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Special Section: Blue Short Stories

W. S. Merwin’s Fabled Waters

Françoise Palleau-Papin
p. 65-82

Résumés

Dans ses deux recueils de nouvelles, The Miner’s Pale Children (1970) et Houses and Travellers (1977), rééditées en un seul volume par Copper Canyon Press sous le titre The Book of Fables (2007), W. S. Merwin fait de l’eau un agent actif et puissant. En associant la forme brève à son sujet, les nouvelles de Merwin remettent en question la frontière habituelle entre l’eau dans la nature et celle dans le corps humain, mais aussi entre l’eau et d’autres éléments, bousculant les catégories du monde occidental. Ces nouvelles proposent une reformulation d’une philosophie ancienne par leur usage de l’animisme et par la littéralité de leurs métaphores. Sans faire parler la nature directement, mais en lui laissant signifier son mystère pour notre entendement humain limité, elles mettent en avant l’interdépendance de destins liés dans la biosphère, dans le respect de l’eau, source de vie dans la nature, par et pour elle-même.

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1In his two collections of short fiction, The Miner’s Pale Children (1970) and Houses and Travellers (1977), later reissued together by Copper Canyon Press under the title The Book of Fables (2007), W. S. Merwin gives agency to water. In his “Foreword to the 1994 Edition” of Houses and Travellers, he explains that he questions the “boundaries and definitions of genres altogether” (ix), as he mixes legend, fable, journal entry, oral tale and short story, and also erases the boundary between prose and poetry in his short pieces in prose. The more recent label of flash fiction largely applies to his collections, linking the efficiency of the condensed format to the contents. Thematically, in his explorations of the short form in fiction, he questions the boundaries commonly established between water in nature and water in the human or other bodies, but also between water and other elements, revisiting the categories that have informed the Western grasp of the natural world. This article attempts to analyze how the form and content of the pieces coincide in their questioning to suggest a rephrasing of an ancient philosophy, exposing the dangers of human mastery over nature and battling our prolonged inheritance of René Descartes’s views, while suggesting respect for the water of life in the whole of nature, in and of itself.

Literature’s Take on a Political Issue

2The short form of Merwin’s fables and stories creates memorable and startling parables of an ecological paradigm as early as in the 1960s, when they were first published in magazines before their collection in book format. They come in the wake of Merwin’s strong political commitments, after Rachel Carson’s Sea Trilogy (Under the Sea-Wind, 1941, The Sea Around Us, 1951, and The Edge of the Sea, 1955) and Silent Spring (1962) and later, according to oral testimonies, when Merwin famously recommended Lewis Regenstein’s America the Poisoned (1982) as a must read to everyone he met. In 1982, Regenstein clearly followed up Carson’s work, stating from the onset of his study: “Today, twenty years after Silent Spring, almost all of the toxic chemicals Rachel Carson discussed are still in widespread use; the few that have been restricted have often been replaced by equally or more hazardous compounds, and a thousand new and largely untested chemicals are introduced each year” (17). The main difference between Carson’s works and Regenstein’s is that the latter documents the various chemical pollutions in the environment and the bodies of the living, while Carson also attempts, in the words of Sandra Steingraber for the Library of America volume she edited, to “unlearn our necessarily anthropomorphic perspectives”: “I wanted my readers to feel that they were, for a time, actually living the lives of sea-creatures. To bring this about I had first, of course, to think myself into the role of an animal that lives in the sea. I had to forget a lot of human conception” (Carson, Under the Sea-Wind, qtd. by Steingraber xv). Merwin’s literary answer to such ecological and political issues was to find a form and a way to express the power of water’s memory, thus decentering the focus from our human viewpoint and agency (we pollute natural water) to the perception of nature, following Carson’s heritage.

3Water does not only carry the pollution it has been exposed to, when, according to Regenstein, for example, “there appears to be little hope of ever finding a way to break down and remove PCB’s contaminating our rivers, lakes, air, food, wild life—and our own bodies” (303). In Merwin’s poetry, it also has an active memory and a consciousness of what it has gone through in its flow, and not just because it came into contact with various substances, but because it remembered the sounds of its contacts, as in the poem “The Cisterns” from the 1996 collection The Vixen:

in all that unmeasured silence the least of the sounds
remembered by water since the beginning
. . . the one still continuo

of the water and the echoes sinking in their turns
into the memory of the water . . . (64)

4As in his poetry, several short stories or vignettes uphold the same conception of water as an active agent having consciousness. In the one-page piece entitled “The Water Clock,” the water in the clock whispers and reflects images cast onto it—reflections which speak to the young Trojan man who is the keeper of the clock, telling him to “‘Listen, listen, listen.’ So he listened, and heard the echo of his own heart, and within it the echo of feet running. Then the spear found him” (Houses 18). When the young man dies, the magic is broken. After the Trojan war, the water stops whispering, as if the passage from legendary time to Greek civilization entailed a breach of communication between the water and humanity: “When the survivors of Troy built their city, they too set a water clock in the main square, and modelled it as closely as they could on the one they remembered, but they no longer believed in the legend” (19). Implicitly, mysteriously, no longer believing in the legend has severed the inhabitants of Troy from the time the water spoke, echoed a human heart, and gave warning of impending danger. The purpose of the short story seems to be to pinpoint the fleeting moment when such a rich understanding and interaction disappeared, at the point of a spear, when the young man died, while the goal of the collection seems to be to suggest fragments of a lost understanding between the speech of water and that of humanity.

