How do we deal with things we want but cannot reach? Aspirations or goals, which after making every effort, prove unattainable?
Aesop’s fable of ‘The Fox and the Grapes’ describes one method: lie to yourself. Dismiss the goal as not worth having and move on. In modern parlance, you might call this a coping strategy, though I suspect Aesop and his translator were not recommending it. The lies are transparent. The fox contradicts itself. Suddenly denigrating that which a moment earlier it coveted. Its motives are plain to see.
I wrote about it a few years ago [here], but find myself returning repeatedly to the same theme. I am uncomfortable with lies, suspicious of the plasticity of beliefs, as practiced by some, and recommended by self-help gurus, and yet I acknowledge the utility of it.
How else do you move on, without carrying a burden of failure?
The new variation, ‘Two Foxes and a Bunch of Grapes,’ stays closer to the original, but considers what happens if you fail to move on, if you are unable to match your behaviour to your revised attitude, because you do not believe it, or have even found your attachment to the unattainable has stiffened.
When is a fable not a fable? — When it doesn’t have a clear moral, or does not appear to be constructed as if it had a such a moral.
How is the moral constructed? — There are numerous ways. The protagonists can get punished for an act of presumption, or for their vanity and folly, as in ‘The Fox and the Crow‘. They can receive a lesson in the reality of power and brute force, as in ‘The Lion, the Fox, and the Ass‘. Boastfulness can get undermined, as in ‘The Oak and the Reed‘. Or an action can be rebuked by another character—the laziest and most annoying model, as in ‘The Oxen and the Axle-tree‘.
It can on occasion be more subtle. ‘The Fox and the Grapes‘ is a slim narrative describing how the creature reacts to its failure to reach some overhanging grapes. It does this by way of a lie: claiming the goal was not worth having in the first place. As dishonesty, it is deserving of rebuke, but there is no punishment, or consequence.
THE FARMER AND THE SNAKE
My version of Aesop’s ‘The Farmer and the Snake‘ retains the core actions, the barest bones, including the ‘punishment,’ but lets the moral fall through the gaps. Is it therefore no longer a fable?
In the original, a farmer finds a half-frozen snake and tries to revive it by holding it close to his breast. When the snake comes back to life, it bites him. (Understandable, when you think about it.) The bite, of course, is a consequence, a punishment for compassion wasted on an unredeemable ‘evil’ creature, and an example of ingratitude, which ought to have been expected. This offers a pessimistic message too often used to bolster a general withholding of care and benevolence.
A while back, as a response, I wrote and shelved a version in which the farmer’s son treats the frozen snake with contempt rather than compassion; believing it to be dead he uses it as a stick for his dog to fetch, but the game revives the snake and it bites the boy’s dog: thus delivering a punishment for his callous attitude. [As I write, this seems quite a good idea to me and I wonder why I shelved it.]
The latest version, on the other hand, omits the punishable attitude, whether misplaced compassion or callousness. In its place, there is only curiosity. And symbolism. The incident describes a loss of innocence, a tremor on the threshold of passage into adolescent. Could this be where the land of fable meets ‘a boy in a park’? Have I crossed the border into plain fiction?
Sometimes we choose not to see something. We overlook it. This new version of ‘A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing‘ dramatises that choice, brings its unconscious processes into the light.
The wolf’s disguise is easy to see through, casual, enough to fool the sheep, but not their guardian. The shepherd instantly recognizes the threat, but through a combination of intimidation and sophistry, his challenge is disarmed and he yields his position.
You might say this is also another version of ‘The Boy who wouldn’t Cry Wolf‘. Both address the risk of not raising the alarm, not denouncing the genuine threat, and letting the wolves overrun the body politic, by which I mean democracy. The press know an authoritarian when they see one—they are rarely well-disguised—yet it seems they dare not call them out.
I don’t know for certain. The plant, I think, is a bonsai, a miniature tree planted in a container. Here the container seems to be the mouth of a frog, elsewhere it’s the mouth a turtle, and sometimes, perhaps more commonly the container is excavated from its shell. This suggests something decorative, as too does the surface on which it sits, with the choice of creature bound up with the local symbolism, the frog meaning good fortune, rebirth?
But the frog is also rendered expressively. Its upright front legs seem tense as if the bonsai growth had arrested its ability to move, and the small yellow eye framed by a dark, arching brow, appeals to us for aid or explanation.
My fable responds to that expression, and follows on from ‘The Frog and the Butterfly‘ in its fascination with the amphibian’s lengthy, predatory tongue. I’m afraid it is not a tale of good fortune, or rebirth.
This illustration in the traditional Chinese ‘ink wash’ style* inspired the following fable:
~~~
A butterfly saw a frog squatting on a rock. “I wonder how long its tongue might be,” the butterfly asked itself. “This long,” answered the frog, as it grabbed the butterfly and swallowed it whole.
