Follow the White Rabbit

This chapter begins with a decoy question: why bunny rabbits?

Certainly, the bunny rabbit looms large in the Anglo-American imaginary as a virtual totem for ontological uncertainty; and it is this thematic consistency of the role played by rabbits in cultural texts and discourses which interests us here. For while an analytical map of any given animal could yield interesting hermeneutic patterns, the rabbit has proven itself to be a catalytic object for dialectical questions of presence and absence, as well as metaphysical explorations of madness, sanity, and those existential forms of psychic liminality which lie between these relative poles.

To begin with, consider the prototypical magic act: pulling a rabbit out of a hat. This prestidigital standard has amazed and delighted children for many generations, since the hat seems to work as a kind of cosmic portal from which rabbits manifest themselves “as if from nowhere.” Indeed, if pressed, the children may say that the hat serves as a kind of burrow leading to a parallel universe populated by bunny rabbits; suggesting that the particular bunny on stage is a kind of tourist in our own dimension. There may or may not be a puff of smoke, helping the bunny make the remarkable transition from not-there to there – a transition which subliminally initiates the children into the basic philosophical question: “Why is there something and not nothing?”

Doubtless, once again, a hamster or a dove could serve the same function as the rabbit, but for some mysterious reason the latter is the creature endowed with the greatest symbolic weight. So while our decoy question may be “why rabbits?”, we are actually using this question as a portal to understand the psychosocial subtext of a particular genealogy involving rabbits as ontologically unstable, virtual creatures.