The Power of Water

5In the short piece entitled “Promontory,” the sea leads the beginning of an offensive war against the mountains, first sending “lines of white foam” in a discreet, devious way, with the phrasal verb “slide in”: “Lines of white foam are sliding in from the left hand.” Then the attack becomes more frontal, in the nominal sentence: “Large waves, green, suddenly shouldering out of riding swells, and running forward.” The water in the sea spray then joins forces with the airborne water of “heavy clouds” in a common assault: “Over the foam a haze of blown spray is rising and moving landward to join heavy clouds against the mountains of the coast.” Water in all its forms is highly active, and the narrator’s acknowledgment of such agency places him in a position of awe. The wounds the clouds inflict on the foothills through erosion is described as “a skin parted and drawn back without a word.” The soil may be brave in its voiceless pain, but the water enacts its operation, flaying the land with the power of a scalpel over a limb. The valleys thus carved out of the mountains are taken apart further by waterfalls: “Water rushing in white falls between them” (Houses 210).

6By the end of the story, the rain has enough power to erode mountains as an active agent, winning the war with the verb “take” and the sounds of “hammer” and “saw” in the ending: “At the pace of the sea the rain is taking the mountains. Hammer sounds seem at first to be separate. Saw sounds run together. Rain disappears” (Houses 211). The rain disappears only once it has done its work of destruction on the mountain, with hammers and saws, endowed with intention and efficiency. The water has performed its work on the mountain, without language but with sounds signaling its actions, and with visible consequences. It has signaled its capacity to shape the world. The narrator has acknowledged the water’s power, and granted his words to describe it, inscribing his observation in a joint perception of reciprocal agency. This follows David Abram’s analysis, in The Spell of the Sensuous, that “[o]nly by affirming the animateness of perceived things do we allow our words to emerge directly from the depths of our ongoing reciprocity with the world” (56).

7In “Small Oak Place,” the animism of the rain was minimal enough to be barely noticeable, in common usage: “Rain flows east, when it comes” (Houses 209). But in the following story, “Promontory,” the agency of the rain goes further. The departure from common usage has thus been gradual in this case, in the sequence between the two stories, “Small Oak Place” being the antepenultimate, and “Promontory” the penultimate in the collection. The order matters all the more as the last story in the collection insists on the intermingling of water and the bodies of the human observers, when they imagine they are in a pearl while sailing “in a fog” in the day and later, at night: “The light went out of the pearl and we sailed on, through the back of a mirror, hearing the sound of a stream, which was ourselves, in the darkness” (Houses 212). There may be a logical rationalization to this sentence, if we guess that the “stream” may be the wake of the ship on which the observers sail in the night and that consequently, they hear their own passage through the water. Still, if there is a metaphor, there is no simile with any word introducing the comparison (such as the comparative “like”), and thus the wording may also be read literally as “a stream, which was ourselves.” Such poetic expression, which permits a wide interpretation of the short piece, also provides an intricate vision of the narrator’s relationship to nature and to water in particular. He is sailing on the stream, but implicitly, he is the stream, as water flows through him and his sailing companions.

  • 1 “[W]ith peaceful animism and the strength of ecopolitical accuracy, so precious today, the poem set (...)

8In Nos cabanes, Marielle Macé’s analysis of Francis Ponge’s poetry could apply to Merwin’s short forms, in his poetry as well as in his flash fiction: “c’est l’animisme tranquille du poème, sa force de vérité écopolitique, aujourd’hui très précieuse, que de dresser une scène de parole et de pensée où écouter ce qui ne parle pas et pourtant signifie, non en lui ‘donnant voix’ mais en le laissant faire signe à sa manière” (101).1 The very short form of Merwin’s prose collections is particularly apt to express the voiceless meaning of elements such as water, because it forbids explanation and favors enigmatic, sparse statements, raising awe in front of the agencies of the water’s action in its sawing and hammering sounds in “Promontory,” for example, rather than providing a detailed or argumentative demonstration of the processes at work, or stating that the narrator and the stream share the same identity in “Small Oak Place,” but without any scientific development or any rationalization of the intuition.

9In the very short stories, the burden of consequential reasoning has been dropped, in favor of the logic of dreams with its short circuits and surprising concatenations of images, but implicitly relying on a shared ecological consciousness. Far from making us balk at non-sequitur descriptions, with a logic of their own and precisely because of their lack of explanation, the stories invite us to immerse ourselves in the common realization of our being part of nature, but without direct access to its language. All we can thus expect to see are mysterious glimpses, or to hear some sounds, as in the beautiful phrasing from “On the Map”: “The canal is a long white beam. Light hides in itself” (185). If the canal of water is a visual image, then how does light, or water, hide in itself, making discovery and any understanding of the processes of nature more intricate? Thus, in Merwin’s stories, the flow of water expands, within and without the limits of water, within and without our bodies or the bodies of other animals, as in the use of the verb “flow” in the sentence “Mice flow out of crevices” from the story “Small Oak Place” (209), emphasizing organic unity.

