, some possibly fairly new, but most rather old and patched; they dance and sway in the breeze, they flap and flutter, or hang limp and lifeless. And some are ordinary enough, and some are of a rather private and intimate shape and give the owner away, even show up his or her peculiarities. And, owing to the invisible clothes-line, they seem to have connexion and continuity. (qtd. in Chalmers 216)
At heart Grahame seems to remain the essayist who launched his career with Pagan Papers, intermingling narrative with nature writing, mystical musings, parodies and pastiches. While some critics (e.g. Carpenter), might find these distracting in a novel such shifts in style and register are undoubtedly deliberate; Grahame moves wilfully from the classical to the mystical, from the slapstick to the philosophical and, in style, from the mock-medieval language of popular Victorian historical novelists like Harrison Ainsworth (“Oddsbodkins”) to Estate Agent pastiche (“Toad Hall …is an eligible self-contained gentleman’s residence … replete with every modern convenience. Up-to-date sanitation. Five minutes from church, post office, and golf-links” [Grahame Wind 87, 103]). This discursive mix was all grist to Grahame’s mill, for in his own mind, he thought he had a strong enough clothes-line on which these disparate elements could not only hang, but dance.
Baldly, these garments – the character types, both animal and human, the descriptions of nature, the intertextual allusions, the stylistic shifts – are linked in his text by his underlying theme, which is about what makes life meaningful. This theme itself comes to life only through the animating wind of the title. Moreover, for Grahame, as for so many Romantics, the wind is itself a metaphor for inspiration, the word inspirare meaning to “breathe into” something. It is there, for instance, at the opening of Wordsworth’s The Prelude, “Oh there is blessing in this gentle breeze,” (1) where the wind is invoked in place of the muses, with the added suggestion that it “reaches only the ears of a chosen few,” to quote Grahame’s own essay, “The Rural Pan” (32).[2] In the course of Grahame’s novel, then, the coordinates of a meaningful life are plotted across the three interlinked realms of Wild Wood, Wide World, and Riverbank. Indeed, it is of note that Grahame juxtaposes a similar threesome in a lecture he gave in 1921, which touches on the same theme:
… your hill-top may disappoint you, and your sea-coast be too stuffy or too expensive, but the mountain air of dreamland is always recuperating, and there Apollo and all the Muses, or at least Pan and his attendant Fauna, await you. (Grahame, “Ideals” 271-2)
It is of note too that Pan, rather than the Muses, is seen to be the most dependable figure. And for Grahame, as for many others at the fin de siècle, Pan is synonymous with the inspirational wind, as he is of all animated nature. Pan is there from the very first page in The Wind in the Willows, in the image of the stirrings of the spring air, “penetrating with its spirit of divine discontent and longing” (1).
I shall have more to say about Pan later, arguing that he does indeed make manifest the “invisible” coherence of Grahame’s otherwise disparate assortment of garments. But, as suggested in the above quotation, in which Grahame sees Pan as possibly more reliable than the female muses, such coherence seems to come at the expense of the female. For while an inspiring wind might animate the garments on Grahame’s fictional clothes-line, this would only occur after some invisible female had pegged out the clothes; indeed, just such a lowly washerwoman features in Grahame’s novel, where she suffers “[t]he chaff and the humorous sallies” (106) of males. However, before I come to this, let me finish discussing just how disparate these garments are.
A Contradictory Text: Garments of “all shapes and sizes”
The shifts in style discussed earlier are linked to the larger debate about whether the book, with its mix of registers, is really for children or adults. The adventures of Toad are frequently seen as being for the former, the parallel story of Mole’s exploits slightly less so (especially in “Wayfarers All”), and the intrusions of Pan in “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn” as, for many, “an error of judgement on a grand scale” (Carpenter 169). Undoubtedly the book is a discursive mix (as Grahame seems to have been aware) but, as Bakhtin made most plain, this is very much the nature of the novel per se. However, critics still like to pontificate about who, exactly, the intended audience is. Humphrey Carpenter can thus dogmatically claim that “The Wind in the Willows has nothing to do with childhood or children, except in that it can be enjoyed by the young, who thereby experience (though they do not rationally understand) what its author has to say, and are able to sense some of its resonances” (168). Not only is his opening generalization unhelpful, but it is itself undermined by the ensuing subordinate clauses. But apart from this, one would want to query the suggestion that it is adults who do the understanding. Would we, for instance, include TheTimes reviewer, who finds the book’s contribution to natural history minimal? Or what about those whom W.W. Robson accuses of having an “anti-religious bias” in their hostility to “The Piper” chapter: “[a]nyone who could read this chapter and imagine that the author was thinking about politics goes beyond my comprehension” (131-2). Robson, who also avers that the book “ignores sex” (143), would presumably find Peter Hunt equally uncomprehending in his claim that Grahame “seems to have drifted into very questionable sexual waters” in “The Piper” chapter (Hunt 88). Even leaving aside the question of adult rationality, one would still want to question Carpenter’s assertion that children lack such a quality, that they are inherently intuitive rather than rational.
