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A jackdaw features as protagonist in five or six of Aesop’s fables. He gets into the same sort of problems every time and I have become quite fond of him. He’s a comic everyman, afigure ruled by appetite and envy, wanting to be something he is not, and failing, an emblem of all-too-human flaws. As a bird, he’s neither indefinite or definite, but singular and capitalized: Jackdaw.

I have returned to this character for my latest Aesop adaptation, Jackdaw and the Pigeons. The action goes like this:

Jackdaw envies the easy life of domestic pigeons and attempts to live alongside them in disguise, after he is found out, by his voice, he finds his own kind also reject him. [aesopica]

In my version, the structure of the fable remains intact, so too its message, more or less, but some details have changed, the angles are different, and the tone is perhaps less fable than epic. When Jackdaw finds himself homeless, it feels less like and end than a beginning. The first of his adventures.

A STORY CHANGES IN THE WRITING

I’d like to share a note about the development of the adaptation. I started with the idea that Jackdaw was trading self-expression for comfort. To live with the pigeons, he has to curb his speech, keep his beak shut. And he finds it intolerable. There were allusions to ‘selling out’ and ‘fitting in’ and all forms of conformity of expression.

As I wrote, this idea fell away. In fact, I had to cut it away like excess fat. The emphasis of the action seemed to be falling somewhere else—on the consequences of rejecting one’s identity, pretending to be someone else, and the offence that causes, ultimately to you.

I wonder if you will read it the same way. (Let me know in the comments.)

Jackdaw and the Pigeons

The Frogs Who Rode Snakeback appears in Book Three of the Panchatantra. Book Three describes an extended conflict between Crows and Owls. The crows hatch a plan to spy on their enemy. A crow poses as a traitor and joins the other side, when he returns his king praises him for his fortitude, but the crows says he accepted the “great tribulation” of living with their enemies because of the benefits it would bring. He relates this fable to illustrate his point:

An old snake, knowing it could no longer hunt its prey, presents itself to the frogs and solicits their pity with a tale of misfortune and a curse laid upon it by a holy man. The curse condemns the snake to becoming a beast of burden to its former prey, the frogs, and to live only what they might afford him. The king of the frogs makes the snake his mount and pledges to keep it suitably fed and watered. The snake endures this subjugation so that it may eat well in its old age.

AN ODD NARRATIVE

The character of the aging predator who tricks its prey into providing for it turns up in Aesop as well, where they meet with varying degrees of success—here we witness a notably subdued outcome. And the advice is more strategic than the clear or self-evident morals found in Aesop.

But it’s an odd narrative structure for a fable. Half the action occurs in flashback, in a story within a story, that persuades the frogs to provide for it: the snake confesses to an accidental attack on a young boy, after chasing a frog into his house; but he boy was the son of a holy man and the holy man lays a curse upon the snake. Back in the present, all that remains is for the king of the frogs to make his decision.

This is a confidence trick. A pitch, a deal, larded with emotion and pretended low-status. The frogs believe the snake because his proposition flatters them, by comparison; they feel superior, and the king seizes the opportunity for aggrandisement. Thus they agree to let the snake eat some of their number.

THE ORDINARY FOLK PAY THE PRICE

The vanity of the king was the grit that worked its way into my soft grey matter. The price of this vanity was the slaughter (of some) of his subjects. In Calila and Dimna, they agree terms: two frogs a day; in the Panchatantra, the snake’s trick is structured so that his need for food is explicitly tied to his ability to perform as the king’s mount, once the king becomes attached to the arrangement he allows the snake to eat its fill of the plebeian frogs.

It’s troubling enough in the Lion and the Hares when the animals of the forest agree to offer themselves to placate the rampaging lion. It’s an atrocity. But when it is enacted merely for the glory and gratification of the king, it is obscene. Maybe in ancient history calculated loss of life for your monarch was less controversial. It is not something I can countenance.

Confidence tricks and self-aggrandizing leaders are not anachronisms, unfortunately.

Read my version here: the Frog King and the Snake

A jackdaw dresses itself in feathers borrowed from other birds. Two of Aesop’s fables are built around this action. They draw broadly the same moral. A condemnation of envy and pretension.