Tears, Without Pathetic Fallacy

10Tears, springs and streams are considered as a whole in the parable-like story “The Taste” in which some mysterious “black springs” rise to suggest memory flowing “toward some of the old” when they are “trying to remember tasting water for the first time” (Houses 20-21). During the process of raising human consciousness in recalling our first memory of water, tears are given an agency of their own, as they detach from the criers and gather at night, evoking dew: “Tears come out and sit in the night” (Houses 20). Whether consumed or produced by the human body, water does not serve our needs, or our greed, but is part of a whole, which the short pieces attempt to picture in their fragmented, yet powerful manner, dismantling old habits and suggesting new visions. The tears produced here do not suggest any pathetic fallacy, in the sense of attributing human emotion to inanimate objects, nature, or animals. Rather, they are on the same level as some “black springs” or of a mysterious human conclave gathering at night. In “The Taste,” they are associated with the dark, and probe unexplained metaphors, such as the depths of the past, or of unconscious memory. What matters is that nothing comes to clarify the possible metaphors, and that a lot is left for the readers to process and spin the web of metaphors, if so they wish. The enigmatic joint metaphor of springs and tears in the story follows the fable entitled “The Salt Peddler” in which, after strange adventures, the eponymous character learns to cry salty tears, springing from his eyes, but miraculously made by an old man from the salt of the sea and the water of streams. If crying is usually considered a human activity, preconceptions are redistributed between the fable “The Salt Peddler” and the enigmatic parable “The Taste.” The haze of mystery surrounding tear making underlines the ways we need to let go of our self-centered preconceptions and logic to understand the way crying is no longer only worth what tears signal regarding the tearful, because tears are not simply a manifestation of human emotions. Once produced, they are endowed with a life of their own and “sit in the night”—detached from the crying faces in an image possibly separating the emotion at their origin from the consequences of the pain, once externalized. In a similar way, the manifestations of intimate or, if one may coin the adjective, “extimate” emotions may be reversed, conversely to usual expectations, as in “The Taste” the stream is no longer the surface on which a boat floats, but a living companion to an “old person”: “After a while the stream gets up and goes to its boat and loads the old person into it and they drift away together toward the valley” (Houses 21). The stream has a boat, not on its surface, but as a mode of transportation, contradicting all commonplace logic: a boat on a stream becomes a stream in a boat. This is a paradox of reversal Merwin seems to favor in the collection because in “Small Oak Place,” rather than the expected idea that rabbits have shadows, we find that “shadows have rabbits” (Houses 209)—a rather humorous way to stress the speed of the rabbits, whose shadow seems to be the only thing we see, while poking fun at Socrates’s allegory of the cave (according to Plato): we too are trapped in an illusionary world, because our categories are wrong, and we find it difficult to break from illusion into the truth of philosophy (The Republic, sections 514-521, 278-286).

History as Nature’s Story: Revising Categories

11In the short story entitled “Iron,” ironically recalling the “age of iron” of human history from the beginning of the first sentence, whales in the sea are actually the only valid source of date-keeping: “Before the first blacksmith was born, whales sleeping in calm water would swing slowly to face north, the position in which they gave birth” (Houses 41). Long before “the first blacksmith was born” and so before the first compass was made, before any magnetized needle showed the magnetic north, whales have known how and when to face north at such important moments. The two-page story remains mysterious, mimicking the readers’ difficulty to grasp a date-keeping which decenters our attention from humanity’s world to a sea mammal’s instinctive behavior. The poetic writing eschews realistic explanation in enigmatic expressions such as “the iron rose of the world went sailing” (40), while the north-facing whales when giving birth are the only compass that holds text and meaning together. The story exposes mankind’s greed in commerce and navigation, because unlike whales who point north for life-giving purposes, men have used their orientation skills for lethal or greedy purposes, as expressed in a nominal sentence, full of scorn in its condemnation: “The north of the file and of blood, and of ambition and the amber of commerce.” Unlike the human list of outward pursuits with the four genitives in “of” tolling destruction around them, the whales feel the north in their environment, and orientate their body in its course, so that they can feel it “turning in each of them” (Houses 41) and give birth accordingly. Their bodily perceptions hold the only compass of the world worth holding, in their clarity of purpose. Their innate categories sound right, unlike those of Western civilizations.

12In The Miner’s Pale Children, the fable “The Dwelling” also engages in a revision of our common categories and ways of understanding the world. The narrator becomes the stone of the cliff face, in a mysterious identification phrased like a metaphor gone literal, from his own “darkness” to that of the stone: “I knew that my darkness on the wall had sunk into the stone and acquired a shadow of its own. Inside it” (Miner 4). Once inside the stone, the narrator values “oblivion” without stating what is forgotten, and we may infer that a whole range of mental habits and acquired knowledge disappears, just as the following paragraph seems to insist on the change of categories: “Oblivion came then in the form of a messenger. Sometimes he called himself time, or water. . . . We conversed in silence” (Miner 4). In the “Foreword to the 1994 Edition,” Merwin describes how he did not visit the cliff-dwelling near Santa Fe with his friends because of illness, but imagined it: “I had read what had been written about the cave and the area around it, and after my friends left I tried to imagine it” (Miner xiii). His understanding of the ancient dwellers of the cave thus comes to him as a personal projection, informed by readings, into new ways to grasp the world. The messenger from the caves seems to deem the categories of “time, or water” interchangeable, as if time was measured by water and tides, in a conception which recalls Heraclitus’s famous explanation of time, with the idea that we “cannot step twice into the same river, for other waters are continually flowing on” (Fragment 21, 29). Merwin’s narrator identifies with the cliff-dwelling to the point that the outer architecture of the dwelling and the inner structure of the heart become the same: “At last there were chambers in me, like a heart” (Miner 4). The adverbial expression “at last” expresses relief: once turned into stone, the narrator finally acquires “chambers” compared to a heart, as if he had neither the tenor nor the vehicle of the comparison before becoming stone. He used to be a man without a heart, and without “chambers” resonating the history of stone in the place, a long history shaped by water over time. Willa Cather’s narrator phrases a similar idea in her 1915 novel The Song of the Lark, about a character who experiences an epiphany in the same cliff-dwellings: “The Cliff-Dwellers had lengthened her past. She had older and higher obligations” (555). In “The Dwelling,” the past of the narrator has been lengthened to geological times, encompassing the time of the cliff-dwellers and beyond.

