Watership Down: Language & Tacit Knowledge

Dandelion, Hazel, Bigwig, Fiver & Friends contemplate their expanding World H.

The animated version of Watership Down was released in 1978. You might ask your parents about having watched Christmas reruns- it likely gave some of them nightmares when they were your age! Richard Adams wrote the full story in the 1950s at the insistence of his granddaughters who he read a variety of short invented tales to in car journeys as they were growing up. 

It follows the tale of a group of rabbits, led by Hazel, with Bigwig, Fiver, Dandelion the storyteller, and their friends. The rabbits must overcome their present circumstances and venture out into the world, expanding their World h to ensure the foundation of a new warren at Watership Down. They seek a new home with plenty for all and where the group of young rabbits can fulfil their primary physiological needs of food, shelter, safety and family. A bunny bildungsroman, if you will. 

And so, they leave their stifled existence in the comparative shelter of Sandleford Warren. In doing so, they find much more than they might have expected in a wider world that is full of promising possibilities, but also danger, with nature at her most cruelly unsentimental. What they achieve eventually are unshakeable social relationships in their new drove, warren, bevy.*

Our human hierarchy of needs (Maslow tells us) are more complex than actual rabbits, of course. But Adams is using the storytelling device of anthropomorphism to give the reader an allegory with deeper layers of meaning and significance. 

Actually, an interesting note on Maslow, who gave us the instantly familiar hierarchy of physiological & psychological needs below: his initial hypothesis speculated that men needed to be dominated to feel that they were in an ordered, structured environment they could make sense of. It was only after spending two months with the Blackfoot First Nations people in the Montana/Calgary area of North America that he witnessed a people with a much more balanced and harmonious social order than the “western” model that was imposing itself across their lands. The grounds for people to feel accepted, loved, and self-actualised was possible within a community in harmony with nature, rather than a capitalist society whose goals were set towards perpetual economic growth. (The Blackfoot has Long, Epic History- TOK research notes)

All you need is love. And food, shelter, and the hope of self-actualisation

How does Adams convey his characters, themes and ideas? Through language of course. A gift not bestowed on the rabbits by the Almighty, or evolutionary design. They may have a code of signals: a thumping foot for danger, a mewing call to identify themselves to an individual or group, pheromones that announce their presence in the world. 

Your average rabbit cannot express itself through a sophisticated symbolic code in such a way that they can coordinate plans and achieve goals beyond the sum of all their parts. They rely on their instincts to eat, dig burrows, fight, form alliances and, hopefully, reproduce.

But the rabbits of Watership Down can, of course. We suspend our disbelief and are transported into the rural idyll with Adams’ genius for storytelling**.  

It would be worth me introducing the cast of main characters who will form the main thrust of the rest of this piece. And, so, please make the acquaintance of…

Hazel is the leader of the rabbits. He is not the smartest, but knows who is and leans on their wisdom and counsel when needed. He is not the strongest, but he is certainly brave and leads by example. His intelligent decision making skills, democratically canvassing opinion from his retinue of advisers, before synthesising their ideas into decisive action points wins him the respect and loyalty of all the warren. His instinctive knack for making the right calls when the pressure is on lead to unwavering support from the rest of the drove.

Fiver is a savant– a rabbit who sees visions and is very connected to nature, and the realm of myths. He is able to use a “sixth sense” to warn the rabbits of future dangers. But this comes at a great cost. He is emotionally fragile, and his ability to see a reality that is beyond the realm of his friends is an exhausting burden. His nerves are often on edge as his restless mind crackles and pops with ideas and interpreting signs and symbols. He needs time to himself, and Hazel and the others offer him this space unquestioningly.

Bigwig is the courageous fighter. He refuses to back down when the odds are stacked against him, and even relishes scraps with traditional enemies of rabbits such as cats and weasels. He isn’t the sharpest carrot in the vegetable patch, but he is unshakeably loyal and honest. At times, his impetuous nature must be kept in check by the other rabbits as he can be brave to the point of recklessness. But when the going gets tough, there’s no one else you’d want beside you, or, more likely, leading from the front, than brave Bigwig.

With all the characters mentioned above, I’ve included the hand-drawn frames, care of the animators that reimagined them from the pages of the novel. I think there’s an artistic craft in capturing the characters’ personalities and emotions with a pen and paintbrush that the new BBC animation rather lacks. But, in the interest of parity, and in the hope it keeps a few more readers engaged who have stayed with me to this point, you can be your own judge…

BBC Watership Down Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3gQ117IKkM

So, how does this relate to language and HT? 

In the exposition of the novel, the rabbits are confronted with a strange man-made wooden structure at the top of their field. Its sudden appearance disturbs their conception of the world they know. It is, patently to the reader, a sign from the forbidding world of men, who are a source of constant threat to the rabbits. We can use our reading for inference skills to work out from the rabbits’ discussions, and other clues such as the trackmarks of heavy machinery etc. that it is bringing news of a construction site that represents an existential threat to their warren. 

Rabbits, of course, operate without the sophisticated prefrontal cortex with which we humans are equipped. We are able to use this unique-of-all species, super cognitive capacity to cooperate, plan, imagine futures, communicate, and expand our habitat…regardless of whether any bunnies dwell within. 