But I don’t feel the actions of Jackdaw are entirely deserving of censure. Or in other words, is he really so bad?

THE VAIN JACKDAW

The Vain Jackdaw is a simple case of envy. Struck by the peacock’s beauty, Jackdaw seeks to emulate it by inserting peacock feathers into its own plumage. It’s a harmless, silly endeavour and the daft bird is mocked for it. I can’t take issue with that, except to note the misleading title of the fable. The Jackdaw is envious rather than vain and if any character could be said to display vanity in this tale it is the peacock.

THE BORROWED FEATHERS

In the Borrowed Feathers, Jackdaw turns up at a beauty contest to decide who becomes the king of the birds. He wins by dressing himself in the discarded feathers of the other birds, but his victory is short-lived. The other birds expose him as a fraud and he is humiliated.

Harsh. And, again, it is the other birds who might more credibly be accused of vanity. (I mean, is there an image of vanity more blatant that the tail of strutting peacock?) Jackdaw’s offence is pretension claiming to be something he is not, something better. Or is it the offence of presumption, not knowing his place?

Jackdaw’s plain appearance would never make him one of the contender’s at a beauty contest, yet he dares to compete for the prize. And to do so, to give himself a chance, he dresses in a motley fashioned from the feathers of his rivals. He cheats. And gets caught.

But it seems to me the skill and imagination he demonstrates make him worthy of applause as much as punishment and Zeus, who called the contest and acts as judge, would be someone who’d appreciate that.

That is why I wrote my version: ‘Jackdaw and the Borrowed Feathers’

(Stripped of Borrowed Feathers: The Raven Jackdaw by Melchior d’Hondecoeter)

Misadventures in the Land of Fables #14

My adventures in the land of fables have led me into the Himalyas, to Kasmir, and to the Panchatantra, a text first compiled in 350-400 CE by Vishnusharma, an octogenarian Brahmin.

I did not literally venture into the mountains to retrieve this ancient literature, of course. I did no more than scale the digital foothills of the internet, where I gathered some background information and start to read two translations of the work. It was then my unarduous journey ground to a halt as I struggled to get through them.

Too Old, Too Rarified

The first and longest part of the Panchatantra describes the intrigues of the jackal Damanaka as he seeks to secure his position in the court of a lion. It’s all talk, as you migh expect: highly-mannered discourses between courtier and king follow on from debates between the jackal and his principled friend Karataka, to whom he reveals his stratagems.

Damanaka is a villain, a liar, who plays one side against another with no concern for anyone’s well-being but his own. His machinations are presented as a caution to princes and rulers who depend on advice, but lessons for us common folk are limited.

The fables appear as part of the dialogue, employed by the characters to illustrate their arguments, as fictional examples cited to warn of adverse outcomes. This is where most of the action is, and where the thrill of complex narration begins, as the stories become nested within each other, but it is the framing story that dominates and it moves too slowly for my taste.

Too Young, Too Simple

So I abandoned the trip and returned home, so to speak. Or rather I leapt forward fifteen hundred years to early last century, when Maude Barrows Dutton published a collection of fables drawn from the same source (probably after Jean de la Fontaine’s collection, who also credited to an Indian sage, ‘Bilpai,’ as author of the original). Now the fables had been chiselled from the ancient text and reformed in the domestic language of the hearth or the bedside, the complexity so much debris on the floor.

But then I discovered the text’s cross-cultural migrations.

The Migrant Text

The Panchatantra had travelled west crossing borders under assumed names in new languages, from Pahlavi to Arabic, Greek, and Spanish, where it became ‘Calila and Dimna’ (the new names for the jackals Damanaka and Karataka). Along the way, it had lost the obscure references and some of the formality, but gained a leaner, more supple form and finally I was able to appreciate it.

I made it through all five discourses (tantras): from the surprisingly upbeat and constructive second ‘book’ in which four creatures become friends and work together to keep each other from harm, which features some robust debate on trust and enmity and mutual interest, to the shocking conclusion of the war between the owls and the crows, which sometimes contradicts the wisdom of the former.

And now some of the fables have fetched up in new versions (by me) here: ‘The Lion and the Hares’ and ‘The Tortoise and the Geese.’