~~~
These two creatures could be in conversation, judging by their inclination, but the butterfly seems also to be within range of the frog’s tongue. Does it not understand the danger? Has it forgotten that frogs eat butterflies? Does it feel protected somehow, perhaps by its exquisite painterly markings, its beauty and goodness?
A fable about the consequences of naivete. Beware the predator. Keep your distance.
*artist unknown, but best guess is a pastiche by Russian artist, Anna Donchenko
Well well well. I thought I knew the story of ‘The Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing’ but it seems I didn’t. Not exactly. There are, or were, three quite different versions in circulation.
This may be because it is one of those fables incorrectly attributed to Aesop. The earliest example dates from the 12th century in a work by Greek rhetorician Nikephoros Basilakis, but it is argued the fable has its source in the ‘Gospel of Matthew’ and the Sermon on the Mount where Jesus produces this metaphor: “Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves.” [Matthew 7:15]
Which came first the fable or the idiom?
THREE AND A HALF VERSIONS
The versions are as follows:
A wolf disguises itself in the skin of a sheep, the dead sheep’s lamb follows the scent and becomes the first of many easy meals for the wolf. [Jacobs]
A wolf disguises itself in the skin of a sheep, joins the flock and makes is way into the fold, but before it can begin its slaughter the shepherd returns to kill a sheep for his dinner, the one he selects is the wolf. (It is not known whether wolf was served on the menu that night.) [Townsend, Gibbs]
A wolf disguises itself in the skin of a sheep, approaches the fold and invites another sheep to go wandering to the next land, the sheep replies that it would go if its companion were a wolf, to keep it safe from harm, the wolf reveals itself thinking this will clinch the deal, but the sheep declines. [Golding]
TWISTS, REVERALS, COMEUPPANCES
The last of these, from Arthur Golding’s A Moral Fabletalk, is a curiosity. It violates the stereotypes. Roles are reversed. The sheep outwits the wolf. Its trick seems to play on its own reputation for stupidity—it says it would go wandering with a wolf—and the wolf’s mistake is to believe it.
The others differ in their outcome, either the villain gets its comeuppance or he gets away with it. One is simple warning: there are deceivers, beware! The other goes further and suggests the deceiver may find itself in trouble. It’s more satisfying both narratively and morally, the visitation of karma has an abiding appeal and there’s a kind of righteous comic value in a deception backfiring.
In a version by Laurentius Abstemius (in late C15th), the comeuppance is served straight. The wolf is discovered and the shepherd hangs its body from a tree. As a narrative, this is much less interesting, but the gruesome image proved popular with classical illustrators.
I prefer the irony of the disguise proving too good and the well-executed plan failing to consider the range of eventualities—such as the sheep may also be victim of its keepers. Most of all, I am fascinated by the deception. Why bother? Why take the risk? Why not attack with the force of numbers? Or simply wait patiently for an opportunity, for the lamb that strays momentarily beyond the flock?
I suspect the deception is an end in itself. An exhibition of skill and cunning. A proof of dominance. The conman relishes the con.
‘The Goose that Laid the Golden Eggs’ is one of those fables that have stuck. Like ‘sour grapes’ and ‘crying wolf,’ the phrase “to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs’ has become common parlance, crossing the blood/brain barrier from narrative to idiom. It captures the self-defeating destructive tendencies of greed.
The story has elements of the folk tale. An extraordinary scenario in which a goose suddenly begins to lay golden eggs, bestowing instant wealth upon its owner, a farmer (lord or peasant), but this prove not to be enough for the farmer. He wants more gold and he wants it sooner. When the goose cannot provide, he kills it, ostensibly to gain access to the reserves of gold inside the bird.
The stupidity of this decision is brutally obvious.
HOW COULD YOU BE SO STUPID?
Attempting to extract gold from the inside of the bird was never going to work. It betrays a childish concept of egg production, as if the constituent elements were held inside the bird like raw materials and the eggs manufactured rather than synthesized. You wonder if the killing is more an act of rage and desperation than merely a dimwitted strategy.
But why the desperation? The farmer has become wealthy. He has a good thing going. Why not wait? The extant versions of the fable do not elaborate on the nature of his discontent, but the pitfalls of greed are well-established. There are always more ways to spend your money; there are always people more wealthy and more powerful, and your ambitions rise like floodwater bringing you within reach of the ceiling above, convinced you can break through.
(Perhaps you have to assume the value of the bird’s output was, per egg, relatively modest. Life changing only in that first instance and as an accumulation thereafter. As Goldings puts it “an egg of gold, which undoubtedly was a great maintenance to her house and household.”)
