We had an ant infestation this summer. My mother, who suffers from Alzheimer’s and advanced dementia, is a very untidy eater. The floor beneath her seat at table is littered with debris, mostly breadcrumbs and grape skins. Rising in the heatwave, the ants must have caught the scent and found the ‘mother’ lode. I came down one morning and discovered an ant highway had been routed across the kitchen floor. Traffic wasn’t travelling in the regimented lines you saw in Tom & Jerry cartoons, but the direction was clear: the kitchen table. ‘This way, chaps!’
I discouraged them by masking the scent trail. They began to wander and eventually to retreat. A week later, their annual rapture came upon them and they were transported to territories new. But they left behind this little fable on the theme of cooperation, common purpose, and individualism (which, after all, is not something ants exemplify).
Another fable inspired by an illustration. This time a watercolour, most likely from a Chinese natural history collection.
The first thing that struck me was the number of insects the spider had caught. What a haul! What a feast! I don’t know the quantities a spider needs to survive but this spread would seem a recipe for indigestion. The second thing was the contrast between the soft lines of the insects, the butterflies and dragonflies, and the angular joints of the spider, a black presence surrounded by colourful victims. A picture of an extravagant shindig with a predator as host.
“What’s for dinner tonight?” the damsel fly asked on its arrival.
“You are,” said the spider. “And the rest of you, stick around. Your turn will come.”
But this was more a tale of horror than a fable, and as a rule fables benefit from fewer protagonists; they work best as dialogues. And there was something I had forgotten in this scenario, the web. The web in the painting was only lightly traced, hinted at, de-emphasized in order to highlight the array of insects. A search for related images produced more impressive constructions.
So now we had the patterned beauty of the butterfly placed alongside the architecture of the spider’s web. The spider might, or might not, be considered ugly but its web can often be a thing of beauty. The fable developed from there.
It must be two years since I wrote a version of Aesop’s ‘The Frogs who wanted a King’. A few days ago I saw this illustration (above) from a trading card in the mid-1920s. It must have been inspired by the same fable and it prompted me to produce another of my own, with the same characters, the frogs and the heron.
I’d forgotten the theme of the earlier work was the conflict between pursuit of pleasure and moral order. The new one is not unrelated. Frogs inclined to merrymaking provoke a reaction from those who are suspicious of pleasure. (I wonder if this association is the result of stumbling on the spectacle of tumescent frogs spilling out from ponds to forest paths, squirming in groups of two and three and more, seemingly unguarded, consumed by libidinal upsurge, though the merrymaking is rather more innocent in the text.)
There are other themes, or lessons, to be had, in particular on the question of whether relations between two parties must remain fixed, whether an ex-offender can be trusted, or an antagonist become a friend. As usual, I will let you decide for yourselves.
When I write a new version of an old fable I can usually find a vintage illustration or three to add some visual appeal to my commentary. For an original, it’s not so easy. I can source an image of the animal protagonist—there’s a tradition of highly aesthetic, scientific illustration to draw upon—or I could draw it myself.
My first attempt at illustration (see below) tried to capture the size difference between snail shell and dung beetle that was a key element of the story, at least when I began to write. But the image didn’t work thematically. It adopts the beetles point of view and portrays it in an almost heroic confrontation with a force greater than itself, a mystery.
More appropriate would be the snail’s departure, but even that is only part of the story. The beetle needs to be there, reacting to this turn of events. Perhaps one day I’ll add him to the picture.
Drawing is one thing, illustration another: both are hard.
James Thurber’s second volume of modern fables offers more of the same whimsical, witty, and remarkably wide-ranging short narratives. Entertaining, but for those who like their fables to strike a more serious tone the collection is disappointing.
Nothing sticks, nothing much.
I was amused to see a version of Aesop’s ‘The Fox and the Crow’ in which the crow offers to share the cheese with the trickster, as it does in my re-working. (More Fables.) Here it serves as an inducement for the fox to stay and listen to the crow’s self-praise. The moral: “No one else can praise thee quite so well as thou”
Thurber adopts an archaic style for his epimythiums (the moral at the end). This is amusing; at the same time betrays a lack of confidence in the form. In the modern age, you can’t pretend to wisdom without adopting a tone either of world-weariness or of trivialising parody. If you make them laugh, you avoid being laughed at.
The fables closest to my taste were ‘The Lion and the Lizard’, whose tragic conclusion achieves a sort of melancholy grace, the glutton eats himself to death while the creature he had once terrorised starves, and the tale of ‘The Peacelike Mongoose’ ostracised, indeed, exiled for his rejection of violence.
“I am trying to use reason and intelligence,” said the strange new mongoose. “Reason is six-sevenths of treason,” said one of his neighbours. “Intelligence is what the enemy uses,” said another.