13“The Dwelling” opens The Miner’s Pale Children, while at the end of the collection, the antepenultimate story “The Herald” recalls a similar conception that elements we believed to be very different may turn one into the other: “It had been a moment of happiness, in which the smell of water turned to stone had passed like a white fish, never looking at him, and he had laughed to himself, without even knowing that he was born” (Miner 227). The mysterious sentence brings together much information. First, nature is indifferent to the narrator’s presence. And yet the narrator’s observation of nature is a source of “happiness” for him, and even glee. Moreover, the implicit, commonplace Cartesian assertion that man is the only entity endowed with a consciousness and a conscience, with the capacity for self-knowledge and reflection, is here entirely debunked, as the narrator remarks about a former self, or at least an identity mentioned in the pluperfect (“he had laughed”), that he had no consciousness of having been born: “without knowing that he was born” uses the -ing form, as a common point of reference between narrator and implied reader, as if such lack of self-understanding went without saying for everyone. Finally, and most importantly, what seems to have a consciousness and the capacity to look around is “the smell of water turned to stone” which is the subject of the verb “had passed.” Synesthesia stresses the power of the metamorphic “water turned to stone” because its “smell” passes by, “never looking at him.” Smells look, water becomes stone, and the human observer witnesses the phenomena, but with no consciousness of his own existence, other than his happiness in his observation, in the moment. David Abram has analyzed synesthesia as intrinsically linked to an acute perception of non-human nature: “Direct, prereflective perception is inherently synesthetic, participatory, and animistic, disclosing the things and elements that surround us not as inert objects but as expressive subjects, entities, powers, potencies” (130).

14Framing the volume, the story opening the collection and the antepenultimate story have thus unsettled the common Cartesian assumption of the dominant position of humans as conscious and sentient beings over nature, and largely apart from it. To make sense of the world, the interactions between a human observer and the non-human environment are so intricately bound that the history of the world cannot be limited to keeping a record of the human sense of superiority over the natural world. On the contrary, many stories in the collection provide examples of intricate interactions and interdependencies between human characters and the whole of nature, involving water in particular, and recording a history of larger scope and meaning than traditional history-book narratives.

Interlinked Fates

15First published in 1970, the collection The Miner’s Pale Children was written in the context of the Vietnam War. The writer’s acute consciousness that pollution is rampant and is killing people comes across clearly in the story “Make This Simple Test”—the seventh in the order chosen for the volume. The story begins by asking us to reflect on “the components” of food products tested with a blindfold. In three consecutive paragraphs, we are then given the full composition of unnamed processed food, with unreadable elements such as: “imitation lemon oil, acetyl tartaric esters of mono-and di-glycerides as emulsifiers, polysorbate 60, 1/10 of 1% of sodium benzoate to retard spoilage” (Miner 18). Some chemicals may cause harm if ingested frequently or in more than infinitesimal doses, but the text does not get into this medical issue. In a striking ending, the story concludes more broadly with the following invitations to exercise our critical capacities:

Guess how completely you become what you eat. Guess how soon. Guess at the taste of locusts and wild honey. Guess at the taste of water. Guess what the rivers see as they die. Guess why the babies are burning. Guess why there is silence in heaven. Guess why you were ever born. (Miner 18-19)

Merwin was well aware of the risks of cancer from the ingestion of chemicals, as he was aware of water pollution, and of the deforestation in Vietnam, all caused by industrially manufactured chemical products. The stark list of anaphora, beginning with the imperative “Guess” brings together what industry prefers to ignore, hush, or keep separate, here suggesting similar causes and effects. Even the Biblical “locusts and wild honey,” which John the Baptist fed on, when preaching in the wilderness (Matthew 3:4), have become killers now that they have been polluted. The short, lapidary sentence “Guess at the taste of water” is so general as to mean any water, whether from the tap, to wells, rivers or lakes. It brings to our attention the way we can “taste” such pollution, meaning that our direct, sensory contact with water has been corrupted, just as water pollution endangers our cells and ultimately, our lives. John the Baptist admonished the crowds to “prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight” (Matthew 3:3), and radically, adopting the persona of the Saint who baptized Jesus, Merwin raises a final question: “guess why you were ever born”—if people were born to pollute and be polluted themselves.

