Ten Emblematic “Bird,” “Bear,” and “Fish” Writers
(In her novel Pure Colour, Sheila Heti proposes something fascinating: a God who takes three forms, not the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, but “a large bird who critiques from above, a large fish who critiques from the middle, and a large bear who critiques while cradling creation in its arms.”
Let me quote from the novel at length:
*
People born from the bird egg are interested in beauty, order, harmony and meaning. They look at nature from on high, in an abstracted way, and consider the world as if from a distance. These people are like birds soaring—flighty, fragile and strong.
People born from a fish egg appear in a flotation of jelly, and this jelly contains hundreds of thousands of eggs, where the most important thing is not any individual egg, but the condition of the many. For the fish, it’s less any one individual egg that concerns them than that eggs are laid in the best conditions, where the temperature is most right, and the current most gentle, so the majority might survive. For fish, it’s the collective conditions that count. A person hatched from a fish egg is concerned with fairness and justice here on earth: on humanity getting the temperature right for the many. One thousand eggs are the concern of a fish, whereas the person hatched from the egg of a bear clutches one special person close, as close as they possibly can.
A person born from a bear egg is like a child holding on to their very best doll. Bears do not have a pragmatic way of thinking, in which their favorites can be sacrificed for some higher end. They are deeply consumed with their own. Bears claim a few people to love and protect, and feel untroubled by their choice; they are turned towards those they can smell and touch.
People born from these three different eggs will never completely understand each other. They will always think that those born from a different egg have their priorities all wrong. But fish, birds and bears are all equally important in the eye of God, and it wouldn’t be a better world if there were only fish in it, and it wouldn’t be a better world if there were only bears. God needs creation critiqued by all three. But here on earth, it is hard to believe it: fish find the concerns of the birds superficial, while birds are made impatient by the critiques of the fish. Nothing makes a person feel like their life’s work—or their self—is less seen than when it’s being judged by someone from a different egg.
Yet birds should be grateful that someone is making the structural critique, so they don’t have to. And fish should be grateful that someone is making the aesthetic critique, so they can focus on the structural one.
*
I’ve been thinking about this idea in relation to fiction. I think it’s fair to say that as a writer I’m a bird, with something of the bear about me and almost nothing of the fish, but the writers I admire as a reader are almost evenly split between Heti’s three “eggs.” Here, then, are ten writers of each kind. I’ve arranged them category by category, then alphabetically by author, with an illustrative book by each author in parentheses.)
Birds
Solvej Balle (On the Calculation of Volume)
Jorge Luis Borges (Labyrinths)
Italo Calvino (Invisible Cities)
Éric Chevillard (The Crab Nebula)
Juan Emar (Yesterday)
Russell Hoban (Kleinzeit) *
Hilary Leichter (Terrace Story)
Kelly Link (White Cat, Black Dog)
Giorgio Manganelli (Centuria)
Adam Ehrlich Sachs (Inherited Disorders)
* My favorite of Hoban’s novels, Turtle Diary, is a bear book, but it’s an outlier in his bibliography.
Bears
Peter S. Beagle (The Last Unicorn)
Lan Samantha Chang (The Family Chao)
E. M. Forster (Howards End)
Lauren Groff (Brawler)
William Maxwell (So Long, See You Tomorrow)
Peter Orner (Maggie Brown and Others)
Karen Russell (Swamplandia!)
Charlie J. Stephens (A Wounded Deer Leaps Highest)
Walter Tevis (The Queen’s Gambit)
John Williams (Stoner)
Fish
J. G. Ballard (High-Rise)
John Berger (G.)
Carmen Boullosa (The Book of Eve)
Octavia Butler (Parable of the Talents)
Samuel R. Delany (Tales of Nevèrÿon)
Stephen Markley (The Deluge)
Gabriel García Márquez (One Hundred Years of Solitude)
Olga Ravn (The Employees)
José Saramago (Blindness)
Leo Tolstoy (War and Peace) **
** More than most writers, Tolstoy was born from all three eggs equally. Still, though—I think the fish predominates in him.
— April 3, 2026