Misadventures in the Land of Fables #36
Just before Christmas I published a fable on my Facebook page. Followers may not have realised what it was: the fable consisted of only one line and was accompanied by a Christmas greeting. (The pessimistic tone was hardly full of Christmas cheer. Sorry about that.)
But it raised a question: can a fable consist of only one line?
Typically, the Misadventures project has seen Aesop’s originals subverted and expanded, invested with telling detail, and as a result they tend to last for half a dozen paragraphs or more. These transformations are valuable, I believe, as responses to the original meaning of the tales; they are rebuttals, complications, contradictions. That’s why I call them ‘misadventures.’ But ideally I would prefer them to be as concise as the source material.
Some fables are no more than three lines. But can they be any shorter than that? Let’s find out. Here’s the fable:
“It’s a dog eat dog world,” said the dog wiping blood from its mouth.
~~~
[pause while you consider what this means or if it means anything at all]
~~~
The fable is about self-justification, how we justify our actions by generalizing the morality or lack thereof, naturalizing it. The action of the fable depicts only that manoeuvre, but some preceding action is implied. One dog has killed another. This killing is a moral offence, an obscenity, which the perpetrator then justifies as the way of the world. We do this, usually in situations of less portent; we produce moral claims that authorize our actions after the fact and (we hope) allow us to live without dissonance or guilt
Is this too subtle? Would a longer version work better?
The fable could be the last line of a slightly longer narrative. Two stray dogs search in vain for food. As they grow increasingly desperate, one dog attacks and kills the other, declaring it an act in keeping with the world.
That works, but it’s not the same. The preceding action justifies the killing or at least provides grounds for it, whereas with context suppressed, the single line fable focuses on the act of self-justification itself. Rather than an endorsement of ‘doing whatever is necessary,’ we have a critique of the stories we tell ourselves. ‘Dog eat dog’ is one such story and here in my single line it stands as a brutal example of all such stories.
What do you think?