16Before broadening the risk to all lives, the text considers the danger for water, as the rivers are animated, living creatures, with a consciousness, because they “see” things happening before they “die.” The following assertion that “the babies are burning” is a direct evocation of the deforestation in the Vietnam War, and the unforgettable photographs of children screaming with pain from napalm burn, showing that the same pollution occurs nationally and internationally, although in much higher dosage abroad, with more visible, lethal, and shocking results. All fates are intertwined in nature, within and without every body, across all living and inanimate elements, and across borders in the terrible interactions of war. The final sentence of the story is a strong moral condemnation, after the silence of “heaven” when we might expect fire and brimstone to rain upon such sins, bringing the dire question of our purpose on earth, or why we “were ever born.” The story directly links the chemicals in our food products to the rivers dying and the babies burning, making the outrage of the narrator audible, in a very summarized, blunt list of imperatives. The story is short and to the point, encompassing mass murder and canceling the Biblical message of the stark purity of the biblical “locusts and wild honey” in barely two pages.

A “hard heart”?

17Building on the death of the river through chemical use in “Make this Simple Test,” Merwin adopts various ways to signify that water corruption, or scarcity, are the direct results of the actions of mankind in several other stories. Linking the death of water to the end of life for all of nature, “The Fountain” takes the form of a fable to turn the figurative language of a dry heart making a fountain dry out into a literal and magical happening. Step-by-step, the story accumulates events showing that the hardness of the king’s heart is literally causing the drought in his kingdom, as in Arthurian legend, Fisher King must be cured for the land to become fertile again. At first, the king tries to keep his “hard heart” a secret from everyone, but nature is no fool: “When his secret had been weighing on him for several years, the kingdom began to suffer from drought” (Miner 37). The fable develops the notion that nature is sensitive not just to direct actions upon it, but to secret predispositions toward it as well. In the Christian faith Merwin was raised in as a child, only God has direct access to a man’s heart and his secrets. In Merwin’s adult ecological views, a man’s hidden lack of concern and his lack of love come out in nature, who is the first to know, before the direct and damaging impact becomes visible to everyone. The crime lies not so much in any intention to harm the kingdom, as in the King’s passive lack of care, causing lethal consequences all the same. The king is not the custodian of his kingdom, and it shows.

18During the ensuing drought, a mysterious animal volunteers to help. The animal’s power seems to come from his having inhabited the land long before the kingdom was established. He gives the king “a tuft of fur” which produces a spring once laid into the ground, and the land becomes lush again. In return, the animal asks to be “restored” to his “ancient office”: “I wish to be appointed Warden of the Waters, with full authority over the use of all the waters in your kingdom” (Miner 41). Twice, the king refuses, and twice, one of his sons dies and the drought takes hold of the land. Finally, when the animal returns and gives another tuft of fur, offering help without strings attached, the king murders him. “And from the animal’s neck the fountain began to flow. The fountain of Llorndy, on its way to the salt. But the king fell back on the stones and from his heart the first of the oaks raised two tender leaves” (Miner 45). The nominal sentence between the two miracles adds that the new fountain flows “on its way to the salt,” as if to emphasize the scope of the miraculous spring, encompassing the kingdom widely, from the land to the sea.

19Such an enigmatic ending raises more questions than it gives a resolution. Murder and death occur simultaneously, both providing water and growth. The king’s heart has finally broken, not because of his two sons’ death, but after his murder of the animal. The animal retains the power to give water even after its demise, while the king finally grows “tender” leaves, a metamorphosis of his previously “hard heart.” Throughout the story, the adjectives “tender” and “hard” both maintain their tactile quality as well as the emotional attributes associated with such quality in common usage, in a fabulous world where meaning can be literal and figurative at the same time. In such coincidence of abstraction and tangibility, ideas and power relations are made palpable in the landscape, as when a tuft of fur works its magic in spite of the hiatus of drought the king imposed on the land: “There were even fish in the streams and ponds, as large as though they had been growing through the whole time of the drought” (43). Inanimate matter, such as the animal’s fur once plucked from his hide, can animate man-made objects like fountains, causing water to spring from dry fountains, because the animal’s “nature” is to “help” (Miner 44): “From every hillside on which you lay a piece of fur a stream will begin. Merely brush the village fountains with the ends of it and they will leap into the air” (44-45). The verb “leap” shows the manifestations of joy in the natural world, because the water does not just flow downward, it “leaps into the air” as in celebration, when the dry fountain is simply brushed by the fur of the animal. This animal is capable of making springs literally spring up, as if words and the world were one, without the duplicity of lies, performative like a magic formula operating a visible transformation.

20The magic creation of the “fountain of Llorndy” sounds like a cognate to “Llorando,” which means crying in Spanish, or possibly inscribes it in a Welsh legend with the initial double l of the imaginary place suggesting the voiceless alveolar lateral fricative of the Welsh language. Merwin here taps allusively from a wealth of folk tale conventions to write a modern fable of warning in an era (the 1970s) when ecology was not a mainstream concern and folk tales were not in fashion for poets and prose writers of the time. Yet, his folksy tale is not understandable in any clear correspondence of events to politics. The allegory of this fable resists the easier reading of a “one-by-one correspondence to the implied meaning” (Lodge 143), and suggests several possible interpretations, but without closure. The first one is the problematic understanding between the king, who holds political power over the kingdom, and the mysterious animal that speaks and has power over water in the land, but still asks the king to appoint him “Warden of the Waters” officially. Their death turns the country into a fertile forest first described at the beginning of the fable: “In the forest of Morb, which means untouched, there is a fountain known as Llorndy, which means unchanging” (Miner 36). The roots of such etymology are fictitious, but bespeak the poise of erudition, from a wise-sounding narrator, in a position of power. A wise man, or an impostor, seems to be narrating the origin of a fountain in a dense forest, going back to its foundation in a double death, when animals and humans spoke the same language, and the murder of one coincided with the mysterious death of the murderer.