THE HEN OR THE GOOSE?
There is some disagreement over whether the bird should be a goose or hen. The Greek source, Babrius, may be ambiguous, speaking only of a bird (I think), while the Latin, Avianus, refers to a goose. Caxton and Jacobs choose the goose, but La Fontaine, Townsend, Goldings and Gibbs are in the chicken camp. I don’t know if this indicates which source they used, but the difference is not trivial.
Hens are kept for their eggs and lay regularly, every day, all year round. Geese, on the other hand, have many other uses and lay only in ‘season,’ March through April. So, while a hen might provide a reliable supplier of gold, the output of a goose would be less frequent and subject to long hiatus. I’m not sure the authors knew this—I mean, I did not know this until I began to research my own version—I wonder if the farmer would have known this, if they did not have responsibility for the yard animals or the kitchen.
THE VICTIM’S POINT OF VIEW
I had already chosen the goose when I became aware of its natural limitations in egg production. It proved quite useful in the human story. However, my version also considers the goose’s point of view. What happens to the goose is perhaps more interesting, dramatically-speaking; its story has greater amplitude—and only partly because it is brutally murdered at the end. When you start to imagine how the goose may have been treated once its powers were discovered, a rollercoaster journey unfolds from innocent simplicity to celebrity and special treatment, culminating in unreasonable demands and the most obscene violation. The poor bird was a victim of its own talents.
In the documentary ‘Bosch: The Garden of Dreams,’ Chinese artist Cai Quo Quian picks out a relatively innocuous detail in the surreal, polyamorous super-abundance of Bosch’s ‘Garden of Earthly Delights.’ An image of animals drinking from a river or lake. He connects it with his own work, specifically the installation entitled ‘Heritage’ in which all the animals of the grasslands congregate around a waterhole, their heads bent over the water to drink.
These two scenes prompted me to think about the proximity of animals at a waterhole, the social friction this proximity might create and the idea of the development of community with its rules and manners. However, a closer look at the Quo Quian make me realise the flaw in this idea of community among animals. Here we found predators drinking alongside their prey, tigers and cheetahs just yards from zebra and antelope. Something was wrong. Surely this could not happen?
Both the Bosch and the Quo Quian were fantasies: Quo Quian presents a dream of peace and harmony, while the Bosch detail features unicorns and appears in the first panel of the triptych, likely a depiction of Eden. This is not always a dealbreaker for a genre (fable) in which animals routinely talk to and sometimes ally with their natural antagonists. But I was curious about why I had initially assumed this peaceful congregation actually occurred in the real world?
THE ATTRACTIONS OF A REASSURING IDEA
Somewhere along the line I had heard that animals would not attack each other at the waterhole and I believed it. Or accepted it. Where had I got this idea from? Turns out the source was probably Rudyard Kipling’s ‘The Jungle Book.’ Kipling imagines a truce at the waterhole and portrayed it as a law of the jungle: the mancub Mowgli is told that the animals suspend hostilities at the waterhole so that they might each tend to their thirst. It’s an attractive, optimistic idea: a vision of a rules-based order and a very English fantasy of respect and fair play, like a gentleman’s agreement.
Attractive, but not the way it goes down in real life.
I don’t know the frequency of attacks at the water’s edge, as animals go to drink, but we do know that predators migrate with the other animals to the waterholes. They need water, of course, as much as the next creature, but with so many animals in one place, the waterhole represents an opportunity for them. And it would not be the opportunity to adopt a diet of leaves or grasses.
COMPLACENCY CAN KILL
Slightly embarrassed by my credulity, I started to imagine a story in which an animal was, like me, persuaded of this truce. It would be a fable warning of the danger of the favouring an attractive theory over personal experience, of recourse to reason before instinct. And as a warning, it doesn’t turn out well.
The ostrich’s reassurance is, if you like, a riposte to ‘the Boy Who Cried Wolf.’ The ostrich minimizes a threat that should in fact be taken seriously. Complacency can kill.
The antelope again seemed like an appropriately worried protagonist. As for the complacent, reassuring promoter of theory, well, I drew upon another myth, that of the ostrich who supposedly puts their head in the ground in denial of unpleasant reality. (This isn’t true either: it was a misapprehension based on their practice of turning the eggs which they lay in shallow holes in the ground.)
Can something be both superficial and deep-rooted? You’d think it would be a contradiction, but if you consider roots horizontally extended over decades and centuries, the space opens for the two concepts to co-exist. A superficially attractive idea, an assumption based on appearances, an error, these can persist and the longer they do the more deep-rooted they become.
