More on Bambi – Maddie Crum in LARB:

‘IN FELIX SALTEN’S NOVEL Bambi — published in Berlin in 1923 and cutesified by Disney in 1942, around the same time that its author, whose work had by then been banned by the Nazis, fled Austria to Zurich with his family — there isn’t a single woodland creature with glistening eyes. No long lashes, either. The natural world is often portrayed frankly, in a tone of reportage so detailed it seems to reveal an obsession. “Blackthorn bushes and hazelnut, dogwood, and young elder trees grew all around,” Salten writes of the titular roe deer’s stretch of woods. “Tall maples, beeches, and oaks formed a green roof over the thicket, and ferns, vetches, and sage sprang from the firm dark soil.”

Salten was a journalist, a theater critic, a short story writer, and, after publishing Bambi, the author of several other novels told from animals’ points of view, including Perri: The Youth of a Squirrel (1938), Bambi’s Children: The Story of a Forest Family (1939), and Renni the Rescuer: A Dog of the Battlefield (1940). He was also a hunter, criticized for his pastime by his contemporaries. But, as he wrote, “Bambi would never have come into being if I had never aimed my bullet at the head of a roebuck or elk.”’

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‘In September, NYRB Classics released its own version of Bambi, translated by Damion Searls with an afterword by Paul Reitter, author of Bambi’s Jewish Roots and Other Essays on German-Jewish Culture (2015). Like Zipes, Reitter pays attention to Salten’s interest in the psychological effects of oppression, but he’s less dismissive of Bambi’s distinction as an early work of environmental fiction. According to Reitter, Salten’s “primary political intention in Bambi and elsewhere was to ‘humanize animals’ […] so that humans wouldn’t treat them like beasts.”’

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‘Zipes’s take that Bambi is allegorical and therefore not a work of ecofiction is an either-or fallacy that might be a consequence of academic siloing, but it’s also revealing of common attitudes toward art centered on nature: it’s sentimental, kids’ stuff, full of glistening eyes, flowers, and the moon, told in a high, musical pitch.

This is not a baseless attitude. You don’t need to look beyond a bookstore’s bestseller rack — or your own Instagram feed — to know that nature, which needs no language to inspire awe, inspires instead some of the vaguest, rosiest-colored art. And the English-language roots of what’s now called ecofiction see human beings escaping merrily to nature, shepherd’s crook in hand, in order to live more simply, retreating from the sad, smoggy city life — never mind the effects that smog may have on the green backdrop.’

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‘Humans can’t write about nature without leaving tracks; still, Salten, a hunter, listened closely to forest sounds. The world of Bambi is alive with Viennese chatter and warblers’ cries, allegory and realism. Glee at the sight of an open meadow — a kind of natural commons where animals romp, away from their lonely and sequestered thickets — serves as a hopeful symbol. What might life be like for Salten and other Jews if they were free from persecution? But the meadow is also just a meadow, as the toad in Marianne Moore’s imaginary garden is also a toad. For Bambi, the meadow is a site of rollicking, tumbling; the novel’s narrator, on the other hand, is measured in his description, ending an otherwise cheerful scene bluntly: “That was the meadow.”’

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‘Bambi’s response to human violence is interpretable, but the forest creatures’ collective response to Him provides one of the book’s most overtly allegorical scenes, a proto–Animal Farm perhaps, a wild town hall. Bambi’s cousin Gobo is taken captive by Him and returns to the forest newly fattened and accustomed to comfort. “Sad,” the Old Stag laments, but Gobo believes men to be generous. Other deer insist that reconciliation is necessary; still others claim it’s impossible.

When a man arrives on the scene, he’s a shadowy aberration. Through Bambi’s eyes, he is magical and grotesque, like a Romantic rendering of nature, eliciting fear and wonder. “For a long time the shape doesn’t move,” Salten writes. “Then it sticks out a leg, a leg that’s on top, near the face, which Bambi hadn’t noticed was there at all.” And later, “There He was, coming out from the bushes, there, and there, and there. He appeared everywhere, lashing out in all directions, thrashing the shrubs, drumming on the tree trunks.”’

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‘Unlike, say, a novel by a colonizer written from the imagined point-of-view of the colonized, there is no (as yet known) possibility that a roe deer will write something like Bambi; there’s only the determination to use fiction to try and see what he sees.’

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‘To choose only one of these interpretations is to ignore the mutuality of our human suffering and nature’s suffering, which is no longer only a poetic platitude but an urgent fact. How could we have lost sight of that mutuality? In one of the most affecting scenes involving Him, Salten points to a culprit. Bambi and the Old Stag dodge a trap, which confounds Bambi. The Old Stag explains that the trap is Him, but He Himself isn’t currently in the forest. “And still, it’s Him!” Bambi cries, shaking his head. Humans are alienated from the task of hunting, relying on machines, which arouses in Bambi wonder, fear, and pity.’

Read the article here.

Everybody saw in ‘Bambi’ and can see in ‘Bambi’ something else.
Marlene Streerutwitz saw in ‘Bambi’ a metaphor for the Nazi’s, the deer were not victims of the Nazi’s but were rather Aryans, Nazi’s themselves.

Others have criticized the book for being misogynistic and for being Ayn Rand-like, celebrating boundless selfishness. Yes, defendiugn neoliberalism.

In The New Yorker Kathryn Schulz suggested that Salten wrote also child pornography, that may be a judgment that is that too harsh for an erotic novel (a sex worker tells about her life) that possibly was written by Salten. Most experts now think he was the author.
Keep in mind that the famous economist Schumpeter drove in a carriage filled with prostitutes in Vienna to shock to petty bourgeois, whom he also accused of destroying capitalism.
Vienna at that time had a different attitude towards sex and sex workers than we do now.

Others have claimed that the deer were the Jews, the deer were the Zionists and maybe, yes, the deer were just the deer.

Bambi, ecofiction, why not?

Humans writing about animals, that’s cultural appropriation par excellence.

But what are the other options?

Dutch readers might read my preface by the new Dutch edition of ‘Bambi’ – see here.