Aesop’s ‘The Fox and the Grapes’ cannot be improved. One of the rare fables to feature a single protagonist, it is concise, complete, and memorable, etched into our culture with the phrase ‘sour grapes.’

Fable as dialogue

Typically, the substance of a fable is a dialogue—a negotiation, a trick, a contest, sometimes little more than a complaint or comment; these latter tend to be the least satisfying, as the moral of the fable is delivered without any semblance of proof or demonstration. Take ‘The Oxen and the Axle-tree.’ The oxen responds to the creaking of the axle as if it were moaning about its labour, delivering a moralistic rebuke on the theme of stoicism, which effectively stands as the meaning of the fable. Similarly, in ‘The Fox and the Grapes,’ there is no one to challenge the fox, but we are not invited to agree with its assertions either.

The Fox and the Grapes

If you aren’t familiar with the fable you can find it here. To summarise, a fox spots some grapes, tries and fails to get them and, upon giving up, dismisses them as not worthwhile—they must be ‘sour’ or ‘unripe.’

We know what the fox is up to, we can see what she’s is doing, and we respond critically rather than approvingly. The moral supplied by most authors tends to support that reading: ’it is easy to despise what you cannot get’ (Jacobs) or ‘what cannot be had, you speak of badly’ (Bensarade, the French poet who composed the lines to accompany the sculptures at the Palace of Versailles).

Roger L’Estrange offers a different angle and combines this fable with another on the same theme (’A Wolf and a Lion’). “Tis Matter of Skill and Address, when a Man cannot honestly compass what he would be at, to appear easy and indifferent upon all Repulses and Disappointments.” He stresses the pragmatic, strategic aspect of the behaviour. In other words, a way of dealing with failure, moving on, ‘adaptive preference formation’ [Jon Elster].

The Fox The Mouse and The Grapes

In my fable ‘The Fox The Mouse and The Grapes’ I have not attempted to rewrite Aesop. I was thinking about the theme of getting told to lower your expectations, of receiving advice which does not honour your request, which changes its goal. And I was trying to find an action which could illustrate it. The fox’s problem seemed to suit my purpose, but its adaptive solution was the opposite of what I wanted. I quickly realised I had to introduce another character, the adviser—a mouse—and the action developed from there.*

*while researching this article, I discovered another version of the fable (Perry index 15) which introduces a mouse as second character: the mouse doesn’t alter the meaning, or even extend the action, but functions as prompt the fox’s dismissive remark, funny though

THE FROGS WHO DESIRED A KING

Funny, surreal, and brutal, ‘The Frogs Who Desired a King‘ is one of the strongest and historically most popular of Aesop fables. At its core, there is a cautionary ‘careful what you wish for’ message, but it is the political applications that account for its longevity.

This is the story:

Frogs decide they want a king and ask Zeus to provide one. Zeus sends them a tree stump or log. The stump of course does nothing and the frogs lose respect for it. They ask Zeus to send them another king and this time Zeus sets a water snake, or a heron, or a crane, upon them. The frogs are destroyed by their new king.

Political Analogy

The political upheavals of the past six centuries have prompted comment by way of this fable. The frogs tire of liberty and want a new regime. They relinquish their freedom and are ‘rewarded’ with a tyrant. Alongside this, the benign inaction of the ‘Stump King’ can be contrasted with the active predation of the Crane, representing two modes of governance.

This was not a fable I considered as a candidate for revision because the existing versions were already sufficiently provocative: the brutal ending was dark and glorious satire, the tree-stump/log as king was a perplexing, surrealist move—but the more I thought about it, the more I was intrigued. The ‘stump king’ was the loose end on which my imagination began to pick.

The Puzzle of the ‘Stump King’

Dumping a lump of tree into the pond was a dismissive act on Zeus’ part. A joke. But was he giving the frogs a hint? Was the stump a placeholder, a king who was not a king, which could allow them to avoid being told what to do and to continue as before? Or was it merely an expression of impatience by the self-centred god? Either way, it seemed to me the frogs’ attitude to the tree stump and the discussion it prompts regarding kingship was the crucial scene.