The stereotyping on which fables depend is superficial. It abstracts one particular quality of a species—perhaps the most obvious as seen from our point of view. The animal as character comes to represent an idea and not itself. It’s a kind of shorthand without which a fable could not be as concise and immediately intelligible form that it is. As George Fyler Townsend writes in the introduction to his 1867 collection of Aesop:
“The Fox should be always cunning, the Hare timid, the Lion bold, the Wolf cruel, the Bull strong, the Horse proud, and the Ass patient.”
But the writer cannot invent these stereotypes: they work only if it is already understood, deep-rooted, as well as widespread.
FLIP AND REVERSE
On the other hand, one of the easiest ways of reworking a fable is to confound the stereotypes. The way folk tales have been gender switched in recent years. Flip them and see where that takes you; ask what things look like upside down. This can produce new material, but it is not quite as clever as it seems. Flips and switches tend to comment more on the stereotypes themselves. In so doing, they miss the point, because the heart of the fable is the moral not the symbolic system on which it is built.
A fable is always about us, not the animals.*
A FABLE WITHOUT STEREOTYPES
But what happens when those stereotypes have not been established? Can a fable take place in an unfamiliar setting, with a new set of characters, when it cannot draw on that well of meaning? Can it still work?
I think so.
The characters are defined by their actions or their attitudes and as long as the narrative remains concise and to the point there will not be time for those qualities to be both established and disavowed. The problem arises when our prior knowledge of that animal’s behaviour creates resistance. If the character’s behaviour conflicts with our expectations, we may consider that fact itself as significant and this may interfere with our understanding of the fable’s moral.
This was one of the challenges in writing ‘The Hippos and the Antelope,’ a fable set around a waterhole. The animals did not come equipped. I had to select them for the roles and it seemed to me it would help if I stereotyped them based on my limited and superficial knowledge. The hippos were a straightforward choice becauset they had to be semi-aquatic creatures, but also stubborn. A superficial association of bulky with obstinacy. Of the range of grassland animals, antelope struck me as most plausible as a group of petty complainants, while the Giraffe, with its long-neck, was ideally proportioned for the role of someone who makes an intervention from a position of assumed superiority.
*but persistent negative stereotypes can be harmful, they prepare the ground for mistreatment and justify murder: wolves, for example, get a hard time because of an exaggerated estimation of their threat
Images from RawPixel: An Eagle Perched on a Rock; Lion, Fox, Two Hounds and a Rooster (possibly for “Aesop’s Fables”) Original public domain image from Yale Center for British Art; Hippopotamus (Hippopotame Amphibie) illustrated by Charles Dessalines D’ Orbigny (1806-1876). Digitally enhanced from our own 1892 edition of Dictionnaire Universel D’histoire Naturelle.
To eat a tortoise you must first break its protective shell. Chances are, you hadn’t given this particular challenge much thought up to now, but it seems to have been the prompt for two Aesopic fables, two which over the years have undergone a number of transformations.
The key action, as it impacts the victim, is this: a tortoise is seized by an eagle, the eagle drops the tortoise and breaks its shell, the tortoise is eaten.
In one version, ‘The Tortoise and the Eagle,’ [Perry 230], it becomes a cautionary tale of what happens if you aspire to things beyond your scope. In the other, ‘The Tortoise and the Birds‘ [Perr 290], a crow advises the eagle to drop the tortoise and we witness an example of what can be achieved through collaboration, or in some versions, of how cunning gains the spoils.
In both, my sympathies tend toward the victim, the tortoise. Who could not pity the poor creature as it plummets to its death? Or look on with horror as the two birds have themselves “a hearty meal?” The version published by Joseph Jacobs features expressive illustrations which reveal an ambivalence about the fate of the foolish victim:
And yet, though the tortoise has my sympathies, it is the eagle who intrigues me.
The Eagle has Fallen
It agrees to transport the tortoise from one place to another, moonlighting from its natural role as predator. This is a refreshing change and though it is promised a reward for the gig, you feel it is has made a rare connection with a fellow creature. Then the crow comes along, suggests it drop the tortoise on the rocks, because it will make a good meal. And the eagle does it. It’s a stunning betrayal and not the kind of taxi service you would hope for. No wonder the fable tunes out any protests from the victim.
Shouldn’t the eagle resist the temptation offered by the crow? Shoudn’t it keep its word? And if it should do that, but fails, isn’t this where conscience enters the world? Conscience and regret. Shame at what it has done to the victim and to its own sense of honour. Who could eat with relish in such circumstances?
In the land of fable, animals must be emblematic of certain qualities, in order for the meaning to be readily comprehensible. The cunning fox, for example. It seems to me the eagle would be understood as one of the noble creatures. Majestic. Deadly. But with great power come great responsibility. And thus, for me, this is a fable of a fall from grace.
Sometimes we choose not to see something. We overlook it. This new version of ‘
