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It wasn’t
until I reached the resolution of the crisis that drives this story that I
realised why the characters had to be animals. Indeed, for the first three
quarters of the book, though my attention was constantly drawn to the fact that
they were cats, dogs, snakes, echidnas, rabbits and more, I kept visualising
the characters as human. I saw Rupert, for example, as Finn Burridge (Arthur in
The Paradise, ABC1 Saturday 7:30 pm)
and Sylvia as Phyllida Law (Aunt Auriel in Kingdom,
Saturday 9:30 pm). I visualised the whole as if in the cinema thinking that
human characters would be totally credible – until I came to the bit where it
becomes, in the Author’s own words, a fairy tale. No one would have trouble
with the part of the story that dwells in hardship, but happy endings, that’s
another matter. We don’t like to see happy humans!
Having said
that, I do not mean to dismiss the last quarter of the book as “just a fairy tale”.
Disney has much to answer for when it comes to how fairy tales are dismissed as
kids’ stuff. They are actually the depositories (depositories, Mr Rabbit) of folk wisdom. Danielle de Valera’s #MagnifiCat is no exception. But I want
to go further than that by saying that this book could be called The Book of Danielle, because, like another
with a similar sounding name, The Book of
Daniel, it is apocalyptic.
Like all
important phenomena, the word Apocalypse and what it signifies, has suffered
the effects of the Second Law of Thermodynamics which states that everything
turns to shit. Or, more classically, working systems break down because entropy
increases. Contrary to popular opinion, an Apocalypse is not about bad things
happening but a revelation of faith – which is why The Apocalypse of St John in the New Testament is called The Book of Revelation. If all you see is
fire and brimstone, you missed the point. And so it is with Magnificat. If you look below the
narrative you may catch a glimpse of Danielle de Valera’s faith.
Faith is not
to be confused with belief. We readily accept that
there is a difference between belief and knowledge. But what is faith? The
intuitive answer is that faith is an instance of belief. But I want to suggest
that faith is actually a form of knowledge. I can believe something that is true,
but that true belief would not be knowledge unless properly justified. A false
belief can never be properly justified and therefore cannot be knowledge. A
true belief that is falsified by a single instance, however, is not necessarily
a false belief. If I believe, for example, that all metal bars expand when
heated, the discovery of a metal bar that does not expand when heated simply necessitates a couple of minor
adjustments – drop one word and add another – for my belief to remain true – metal
bars usually expand when heated.
Faith is expressed as belief that undergoes adjustments over time. But unlike
the belief about metal bars which can properly be justified and become
knowledge by systematic empirical experimentation, faith is knowledge before it is a belief; it is existential
knowledge which comes to be expressed as belief that changes over time. Faith
withstands the most serious challenge to belief and is thereby properly
justified as knowledge. I can believe or disbelieve in miracles and be right or
wrong depending on whether miracles do or do not occur; but I can never know
that miracles do or do not occur. Faith, on the other hand, which is usually
thought of as believing, is firstly a radical un-belief – faith is un-convinced
that things are as they seem. It is when faith attempts to answer the question,
if what seems real is not real, what is real? that it expresses
itself as belief which changes over time. You know… death is not the end of
existence – that sort of thing … But what does not change is what faith knows
to be true – things are not as they seem; existence is more than we observe. But
I digress.
Apocalyptic
writing celebrates the fact that despite all the troubles that assail us, we
better than merely survive: we thrive in ways unseen to most other people. This
is not to be confused with the Byronesque Dogma that if we believe that the
Universe will look after us (another by-product of TSLT), we will find
ourselves rolling in abundance – an assertion pitiful on the lips of someone on
the dole but reprehensible in the mouths of the affluent. No, The Book of Daniel, and The Book of Revelation are not about
people who don’t suffer. They are about people who know that their suffering
does not define them and who, staring down the source of their suffering, know
who they really are.
As
the first fourteen chapters of Magnificat
show, Danielle de Valera is no stranger to suffering. She knows poverty as
a sister. This is evident in the way she writes about poverty. Her characters
engage with it with a complete lack of resentment. When Claude loses his job it never occurs to him to think,
let alone say out aloud, “What about me? It isn’t fair!” Intriguingly, Sylvia
reads Schopenhauer. Why not Albert Camus or Jean-Paul Sartre, both of whom were
champions of the kind of freedom that is to be found in taking responsibility
for the quality of one’s existence? Schopenhauer was the first western
philosopher to “get” that “life is suffering” and all that follows from that in
the thought of the Buddha. So why not just have Sylvia chanting the mantras so
familiar in the geographic location in which her story is set? Is it because suffering
is not answered, by a Westerner, by putting on the livery of the Buddha but by engaging
with it as a Westerner – hence her
interest in Schopenhauer?
And, of course, the title of the book is not just a
pun. The Magnificat is the definitive statement of faith in the mouth of Mary,
the mother of Jesus and includes the words: “He fills the starving with good
things; send the rich away empty.” The story in which people are constantly on
the verge of hunger, ends with a feast. But wait. Isn’t it the rich who put the
show on? Yes, but that doesn’t mean they’re not empty – living their eleventh
century fantasy.
There
are depths to plum in this apparently simple tale. I will end by alluding to one
of them. Is there a reason why the characters that are cats or dogs are not,
say, possums or sheep or... whatever? And why are rabbits the snobs, rather
than, say, camels with their haughty heads held high looking askance at the
world? One thing’s for sure, it’s not a scheme that encodes references to Australian
artists, otherwise Rupert would be a Bunny.