Once the initial fear and apprehension dissipates, the frogs make the stump the focal point of their lives, but its passivity soon leads to indifference and disrespect and even contempt. The image stuck in my mind, of the frogs climbing on top of their king, using it as diving platform, while some frogs took offence and perhaps grew angry that their king tolerated it and did not punish them.

The Discontent

The conflict between the frogs at this point suggested a reason for the discontent that set the events in motion. Previous versions had been vague or glib on the matter. Various reasons are glossed: Lafontaine describes them as “silly and frightened” and tired of democracy; Townsend too says they’ve grown weary of freedom; L’Estrange, well, it’s almost as if they feel deprived of a monarch (!), while Perry refers to “dissolute habits,” drawing I think on Phaedrus original latin.

For me, the hedonistic energy of the frogs climbing onto the back of their ‘king’ and diving into the water, as if it were a play pool, suggested not so much ‘dissolute habits’ but a clash between innocent chaos and order, perhaps even a generational conflict—the ‘tut-tutting’ about disrespect pointed in that direction. This was my point of entry. I recalled the frogs I’d seen in the local canal and in shallow woodland ponds, piled on top of each other, a jumble of limbs and eyes, slipping between algae and spawn. An image of simple, yet disorderly innocence.

The Plunge

I took the plunge, but soon after discovered the key scene had shifted from the tree-stump to these opening images. (Things often change once you start to write.) It was only the discontented frogs who wanted a king. Their desire for order was also a denial of a way of life and carried with it the threat of violence. It was a desire for destruction.

You can read my version here: the Frogs who wanted a King

Ernest Griset ‘Les Grenouilles Qui Demondent Un Roi’ (1869)

Misadventures in the Land of Fables #11

Foxes, lions, sheep, frogs, jackdaws, snakes, monkeys talking to each other or to themselves. This has been the substance of a fable from the beginning, from the oral traditions of the Indian Subcontinent to the translators of Aesop and beyond.

Why? Because the distance between us (as storyteller and listener) and them allows for a narrative unburdened by our ambivalence toward our fellow men and women. In short, animals make better symbols.

But sometimes people can feature as protagonists. Notably in ‘The Boy Who Cried Wolf‘ (which I discuss here, with more than pinch of ambivalence) and also in the cautionary tales of Heinrich Hoffman, which are, arguably, fables or at least fabular.

The Elements

Fables also give voice to inanimate objects too. Aesop’s ‘The North Wind and the Sun‘, for example, sees the two elements contest each other’s abilities in a challenge to rid a man of his raincoat, presenting us with the most precise demonstration of the art of persuasion you could imagine.

Apart from talking, and having feelings, the behaviour of the wind and sun conforms to their nature as we understand it. It seems you can’t really depart from that template when using inanimate objects. You must take them as they come.

The Water Cycle

I observe this rule in my original fable about raindrops, ‘The Drops of Water‘. One of the few lessons I recall from my primary school days concerns the hydrologic cycle. It was known only as the ‘Water Cycle’ and really just explained where cloud and rain came from and where it ends up. Inspired by this elementary knowledge, I put the raindrops in the cycle and let them fall.

If raindrops could speak, I asked myself, what might they say? How might they see their destiny? What would their attitude be toward it? Would they realise how passive they are? That they take part in cycle far greater than themselves. It seemed to me that, unlike the great forces of the elements (the wind and sun), a tiny raindrop could only have a partial grasp of their nature.

This, I believe, corresponds to our own limitations, our inability to comprehend the bigger picture, and ultimately to control how things turn out, or rather to accept that we do not control it, ultimately. This is the insight that informs every beat of the narrative.

It is fanciful. Raindrops do not talk or have feelings and nor do they remain as individuals for longer than their brief journey to earth. But these raindrops aren’t really raindrops, are they?

Fables are simple narratives, often rendered in simple language, and as such easily dismissed as being ‘for children.’ Unfairly so. The Victorians may have put them to use in the nursery, but they were never intended for the younger reader.

These sometimes harsh lessons on pride and vanity, on the exercise of power, tactics and strategy, informed statecraft and political debate in the Ancient World. Socrates transposed them into verse while awaiting judgement and execution.

As an ethical system, Aesop’s fables are incoherent and contradictory, best treated as elements of folk wisdom, appealed to case by case. Each fable is an example, and thus a point of reference, of comparison or contradiction.