Thurber’s trenchant response to the McCarthyite ‘Red Scare’ in the 1950s America. And you might say the miscommunication at the heart of ‘The Weaver and the Worm’ speaks as much to the current age of ‘bullshit’ and ‘bad faith’ as it does to the paranoia and persecution of the Fifties.
“We live, man and worm, in a time when almost everything can mean almost anything, for this is the age of gobbledy-gook, doubletalk, and gudda.”
A few weeks ago I picked up a two volume collection of works by James Thurber, ‘Vintage Thurber.’ Among these works were the ‘Fables For Our Times.’ These were very nice. Fantastic, in the superlative if not the ‘wildly imaginative’ sense of the word. Where Ambrose Bierce is cynical and disenchanted, Thurber is tuned to human foibles with a wry sense of humour and a delightful turn of phrase.
There are some witty riffs on the classics: the versions of ‘The Country Mouse and the City Mouse,’ ‘The Tortoise and the Hare,’ and ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ are flippant, but ‘The Sheep in Wolf’s Clothing’ is a reversal with a point. The originals are better and these make up most of the collection. I’ll do no more than cite a few of my favourites.
‘The Very Proper Gander’ is a tale of pernicious Chinese whispers, which charts the path to social exclusion through the misapprehension of ‘proper gander’ as ‘propaganda’ and so on. A fable almost for our social media times.
‘The Lion Who Wanted to Zoom’—no, not that kind of ‘zoom’—displays the raw brutality of Aesop in its critique of ill-advised ambition.
‘The Birds and the Foxes’ is very very droll. You hardly notice just how dark it is. For obvious reasons the foxes object to the high fence erected to create a sanctuary for Baltimore orioles and when dismantling it they argue they are only setting them free.
‘The Moth and the Star’ is perhaps the one most aligned to the ‘head in the clouds’ characters of ‘a boy in a park.’ A young moth sets his heart on a star and clings tenaciously to that goal despite his parents’ more realistic recommendations of bridge lamps and street lamps. In so doing, and never reaching his goal, he never gets scorched and outlives everyone.
The title ‘Fantastic Fables’ is as misleading as the cover image. These are not ‘fantastic’ or ‘fantastical.’ You might call them whimsical if they weren’t so deeply misanthropic and if the characters weren’t figures of contemporary life, familiar objects of satire (politicians, clergy, doctors, judges). These are the caustic amusements of a world-weary journalist too acquainted with the bad side of probably just about everyone.
They are fables, to the extent that they adopt the fable form, a short simple narrative or dialogue with a resolution that produces or points to a message. But they feel more satirical than didactic: the message boiling down to ‘don’t be fooled, kid’ or ‘they’re all the same’ and the effect, despite the agile wit, so dispiriting—literally demoralizing—that there’s little else to do but reach for the bourbon like the most stereotypical hard-bitten newspaperman.
The last third of the collection, the Aesopus Emandatus, features riffs on Aesopic originals. Bierce doesn’t do much of note with them. For example, with ‘The Tortoise and the Hare’ the twist is the tortoise doesn’t realise the hare had in fact won the race and only fell asleep when returning to cheer on his rival. Meanwhile, when the dog attacks its own reflection, mistaking it for another, he pulls from the pond a piece of meat discarded by a butcher’s boy. Bierce is witty and sharp, but his disillusionment reflexively trivialises anything pretending to wisdom.
But there are few good entries, two of these are originals:
The Man and the Eagle
“An Eagle was once captured by a Man, who clipped his wings and put him in the poultry yard, along with the chickens. The Eagle was much depressed in spirits by the change.
“Why should you not rather rejoice?” said the Man. “You were only an ordinary fellow as an eagle; but as an old rooster you are a fowl of incomparable distinction.”
A Needless Labour
“After waiting many a weary day to revenge himself upon a Lion for some unconsidered manifestation of contempt, a Skunk finally saw him coming, and posting himself in the path ahead uttered the inaudible discord of his race. Observing that the Lion gave no attention to the matter, the Skunk, keeping carefully out of reach, said:
“Sir, I beg leave to point out that I have set on foot an implacable odour.”
“My dear fellow,” the Lion replied, “you have taken a needless trouble; I already knew that you were a Skunk.”
And the other is snappy revision of ‘The Ant and the Grasshopper,’ in which the fact that, for all their industry, the ant is not a producer but a gatherer and an opportunist is turned against their smug claims of prudence and merit.
The Grasshopper and the Ant
“One day in winter a hungry Grasshopper applied to an Ant for some of the food they had stored.
“Why,” said the Ant, “did you not store up some food for yourself, instead of singing all the time?”
“So I did,” said the Grasshopper; “so I did; but you fellows broke in and carried it all away.”
‘Fantastic Fables‘ was published in 1899 and is out of copyright. You can read or download the complete volume at Archive.org and Project Gutenberg.
