Katherine Rundell: In today's world, wonder is political

The New Society | culture from the New Statesman

In this episode of The New Society, host Tanjal Rashid interviews author Katherine Rundell about her new essay collection, Napoleon's Orangutan. The

Key takeaways

• Katherine Rundell's book explores the story of Josephine Rose, an orangutan given to Napoleon's wife that died due to displacement from her natural habitat.
• Rundell argues that 'wonder' is a political act because recognizing the extraordinary nature of the living world necessitates active protection against its destruction.
• The author highlights the threat of AI to human intellectual freedom, specifically how LLMs might allow learners to bypass the necessary struggle of thought.
• Fantasy literature, such as the Impossible Creatures series, serves as a way to explore real-world biological truths through the lens of myth.
• Rundell's childhood in Zimbabwe provided a foundational understanding of biodiversity and the importance of observing the natural world closely.

Main topics

• Napoleon's Orangutan
• The politics of wonder
• Fantasy vs. Reality

Notable quotes

We live in a world that deserves unicorns.

Conclusion

An evocative discussion on how imagination and literature are essentia

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) The New Statesman. Speaker 2 (0:05) We live in a world that deserves unicorns. That's what Catherine Rundle told me when we spoke. If you haven't come across Rundle's work yet, you will soon. She's written over a dozen books, including an award-winning biography of John Donne and the children's fantasy series Impossible Creatures, a copy of which every year six child in the country will receive this Christmas. Disney has just signed a seven-figure deal for the screen adaptation. Rundle is being touted as the next J.K. Rowling. When she's not writing, Rundle works on Renaissance literature as a Fellow of All Souls at Oxford University. Two themes recur throughout her work, fantasy and animals, and as you might guess from her feelings about unicorns, the two are rarely far apart. She joined me recently following the publication of her new essay collection, Napoleon's Orangutan, to talk about what humans should learn from animals, the connection between religion and fantasy, and in her words, why wonder is... political. I'm Tanjal Rashid and you're listening to The New Society from The New Statesman. I hope you enjoy the conversation. Speaker 2 (1:11) Catherine Randell, thank you so much for joining us here at The New Statesman. Your new book is called Napoleon's Orangutan. Now, who or what was Napoleon's Orangutan? Speaker 1 (1:22) Napoleon's Orangutan was Rose. She was given to Napoleon's wife, Josephine. She was named after Josephine. His name was Josephine Rose. And she was famous at the time. for her beauty and for her intelligence. She was young. She was said to wear a little frock coat. She would dine at the table with the diplomats. She was said to eat with a knife and fork her favourite food, which was turnips. She would sleep in their bed. She would get up when people came into a room. She would play with the cat. But she wasn't designed for Paris. She was given first a wet nurse, a human wet nurse, and then a goat. But she wouldn't suckle from either. And she got thinner and thinner and eventually died in 1808 in Josephine's care. And she was, I think, in some ways emblematic of this way that we have longed to be close to the living world. We have longed to see it. We have loved it and adored it. And often our adoration has been part of destroying it. She was never supposed to be in a glorious city. She was supposed to be in a glorious rainforest. Speaker 2 (2:31) It's interesting that she was very much understood in anthropomorphic terms. She was given a name and habits and manners were described in human terms. But this was before the theory of evolution, or at least Darwin's theory of evolution. And the idea that we might be descendants or cousins of apes was not yet present. So how did people relate to the animal world? before we understood ourselves to be animals ourselves. I Speaker 1 (3:04) think with orangutans, you have a very specific... Speaker 1 (3:09) comprehensible but nonetheless extraordinary attitude that we had towards them. We thought of them as the wild men, potentially the wild men of the forest, the wild men of Borneo. There was a belief, a second orangutan was brought to Paris about 30 years later, and there was a belief that it was very possible that if this orangutan was raised with the children of the zookeeper, it would end by speaking French. It would end by being fundamentally human. I think with some apes, because they looked so similar to us, even though our understanding of evolution was in no way where it is now, there was a sense that there was some likeness and some belief that we might be different, not in kind, but only in scale. And that perhaps we and the orangutan had some intimate cousinship. I think otherwise, more generally. the ways in which we have understood the natural world have varied so wildly. We have feared that which we need not fear. We have adored that which we have destroyed. We have taken wild leaps in ways of guesses. We have believed that because birds who we knew now migrate. I'll do that again. We have believed that birds, birds we now know are migratory, because they disappear part of the year, we thought perhaps that they slept at the bottom of lakes or maybe in one case migrated to the moon and back. We have had a sense, I think, of the world as something that we must understand. But the wild guesses we have made have often been more optimistic than clarifying. Speaker 2 (4:51) It's interesting this because today... the way most of us study the animal world is through scientific means, through the discipline of zoology. A lot of what you're describing seems to involve an aesthetic response to the animal world. The idea that people looked at an orangutan and felt some sense of kinship and likeness. Would you say