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There doesn't seem to be an attested link, not one that I could find in a cursory googling, anyway - but I've just been amazingly startled by something. I'm working on an essay about Alejo Carpentier's 1949 novel El reino de este mundo, a magical-realism work about the Haitian Revolution, and toward the end of it Ti Noel, the former-slave narrator, is starting to reach real wisdom; and he begins to be able to turn himself into animals; and he disguises himself as an ant, but it reminds him too much of carrying heavy burdens as a slave; and he disguises himself as a goose, . And I got to that bit of the text and went, holy fucking shit that's The Once and Future King, contrapuntal transformations into ants and wild geese as the culmination of a lesson in political wisdom.
I've been thinking a lot about White, the last month or so, so I might be reading too much in to things. The ants and the wild geese are a special pair of adventures, though - they're the ones that were translocated from "The Book of Merlyn" back into "The Sword and the Stone" for publication. In the full recombined narrative - which is the one I've been thinking about - they're the hope all-unlooked-for that comes at the very end: when Arthur sits in his tent at Camlann, reflecting on the failure of the table and his reign, Merlyn comes back to him and explains that he forgot to teach the Wart two key lessons as a child. He hadn't turned him into an ant, letting him experience fascism, or a wild goose, showing him the purity of anarchism. And Merlyn gives the old king those transformations, and it lets Arthur have this fucking essential moment of final character development where he gets angry about what he's sacrificed for his ideals and fantasizes about walking away and then chooses to go die for his people but with a lighter heart.
I've been thinking a lot about White, the last month or so, so I might be reading too much in to things. The ants and the wild geese are a special pair of adventures, though - they're the ones that were translocated from "The Book of Merlyn" back into "The Sword and the Stone" for publication. In the full recombined narrative - which is the one I've been thinking about - they're the hope all-unlooked-for that comes at the very end: when Arthur sits in his tent at Camlann, reflecting on the failure of the table and his reign, Merlyn comes back to him and explains that he forgot to teach the Wart two key lessons as a child. He hadn't turned him into an ant, letting him experience fascism, or a wild goose, showing him the purity of anarchism. And Merlyn gives the old king those transformations, and it lets Arthur have this fucking essential moment of final character development where he gets angry about what he's sacrificed for his ideals and fantasizes about walking away and then chooses to go die for his people but with a lighter heart.