While debates about issues of audience are perhaps the most commonly discussed contradiction within Grahame’s text, critics have also focused on other contradictions in the novel. For example, several critics have noted the inconsistency of scale in Grahame’s depictions of his main animal characters. This is of concern to Robson, though he too feels the need to divide and generalize by age: “Children notice these things,” he claims (123); thus, “[w]hen Toad is disguised as a washerwoman he seems to be washerwoman size, but when the barge-woman detects him he is toad size (she picks him up by the leg and throws him into the river)” (122). We could, of course, respond by saying that there are many precedents in other shape-changing trickster figures, from Loki, Anansi and Till Eulenspiegel to Bugs Bunny and Ulysses, Toad being most explicitly linked with the latter. Alternatively, one could respond in the manner of A.A. Milne:
… [I]t is necessary to think of Mole, for instance, sometimes as an actual mole, sometimes as a mole in human clothes, sometimes as a mole grown to human size, sometimes walking on two legs, sometimes on four. He is a mole, he isn’t a mole. What is he? I don’t know. And, not being a matter-of-fact person, I don’t mind (Milne vii).
A related tension is that between naturalism and anthropomorphism. Ironically, Grahame himself declared that he used animals because he
… felt a duty to them as a friend. Every animal, by instinct, lives according to his nature. Thereby he lives wisely, and betters the tradition of mankind. No animal is ever tempted to deny his nature. No animal knows how to tell a lie. Every animal is honest. Every animal is true – and is, therefore, according to his nature, both beautiful and good. (Hamilton, from a conversation with Grahame, 72)
I say “ironically” because, taking this statement at face value, Grahame’s work seems a complete travesty, with Toad most obviously transgressing all such authorial guidelines. Indeed, none of the main characters lives according to its nature – although the supposedly feckless Wild Wooders might be seen the closest, at least, until their seizure of Toad Hall. It is actually when Grahame tries to write in a more naturalistic way – closer, say, to Beatrix Potter[3] – that he creates more contradictions for his otherwise anthropomorphic characters. Thus one of the most disturbing images in the book is surely that of the “errant May-fly” swerving across the path of Mole, Rat and Otter, “in the intoxicated fashion affected by young bloods ... seeing life” (Wind 10). In its anthropomorphism, this episode seems to parallel the equally errant Mole’s decision to abandon spring-cleaning a few pages earlier. However, the May-fly is promptly devoured by Otter for its errantry, though we are told that animal-etiquette forbids any reference to the activity (Robson’s claim that the book “ignores sex and death” (143) is obviously open to challenge on both counts).[4]
The anthropomorphism of the animals, especially the River-Bankers, has led to them being interpreted allegorically, resulting in partial, and sometimes contradictory readings. Thus Peter Green sees them as upper-middle class rentiers, with the Wild Wooders as a “stunted, malevolent proletariat” (Green 246). In this way Grahame can be accused of trying to naturalize a class society in social Darwinian terms. Carpenter, on the other hand, sees the Wild Wooders as less “working-class mob” than “dissipated gentry” in their treatment of Toad Hall (Carpenter 165), partly basing his reading on the chapter’s title, “Return of Ulysses,” which links the interlopers formally with Penelope’s suitors in The Odyssey.[5] In another reading still, Gilead sees the usurpers of Toad Hall as “metaphors for Toad’s libidinal aggressive/erotic drives” (156).