The words on the sign are, to the rabbits, nothing but indecipherable squiggles. Richard Adams keeps the sense of their “rabbitness” very much to mind throughout. The rabbits rabbit. They lollop along on their back legs, dig holes, forget quite a lot of things, and perpetually nibble grass in the shade or sunshine.

The world of men represents nothing but threat to the rabbits. Hazel must encourage his troop to live their lives warily conscious of the voracious apex predators who live next door. The men’s guns, their loud voices, the germs of their chemical pesticides and steel machines are all signifiers of a dangerous and formidable enemy. 

How to survive amidst this territorial aberration?

The rabbits have one significant advantage over the world of men. They have a sense of togetherness and comradery that is beyond language. 

They have a tacit experience of the world and an intuitive sensory apparatus that keeps them utterly in tune with the seasons and each other. The move and operate within the rhythms of nature and the cycle of the seasons. For most of the rabbits, save the more intellectually-gifted of the afore-mentioned heroes, they don’t dwell in states of over-anxiety about the future, fretting over their own mortality. 

Men blunder around and apart from the natural world of the rabbits. They clomp through muddy puddles in a state of ignorance of how the rabbits manage to evade their traps; the only impressions we have of the humans are the impressions we receive from the rabbits’ perspective. We feel the thump and splash of their heavy Wellington boots; we understand the terrible power of the strange metal contraptions carried under the arms of men; the white sticks of their cigarettes that the men leave littered around the landscape. 

They are farmers, though. They do have some understanding of the land and the seasons. But, like our forebears descended from those first tribes that learnt to settle, to cultivate the land, to impose order on nature, they exploit it. 

The psychologist and philosopher, Ian McGilchrist, would affirm the efficiency of their left hemisphere brains which conceive of the world in a logical, ordered way. It is that of the rigid, organised, bureaucratic, reductionist, materialist manner of thinking. And this definition extends to language too. 

Just a rabbit? 

Once we give something a name, we have given ourselves the chance to place it into a framework of understanding so that we can communicate our experience to ourselves and others. A rabbit is a rabbit, right? But also a rabbit is a four-legged mammal, it might be floppy or straight-eared, it might be a pet, and it might be lunch! And, that’s just a rabbit. How about concepts such as love? Trust? Friendship? Empathy? How are we to define those complex ideas? And how much must be left out? 

Our language will always have limits in its capacity to describe precisely the scope of our lived experience. 

This is opposed to the right hemisphere world of dreaming, myths, poetry, and wonder. McGilchrist actually states the brain is asymmetrical- our right-sided dream factory is larger than the logical left. It seems evolution has stacked this side, but we operate in a world of exams and economical goals, such that a scientifically minded rabbit might hypothesise that our left-sided rational side would be more pronounced. 

Adams’ writing is an appeal to reject a reductionist world of pure order and rationality. The world went down this route to totalitarian order in the decade before Adams wrote Watership Down. The spectre of a brutal leader who rules by fear is symbolised in the novel by the fearsome General Woundwort who rules his warren with an iron fist.  

Instead, Adams writes to preserve the sense of the sacred. Through evoking such a rich landscape of rabbits- complete with complex systems of spiritual beliefs- he has revered nature, and also allegorically given us humans the chance to see the best versions of ourselves when we spirit together, share stories, build friendships, develop the courage to commit to bold new futures…

This world of Watership Down in this age of AI can appear as a nostalgic postcard from another era. Yet, these values are not so far away from us now if we choose to engage with them. There are trace legacies of the contact and reverence of the natural world throughout Hong Kong, with the Tin Hau temples that dot the landscape. I am writing this at the foot of the Eight Immortals range at Pat Sin Leng. At one stage in our time, respect and reverence for nature were universally shared ideas, as Y12 TOK students found out in their exploration of Viking, Maori, Bajau, and Asmat cultures this week. 

And if you choose to write a poem, sing a song, watch a concert, walk in nature, participate at a Lion Dance, you are exercising that right-side of your brain which is the wellspring of generosity, courage, empathy, compassion. 

There is no better time to do this than across the forthcoming week of celebrations for Chinese New Year. So, get out there, and enjoy your time however you choose to celebrate. 

Kung Hei Fat Choi everyone! 

*Apparently, there are a wide range of collective nouns for rabbits. So, for variety, I will employ the range of terms including warren, colony, herd, drove and bevy https://thecollectivenouns.com/animals/collective-noun-for-rabbits/

** Richard Adams’ classic story from the 1950s is often listed in the Top 100 novels ever written. Modern readers in a revisionist approach would have questions about the role of female rabbits (there are some very brave ones later on such as Hyzenthlay & Thethuthinnang, but the plot hinges around a fact of life observed by a natural scientist friend and collaborator of Adams, who studied rabbits across the course of a lifetime and observed the phenomena in nature that groups of young bucks would schism from the main herd and seek their fortunes and reproductive rights away from their original warren). There are other (fortunately rare) moments where the colonial-era attitudes of the author arise. But, given the depths of humanism within the story, I am prepared to give R.A. the benefit of the doubt and feel, were he living today, he might be rather embarrassed about some of these moments.

Works Cited: 

Adams, Richard. Watership Down. Macmillan Children’s Books, 2019. 

“Our Divided Nature & Reasons for Hope: A Conversation with Dr Iain McGilchrist.” YouTube, YouTube, 3 Nov. 2022, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xgT6qbzYtw8.