21While many foundation myths are grounded in murder, in this case the simultaneous death of the murderer points to a co-dependence of the king on the animal, because it seems to imply that by killing the mysterious animal, the king has killed himself. This murder is no classical case of usurpation, by which the king would eliminate a power greater and older than his own, but rather, an unexpected case of suicide. From the start, the animal’s eyes are described as “set so deep in its head that he could not see them at all.” When the animal questions the king about his motivations for his double wish, “the rain to fall” and for his “heart not to be hard any more,” the king cannot get eye contact: “The king looked into the holes that were the animal’s eyes” (Miner 39). In the verbal exchange, there is no otherness in vision, no exterior gaze looking back at the king, no confirmation of his existence through the acknowledgement of a counterpart. The animal may be an older and wiser extension of the king’s self, before the king believed in his own power, before his arrogance gave him a “hard heart” of which he cannot cure himself alone.

Magical Music

22The magical imbrication between human characters and animals is the moot point of several stories, as in “Phoebe.” The young Phoebe, when coming of age, does not care for her parents’ wish to see her get married: “But all she wanted to do was to spend her time with the birds, listening to them. All the birds knew her and would sing when she was there.” The interaction is more than a friendly recognition and a sociable exchange:

She had discovered that if she really listened, each of their voices made something happen to her. When the sparrow cheeped she could feel her blood moving. When the swallows chattered she could remember things from her infancy that she had forgotten. When the crow cawed she could see the darkness in everything. There was one gray bird who was silent. She used to believe that if that bird called her name she would vanish. (Miner 69)

Merwin was a member of the LPO, acronym for Ligue pour la Protection des Oiseaux, a French society for the protection of birds founded in 1912, and to this day, the LPO signs he put up on the grounds of his house in Lacam-Loubressac (in the Quercy Region) can still be seen on the trees facing the road. We can feel his long-term knowledge and observation of birds in the story, as in all of his works, through his precise vocabulary: in this prose, sparrows “cheep,” swallows “chatter,” and crows “caw.” No mere hypernym may suffice to characterize the expression of every bird kind. More strikingly, each bird produces an unexpected effect in the human character, going from the consciousness of “blood moving” in her body, to the character’s deep memory, and finally, to a mysterious vision of “darkness in everything.” The color of the crows metonymically seems to taint the world in a deep manner, “in everything” referring to more than surface color, and suggesting an essential darkness at the core of the world, suddenly made visible to the eyes of the character who relates to the crows around her in a communion of vision. As Davis Abram suggests in his analysis of the relationships of humans with the non-human world in indigenous societies, such communion of vision is not magical according to our understanding of the supernatural, because it is not a knowledge from some deity situated above and beyond nature, but one coming from within nature, and Merwin would seem to agree with Abram that we must decenter our Western lens to read the world, and dismantle “the modern, civilized assumption that the natural world is largely determinate and mechanical, and that that which is regarded as mysterious, powerful, and beyond human ken must therefore be of some other, nonphysical realm above nature, ‘supernatural’” (8). Phoebe’s relationship with the birds around her is akin to that of Abrams’s indigenous “sorcerer” or “shaman”: “Only by temporarily shedding the accepted perceptual logic of his culture can the sorcerer hope to enter into relation with other species on their own terms” (9). The choice of name for the character points to such a luminous vision through the eyes of other species, including into the vision of the crow’s understanding of darkness, because in Greek her name means “bright” and “pure,” and refers to Phoebe, a Titaness, the grandmother of Apollo (the ancient Greek god of the sun, also known as Phoebus). She was an oracle and deity of the moon. The name recalls the ancient, non-monotheistic and still largely oral culture of rhapsodes, which did not see a clear separation between the world of the gods and the world of humans, or between the world of both gods and humans and the natural world, as opposed to post-alphabetic cultures, according to Abrams: “the traditions of prealphabetic Greece were actively preserved in numerous oral stories regularly recited and passed along from generation to generation by the Greek bards, or ‘rhapsodes’” (104). So that between her bright, sun-like name and her bird-enhanced vision which grants her dream-visions as an oracle, Phoebe sees and hears much more than her parents, who are conventional in every way. And the “ruler” (Miner 70) of the land, whom she is made to marry, is even more conventional, because he is not satisfied with having a daughter, and demands a son. His function and his hard heart are reminders of the king in “The Fountain” because, under the influence of his mother, he decides to send his little girl away, to be eaten by wild animals in the forest, implicitly with the obscure idea that the disappearance of his daughter may bring about the birth of a son. His evildoings happen at night, and when Phoebe discovers her missing child, she is helped by the mysterious gray bird who is her alter ego:

