"EYES OF THE PIG."

New Zealand Listener, Volume 21, Issue 539, 21 October 1949, Page 5

"EYES OF THE PIG."

Sir,-Peter N. Temm’s letter raised an interesting question as to the extent to which a fiction writer is entitled to play with the facts of nature. Would Mr. Temm claim that if his "imaginative work of fiction’ required it, he would say that a river ran uphill, "or that the hero thrown out of. an airliner by the villain did not fall to his death but remained floating in the air? Jules Verne did not go that far. If a fiction writer cannot disregard the -laws of natural forces, then is he entitled to disregard the nature, habits or physical characteristics of animals? I imagine that the deer stalker who didn’t shoot his deer but ran it down or the.chamois hunter in the alps who outleaped his quarry, would merit the "hoots of derision" mentioned by "Nimrod" in his letter. To quote only two instances of this defiance of nature in Mr. Temm’s story: (1) The pig tossed the dog, and while the former still had its head in the air, the boy rushed in and stuck it. A pig with its four feet on the ground cannot raise its head above the horizontal plane, (Never mind about asking what the pig was doing while the boy was rushing in.) (2) The pig’s eyes had turned red with rage and the boy stuck it, so that when his boss’s eyes turned red with rage, the boy’s automatic reaction was to stick him. As a pig’s eyes do not turn red with rage, the whole premise on which Mr. Temm’s story is built (and which gives its title) is false. °

N. V.

HODGSON

(Opotiki).