To bring this section to a close, let me stress again that my purpose here is not to arbitrate between the different readings of the text. Rather I want to show that the text itself, since its initial reception as faux “natural history,” has appeared contradictory with its garments “of all shapes and sizes,” and has therefore generated contradictory interpretations. But I’ve also suggested that such critical interpretations arise from partial readings of the text, in which critics ignore certain elements (Gilead with Pan, for instance). In contrast, I maintain that there is unity within Grahame’s discursive mix, a unity embodied in the figure of Pan.
Pan as Pandemic
Pan is a demi-god from Greek mythology, renowned for his sexual appetite, and most often represented as a hybrid being, half-goat, half-human, with horns and legendary pan-pipes. He obtained these pipes after chasing the nymph, Syrinx, who initially escapes Pan by being turned into a reed, only to be then fashioned into one of his reed-pipes. His name derives from the Greek word for “pasture,” though in folk etymology he has come to be associated with pan, Greek for “everything”(as captured in words like “pandemic”); and, in the fin de siècle he certainly was everywhere. Peter Green mentions three traditions on which writers drew; one in which Pan “incarnated terror and cruelty, the rejected forces of nature taking their revenge,” a second emphasized “his sexual attributes … the fierce unrestrained lechery free of all human conventions,” (Green 141) and a third saw the god in more benign terms, as one who “loveth the more unpretentious humankind” (Grahame “Rural” 33). Robert Dingley explains Pan’s particular appeal at this time as arising from a void that Darwin had created in removing God’s hand from creation. Rather than accept existence as a meaningless struggle, many held on to nature as itself spiritually imbued – usefully personified in the figure of the god Pan, as Grahame shows in his essay “The Rural Pan.” The key to Pan’s appeal for Grahame as a figure in Wind, I would suggest, lies in the flexibility of this figure’s signification: as a hybrid being that melds the natural (in both the bestial, and unspoilt, senses) and the supernatural (spiritual, disembodied). It is scarcely surprising, then, that he is most readily found between the wilds of the Wild Wood and the byways of the Wide World, at the River-Bank.
Pan operates in Grahame’s text like a pandemic. He can be detected at levels from the phonological to the thematic, and, between these, he is captured in both imagery and symbol; more indirectly, Pan’s presence is also marked by the characters’ own levels of awareness of him. But Pan’s actual inclusion in the novel was a late decision. As Grahame himself writes, the “invisible clothes-line” seems to emerge only retrospectively, as a result of inspecting the variegated material hung thereon. We certainly know that this was the case in that the “Wayfarers All” and “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn” chapters were added last, making the animating figure of Pan more explicit (Green 206) and thereby giving the text’s clothes-line an inspiriting lift.
However, as noted earlier, Pan is implicit in the title and from the first page on, being made more overt in the opening chapter when Mole catches, “with his ear to the reed-stems … something of what the wind went whispering so constantly among them” (Wind 14). Note the repeated /w/ sound here, mixed with the susurrating /s/. Not for nothing is the /w/ known as an “approximant” consonant, such that, in articulating it, the speech organs come close together, yet are then drawn apart in its voicing,[6] simulating what the hybrid Pan does with his reed-pipes: forcing the stems apart as his breath blows through them, inspiriting the landscape and inspiring those who witness it.
Grahame’s earlier, preferred title, “The Wind in the Reeds,” was not used (owing to its similarity to William Butler Yeats’ 1899 work, The Wind Among the Reeds), but in some ways it does not matter, for the /w/ sound is still neatly linked with the /r/, both phonologically (r is another approximant) and thematically, with the river itself being animatedly forced between its constraining banks. These three elements – reed-pipes, river and Pan himself – are most overtly united in a later sentence from “The Piper,” depicting Mole’s awe: “Breathless and transfixed the Mole stopped rowing as the liquid run of that glad piping broke on him like a wave, caught him up, and possessed him entirely” (93). But the association is first made when Mole is introduced to the river, which is both fellow animal and a human (another hybrid, of course):
… this sleek, sinuous, full-bodied animal, chasing and chuckling … Mole was bewitched, entranced, fascinated … he trotted as one trots, when very small, by the side of a man who holds one spellbound by exciting stories; and when tired at last, he sat on the bank, while the river still chattered on to him, a babbling procession of the best stories in the world, sent from the heart of the earth to be told at last to the insatiable sea. (3)