The Lacuna

The howler monkeys are a recurring motif in the novel that Barbara Kingsolver uses as an extended metaphor for the theme of The Role of the Media in Shaping Public Perception and Creating Panic. The novel opens with a description of how, on the island of Isla Pixol, every morning one howler monkey begins to scream, which awakens the others until “the whole jungle filled with roaring trees” (3). The sound frightens young Shepherd and his mother. Later, Lev describes the media as “the megaphones of the other people” in the way that they amplify false or misleading information to create fear (207). In this conversation, Shepherd compares the media’s howls to those of the howler monkeys. He uses “howler” as shorthand for the media throughout the rest of the novel. For instance, in a letter to Frida Kahlo on June 30, 1944, Shepherd writes skeptically about Frida’s report that the US government is putting Japanese people in internment camps, noting, “You know these howlers” (376). In a letter to her on March 10, 1946, Shepherd uses the term again when reflecting on the amplification of the Red Scare during the Cold War. He writes derisively, “the howlers went right to work as soon as they heard of this strange new curtain of metal [the Iron Curtain]. They are thrilled with the image” (408). When the media begins to target Shepherd for his purported Communist ties, Shepherd again deploys this metaphor, stating, “It always begins somewhere, one howler waking up the others. They pass it on, embellished, not through any creative drive but only a pure slothful failure to verify a fact” (544). By the end of the novel, Shepherd writes a cynical “Universal declaration of the rights of the howlers,” a parody of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In it, he laments the way that the “howlers,” meaning the media, will work to “cut down” those in the public eye without thought to fact or the person’s humanity.