And in the morning Phoebe came into the child’s room and found the bed empty. On the floor beside it were a few gray feathers. There were more by the door. And on the stairs. And on the stones outside. And on the road. She began to run. All the way along the road there were those same feathers. The road went into the woods. She began to call. The name of the child was Phoebe. (Miner 71)

Given only in the last sentence of the story, the revelation of the child’s name creates a structural loop, going back to the beginning of the story about the eponymous character of Phoebe in her youth, when her body and her mind responded to the singing of birds, before her disastrous marriage to the “ruler.” The gray bird is the link between the ages, from the young girl to the young woman who becomes a mother, to her dead child. Naming the child in the last word of the story invites readers to start again, and if they do, following the loop, the tale becomes an endless process of rebirth, just as the mysterious gray bird seems to have the power to summon or erase characters in the text. When the bird calls Phoebe from a bad dream, for example, the next paragraph records the birth of her daughter (Miner 70), and later, the disappearance of the child is signaled by the gray feathers of the bird associated with the mother, as if the bird had lost his feathers, and possibly his life, in the violent kidnapping of the child, suggesting a direct interdependency between Phoebe—the child or the mother—and the gray bird.

23Thus, the very structure of the three-page story emphasizes a return and a feedback process between nature and the characters, just as in the story, the many references to the young mother’s “blood” and her “tears” (Miner 68, 70) suggested a cycle between the water in her body and the natural world she lived in, in direct dialogue with the birds. The story leaves much unexplained, and the keys to the text seem to lie in its cyclical composition and in its poetic themes of tears and blood, rather than in the sum of the events narrated. Readers also need to let go of their logical reasoning to access a new insight into the world within and around them, to return to their childhood self, to “feel [their] blood moving,” “remember things from [their] infancy that [they] had forgotten” and “see the darkness in everything.” The story exposes our tendency to deny the dark (including our own inner darkness), and our temptation to assess our power over nature (like the ruler’s over his kingdom).

24Attuned to the music of nature, we need to be able to hear “The Songs of the Icebergs” and stop shutting the door between nature and humans. We need to acknowledge the spirit and intentionality of nature in its own processes, rather than to “deny any vestige of intention, plan, form, spirit” (Miner 125) in the icebergs’ musical composition. With humility, we need to understand the superiority of the whales: “And yet the whales, who are imprisoned in no such rigid refusal, though they themselves have been able to catch only occasional chords from the pale submerged hillsides, have built on their recollections the whole of their rich and happy music” (Miner 125).

The Second Person

25Suggesting a leap across the metaleptic gap between the characters and the implied reader, i.e. the reader the text summons (rather than unreachable, actual readers), what most of the stories call into question is the issue of addressee involvement. Phoebe, with her tears, her blood, and her bird identity, calls an implied reader onto the stand: where are we in the process of such interchangeability for the sensitive character, the cross-species enigma we are made to feel interested in? And in another story, where do we stand when we stubbornly refuse to listen to “The Song of the Icebergs” because we may intuitively perceive their tragedy, guessing that their songs occur once their “whiteness” meets with the sun, causing their tragic fate: “Unconsolable. Breaking” (Miner 125). Two consecutive stories raise the issue of the addressee with great power, “The Second Person” and “The Moles” (both in the middle of the collection The Miner’s Pale Children).

26The first begins with the direct address: “You are the second person.” The narrator then proceeds to cancel the resistance a reader may feel, trying to escape the summons, first by avoiding the call: “You look around for someone else to be the second person. But there is no one else.” The addressee may then try to bypass any direct responsibility in an inner dialogue between a judgmental superego and the id’s innate desires (in Freud’s terminology), as if another self or ego could step up, to negotiate the tensions between a braver, conscious superego which has internalized socialization, and a fledging, unconscious id, closer to primary drives: “You try to shelter in imagining that you are plural. It is a dream which the whole of the waking world is trying to remember.” Upon waking, the conscious self takes over the traces left by the unconscious in dreams, and both struggle to cope with the demands of living in the world, and abiding by certain ethical commitments. Tellingly, Merwin’s narrator then chooses to spin the metaphor of birds to characterize his own goal in his expression, in a metatextual paragraph beginning with the same sentence as the opening line of the story, and which is worth quoting fully here:

You are the second person. The words come to you as though they were birds that knew you and had found you at last, but they do not look at you and you never saw them before, you have nowhere to keep them, you have nothing to feed them, they will interfere with your life, you cannot hear yourself, the little claws, meaning no harm, never let you alone, so tame, so confiding. But you know they are not yours. You know they are no one else’s, either. (Miner 116)