For me, they are a starting point. A proposition that prompts a reply. Or even another idea, another discussion.

‘The Shepherd Boy and the Wolf’

Consider Aesop’s ‘The Shepherd Boy and the Wolf’ (aka ‘The Boy Who Cried Wolf’). A simple tale of a naughty boy who gets his comeuppance. In later versions, that comeuppance is extreme: the boy loses his life; in earlier versions—the original Greek?—he loses only his sheep. In this, the villagers suffer almost as much as the boy. It is the community that sustains the economic damage. It needn’t have happened.

I have long felt the villager’s were remiss in not responding to the boy’s last cry for help. They chose to ignore him when the better course of action would have been to respond and then sack the boy for his third offence. They didn’t and are therefore partly responsible for. There is a lesson there. See my version: ‘The Shepherd Boy and the Wolf’

The moral of Aesop’s original has remained consistent across translations: there is no believing a liar, even when he speaks the truth [Townsend]. It’s curious then that the fable came to be used as a denunciation not of dishonesty, but alarmism.

‘To Cry Wolf’

I suppose the phrase was popularised by newspaper journalists and politicians censuring those making exaggerated claims of dire consequences, disaster, defeat. You risk losing your credibility, they warned.

But accusations of crying wolf can be disingenuous, a tactic to play down reasonable claims, to delay or derail calls for action that certain parties might find restrictive. It really depends on how plausible these claims are and whether it is possible to mitigate the consequences after they have transpired. (See climate change and fascism for examples of calamities which are best tackled in advance.)

This tension between sounding the alarm and claims of alarmism informs a version of ‘The Shepherd Boy and the Wolf’ that I uncovered in my research. It’s a kind of sequel; a variation or reverberation of the original, and its moral might be summarised thus: an alarm system you decline to use is also no alarm system at all.

You can read it here: ‘The Boy Who Wouldn’t Cry Wolf’

The fable of ‘The Two Dogs’ has a simple premise: a man has two dogs, one he takes hunting, while the other remains at home on guard duty; he feeds them equal portions. This seems fair enough, but the hunting dog is not satisfied. It feels it deserves a greater share, especially when it comes to divvying up the meat from the hunt: it did the work, it argues, it should get the benefit.

A Political Fable?

So, this is a political fable examining the issues of labour and remuneration?

No. Apparently not, neither for Aesop, nor his translators. Another element is introduced into the scenario: training. The man trained the hunting dog for its task, but left the guard dog unskilled. Thus the fable sides with the hunting dog’s complaint and blames the man for the alleged inequality.

“This fable shows that the same is true of children: it is not their fault if they don’t know how to do anything, since this is how their parents have raised them.”
[aesopica]

This seems … tangential.

The obvious analogy here is not pedagogy, but economics, the division of labour.

Who Gets What and Why?

There are two roles to be performed: the property must be guarded and the hunter must be assisted. Dogs are trained and indeed bred for these roles. There is good reason for them to receive equal remuneration, and that is the arrangement we find, as decided by the master, the executive.

The hunting dog wants more. You can understand its point of view. It will have been instrumental in obtaining the meat from the hunt; it likely had direct contact with it. It worked for it, while the guard dog did not. It deserves more.

However, as one of the early versions suggests, the role of hunting dog is more coveted than that of guard. The guard dog did not choose to stay at home. It would have preferred to stretch its legs by its master’s side. It would have relished the activity and the exercise. Despite its vital role, the guard dog must feel under-appreciated, even neglected. An equal portion at dinner makes up for it.

The Amplification of Privilege

Seems to me there may be more than a little self-regard in the hunting dog’s complaint, more than just the demand of a keen appetite. It knows it is privileged. It has been given more skills than its rival, it has been trained and improved. It therefore believes that superiority ought be reflected come dinnertime. And prompted by its sense of entitlement, the hunting dog takes action.

This is how I develop the action in my version of ‘The Two Dogs’.

Where the original fable sees the hunting dog’s complaint as a conclusion, a proof of an unstable, unsatisfactory situation, I use it as an inciting incident, a provocation, leading to a new resolution, one which may or may not be satisfactory. [clue, it isn’t]