Misadventures in the Land of Fables #26
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.
You can read the new fable here: ‘The Hippos at the Waterhole.’
*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