The metaphor weaves a complex set of meanings, in an intricate and beautiful paragraph on the ways and means of speech to inveigle thoughts into our consciousness, and by extension, on the power of literature, which this reading attempts to respond to. To use mere “words” rather than sentences makes the touching point of the encounter (“had found you at last”) flimsy, lighter than a more organized syntactic structure, because the words come not as heavily structured injunctions, but as invitations or possibilities. Yet the words have power, as “they will interfere with your life” in a process less of conquest or brutality, than seduction based on trust and friendship, because the words’ “little claws, meaning no harm, never let you alone, so tame, so confiding” (Miner 117). The rhythm of the sentence seems to imitate the fleeting contact of birds with the addressee, accumulating commas between short clauses or successive adjectives (“so tame, so confiding”), conveying the birds’ speed and the recurrence of their light touch. In their lightness, in the confidence they establish, the bird-like words have great power because they carry the addressee’s story, as the narrator tells us in a direct address: “Dear reader at times imagining in your own defense that I am the second person, I know more about you than I know about myself, but I would not recognize you.” There is no way we can bounce the responsibility of the story onto the narrator only, because he is telling our story in the second person: “It is true that you do not know your own story. That is has all been given away. That it lies at the bottom of a river where everything joins it but no one owns it” (Miner 117). Here again, any story between reader and narrator is set out in water, precisely “at the bottom of a river”—emphasizing our common use of the water flowing through our shared living place on earth, our joint need for the water of life, which no one should ever “own” but share, respect and protect. Or, according to the story “The Moles,” we need to be like the underground animal which brings together the third person with the first person plural, implicitly uniting with the second person, and linking humans, animals and the sea: “But the fate of the moles is linked to our own, and to the sea’s. . . . The moles, propelled by a small model of the forgotten sea, with eyes for nothing but their labors, urge their black bones forward in our endless quest” (Miner 118-19). In their “labor,” the moles join our common “quest”—insisting on the unity of nature across habitats for a land animal still keeping a trace of “the forgotten sea,” across time once geological upheavals have changed the shores of the seas, and across species, between moles and humans.

*

27Merwin’s short pieces are an aspect of his contribution to the ecologist cause in the powerful tool of short fiction, often more memorable and vivid than longer prose pieces, appealing to the reader’s imagination through his use of animism in his themes and unexpected usage of metaphors in his style, turning metaphors into a literal process, or into an intricate web of meaning to invite us to revise the common conceptions we live by. Relying on the prevalent structural metaphor of water as an element flowing or having flown through every form of life, including geological, waterless structures, the stories contribute to an understanding of the magical interactions of water with every element in our world, including our perception of time and memory. The power of Merwin’s short fiction does not only lie in what he states, but most importantly, in how innovatively he writes about what was a lifelong commitment for him, revisiting the form of the fable to assess the dangers of disregarding ecology and the pain such disregard inescapably entails. His narrative voice may be close to the fabled “old man” in the story “The Islands” in a world of disappearing species: “Under the sea there lived an old man bent over like a bell, who could hear pain. He could hear the pain even of those who disappeared” (Miner 120).

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Bibliographie

Abram, David. The Spell of the Sensuous. 1996. New York: Vintage, 2017. Print.

Carson, Rachel. The Sea Trilogy: Under the Sea-Wind, The Sea Around Us, The Edge of the Sea. Ed. Sandra Steingraber. New York: The Library of America, 2021. Print.

Cather, Willa. The Song of the Lark. 1915. Early Novels and Stories. Ed. Sharon O’Brien. New York: The Library of America, 1987. Print.

Heraclitus. Fragments. 1934. Trans. Philip Wheelwright. New York: Atheneum, 1959. Print.

Lodge, David. The Art of Fiction. London: Penguin, 1992. Print.

Macé, Marielle. Nos cabanes. Lagrasse: Verdier, 2019. Print.

Merwin, W. S. The Miner’s Pale Children. 1970. New York: Henry Holt, 1994. Print.

Merwin, W. S. Houses and Travellers. 1977. New York: Henry Holt, 1994. Print.

Merwin, W. S. The Vixen. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996. Print.

Plato. The Republic. Trans. H. D. P. Lee. Middlesex: Penguin, 1959. Print.

Regenstein, Lewis. America the Poisoned. Washington: Acropolis Books, 1982. Print.

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Notes

1 “[W]ith peaceful animism and the strength of ecopolitical accuracy, so precious today, the poem sets up a thought-provoking stage for expression, where we can listen to what does not speak and yet signifies, not by giving it a voice, but by letting it prompt meaning on its own terms” (my translation).

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Françoise Palleau-Papin, « W. S. Merwin’s Fabled Waters »Journal of the Short Story in English, 85 | 2025, 65-82.

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Françoise Palleau-Papin, « W. S. Merwin’s Fabled Waters »Journal of the Short Story in English [En ligne], 85 | Automn 2025, mis en ligne le 05 décembre 2025, consulté le 16 janvier 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/jsse/4794

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Auteur

Françoise Palleau-Papin

Université Sorbonne Paris Nord, PLÉIADE (UR 7338)

Françoise Palleau is Professor of American Literature at the Université Sorbonne Paris Nord, and a member of the multidisciplinary research center PLÉIADE (UR 7338). After completing a PhD dissertation on Willa Cather, she has published a critical monograph on David Markson (This Is Not a Tragedy, Dalkey Archive, 2011), and two critical studies of Willa Cather’s novel My Antonia (Atlande, 2016) and of Alexis Wright’s novel Carpentaria (Atlande, 2022). She has also edited a critical analysis of William T. Vollmann’s novel The Rifles (Under Fire, Peter Lang, 2016). With Lou Rowan, she was guest editor of the online special issue of Itinéraires 2017/1 on Biography and Fiction. She has translated Patricia Eakins’s short stories The Hungry Girls and Other Stories (Les Affamées et autres nouvelles, UGA Éditions, 2010), and W. S. Merwin’s prose narratives “Shepherds” (Bergers, Fanlac, 2023) and “Foie Gras” (forthcoming, Fanlac).

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