we're sort of missing that a bit? today, you know, in an age when the scientific mode of understanding the natural world is prevalent. Speaker 1 (5:29) I would say that there is a risk, though not created by science, that we might have ceased to find that extraordinary which deserves our astonishment. I do not think that science is the culprit for that. I think it is in part the extraordinary nature depletion that we have wrought upon our natural world. But I do think that we perhaps have lost some of the sense that if we looked clearly at the living world that surrounds us, the parliament of the non-human, we would be astonished. I think hundreds of years ago, that astonishment took the form of the wild guesses, the idea that perhaps eels were formed when a horsehair dropped into the water, or the idea that chickens might be able to predict the future. Those perhaps are not great losses. Chickens can't predict the future. I mean, TBC. I do think that what we might have lost is a sense of the intricate extraordinary and the intricate extraordinary of the living world. And that, I think, is in part because it is very possible now to live your entire adult life without really encountering wild things. You could, if you were a city dweller, go for years seeing only cats, dogs, sparrows, pigeons, crows. Not seeing, perhaps, with the clarity that it deserves, the strange ways in which the ecosystem around us operates. Speaker 2 (7:01) You've used this word astonishment a lot. You've also spoken about wonder. I want to ask you what lies at the heart of your response to animals and what got you interested in animals? You know, you're not a zoologist. You have a background as a literature academic. Why did you turn to animals? Speaker 1 (7:27) For me, I grew up in part in Zimbabwe. My father worked for the Department for International Development, which was NODA. And I was given a sense of the world as teeming with life, some of which deserved your at-a-distance respect. snakes and scorpions and spiders, some of which was something that we longed to get closer to. There were monkeys who lived by the shopping centre who, despite our best efforts, would not become our friends. But a sense of the living world as multiplicitous, as beautiful, but fundamentally the... absolute core of my understanding was that it was alive, that we lived in a world that was teeming with life, that it was something that would be worth knowing because that which is alive is worth knowing. When I talk about Wanda, I think it is very easy to become twee. I think a lot of the ways that we have... Wanda has had a bit of a fashionable moment. The idea it might be something that one does with both hands wrapped around a coffee mug staring into the middle distance. I mean something much more political. I mean a sense that if we were to see clearly, if we were to see politically, these things we would recognise are more extraordinary than we have given credit for and therefore deserve more of our time, our focus, our attention, our... action, our money, and indeed our rage at those who ask us to acquiesce in their destruction. That's what I mean by wonder, a sense that there is something beyond us, foreign to us, but alive like us, that deserves our love, and that our love in that context needs to be active. Speaker 2 (9:17) Fascinating. So wonder for you is not, let's say, what the Romantics thought of as wonder when we speak about their poetry in the age of wonder. That kind of wonder was not necessarily political. But for you, you used the term political. Could we get into that a bit more? I mean, why is your conception of wonder, you would say, political? So Speaker 1 (9:44) I would argue that the Romantics' wonder was also political. And a lot of them were, of course. reacting to the beginnings of an industrial revolution. They were trying to assert the value of something that they thought was being encroached upon in ways that they thought were destructive. And they would have thought, I think, particularly someone like Wordsworth, of... I don't think they had the idea of endangerment, of extinction, of the sense of natural world as threatened in the extraordinarily urgent and... Speaker 1 (10:18) potentially irreversible way that we now understand. But they did have a sense. I think their wonder was infused with a sense of something under threat. And when I say political, I mean in the sense of politics as trying to find nonviolent solutions to urgent life or death problems. And I would argue that a wonder that is static. A wonder that starts and ends with personal love is not enough. Personal love is urgently important. I would say it is the condition precedent for this kind of political change. But it's not enough because to our great bad luck, we live in a moment of tipping points, ecological tipping points. tipping points in terms of that which may be destroyed and never returned. And therefore, to fall wildly in love with something is the first step. The next step is to act. And that action will be different for every individual. I get asked a lot, what should we do? I tend to only repeat that which the scientists I speak to have told me. They feel to me better equipped to answer that question. But I do think that that needs to be the question. I think it is our tragedy that we live at a time in which just passive delight is not enough and our opportunity that it is not too late. Speaker 2 (11:53) But it all begins with your childhood, you say, in Zimbabwe. Speaker 2 (12:02) What is it about this landscape that seemed to inspire such wonder? I'm also struck by the coincidence that Richard Dawkins, for instance, also grew up in Zimbabwe and became a very great zoologist. What is it about this place that inspires a fascination for the natural world? Speaker 1 (12:28) It is a place of extraordinary biodiversity. Across the country, there are the high veldt and low veldt areas which have such different landscapes. So there is something akin to rainforest, something akin to bush, something akin almost to desert. And all of it has