“You are like the man who lay down to give his shadow a rest.”
~~~
This proverb in the second person feels like the application of a fable: ‘you’ are being criticised by way of comparison to a fable. But there is no such fable, nor indeed is there a ‘you’ because the object of the criticism is yet to be found. The proverb is armed and ready, if you can find occasion.
What does it mean? Don’t ask me I merely wrote it. [Answers, please, in the comments.]
It seems I am fascinated by shadows, particularly those that accompany us, attached but uninvited, as we walk the streets. At times, on a bright summer day, our shadows are doubles, following us, preceding us, slipping alongside, getting under our feet. Other shadows swallow them. They vanish into ginnels and alleyways, dissolve in the leafless gaps of hedgerows. Who knows what else they get up to? A photographer will tell you they disfigure portraits and must be managed, redirected, softened.
The man who lay down to give his shadow a rest was making an excuse for his own wish to relax. He projects it onto his shadow, which is itself a kind of spontaneous projection, as the shadow felt the exertion of his body’s movements and would at some point be fatigued by all the contortions it must perform. It’s foolish, dare I say, whimsical. But really it’s an example of someone making an excuse, pretending a generous motive for an act which gratifies them.
BACK TO BABYLON
The form of this aphorism was inspired by the fragments of Sumerian proverbs I discovered last week. A number of these were rendered in the second person:
“Like the ox, you do not know how to turn back.”
“Like the wild bull, you only do what pleases you.”
“You go like an elephant to raise a sunken boat.”
Many of these proverbs are rooted in the imagery of agriculture—oxen, donkeys, ploughs—which was no surprise coming from the rich arable lands between the Tigris and the Euphrates (aka Eden). What struck me, and I confess amused and delighted me, was the promince of scatalogical motifs. (See the boastful, defecating elephant of the fable.) Thinking about it now, it should not have been so unexpected. Farmland is full of manure, dung, and the fable was not high-brow literature, the literature of the poets, metaphysics and myths; indeed, not so much literature, as collected oral sayings and stories.
The meaning of some is obscure, others intriguing, while many reveal the consistency of folk wisdom through the ages; some things just don’t change.
“The wild bull is taboo for the plough.” “No one walks for a second time in the place where a lion has eaten a man.” “If the lion heats the soup, who would say “it is not good?” “Imagine a wolf is eating. Utu looks down on it and says: “When will you praise me?” “When I’m fat!” would be the answer.
and my personal favourite:
“The dog gnawing on a bone says to his anus: “This is going to hurt you.”
I read somewhere that among the earliest extant fables was one entitled ‘The Elephant and the Wren.’ I was intrigued. The elephant is a stalwart of Middle-Eastern folk literature, but the wren? What was it up to four thousand years ago, I wondered? What did wrens mean to the Ancients. I went a-looking and found a pdf of proverbs, or fragments of proverbs, translated from cuniform tablets dating back to at least 1500 BCE, from either the Akkadian or Sumerian, I’m not sure. I think that’s all there is,.
‘The Elephant and The Wren‘ appears in two versions, a short dialogue, no more than an exchange of words.
“The elephant spoke to himself: “There is nothing like me among all the creatures of Cakkan!” The wren answered him: “But I, in my own small way, was created just as you were!” The elephant spoke to himself: “Among all the creatures of Cakkan, the one that can defecate like me has yet to be created!” The wren answered him: “But I, in my own small way, can defecate just as much as you!”
I laughed out loud at the talent the elephant chose to boast about. Really? Are the dung production abilities of elephants so renowned? I mean, yes, I’m not going to argue. And yet, is that what makes you special? Is that the best you can do? Is that it? It could be the work is incomplete. My guess is these are two versions of the same fable, the second being an earthier variation, so to speak. As presented, I read them as a progession, with the elephant responding to the wren’s challenge, and this for me pointed to a missing third beat in the narrative. A conclusion. This got me thinking.
Much as I am fond of elephants, the boastfulness of this one, and the pride it took in its own shit, reminded me of a certain political figure whose relationship with truth is one of contempt. Perhaps I should have changed the animal from elephant to bull. Later iterations of this theme, of large beast encountering smaller creature, do make that change to a bull, or a camel (!), while the creature becomes something smaller and less charming, an insect, a gnat, a flea or a mosquito. Thus the fable makes it way from Babylon to Ancient Greece, and through to us, via Babrius. (You can read a number of versions here)
“A gnat settled on the horn of a Bull, and sat there a long time. Just as he was about to fly off, he made a buzzing noise, and inquired of the Bull if he would like him to go. The Bull replied, ‘I did not know you had come, and I shall not miss you when you go away.’ Some men are of more consequence in their own eyes than in the eyes of their neighbors.”
Curious that the later fables grant the big beast its elevated status and the little one becomes an impertinence, the so-called impertient insect.
