THE FIRST RULE OF Borrowing, a father tells his daughter in Mary Norton’s Borrowers, is that “a Borrower must never be seen.” But like in Fight Club, the story is dependent on this rule being broken. And so Arrietty, a girl two and a half inches tall, steps forth onto a boy’s palm and looks at his skin: a landscape, a touch, a stage. This is the most intimate it gets, for two beings who are too far apart in scale to hold a handshake or a kiss. If our imagination of the gigantic is of calamity, of sudden, unexpected disaster—Godzilla emerging from Tokyo Bay, tsunami and nuclear devastation embodied in one lurching beam—then the world of the tiny is about the everydayness of extinction. Perched on a giant hand, Arrietty’s mind works through her creaturely instinct for survival and her human want to see and be seen. To be noticed by humans means entrapment, a speedy death. But who cares about that if the alternative is to remain undetected, unremembered?
The triumph of the little over the large is a story so familiar to us, almost condescending in its simple lesson: that a person is not necessarily limited to their size. But the tiniest person, with the ability to disappear, hints at something more complex: the possibility that size can want, but refuse, to speak.
THERE ARE TWO TYPES of tiny-person stories, that of the always tiny and that of the shrunken
